The Seven Deadly Sins (10 page)

One more thing: I do not mean to brag or anything, but, goddamn, I am pretty.

Not just like Ewan McGregor or Jude Law pretty, but like Kate Beckinsale pretty. I know, I know, in front of a mirror it is all well and good, you got to deal with shadows and shit, but standing still, I cut a very handsome figure. Also, to quote Ani Difranco, “I have the kind of beauty that moves.”

I have a visage so stunning I make women and men pregnant. When I move through a room, I leave trails of vapor that intoxicate even the sternest critics. My eyes melt butter, iron, graham crackers, and Silly Putty. I dance like Stevie Wonder and I blush like Betty Boop. I am just all-around kick-fuckin'-ass.

God, if only any of that shit were true.

I have just given you a taste of Vanity, this chapter's delicious little deadly sin. Self-love, the only true love, besides the love of food. Everybody has a little of it. It is different from pride: Pride is love for one's deeds or achievements. Vanity is love for one's. . .one, I guess. From vanity plates to
Vanity Fair
, it seems commonplace. It is very easy to explain: Most of us are who we
are, but vain fuckers are who they love, and they will do whatever they have to do in order to ensure that everyone around them loves them, too. This is the grotesque by a whole new name; it is pure peacock syndrome.

Again, by and large I have no trust in the field. People who come off as very vain are pompous asses, and people who do their very best not to care how they look or act come off as—you guessed it—pompous asses. But if we're honest, we are all at least a little bit vain. We all have a need to love ourselves, or at least one thing about ourselves. But there is nothing wrong with a touch of self-assurance. That kind of empowered feeling can be the fuel for great accomplishments. But too much and you run the risk of having way too much in common with Paris Hilton. It's okay, you can think what you want about her while reading my book. There is no chance in hell she would read this because there are no pictures of cartoon dogs to color with magic markers in here.

Vanity is constantly checking every mirror, storefront window, tea kettle, microwave door, windshield and any other reflective surface just to get a glimpse of your fine self. Vanity is leaving a child's birthday party because one of the seven-year olds has a better vintage Van Halen T-shirt than you do. Vanity is pumping fat from your ass into the lean bits of your face and pretending people do not totally think you look like a flying coconut raped your face. Do not kid yourself, true believers (love you, Stan!): Vanity can be a dark, dangerous, hulking bipolar bitch that can chase you till the day you die.

But that does not make it a fucking sin.

Sure, it is ironically ugly. It is disgusting to see someone so into his or herself that your skin crawls just standing near them, with little more to go on but their constant use of “I,” “me,” or
“my.” But as satanic as it gets, the frustrating part comes when these people do not even recognize the issue. They think they are being confident—and to other vainglorious fucks, I am sure they are. But it is all in the details. They are trying to look like they are not trying at all. I can tell; maybe even you can tell.

A vain person cannot allow a conversation to happen without dishing in his or her own exploits. No matter what, it always has to be about
them
. Bring up football, they will turn it into a dissertation on how they were the best flag football player in second grade: “Could have gone pro, if there was an official league, but my friends are petitioning the state legislature.” I really heard someone say this, swear to Buddha.

A vain person will size up the room to draw the most energy to his or herself. They do it by talking loudly, gesturing like a Shakespearian actor and laughing like a hyena on Meth. Mick fucking Jagger could walk into a smoking lounge in St. Louis, Missouri, on a layover to Africa in the hopes of raising money for impoverished natives. A vain person would still walk up to him and explain what he is doing wrong with his band. An expert is nothing more than a vain person who has read a book.

The deception of vanity is that it is not only skin deep. It is a soul-sucking disease that warps within and without. It makes truly beautiful people look like they should live under a bypass somewhere, bothering goats and silly knights. It puts the “shun” in pretension. The truth is that most people do not give a shit when you get down to it. Most people do not try to match their catgut belt to every thermos they use to carry their coffee. Most people do not roam around preening like an idiot. Life is not a fucking movie, and you do not always have to look good for your close-up. The emperor's new clothes are now a chain outlet fooling morons into thinking there is more to being less. We
want our heroes to look cool, but they do not have to look like they are trying so fucking hard.

I have probably the worst self-image on the planet. It is like when I look in a mirror, the damn thing is warped. I have never been able to look at myself without picking out a smorgasbord of flaws and ripping myself apart. They could vote me one of
People
magazine's Fifty Sexiest Men Alive and I would freak out because I would be certain someone was setting me up to be
Punk'd
. I have days that are better than others, but for the most part I am paralyzed with a self-image problem. When you grow up with denigrating bastards your whole life, the feeling that you are filthy never really goes away. Thank god you can eventually align yourself with people who will do their very best to reverse this horrible predicament.

Back to vanity: Is there anything more hilarious than watching the mannerisms of a truly vainglorious person when they do not think we are watching? Their faces appear both pinched and glowing depending on the circumstance. It is like on one hand they do not want to be bothered by peons and curmudgeons who could possibly diminish their shine, but on the other hand they need these living mirrors to reflect their dazzle. They need us because without us they would never feel their beauty. Janice Dickinson looks like she should be numb because anyone that pulled on and stretched out cannot feel pain like we mortals do. Vain people do not feel it because they feel nothing.

But the question remains: Is this a sin? No. Being a preening douche bag is a
character flaw
, not a sin. So where the hell did this notion of sin come from? Something tells me a long time ago, there was one flake that just had to brag to the hierarchy about the gold-leaf tunic his mother made for him and he was so braggadocious that they took a vote in Ye Olden Temple to
quash any further use of glamour or self-flattery. That is how Superman saved Christmas. . .oh, and that is also how vanity became a sin. This is also why religious folk dress like fucking paupers. God forbid they wear some shit that does not look like it was sewn out of carpet and fish paper in the 1600s. But people are so terrified of appearing vain that they will rob from the kitsch and live like the Amish.

