The Seven Deadly Sins (20 page)

You would not bother me so much if you were not so envious of idiotic tool bags like Nicole Richie and Tila Tequila. These people make armpit farts seem classy. They are sprayed all over TMZ and
Us Weekly
like cold jizz in a public bathroom. They
are hardly glamorous, have no fucking talent whatsoever, and serve no real purpose other than to make us feel bad about not being them. They remind me a lot of the dried remnants of rogue piss that collects and creates the orange crust around the bolts on a bachelor's toilet: As soon as you find yourself with that problem, you have made a filthy mess and it is going to take a long time to come clean. There are genuine superstars in this world that could not give a dried deer turd whether or not they are in
People
or the
Enquirer
. I am still trying to figure out who in the hell this Heidi Montag person is and why I should give a red shit or even why I know her damn name. Apparently she is a singer. Apparently she got fucking married. And apparently all you people cared. I still do not have the faintest clue. I know she is blonde (until it is no longer stylish), I know she has a mouth a train could drive through, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that I do not find her appealing in the slightest. I do not envy her life at all. But some of you do. Why would you envy anyone who looks like a stunt double at the Preakness?

Is it the money? You can make money, kids. Even people living on the street make money. That is not that difficult. Hell, I knew a dude named Smiley who did nothing but collect bottles and cans and bum spare change from the moment he woke until the moment he finally slept. He had a fucking house
and
a high-end Lexus. So do you envy the money? Do you think if you are famous you are automatically wealthy? Nothing could be further from the truth. I am slightly more famous than most and I make a decent living in my tax bracket, but I am far from wealthy. I cannot yet buy the things I want to buy. But once I am incredibly rich, I will have these things, like an island, a houseboat, another island. . .and Wyoming. But I am still famous. Several of you reading this book know who I am. Some of you might think I
am the gay porn star Corey Taylor. I am deeply flattered! But no...

By the same token, is it the fame? Do you envy them for their relative notoriety? Do you wish you could walk into a restaurant and get a table immediately, even if you still have to pay full price? That is not a very good reason either. First of all, most famous people are secretly angry about being famous. They do not like being bothered just because you recognize who they are, even though they would be hotter under the designer collar if you did not recognize them. Yeah, they hate being famous, until they are not famous anymore. Then they just hate you. Having said that, I have to tell you fame is not all it is cracked up to be. I am the kind of guy who is still surprised when anyone recognizes me, but there are definitely times when it sucks, like walking through the mall when you have to piss really bad, knowing there are five or six thirteen-year-olds following your every move. You feel like you have been tagged by
National Geographic
.

So what is it you envy about these scags? Do you envy their looks? Jesus, Howard, Fine, Howard, and Christ, some of these people look misshapen. Others look like skeletons. The rest are too weird to really get a bead on. There is that guy from the Twilight movies who looks like Count Chocula had a baby with Frankenberry. There is Ashlee Simpson—oh, excuse me, Ashlee Simpson-Wentz. She looks like a cross between a chipmunk and a rat attack. There is the “basic hot” brigade, people like Jessica Simpson and Gwen Stefani. Why do you envy them—because a couple of fucking cheerleaders did something other than wind up working at Hooters? We have stopped giving adulation to the truly talented and started giving it to the truly average in the hope that by lowering the bar, we ourselves might be eligible for the fame and glory. Maybe that is why all we do is clamor and
cling to their coattails and cuffs. We might just be them some day.

Hell, it may not be that far off.
American Idol
does huge numbers in the first few weeks and the last few weeks, which means two things: We all want to see the winners in the end but we also want to scoff at and enjoy the losers who get ripped to shreds in the beginning. I have seriously never seen an episode of
American Idol
past the first two shows of every season. It is sadism at its greatest: the pointing and the laughing as, one by one, these brave and cocksure hopefuls make and snake their way around a line that might as well get them into Disneyland, waiting hours and hours for a thirty-second chance to maybe make it onto the next half of the show. What they show you is a condensed version with lots of highlights you can chuckle and feel good about, because if you think about it too long, you will realize you are a fucking asshole for doing so. What they do not show you are the hours these people spent waiting and how they got more and more nervous and probably threw up a couple different times. Here is some perspective: The same people who laughed at William Hung most likely bought his fucking album. So sit in that shit.

If sins were a Broadway play, these seven would play out as such. Anger would be the high-energy, high-stepping opening number. Vanity would be the duet between the leading stars, all in spotlight with no one else on stage. Lust would be the “orgy” number. Greed would be the solo number for the villain. Gluttony would feature way too much dancing. Sloth would be another boring ballad. All of this would have a lot of red and black-light spots shining, velvet curtains flying around from the jet engine fans blowing shit all over, and glittery staircases that are a little too high and lead nowhere. The songs would seem a
little risqué, the dancer would show a little too much pussy and cock, and the marquee names attached to the project would be the musical equivalent of Spam and nutmeg.

