Between the bar next door and my apartment is a wall. Through this wall, a white guy is scatting (no, really) over some jam band-y instrumentals. It’s Friday night. I’m palming mellocreme pumpkins into my mouth that I paid for with my debit card. I do this because I’m maintaining sobriety. I’m sober because people tell me I’m a noticeably better person since making alcohol and drugs absent from my life. Later on, once this singer trades the stool he sings upon for one at the bar to prop him up while he drinks, he’ll probably go home with an attractive female. The sex will have been purchased on the strength of horrible passion. Because I’m perceived as a better person since undertaking sobriety doesn’t mean I see myself planted under the glow of societies approval. In fact, I think I’m an awful human being. Most of the internal dialogue that happens when I’m in public, begins, “Look at this piece of shit…”. Right now, the world is a four-headed: bass-licking, guitar-noodling, drummer-on-acid, lyrical-word-shit-salad MONSTER. For no reason other than it being the job required of monsters, it breathes its fetid stank in my face. It makes me angry. It makes me squirm. I turn the volume up on the movie I watch. This is how I retreat from metaphorical and existential confrontation. In public, because he has no self-identity, because he wants pussy, a guy assumes the personality of Vince Vaughn, and tells the jokes of Dane Cook. He succeeds. The success hinged on a mate responding to familiarity. He provided that, again, with horrible passion. To keep this dragon away, I fantasize about women’s underwear. In all these situations, I’m creating escape routes from the mediocrities inhabiting these situational nightmares. I’m moving myself into the position my enemies benefit most from — stagnancy. OK. This singer on the otherside of the wall can hrrrm-prattle-zzzzzlop his way into the excited yawn of a lady’s crotch and I can get mad about it, feeling like I’m Amadeus watching Salieri reap rewards for middling efforts, or I can truly ignore it and disengage from the fray by focusing on my own work. Each genre listed on my Netflix screen houses 75 potential titles I can choose to throw in my queue. Out of these 75, there are, maybe, two truly great films. The rest range from shit-to-okay. This is what I’m driving at: do I, through the industry of working hard, want to be AIRPLANE! or, through the dead end of bitterness and complaint, be DUNSTON CHECKS IN?
Still, you ladies are fucking way too many terrible singers, and way too little Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker’s.
