How to Not Live Your Life

I think that life must be the worst mistake that anyone ever made.

I never believe anyone who says they actually prefer being alive to never having been born at all.

I usually steer pretty clear of people who say something this stupid. I generally do not find people with such awful and dishonest judgment in this regard to be very good judges of anything else.

Besides, they seem to me like they might be dangerously sadistic and that’s another good reason to avoid them.

I consider the never-born to be the luckiest, naturally. The already-dead are the second luckiest.

The rest of us are totally screwed.

I think its best if you can go through life as if you were already dead.

You should go to places alone and develop a *ghostly presence.* In a sense, you never really *go* anyplace: you *haunt* it.

Its also always a good discipline to lose things: wives, family, lovers, money, jobs, hobbies, looks, etc.

The more you lose the lighter and more insubstantial you’re becoming: the better a simulated *death-experience* you’re getting.

But don’t lose you car keys. That’s just a pain in the ass.

Another helpful idea is to hold in your mind the image of something you want but can’t have, of some horrendous disappointed desire or other.

Once you’ve located this unattainable thing: obsess deeply about it’s unattainability.

The value of life must never exceed what life cant or wont give you.

In this manner, you build a natural disdain for life.

Life will ultimately come to seem like one long cruel joke. That it should end will still seem horrible and unacceptable: there really isnt any way to avoid that. But you may be able to find temporary relief.

Remember: all you need is two or three seconds to pull a trigger, or leap off the curb into the path of that oncoming bus.

If you can manage, however, to develop a really strong apathy towards life and if you lose enough-all of the above becomes somewhat academic.

One sometimes senses that it might almost be possible to just forget to inhale between one breath and the next.

That kind of indifference is really what you want to be aiming for.

Depilation: Angels Don’t have Hairy Armpits

There isn’t a lot to say about this subject: one should simply be hairless from the eyebrows down.

The human body as it commonly presents itself in it’s natural state simply does not look good with its assorted sproutings and generalized mange of sparse and irregularly patterned hair.

This is simply a matter of aesthetics. The body in its ungroomed state can be seen as *balding* and to be balding is almost always indicative of some kind of disease or genetic imperfection.

But it’s really just a simple aesthetic consideration. It’s possible that aesthetic appreciation derives or finds reinforcement in genetic desirability, so that my objections to the *balding* body is similar to the common reactions against balding heads as indicative of some kind of genetic flaw, or incipient decrepitude.

I really don’t care.

What I care about is that the human body does not look good partially obscured by hair.

No other animal is so ludicrously outfitted: maybe the pig comes closest, or a hyena in some cases, both animals you’ll note that inspire a pretty universal senses of repulsion.

Think, too, of the hairless cat: it’s usually never entirely hairless, but sports a few long insufficient hairs here and there. Who doesn’t shudder a little when he see a hairless cat?

I know I do.

Werewolves usually look good: but they are totally covered with hair.

Body hair is dirty: it carries sweat and greases and unmentionable oils. It binds odors.

It obscures the lines of the body. Its really an embarrassment.

I use a Braun Epi-silk electric depilator. It hurts like hell, but it gets many of the hairs out by the root. The manufacturer claims that after repeated use the skin becomes traumatized or something and it starts to hurt less.

Maybe its my imagination, but this really does seem to be true.

I don’t depilate my pubic hair. That would be entirely too painful. I thin it out with an electric hair-clipper.

There are some professional waxing procedures that can take care of this problem and women have them performed all the time. But I personally can’t imagine having a stranger pulling hairs from my scrotum or out of the crack of my ass in a semi-public setting.

Maybe if I could find someone who would be turned on by doing this to me: but what kind of freak would that be?

Besides, I’d be too ashamed, I think.

I’d rather take a shit in front of someone in a sexually-charged situation.

All this seems so extreme-but it’s really not.

It’s likely that my revulsion for body hair originates from my shock as a young boy at first seeing that a woman has hair growing out of her pussy in pirated copies of Playboy magazine.

I don’t know why this should have shocked me as much as it did; perhaps because I didn’t have any hair on my own body at the time.

Maybe because it suddenly seemed that my own slender hairless naked boy body was far more perfect, far prettier than the supposedly sexy woman in the centerfold.

All of this makes me sound like a faggot. The origins of a possible faggotry are certainly here.

Then again, maybe not.

I didn’t think I had a lot to say on the subject of depilation. But I obviously did.

It’s always like this: you don’t think you have a lot to say, but then you start talking and you realize you really do have a lot to say.

