Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? (22 page)

It seems extremely unlikely. Yet there are always two words found on every scrap of food packaging to guard against such an eventuality:
SERVING SUGGESTION
. They may be small, but they’re always there. Like people expect a jug of ice-cold milk to be included in their cereal packet. Even though that would represent a major spillage hazard—which nobody wants. Or a single cherry tomato in their pot of sour cream and onion dip.

The serving suggestions are not only dumb, they’re woefully unoriginal. Good Friends cereal is always—always!—served in a clean white bowl. Why not, just once, show an illustration of the oaty cereal having been dished up into a bowl of another color, or into another kind of receptacle altogether: like lots of tiny walnut shells or a pair of child’s rubber boots? Now,
that’s
a serving suggestion.

SEX TIPS

Some people are so expert at sex that they become “sexperts.” Very much leaders in the field of how to use one’s bathing suit areas, these people inhabit a world of nonstop sensual erotica. They really know about genitals.

For any willing recipient of the awesome wisdom of a “sexpert,” “sex tips” will inject your sex life with such unbridled naughtiness that any passing Bangkok whore would be moved to widen her overpainted eyelids with fearful fascination. Some of the most common “sex tips” include the following:

• Breathe on each other. As one of you breathes out, the other breathes in, so you inhale each other’s breath. Breathing—it rocks!

• Cover each other’s legs in sealing wax. Hey, it’s not for everyone, but don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Waxy, isn’t it?

• Don’t underestimate the erotic potential of the elbow. Find out what you can do with yours and before long your love buddy will be dragging you upstairs as soon as you walk in the door.

• Lather up each other’s pubic regions with shampoo and make amusing shapes. Laughter is a great way of creating a sexy atmosphere!?!?

• Stuff each other’s mouths full of cheese—then lick each other all over. You’ll be amazed at the new sensations you both experience.

• You’d be amazed how talking can get your partner feeling horny. Try reading aloud favorite passages from
The Aeneid.
Trust us . . . phew!

• During penetration, why don’t you both imagine you are soaring through the clouds on the wings of a giant swan? If either one of you can perform a convincing swan’s call, so much the better!

• Oh . . . just, you know, new positions and that. Put your legs in funny places, that sort of thing.

SHOPPED-UP GAS STATIONS

It’s like pulling off the freeway for a wee-wee and ending up in one of those airport departure lounges that are one huge duty-free shop so you are fine if your needs are served by perfume, Scotch, and chocolate truffles. But if you are after a bread-based snack, you’ve got to join a line for the next hour or so to be awarded a stale croissant.

Okay, at Kwik Trip you can buy a bread-based snack at a shop. Or was that Quick Trip? Or Quick Stop? Perhaps Zip Mart? Sprint Mart? Kwik-I-Mart? On-the-Go? Suck & Go? But definitely not a Wawa. All these awful names designed to evoke images of choking down chips and a giant soda while speeding into traffic leaves one wishing for a nice, simple 7-Eleven. Not that anybody knows what “7-Eleven” actually means. Maybe the franchise was started by a Borg named Seven of Eleven.

People actually have to squeeze around each other to avoid the massive piles of water guns, remote-control cars, travel mugs, monster trucks, Wiffle ball kits, watch stands, remote-control dinosaurs, ED-209s, vast selections of doughnuts and popcorn (to keep things calm and puke-free on the backseat). It’s like a shop-shit warehouse sale. With the added bonus of a slightly psychotic guy from the AA blocking your entry to the toilet until you make a purchase. Sure, you say you will after you pee, but he knows you’re lying. But for him, short of hurting you—which, believe me, he has considered—there’s not much he can do about it. His life is a long series of disappointments, adrift in a sea of shop shit.

I’m wiped already—that’s why I pulled up in the first place—so I’m not really going to feel utterly refreshed by a veritable shitstorm of shop shit. Honestly, these shitty shopped-up shitholes full of shit shop shit really should just shut up shop and shit off.

SHOPPING CENTERS, NAMES OF

Going to a shopping center is one of the single most painful things known to the sentient human. Calling the place Lakeside or Bluewater will not change that. It is not like being beside a lake. It is like being in hell. There is only one exception to this shopping center name rule and that is Crossroads Bellevue—it’s in Bellevue and it makes us feel so psychotically aggrieved that we storm out into the streets, so at least it’s factual.

