If God is Dead Then It’s Time To Step Up
By Matthew Glenside
“Oh the honor,” I think to myself, sarcasm so thick it sticks in my beard. I reach for a bottle of Motrin. Apparently rolling ones eyes at a really ridiculous assignment repeatedly can cause a biting headache. I take two and wash it down with cold coffee before remembering that this ridiculous assignment was, in fact, handed down by my orders. I take another and stare at the white sheet of paper jammed into this Panzer tank of a typewriter that ironically sits next to not one, but two computers.
“But this is how I draft,” I say aloud to a dissenting thought in my own head. The thought then tells me not to bitch when I don’t feel like digitizing it from the original hardcopy. “But I edit on the fly when I put it in the word processor, the way I first used to when I became a writer.”
The thought keeps on blabbing. It is self-aware, self-contained, and is as big a prick as I am. I stop listening in favor of another sip of coffee and get interrupted by Harris and one of his stupid stories about some guy he met somewhere who was really cool, packaged with two accompanying links to Youtube that I’m sure have little, if any, relation to his story about his newfound friend whom he’ll never see or think of again.
“I draft on a typewriter because Facebook, email, Twitter, Youtube, and Skype don’t exist. Harris can’t carpet bomb me with links about frogs and should-be-forgotten ska bands.”
The thought has reached the end of its line, no more neural pathway for it to travel. For now, things are quiet, lest my desire for a hot cup of coffee and a better computer chair.
I begin to type.
I’m easily distracted however. I start to question why I’m tearing my friends apart on paper. To put it online so everybody else can see, is not the type of obvious explanation towards which I’m digging. I mean that I have a copy of Anthony Robbins’ Awaken The Giant Within sitting on my coffee table. I look at it sitting there with the bookmark still jammed in the midway point of the text at which I stopped reading. Steve Pavlina just posted an article not three days ago that literally changed the direction of my life. My eReader charges off of my laptop and I think about the 2nd book I ever purchased for it: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Taming The Tiger Within.
I question why, if I surround myself with, and feed myself as much positive and forward thinking and inspiration as I can with the sole intended purpose to keep pushing myself further, to be better, to be stronger, to be smarter, then why dedicate my valuable time to general malaise? Couldn’t you be helping somebody? I imagine any of the aforementioned asking me, donning the faces of parental disappointment, leaving me awash in shame.
I shake the thought and start writing about Tony Heartman first but at the end the gratification of a great word-burst comes quick and leaves too soon. Harris is bugging me again, but in the decade and change that I’ve known him, I’ve become a professional at ignoring him. The question comes back to me. Have I just been reading Jim Goad too much? I start to ask. The answer is a resounding yes, but doesn’t answer the true question about why should we do this, and why should anyone read it.
I continued on writing like any good journalist and did what I was fucking told to do. It wasn’t until after I had all my drafting finished, my editing done for the blurbs, that I started to write this piece and truly understood the Why in all of this. You see, there are people of change—Martin Luther King, Ghandi, the dad from American Chopper—and what they do is indescribably beautiful and the indelible marks they have left and still leave on the world is something to commend whole-heartedly. But unfortunately for this world, it goes so underappreciated, falls on so many deaf ears, and children grow up not even knowing about these great men and their great deeds. This type of ignorance grows, spreads like plague, atrophies and destroys entire generations.
And you know what? If nobody wants to call these fucking idiots out on it, we surely will. Having grown up in dark, greasy kitchens under the barbaric tutelage of angry chefs, the intellectually bankrupt management of restaurant overseers, and having stood shoulder-to-shoulder with felons, parolees, invalids and addicts, made me realize that the best way to get somebody to stop being a dickhead, it to tell them they’re being a dickhead… especially in front of a large group of people.
Listen my hand-holding, Kumbaya-singing, we-are-a-rainbow friends, love doesn’t cure everything. Nietzsche, when he wrote, “God is dead,” demonstrated that the well of moral principal has run dry. Look no further than the media if you need demonstration. The Jersey Shore is one of the most talked about television shows in the country. Idiocy has become glorified. Intellectualism, in a real twist of irony, has become uncouth. Worse yet, the obtuse are completely ignorant to their own folly. In fact, they revel in it.
“Oh the honor” have I to introduce my fellow writers. The honor I have, indeed, to share a singular though amongst them: that the weak, if by their own choice, will not choose to stand, to live by honor, to move forward in thought, shall be ostracized and left for death. Oh the honor bestowed upon myself to shred the shit out of these bastards before we turn on the world at large!
