Are You Really Sirius? (1953) by Leonora CarringtonI was innocently reading yet another article in the New York Times about how to live forever and look hot doing it, and I stumbled on the news that red wine is bad for you but coffee is good for you. Is it just me, or do they switch things up on us every few hours? Next thing you know, I’m going to be trading in my treadmill desk and running shoes for a warehouse full of powdered donuts and heroin. Should I start drinking coffee again? I’ve been drinking black tea for two solid decades now, thanks to my habit, at the age of 31, of calling my boyfriend every afternoon to cry over the phone. Eventually he made a rule that I wasn’t allowed to call him at work. Was coffee really the problem there, or was it my shitty boyfriend? Looking back, it’s pretty obvious that my body was in mourning, probably from being forced to fuck a bossy control freak with a deflated ass, bad teeth, and a shitty sense of humor. Wow, is my body getting vicious right now just so I’ll wake up and smell the coffee, at long last? Maybe what my body wants much more than calm, rational behavior and balanced, zen living is a triple latté. That’s what I drank every single morning, back when I was much more brilliant, had a better sense of humor, looked a lot better… Whoa, almost everything about me was superior two decades ago! Surely the ravages of aging alone didn’t transform me into such a boring boring boring boring polite dull helpful pointless slug of a person! I mean I am flat-out CONFORMING to my local social environment lately, how is that normal? That’s not the vainglorious swamp monster we all know and love! Instead of running out of energy every single afternoon like a balloon slowly deflating, I should be crying and raging like a car with a sudden catastrophic electrical failure that causes it to veer off the freeway and into the forest, where it explodes in a fiery burst of light and sound. Nature wants pyrotechnics from me, not gentle stretching and thank you notes! Why, I used to write funny shit every morning and then have a nervous breakdown every single afternoon — and I looked sexy doing it! What is this life of gently puttering around the garden and making pottery that I’ve chosen for myself? Voice lessons, what is that? Sure, I walked outside yesterday and sang “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus at the top of my lungs. But if I’m not foisting that voice on some half-assed local musical-theater director, what’s the fucking point? With coffee, I’ll not only be healthier and happier, I’ll be much more embarrassing and ridiculous, which I can suddenly recognize is what the gods want from me. This is why they’ve been shoving my face in my own shit lately. They want me to shit myself more often! I finally get it! Because who I am when I’m not humiliating myself? Sipping black tea serenely for two decades? What the fuck is going on? I feel like Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now,” muttering “The horror, the horror!” Why am I even reflecting on any of this? That’s not me! My truest self is Aguirre in “Aguirre: The Wrath of God,” asking the last monkey on the raft, “Who’s with me?” *** If I were teaching a class on pretty much anything to a room full of youngish people, I would tell them that most important thing you need to know about societal norms, cultural assumptions, common wisdom, and shared belief systems is that they’re fucking stupid. A huge swath of what you see and hear from day to day trickled down from some very brash but not very clever human’s bad guess or favorite prejudice or sloppy longstanding opinion. Entire academic fields are swayed by one overbearing blowhard’s calamitously uninformed flourishes. Entire branches of government are guided by one extremist’s vainglorious imperatives. Giant currents in medicine, teaching, finance, publishing, technology — you name it — are influenced by humans with more confidence than brains, more ego than integrity, more grease than wheels. Stupid people are everywhere. And stupid people love stupid ideas a lot. They ingest them with gusto, defend them ferociously, disseminate them like bird shit scattered across an already shit-crusted landscape, until everyone is stupider and stupider and stupidest. To make matters worse, embracing change and celebrating new ideas have received such good press for the past three decades that novelty itself is often treated as a mark of quality. Thus, it’s important to remember that the people creating these new things and making these new decisions are mostly anvil-headed dipshits. Everyone loves a bandwagon, but only because everyone is always a little tired and bored and lonely. As a result, often the most forward-thinking thing you can do is reject the newest ideas and trends and social standards and diagnoses and social movements and culinary flourishes and policy shifts, no matter how radical and flashy they at first appear, because chances are they’re even more idiotic than what came before. But even if skepticism starts trending, we are currently just too dumb as a people to discern much. I mean, have you ever tried to find a really good therapist? Have you ever met an academic? Do you read the news occasionally? Have you ever asked a doctor a question? Have you ever been on the internet? When most people agree about something, you can be sure that a few years from now, they’re going to feel very differently about the whole matter. People will have suffered greatly, thanks to our shared faith in the bad guesses and messy experiments of today’s empowered fuckwits. But if our newest paradigms are like lunchmeat that spoils within seconds of being opened, our longstanding, shared beliefs are more like the listeria-infected meat sludge gluing up the equipment at the Boars Head processing plant. Just because it’s been there for a long time and it’s not going away anytime soon, doesn’t mean it’s good for you. *** Yesterday I gave the dogs bully sticks. I keep a bag of them in my office for those times when they’re bored and irritated, which is often. Both of my dogs are aggressive chewers, which isn’t surprising considering how angry they seem most of the time. But those super-tough nylabones can break a dog’s teeth. So my vet told me that bully sticks were the best option. Unfortunately, they stink a lot. “God, the smell!” Bill said when he walked in the room. “I know,” I said. “What do you think these things are made of?” He found the bag and read it. “Weird. There’s no information here at all.” “That seems suspicious,” I said. Bill was already Googling bully sticks on his phone. “Oh Jesus.” “What?” “It’s the worst thing you can imagine.” “Balls?” “Worse than that.” “DICKS? Jesus Christ!” “They must’ve said ‘We can’t call them bull dicks, can we? But what about… bull… y… uhhhhh…. sticks?’” We both sat there snickering for a long time as the dogs chewed. “Wow,” I said. “You guys have been eating a bag of dicks this whole time. No wonder you’re so pissed off.” Thanks for reading Ask Molly! Yes, I really am going to start drinking coffee again. Stay tuned for calamitous updates! Oh, and subscribe now because things are about to get much more lively around here, and you don’t want to miss a word, trust me. Show Molly some love, her self-esteem is at an all-time low. Oh and she’s moving in with her mother for the next six months while they put windows in her very dark, crumbling house. Are you worried about her now? Worry even more! Loosen up your boundaries! Grow increasingly concerned! And subscribe now!
|