All My Friends are Aliens

I used to be a very loyal, very honorable person. But over the last several years, I’ve been betrayed extravagantly and brutally by two women who were once very close to me. The result is that I feel no loyalty to anyone I meet anymore. I believe most people will sell you out the moment the price is right.

The instant someone perceives you are of no use to them anymore: you can see it in their eyes.

They become an alien.

They seem like human beings until that moment. But after that moment they become as alien as anyone you see walking towards you on the street.

This is most obvious when it comes to women you have fucked.

One moment you can put your fingers up their ass and it’s considered affectionate, even sexy. The next moment, just because they’ve said I don’t want to see you anymore, it’s against the law.

They have changed: they have become aliens.

I’ll betray almost anyone I meet nowadays-except for a certain group of people who Ive known for a long time. I still remain loyal to these people.

Maybe it’s just nostalgia

They are probably no more trustworthy than anyone else, but it may also be that the years have proven that our needs are so inextricably linked that we’ll never have to show ourseves as aliens to each other.

If I were to betray one of these friends, it would likely indicate that Id decided for certain to commit suicide. What I’d be doing was throwing all the nuclear switches:

I’d be destroying everything in a world I no longer chose to inhabit.

I’d be destroying a world of aliens.

Why You Should Pretend to Read

I like going to bookstores. I enjoy finding books that look interesting.

I spend hours in bookstores and I probably end up spending more money on books than anything besides food.

But I very seldom read a book.

I find reading books to be very disappointing.

The more interesting I imagine a book to be, the more disappointing it ends up if I actually bother to read it.

So Ive taken to just buying them and walking around with them for a while. When Im done imagining what they are about I take them out of my knapsack and put them on a shelf in my apartment.

That’s how I know when Im finished with a book. It’s on my shelf. I got tired of carrying it around.

If I feel absolutely compelled to read anything, or Im trapped in a bus or something like that, I’ll read 50 pages of something.

But I won’t read any more than 50 pages.

Every author is really inspired for the first 50 pages. Anything can happen. After that, you can tell the writing just becomes work.

You can sense the author trying to build a plot, or prove a pre-conceived argument. Everything becomes fake and mechanical after the first 50 pages. You might as well stop using your imagination because the author has. It’s all fixed, after that point. It’s like putting together a prefab tv-stand.

The other rule I follow is that I never read anything longer than 250 pages. 300, tops.

No one has anything worth saying that cant easily be said in 300 pages.

Really no one has anything worth saying that cant be said in 30 pages. But let’s face it, we all have to waste time one way or another.

I just don’t want the same person wasting my time. That’s boring.

Going Nowhere

I like riding busess on the parkway. I travel back and forth to New York City.

I’d like to have my office in a bus. You look up and the world is rushing passed the windows at 70 mph.

On a bus, you never get bored or restless staring at the same four walls. The flashes of scenery seem to stimulate my imagination.

I find that riding a bus is something like cruising the internet: the bus moves, the mind moves, the internet moves.

Everything that’s creative *moves.*

I associate creative blocks with traffic jams.

If we hit traffic at Exit 11 I’ll be stopped dead in the middle of a sentence no matter how good the writing is flowing.

For some reason I often do some of my best work going through the tunnel and heading south after midnight.

Your Life is on Channel 18

I was walking down Park Avenue tonight in a blizzard. It must have been around 9pm.

Sometimes people think that New York is always busy; but it’s not true. When there is a blizzard everyone stays inside just like they do anywhere else.

But it’s times like these that I decide to hit the streets.

I like walking across Manhattan on a snowy night. Even the cabs don’t make a sound.

Most people watch a blizzard from behind a window. Or they watch it on television.

Actually, those people are very smart: that *is* the way you should watch a blizzard.

You should live your entire life monitoring screens and windows. There is absolutely no good reason to walk around the streets in the freezing cold.

This is the 21^st century.

Why go outside and shiver when you can see the same thing on tv and be warm, naked, and eating a leftover chicken leg?

I should have stayed inside, too. But I’d been alone all weekend. It was Sunday night and I realized that I hadn’t talked to anyone for two days.

So I went outside which was kind of stupid because no one else was walking around in the blizzard. If anyone else was walking around, they had their head down and they were rushing off in the opposite direction.

If anyone else was outside, they were rushing to get inside. They were hurrying off someplace so they could watch it all on a screen.

There was a point that I looked up and stared down a cold empty street howling with wind and swirling with snow. I said to myself: "This is what we all come to in the end. This is a metaphor for the last road we all have to walk into death."