Van (Duke of New York)
It’s hard for a person to hate Van… unless you’re me. When I met Van freshman year of high school, he had already been shaving for 22 years. Feeling like an underdeveloped little boy, his 11 am shadow really bothered me. Oh, Mr. Vee people may make fun of me for my hairy body now, but I’m confident that the amount of hair I sport now--just shy of my 25th birthday--you were rocking in the 3rd grade. I shouldn’t hate you for that and I surely don’t. I’m just pointing it out as to make you unattractive to women, and to up your buying temperature amongst bear-loving homosexuals everywhere. Especially the ones that hang out in the public bathrooms in the city in which you live.
You once described yourself to me as someone “who has style.” The two issues I take with that statement was that you, for one, described yourself, which is asshole behavior in its highest, and second is that when people say they have style, it typically comes with positive connotations. You, my friend, have A style--a style that puts you somewhere between Weezer’s Blue Album cover, the worst parts about New York City (hipsters), and the 1930’s. I sincerely hope that one day while walking around in the buff you slip and fall on your Coney Island Mustache Competition first place trophy (he actually won that) and it lodges itself so far up your hair-carpeted ass. Why? Because only assholes enter stupid competitions. Only assholes willingly travel to Coney Island. And because cops (notorious assholes) are the only non-hipster fans of mustaches these days. What an absolutely awful way to choose to adorn yourself. I mean, I understand you possess a beard growing power equal to the might of a thousand suns, but please don’t act as if you’re required by law to use it.
Have you any idea what it’s like being seen with you in public? Me neither, because you never leave your fucking basement. The rare times you would be awake at normal hours and I could convince you to leave your rat’s nest, you’d come up to drink. Anywhere we went, the people would whisper to one another, “which of them is the top? Do you think the one with the mustache is the power bottom?” At least when we’d go to the grocery store and buy beer, we both would choose Pabst Blue Ribbon and then the people would say, “Oh! They’re not gay, just faggy hipsters.” My most sincere thanks to you, dickhead.
Now that you’ve moved back to New York City, I’m sure you’re happy amongst the rest of your clones. Maybe some drunk chicks gave you points for your “originality” here, drunkenly confused that you looked stylish, but in NYC you’re only playing a raiment game of follow-the-leader. Here you used to drive us insane with your incessant Blackberry/iPhone usage, but in NYC, I believe that’s how everybody communicates. You’ll fit right back in. Before I fall asleep at night, sometimes I pray that someone steals your phone and forces you to live without “being connected to the network” for a week. I think watching you weep gently into your own mustache and try to readjust to life without Angry Birds and a constant flow of texts from your best friend’s sister for whom you secretly pine after would be a sufficient punishment for your aforementioned sins.
But the biggest, unforgivable reason you are just an unconceivable douche bag lies with the work in which you’ve chosen to take part. For the uninformed, Van takes videos of uncut interviews with teen pop sensations and cuts them down to 3 minute segments, because young people can’t be bothered to watch a full 10 minute interview! That takes, like, a frickin’ hour! And we can’t expect America’s future to dedicate THAT kind of time when they have to go to field hockey practice and have awkward sexual experiences in their parents‘ basement. I hope you contemplate suicide daily while you splice in wacky shots of flavor-of-the-month celebs emerging from limousines like the fecal matter they are into this toilet of a world, between the answers to questions of no consequence, all set to 45 second clips of royalty free “music” you’re forced to use. Congratulations, Van, you’re a mass-media whore. You’re part of the reason this country is ¾ the way down the shitter and I hope you know there’s a special level of hell for you and your ilk.
Tony Heartman
I started the dossier on this prick sometime back in high school. A mutual friend had introduced me to a group of his friends from a local shitpit known officially as Haverhill. To white folk/fans of not being stabbed and raped it’s pronounced “Brazil.” From what I remember of this group of go-getters is that one used to brag that he was In the top 10 players of Halo in the country. Ranked by whom? I don’t know. Did he believe that would lead him down any path that would lead to ass? I never played video games (read: winner, sexually active, of a fine complexion, south of 2 bills) so I cared very little for that idiot. Next in line at this buffoon buffet was a guy we’ll call G and his girlfriend J. G actually was into the competitive side of video games and attended tournaments in Japan for being good at a ninja game or something gay like that. I was way more impressed with his ability to look exactly like now-deceased murderer, former WWE star, Chris Benoit and/or the template for every typecast actor that gets work on Criminal Minds as a serial killer. Now Heartman is most famously an asshole for being best friends with G while coveting, and eventually stealing J away from him. That ended that friendship pretty fast. Good job, asshole.
When I first began really spending time with Heartman, it was right at the time J--who, at best, looked like Big Bird if Big Bird could ever be found slightly attractive by someone--ended up leaving him. Who knew collecting tens of thousands of dollars worth of comic books and action figures wasn’t attractive to women? But, oh well, the big baby went off the deep end because, like an asshole, he had his entire identity invested in this one girl.