Envy's number would be the only shining star in the show, because it would go completely over people's heads. It would have to be the duet between the villain and the hero, but it would slowly morph into an ensemble piece that involves everyone and it would have to be written in such a way that you would not know who was who because both the villain and the hero suffer the “sin” of envy. The villain envies the hero because he gets the girl. The hero envies the villain because the villain does whatever he wants. The girl envies the villain because he gets to be bad. The chorus line envies the core cast because they get their names on the playbill. The dancers envy the chorus line because they do more than just dance. Meanwhile the audience envies everyone on the stage because they are in a Broadway show. So envy would have to be the closing number because it would be the one theme that ties us all together at the end of the night. That is the time of the day when envy hits you where you live. We all go back to where we came from, and the whole time we are wondering what everyone else is doing, envying the mystery of their exploits. It is no mystery; our fantasies are always greater than the sum of all their realities. But we still pine for their lives while next door your neighbor pines for yours, and so on and so on.

We all do it. We all feel it. We all deal with it. It is a tie that binds all different kinds. So here is my question: If this is a concept that we all experience and we all let bring out the best and worst in ourselves, how can it be a sin? Remember: Sin equals bad, and if you are a sinner, you are a bad person. So are you? Do you consider yourself a person of ill intent? Here is something
to think about: A villain is nothing more than someone who is convinced that he or she is right. We have always been two halves making one whole. We have both dark and light sides. Anyone who has an eye and a handle on both is just a little further ahead than the rest of us. And that is someone I envy most of all.

M
mmmmm. . .Greed. Sweet, indulgent, creamy greed: more, more, more for me,
Me
,
ME
. It is as benign as season tickets and as intricate as a Ponzi scheme. It has driven men and women to commit horrendous acts of selfish atrocity, like crushing one another in a mall, scrounging for Cabbage Patch Kids, Beanie Babies, or the latest PlayStation. In short, it can and will make you insane. Sadly, it is not like Christmas: It comes more than once a year and no one is greedy for socks, except Wembly from
Fraggle Rock
, who does not count because he is a puppet and, therefore, not real. Then again it could have been Gobo; I get all my puppets mixed up sometimes.

Greed is the urge to own and obtain every action figure on the planet. Greed is the needle in the back of your neck that pushes you to add extra zeroes to your own bankroll check at the office. Greed is the never-ending search for a completion of
self that, sadly, may never come. It is in all of us, and it is inevitable. It is wealth and stuff and class and holdings and everything else that spins the head from time to time. There is a very serious problem with greed at the moment, but we will get to that later. Let's do some background and figure this out before we go any further, shall we?

Greed is a very special sin on this list because in a lot of ways, without greed, some of the other sins would not exist. Think about envy—what is envy but being so greedy you want someone else's shit? Gluttony is just greed for a particular thing, be it food or otherwise. Lust is an all-consuming greed for sex at all times; even vanity is a sort of greed for the flesh, wanting only to be the most beautiful creature known to man and Ted Koppel. Without the others, greed could stand on its own, a self-fulfilling sensation. But without greed, a lot of these supposed sins could not get off the runway.

Maybe that is the reason it comes first on so many lists of the deadly sins. It is certainly the most powerful and yet it is the most esoteric. It is not pure emotion like anger; it is not a physical rapture like lust. It is not easily recognized like sloth or vanity. But greed, when not kept in check, can warp the very Oak of Man more crookedly than all the waters of the world.

So, having said that,
I am a greedy fuck
.

I want it
all
, and I have no qualms about admitting or even embracing it. I want to have more money than God. I want to do every little thing that comes to mind. I want to write and star in a major motion picture. I want to be the biggest-selling musical artist of all time. I want to own land and have cool shit like compounds and nightclubs. I want to be feared and revered because of power and excellence. Shit, even writing this book is
an example of my greed; sure, it has been a dream since I was a kid, but I am greedy enough to want to be successful at it. So it comes down to semantics, where one man's greed is another man's ambition, and I have never seen ambition on a sin list yet.

I understand the consequences of being driven into the ground by this acumen. But I also know that greed has another side to its coin. Greed can push people to be and do their utmost best, ultimately achieving success and renown for ingenuity and innovation. It can cause a revolution; it could cure cancer. It can bring us screaming into the millennium with advances and hurtling toward the sunshine with breakthroughs. It can open the flood gates to a host of different ways we can all get ahead in this crazy, kooky Jetsons world we are living in right now.

All because some guy wants the money that the patents will bring in.

Nothing wrong with that, people, nothing at all wrong with that. It takes something special to get us humans off of our asses and disengaged from episodes of
House
long enough to heal the world, and I am here to tell you that it is not always charity and good will. Sometimes the only reason to show up to the award show is the fucking goodies bag, you see the metaphor? Now granted, some people work tirelessly to effect change in this world purely for the joy of bringing light into the very darkness that barks at our doorsteps. But somewhere, deep down, a lot of them want something. Most of us, I posit, are spurred on by a vicious little vibe called the Urge.

The Urge is the voice in all of us that has a bottomless pit for a soul and all the free time it could ever need. It feeds on the longings we try to keep quiet and it bolsters the mindset that cannot live without our heart's desires. It is located right next
to your cerebral cortex, lying in wait for those opportune moments when it can spring into action and sell the brain on a simple little tagline:

More, more, more for me,
Me
,
ME
. . .

But does this make it a sin? Does this make it deadly? I do not believe so. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I am assured that this sin in particular makes my point. We are all greedy in some way. We do not all subscribe to the same neo-Christian doctrines, and yet we all feel the brunt of the same human traits. So if being greedy is just another way of being human, then the righteous are saying that being human is a sin. I dare them to say that shit to my face.