“SIR”/“MADAM”

We supposedly inhabit an infinitely less deferential world, one where priests and judges are not gods to whom we must offer unquestioning obedience but are human, just like the rest of us, only with silly uniforms and more money. Rather than referring to politicians as “Mr. Giuliani” or “Mrs. Clinton,” people say things like “dickhead” or “you know, the smarmy bald one.” Given this, it’s surprising how often you can find yourself, a lowly commoner, being called “sir” or “madam” like you’re the ambassador to India ordering high tea at the Ritz. Even though you’re just in Blockbuster renting a video. And one of the
Police Academy
series at that.

If you were to purchase some pants, say, and were to approach the earnest clerk behind the register, you can surely pretty much consider each other equals; you could even exchange friendly pleasantries. But not when he calls you “sir” like a scurvy-suffering rat-catcher addressing a dark-clad knight who’s holding a broadsword to his skull.

But being a servile service-culture square-bear really doesn’t get you anywhere. Unfair though it may seem, when you call me “sir,” I am infinitely more inclined to call you “suckass.” In reality, the only reason to call someone “sir” is if he could cause permanent damage to your genitals if you didn’t. Otherwise, don’t bother.

SIX-PACK SECRETS

Six-packs sex you up. That’s a fact. According to
Men’s Fitness,
“Abdominals are the Top Trump trophy muscles and the ones that drive women wild . . . the abs may have come to symbolize masculinity.” Having phenomenal abdominals will “improve your sex appeal and help you achieve your goals” (although the “other goals” men might have besides having sex remain undisclosed). This is why, at some point or other, all men must uncover the secret of the six-pack.

So how does one go about acquiring these bristling sex muscles of sex? As previously explained, it’s a secret. You can “crunch” until you’re blue in the face, but if you skip the secret stuff, the stuff known only to the chosen few, you are but a modern-day Sisyphus, forever pushing that boulder toward the unattainable peak.

Luckily, some secrets are too much to bear alone, so certain masters of the field have elected to pass on their six-pack lore to the chosen few. There are books with titles like
The Abs Diet: The Six-Week Plan to Flatten Your Stomach and Keep You Lean for Life
by David Zinczenko and Ted Spiker.
^*
And fitness magazines offering “From Fat to Flat—In Six Weeks!,” “Get Hard Abs,” or “Abs: Don’t Think You Don’t Want Them ’Cos You Do Really, Deep Down, Even if You Say You Don’t, You Do Really . . .”

“SMART CASUAL”

Workplace clothing policy devised by the Devil, which decrees that suits are too smart and jeans are too casual. So what does that leave in the middle? Fucking chinos.

“SOLD” SIGNS

The property is no longer for sale. This is surely the point at which to take down all those big, fuck-off, multicolored signs outside it. Not put up a new one.

Want to buy this house? Tough shit, you can’t. It’s not for sale. You should have been here last week. Go and buy another house. ’Cos you ain’t buying this one. Want it? I bet you do. But you can’t have it.

SOUNDTRACK ALBUMS FROM SHIT FILMS WITH SHIT SOUNDTRACKS

Who—
who?
—emerges blinking into the foyer, dusting off a confetti of fumbled popcorn and Milk Duds, after sitting through, say, “Can Pierce Brosnan’s master thief resist one last big score with tough cop Woody Harrelson on his tail?” crappy adventure flick
After the Sunset
and thinks:
Hey—great film, must get the soundtrack
?

“Music from and inspired by . . .” That’s “inspired” in the financial sense rather than in the actually-having-seen-the-film sense.

When creating his twenty-something mope-fest
Garden State,
Zach Braff seems to have spent more time adding up potential soundtrack sales than writing the script. Mildly successful and mildly handsome actor Braff mopes through his hometown until a quirky meeting with a quirky girl makes him quirkily mope mildly less. Plot-wise, a few seconds would have done—but how then could one crowbar in all of The Shins’ first album? What’s the Story? We can’t remember—there’s just this schmuck moping all the time.

Even good films generally have no necessity for a soundtrack release. Who cheers themselves up by listening to the available-at-all-good-record-stores soundtrack to
The Elephant Man
?

