Pop culture anchoring

TJ's note: I was just going through my Word files and found a chapter from the eBook I'm working on. Enjoy ("PUA post" style :))

Pop culture anchoring

Intro

Pop culture is a social force that binds us with a collective unconscious. Advertising, movies, radio, Internet, and television constantly bombard our senses which condition our tastes, behaviors, memories, and, for some, our lives. While many people – pickup artists and civilians alike – view this “socially conditioning” as restrictive, they fail to recognize the possibility such a collective social unconscious offers:

The possibility of superficial rapport.

A label like “superficial rapport” sounds like an oxymoron and, in a lot of ways, it is. It has to be. Because it has to answer a paradoxical, counter-intuitive question: How can strangers quickly connect and build rapport in a way where neither person ostensibly forfeits their social power?

Let’s examine that question.

Strangers overcome their “strangeness” and forge relationships by displaying their personality and establishing commonalities. Even when “opposites attract”, for one person to even learn another person is their “opposite” requires that both display their interests, opinions, and tastes before they can attract.

However, merely fishing for commonalities with a stranger is a try-hard, abrasive approach. Interview-style questions like “What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you do?” are vapid, emotionless, and obscure finding out someone’s unique style, taste, and personality. Rightfully, most people (especially attractive women) refuse to waste time answering such questions from a stranger who has not differentiated himself from the hordes of other strangers who asked the exact same lifeless string of questions.

Rarely are we just given genuine answers to personal questions, we must earn them. And everything we earn in a social interaction is through value.

We gain social value in countless ways – though most lack rapport. For example, say a guy learns a simple magic trick like making a saltshaker disappear. While the trick may awe strangers and pump the guy’s value, the approach does not establish any connection between him and the strangers. He was merely entertaining. The same is true of the guy who learns to play a Dave Mathew’s song on the guitar. Or the guy who parrots someone else’s canned opener. While it may boast the performer’s momentary value, questions still remain: Who is this guy? How does this relate to me? Why should I continue talking to him once he stops being entertaining?

So, for strangers, pop culture is the bridge between value and rapport. Pop culture’s ubiquity spins a web that both traps and connects us. Since we all recognize and understand the same pop icons, moments, and clichés, we have a wealth of emotions to draw from, a gallery of faces to reference, a spectrum of body types to compare to, and a spattering of relatable personalities to analogize. While the characters we meet in TV shows, movies, and books are fictional, we still feel we know them better than most people we meet – perhaps even better than some of our own friends!

Once we acknowledge this, we have access to an unlimited number of ways to connect with strangers as simply as if discussing old friends and mutual acquaintances.

Methods

Metaphor

For a quick laugh, making an outrageous pop culture comparison consistently hits. Additionally, the metaphor or simile emotes on several levels and has the seeds for various other threads. If I simply say, “I saw a nerd walking down the street”, I haven’t cashed in the sentence’s comedic keyword (nerd). The label nerd, while chuckle-worthy, won’t elicit any big laughs because it’s not specific. Now, if I were to say, “I saw this nerd walking down the street that looked like Minkus from Boy Meets World”, I would get a bigger laugh. By specifically referencing Minkus, I’m not only painting a vivid word-picture, I’m also categorizing his personality and style. The variety of nerds can range from a Minkus-looking nerd to an Urquel-looking nerd to a Booger from Revenge of the Nerds-style nerd (to name only a few). In each case, you have a different set of physical attributes (skinny nerd, black nerd, fat nerd, respectively), a different social environment (school acquaintance nerd, next-door-neighbor nerd, college nerd), a different nerd role (antagonist nerd, lovable loser nerd, somewhat-cool nerd). Again, this only lists a few of the infinite number of contexts you can attach to a pop culture metaphor.

However, once you establish the context you want to highlight, you can amplify the humor by spotlighting it. For example, say I’m telling a story about seeing a nerd (who looked like Minkus) and he gave me the finger for no reason. The story’s humor hinges on the nerd’s absurdly unwarranted behavior. If I said, “I saw this nerd walking down the street that looked like Minkus from Boy Meets World. As he walked by, he totally flipped me off! Seriously, the guy looked just like Minkus – he even had the dorky argyle sweater and awful glasses!”, I’d be focusing on the wrong context. The humor is not because the nerd looked exactly like Minkus – rather it’s because Minkus was such a timid (though bitterly repressed) character on the show, imagining him flipping someone off is funny.