Given his rough state, the loss of friends, a warm vagina, and the job that he somehow lost as a result of her leaving him, I did what I could to help him along. But what happens when you spend too much time near assholes? Eventually, they’ll fart right in your face.
The first of two incidents that exemplifies why Heartman is an asshole, was the time I was giving him a ride home, and like a little girl he began commiserating and yelling about how he should “just kill” himself, because his “life was so perfect with her and now it’s over.” Feeling more than slightly uncomfortable, I told him things would be okay. Instead of putting a smile on his face, making sure his ballbag was still attached, and just smoking a god damn cigarette, he then began crying. Worst ride home ever.
Now I tried my best to show him new experiences, meet new people, make some money at a new job up at the friggin beach for the summer, but like a true asshole, he laid a three-month-long cropduster fart and stunk the fun out of every place I brought him. Everybody always ended up looking at me as if it were my fault. Well you brought him, so it might as well be your gas. The worst stinker this asshole laid was at the job I got him working at my girlfriend’s dad’s minigolf/ice cream stand up at the beach for the summer. As he did with every opportunity provided him during that period, he drank more booze than he could handle, mixed it with his heart meds, or brain meds, or HRT, whatever it was, said a rash of way-over-the-line shit and ended up getting canned before the end of the season.
The dipshit still swears he quit though I was next to my girlfriend and heard the phone call from her father when he informed her he had just let him go. Tired of having my face farted into, I cut all contact with Heartman for a few years. Actually, I have no idea why I ever started talking to him again. Ugh. What an ass.
O. P. Harris
Only one other person has ever been closer (much closer) to O. P. Harris than I: a gay German foreign exchange student he used to hang with who tried kissing him in the parking lot of a bank before he was supposed to leave the country. Harris and I have been like a set of brothers for over a decade and with confidence I can say I know him better than whatever girlfriend he’s currently keeping around for some reason whom he doesn’t even actually like. It’s sort of like why he keeps me around as a friend when he doesn’t even actually like me either. In my mind, our friendship gives me full permission to rip him apart, bury him, start a fire on his shallow grave using his Boy Scout uniform, and then take a buttpee on it to extinguish the flame. I could write a six-volume encyclopedia of dickitude on my best friend and actually, I had to save this assignment for last based on the sheer amount of material I have on this French Canadian pansy. I’ll highlight the three main points which, to me, make O. P. Harris such a friggin douche bag.
1. Allow me to illustrate what it would look like if an actual asshole, the body part, found itself suddenly literate: first, it would buy a typewriter off of me, and second, fancy itself a writer. Outside of growing up in/next to Lowell, MA, home of notorious asshole, Jack Kerouac, Harris’ writing credits include working for a school newspaper most notable for being run entirely by editors who had never, in fact, seen a newspaper, let alone read one. One time, he was also published in the prestigious 2007 first issue of the first volume of Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue, with a piece about how he went and saw a real author go read his real work. What do you mean you’ve never heard of Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue?
So now I would ask, where do you, Mr. Harris, get off believing yourself to be an author? Were you born with some kind of arrogance gland buried deep within you--probably next to some overworked bile duct--that produces pure arrogance? I would ask that, yes, but I’m too focused on another question, one where I wonder where you get off writing your first novel as a sequel? And where do you get off writing a sequel to a book yet finished? But the most head-scratching aspect of this literary conundrum is that this novel he claims to be writing is a sequel to MY unpublished and in-the-works manuscript! I mean, really, what sort of asshole would complain that his story is being messed up because I keep making changes to my own manuscript? An O. P. Harris sort of asshole. That’s who.
Be on the lookout later this fall for his collection of heroic sonnets that serves as a prequel to his favorite movie, Pretty Woman.
2. Allow me to be blunt: this cob-knobbler is terrible at being high. Now the both of us are by no means old, but our younger, party-filled days, while not totally behind us, are toned down significantly now. In college though, we went through a fair amount of Visene and Doritos. It’s not to say that Harris was never any fun to get lifted with, but on the whole, he just sucks at being stoned. The first time I ever smoked with him was during a band practice when he decided it would be a great idea to add some Georgia Peach pipe tobacco into the mix. Having only been high enough times to count on one hand, I didn’t know enough to protest, and the pro-stoner, our drummer Rob, didn’t find anything wrong with Harris’ last minute addition either. I didn’t get high. I just got a fucking headache. Thanks.