I thought to myself, I’m miserable and alone and unloved tonight but Im going to be so much better off than all the people who are inside tonight, warm, content, being loved by someone.

All those people who are looking out of windows or watching televisions-they’re going to be in for a real shock when they’re forced outside into the cold and lonely one of these days.

But I realized that was all bullshit.

No one is going to be shocked. No one cares.

I think about people visiting someone they love dying in a cancer ward. Eventually, no matter how sad they act, they all have to get up and leave. They all have to go out and get a turkey club or a burger or something.

That’s the way it is.

The dying guy is left behind in his bed to walk down that cold snowy road all by himself.

But he can always look up and see the television. He doesn’t have to see what’s happening to him. He doesn’t have to be alone. He doesn’t have to go anywhere. He preactically doesn’t even have to die.

He can watch a monitor.

He can see the blizzard on a screen.

There’s always something on: cable news, gossip shows, music videos, old sitcoms, westerns, strongman competitions, etc.

That dying guy doesn’t have to walk down any cold lonely snowy road.

He doesn’t have to experience anything.

No one does.

That’s the beauty of the age we’re not livng in.

We don’t have to experience anything.

There’s really nothing to experience.

I love it, for instance, when it’s snowing like it is tonight and Ive been walking around for an hour or two and then I stop someplace for a slice of pizza or a hot dog or something and the guy behind the counter asks, "Is it still snowing?"

I love it when I have to stop and think because I realize that I honestly don’t know the answer.

When You’ve Got Twenty Reasons for Knowing She’s Not the One

I broke up with a woman Friday: it was Valentine’s Day. Id been faking it for weeks and I thought faking it through this romantically-loaded holiday would simply be too much to bear.

It would require a performance beyond my acting powers-and the strength of my stomach.

I figured, one good look in my eyes and she’d know.

If she said anything *loving,* the great big expanse of silence that followed would have been intolerable.

You can only change the subject so many times without inadvertently answering the question you’re avoiding.

Also, I tallied up what it would all cost: candy, flowers, dinner, movie, late-night club, breakfast the next morning, lunch, maybe dinner again...

Actually, I didn’t even bother to tally it all up: Id be spending a fortune.

So I simply decided to end the whole affair. Later that weekend, to console myself for having thrown away what was a fairly regular fuck, I drew up an informal list of 20 reasons why I was right to dump her:

She would always pretend to leave everything up to me to decide: and then subtly negate everything I decided until we ended up doing whatever she wanted to do in the first place.

She microwaved water for tea.

I hated the stupid winter hat she always wore. If she ever did manage to leave the fucking apartment without it, she’d make a point of saying, "Oh I forgot my hat."

I hated how her smile seemed totally fake-and a badly executed fake, at that.

I hated how while she was making this totally fake smile, her eyes never smiled at all.

I hated her eyes anyway: the left one looked sort of dead, fixated in another direction, like the eye of a frozen tuna.

I hated her stupid dogs: one was this skinny old grey-muzzled thing that limped around and barked; the other was a dopey dachsund you just wanted to kick across the room it was so ludicrous looking.

I hated that she never had anything in the apartment to eat or drink, especially since she claimed to be such a good cook.

I hated that she never turned the radio off and that she always tuned it to the same stupid national public radio station.

I hated it that she knew everything about Buffy and Angel and discussed them like they were real people and not bad tv characters.

I hated that dinner with her always had to cost around $60. She couldn’t ever just grab a burger or some chinese food.

She went down on me like a woman who just wants to get it over with early in the relationship so for the next twenty years she can say, *What are you talking about? I did too go down on you.*

I went down on her and her pussy felt weird: like it had a fat mushroom cap or something sticking out the top of the slit.

One word could describe her sexual response: fake.

Every time I licked her nipples it felt like I had a long hair on my tongue.

When I felt up her ass I thought I could feel a patch of *fur* on the small of her back.

She had some kind of black mole or speck or whatever on her lip. It was really distracting.

Her jaw was just way too big: she had that *horsey* look.

She pretty much just lay there during foreplay in some whatever uncomfortable-looking position she ended up in, her hands palms-up beside her head, and her whole body getting all clammy. It was like molesting a car-crash victim: and I don’t mean that in a good way.

And finally the clincher:

20. Whenever I tried to think of something I really liked about her, some compelling reason to see her again and spend another 60 or 70 dollars and endure another evening replete with all of the above, this was the word that immediately leapt to mind:

Nothing.