Are there really roommates and couples, staring down the end of another evening’s TV brain death, saying to each other: “Let’s make a night of it. I’ll run out to Trader Joe’s and get some Two Buck Chuck—you slap on the soundtrack to
Must Love Dogs.
”

Or: “Which track from mentalist-insomniac-psycho-factory-worker thriller
The Machinist
do you like best? I really like ‘Miserable Life,’ but I
love
‘Trevor in Jail.’ ” “They’re both great, but on balance I definitely prefer ‘Where Is My Waitress?’ ” “Yes! The posing of the question, the lack of resolution—it’s quite, quite beautiful. Do any of us know the whereabouts of our waitress, really? That’s what he’s saying. Where is
your
waitress? Where is
my
waitress?”

TV’s at it, too, with CD spin-offs from
Grey’s Anatomy, CSI, 24,
and
CSI: Miami.
“That quite good drama of Florida-based forensic work certainly enlivened our Monday-evening viewing—let’s get the background music from the bits when they were walking down corridors.” “Cool. We could walk down our hall.”

Even video games have soundtrack albums now—the various volumes of
Grand Theft Auto
have their own section in music stores. “Do you know, later, I think I might pimp some women for a bit and then crash my car.” “Awesome. You’ll be wanting to put this on then.” “Rock on. You motherfucker.”

As a general rule, if it’s not a musical, it probably doesn’t need a soundtrack album. Actually, that holds for most musicals, too. Particularly
Chicago.

SPAM PORN

“TODAY IS JIZZ DAY!” . . . Is it? Is it really?

SPOTTED!

Someone. Somewhere. Out. Doing stuff. Thanks for that.

STORES THAT PLAY SHIT MUSIC AT EARSPLITTING VOLUME

That’s quite a nice shirt, I think I’ll pop in there and try—oh, fuck, no I won’t, they’re playing Nelly Furtado at 12 trillion decibels. Jesus, one of them’s even dancing.

STRESS BUSTING, THE PHRASE

It’s interesting that, in this day and age, you are even obliged to try to reduce your stress in an aggressive way.

Bust that stress! Get it down on the floor and really stick one on it! Faster! Really fuck it over! You’re not good enough! You’re not good enough! There isn’t time! There isn’t time!

STUPID ARGUMENTS FOR BEING PAID TOO MUCH FOR BEING ON TV

After signing John Madden in 2006 to an undisclosed many-millions-of-dollars-a-year contract to cover the NFL, NBC’s Dick Ebersol justified the deal by exclaiming, “John Madden is the best analyst in the history of the National Football League and, in my opinion, the best analyst of any kind in sports television history.” Okay, possibly. But what he’s doing still basically amounts to “watching football,” right? Your dad rambles about franchise histories and makes predictions every Sunday, too, only instead of getting filthy rich from it, he loses money by paying for his own beer and chips.

News anchors argue that wheelbarrows are required to pay them because reading the news is “very difficult.” Now, we seem to manage it fairly well when we read the paper. We’d go as far as to call it “easy.”

The worst lame excuses for minting it for doing nothing are from people on breakfast radio/TV, who always use the argument “We get up really early.” This is the reason that they are the third highest-paid occupational group, just behind coffee shop employees and paper boys.

SUMMER BODIES

“Beach panic! Beach panic! Beach panic!”

Summer used to be a time to relax. To feel mellow and laid-back, even. Enjoy a bit of sunshine. Beaches were often seen as the ideal places on which to enact such soothing operations. “Life’s a beach,” as the saying used to go. But now beaches are places of ungovernable paranoia, as young women are commanded to have “summer bodies for the beach.”

You’ve got to get your body ready for summer. Don’t, for fuck’s sake, leave it to its own devices. That way lies ruin and derision. Which means, according to the women’s magazines, getting into training in the middle of winter. Of course, tans tend to be at their best in autumn, when people start covering up. It’s a fundamental flaw in this whole “seasons” thing that we are now thankfully doing our level best to eradicate. By introducing artificial tans that make people look like they have covered themselves in caramel.

And it’s not just tans, but having a toned belly, non-nasty toenails, exfoliation, et cetera. This whole getting-ready-for-summer is a fucking nightmare. But it’s all-important if you are not going to end the summer sad and lonely, with nothing to look forward to but winter and maybe autumn.

SUPERMARKET FLOWERS