During a different practice, we all got really ripped, sans tobacco, and to pass the time drove about the neighborhood --which at the time featured a heavy amount of construction--and laughed at the cops doing traffic detail. Rob thought it would be a great idea to jump out of the car and steal the box of dynamite the workers needed to do the blasting in the rocky Massachusetts ground. Thinking back on it, I doubt anybody would ever leave dynamite in a metal box simply chained to a telephone pole, unattended. It was a good time laughing at the thought until Harris began freaking out. Was it the thought of committing a felony that worried him, or being in possession of a highly volatile and destructive substance? Was it merely the paranoia that affects many a smoker?
No. He was curled up in the back of the SUV freaking out, whining that his girlfriend was going to be so mad at him, and so disappointed. It all came down to some crap about her ex-boyfriend (Harris’ best friend up until the point when he stole her away) used to ignore her in favor of getting high. Given her wet dishrag personality, I see where he was coming from. But the whimpers from somebody who supposedly has a set of balls saying, “she’s going to kill me. I can’t believe I’d do this to her,” is nothing but a buzz. fucking. kill.
But the time that takes the Hosstess Cupcakes and other various snack foods was during our freshmen year of college. He and I had returned from the vast woods of the campus to his dorm room with swirling heads and severe Ethiopian-level hunger. Harris attended a school most noteworthy for its spectacular food. Though the cafeteria was closed, another late-night, on-campus grubbery known as The Coffee Shop was open and serving the greatest buffalo chicken calzones known to mankind. And we wanted them. I am unaware as to why we couldn’t just walk over to it (it was less than a 60 second walk from his dorm), and whatever reason we had at that time was most likely total crap, but unable to deal in the world of logic, we were forced to call our order in. Now the number was something as simple as 555-FOOD, a free phone call from his dorm phone. Stony McFuckhead was absolutely incapable of dialing the number correctly. I mean like, he screwed it up 25 times. Our hunger started to get the better of us and I contemplated chewing on the desk, or turning on him. We needed food.
For years and years Harris refused to get a job--possibly the biggest asshole decision one can make. Without a source of income, he lived without a working cell phone. Unable to dial out from his dorm phone a simple sequence of 7 digits, in our genius state of mind, we decided to call Marcus. Marcus and I worked together at a restaurant prior to going to college and happened to run into one another earlier that day. I introduced him to Harris. By no means did that make them friends. By no means were Marcus and I anything more than work acquaintances. But we were going to give him a call and have him get us food. Yep. The fatal flaw in our plan? Harris sucks at being high. He refused to dial out long distance on his dorm phone worried that his mother would be angry with him over a $0.42 charge. But alas! He had himself a long distance calling card. Remember how those work? They require dialing about a 19 digit pin and then the 10 digit phone number. Somebody who couldn’t dial 555-FOOD then attempted keying in a sequence of 29 digits. And as the night wore on, listening to a chorus of telephonic beeping and “Shit! I fucked it up again!” I went hungry.
3. In the off-chance he has any feelings left to hurt, allow me to take a moment to discuss how truly gross an individual O. P. Harris is. First off, nice lip ring. I didn’t know pop punk bands were still around. Your “beards” are the weakest thing known to mankind. Each year you grow a playoff beard for the Boston Bruins for some unknown reason, even though you don’t spend a single minute of the regular season paying attention to them. Even more humorous on that account is that you willingly walk around looking like someone glued a few pubes to your face in the name of post-season hockey superstition and you don’t even watch THOSE games! When people aren’t looking at your ragged face, it’s a good bet they’re wincing at the site of you wearing sandals April through November and having to experience the horror of your hairy hammer toes. Buy some god damn shoes, jackass, and while you’re at it, invest in some new tee shirts. It’s not that the shirts you own now aren’t great, but stop punishing good clothing. It’s entirely unfair to expect these garments to support that extra 65 lbs you packed away after high school.
Apart from your physical appearance, what the hell is up with your decorating skills? You couldn’t hang a poster straight to save your life. Is one of your legs shorter than the other? The disarray of the dumb shit you choose to display on your walls is appropriate however, when taking into account that you store everything you own on the floor. As a host, O. P. Harris will not feed you, will not provide you with a place to sit, or stand, or even walk, will blind you with his gross body, and cause the perfectionist in us all to run for the nearest razor blade or noose when looking at his walls. It’s best, if absolutely necessary to see him, to meet in a neutral location. Don’t invite him over because in my experience, he’ll demand--in temper tantrum fashion--to be shown DVDs of the late-80’s family sitcom, ALF. He’ll probably get high, something he totally sucks at, and fall asleep without pillow or blanket, and begin to make this awful noise; a noise that I can only imagine he picked up somewhere during multiple viewings of his favorite musicals.
It's no Seinfeld.
ReplyDelete