Do not get me wrong, there is a difference between wanting to look attractive and treating everyone like beef tripe if they refuse to view you as anything other than spectacular. The gall of the truly vain is the supposition that anyone who stands fast to good old-fashioned good taste will be shunned into obscurity. Nowhere is this state of mind and play more prevalent than that breaker of wills, that fucker of hopes, that dreadful hatch full of fuck and cancerous rancor called high school. It is so true that even at the age of thirty-six, I can still feel like retching when I think of my tenure from ninth to whatever fucking grade I was in when they “asked me to leave,” a nice way of saying, “You are expelled; do not come back.”

High school is meant to be socialism for beginners. Instead, it becomes a strange TV movie for the feudal system. You end up with a commingling of everything bad in the world. If you are one of the Pretty Faces or Alpha Males, you breeze through those four years with little difficulty, signing yearbooks and cheating on tests with just a touch of date rape on the side for good measure. High school is a breeding ground for moronic creamy dreamboats who peak in their teens, for troglodytes who think life only exists from freshman to senior. Can you imagine their chagrin when they realize that if they are lucky they get eighty more years of life? That is, if they can actually count to eighty.

I got my fill of vanity from those limber years of shucking and running, fucking and cunning, and I have to say the only thing I take away from them are my need to put as many years between me and the wet end of puberty as possible. Those could be the worst kids ever, and they were being encouraged to become the worst adults ever. Are we living in a goddamn vacuum? Are we devolving like Devo predicted thirty years ago? A thousand years from now, will any of this matter? A million years from now, will we merely be the hottest, cutest dipshit boobs left who did not choke on their own air?

Pretty people come with pretty problems. This concept is very funny to me. “Should I use the mauve eye shadow or the burnt sienna?” “Should I wear my expensive ripped jeans or my
really
expensive ripped jeans?” “Do I eat at a place where I usually go so people will see me or eat at a place where I have never been before so people will have to
find
me to see me?” Are they fucking kidding me? These are serious questions? I cannot tell you how many times I have had to listen to some of these fucking Californians; they talk the most amazing shit because their heads are so far up their own asses that they can taste every fart before it passes their mustaches. It is a terrible, visceral, and violent mindset that twists and bends people like ancient oaks in a Carpathian forest.

But is it a sin? Or is it just another distraction on the way to death?

Neither is the honest answer. It is too boring to be a sin. Let me take that back; it is only a sin to yourself and is there a worse thing we can do to ourselves than sin? I do not think so. But a sin in general? No fucking way, dude. Vanity is too base to be a sin. Do you know how easy it is to be into yourself? Do you know how easy it is to ostracize your fellow humans because
you are too busy shouting, “Dig me!”? Sometimes I think people are too fucking stupid to be this dumb. It is also too strong to be a mere distraction. I have seen it twist too many people in its wind. No, vanity is something else.

How that makes sense at all is a mystery to me. But as long as I get it, who fucking cares?

Animal activists throw blood or paint on people wearing fur and leather. I think people opposed to vainglorious bastards should throw Avon on them and not the high-end stuff. I am talking about the little bullet-sized lipsticks with the viscosity of rancid duck puss. Vain people are flesh mosaics of abandon and lack of confidence. They are terrified of appearing anything other than perfect. What a sweet hell that would be, huh?

I mean imagine it: spending every second devoted to willful body control, side-of-your-eye attention, and intense command of attitude, vocabulary, and mannerism. It would be like a forty-year-long movie you could never act your way out of. It would be like digging your own grave with a tiny spoon and knowing that the only time you will ever get to add a little differential in your life, it will be too late. They will be putting you in the very grave you wasted your life digging.

The vain of the planet make us suffer in more ways than we can ever imagine. They make us examine all kinds of shit: what they are wearing, what you are wearing, how they look, how you look, how you feel about how they look, how they feel about how you look, how you feel about how they feel about how you look—Jesus Mary and Joseph, does this vicious whirlwind of fantasy ever subside? When all of these social factors are taken as a whole, it all boils down to one simple equation: you (x) = them cubed. They will make you feel so inadequate it becomes difficult to remember how you were able to button your own fly that morning.

As major as that sounds, there is a minor inconvenience to consider. Being an asshole does not necessarily make you a sinner. It makes you a simple hole in an ample ass. Those of us who can handle it simply deal by sauntering off to the bathroom to giggle at these sorry flakes of speck. We also tell others about you, thereby spreading the ridicule as far as we can until somewhere in Guam a rat meat salesmen chuckles under his dirty breath at a YouTube clip that someone made called “Douche Shreds,” which is a video of you with someone else's voice saying “Look at me, I am a fucking douche!”

Get the picture, kiddies? People who put themselves in human trophy cases catch an incredible amount of bullshit. Now, whether they care or not, they get as much disdain as they dish out. The circle of life remains complete. The lion eats the antelope, the lion dies and becomes the grass, and then the lion/ grass becomes antelope shit.

Anyway, vanity makes people do strange things that are as hilarious as the things they do when they are angry. I used to date a girl who drove by the same bank in the same small town for years, even if the bank was out of her way. Why? She wanted to see herself driving her car in the super long picture window that ran the length of the building. That is a true story; it is also why I used to date her. You can only live in someone else's world for so long before you tell them to hurry up and throw the fucking ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Get it over with; death is preferable to incessant primping.