So, to highlight the context of Minkus’s behavior, we could say, “I saw this nerd walking down the street that looked like Minkus from Boy Meets World. As he walked by, he totally flipped me off! Seriously, maybe Minkus mistook me for that piece of trailer-trash Shawn Hunter and thought I stole Tapanga from him or some shit. Whatever, I’m totally telling Mr. Finni Monday morning.” Now that will get a big laugh. Why? Because I isolated the humor in the story (a nerd acting ridiculously), tied the abstract word “nerd” to a relatable icon (Minkus), then I figured out what context to relate my Minkus metaphor to (Minkus’s timid, bitterly repressed behavior), and made a wacky analogy that ties into the plotline of the show (Shawn Hunter stealing Minkus’s unrequited love interest)*.

* For all you hardcore Boy Meets World fans who are all upset because it was actually Cory – not Shawn – who pursued (and stole) Tapanga from Minkus, stop your crying and recognize my comedy of error: 1.) I got to use the adjective “trailer-trash” to describe Shawn (funny in itself); 2.) It calls for the listeners’ input since they can correct you, leading to a Boy Meets World vibe session; 3.) It keeps you from looking totally try-hard as if you are IMDBing the logistics of awful TGIF t.v. shows.

So let’s focus on specific metaphors we can use.

People

By far the best way to anchor a story, line, or routine back to pop culture is to reference a specific person. People fascinate people. Just picture a typical women’s magazine. Celebrities saturate its pages. We are privy to other people’s personal lives as their intimate details are exposed for our entertainment daily – whether it’s a real personal crisis (i.e. the Britney meltdown) or fictional drama played out on t.v. or the movies. Regardless, the notoriety of celebrities offers us an unlimited amount of ways to transmit a message in a funny, recognizable way.

As already mentioned, linking the dominant trait of a character back to a “funny” trait of the person you are referencing is a great tactic. To maximize the effect, focus on an “irregular” trait. For example, saying someone is as bald as Michael Jordan isn’t nearly as funny as saying someone is as bald as Britney Spears. If the trait you’re targeting is atypical or incongruent to the person (or what they represent), that creates humor.

Additionally, quirky features linked back pop culture are even more effective if flipped in some unexpected way. Examples of “flipping” a metaphor can be as simple as gender or race reversal. So, if you were comparing someone to Tony the Tiger, it’s infinitely funnier to say a butch girl looked like a “female version of Tony the Tiger” (rather than an intense dude). The “in-your-faceness” of Tony the Tiger is funny, but so much funnier if it’s a female.

Moments/emotions

A memorable moment is another great pop culture anchor to drop. Unlike tangible things like people or places, moments and emotions are abstract and slippery. As long as someone is familiar with the moment or emotion referenced, the speaker can contort the metaphor any way he likes.

Considered in that context, pop culture moments and emotions not only provide listeners an insight into our (pop) artistic tastes and preferences, but also tells them how we interpret those moments and emotions.

(More to come)

Sirens

The treadmill goes whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. It’s a hungry, terrifying sound.

My legs beat in step with the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. I sink into the moment. Empty exercise bikes are scattered before me. A forest of weight machines stand frozen, mid-shrug.

The whoosh, whoosh, whoosh reverberates brutally in the empty gym. The conveyer belt whips me forward. I have 36 minutes to go when she appears.

She appears often, bending over to organize scattered magazines or to polish a weight bench. Her body is anatomically astonishing. I describe her to friends simply: as a life-size Barbie doll. When she bends to pick things up, she seems to move with deliberate slowness as if she wants me to notice the way the tight, sleeveless workout tops cling to her milky body like bright skin. Maybe she doesn’t bend over with deliberate slowness. But it seems like it. In my mind.

I have to ignore her. For 36 minutes, I have to ignore her. My legs scissor to the beat of 9.5 miles per hour. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. My sweat explodes on my singlet like grey inkblots.

Ignore her. Ignore her. Feel the moment. Ignore her.

She sways through the forest of weight machines. She angles her waist around the scattered exercise bikes. She waves and smiles, “Do you want a towel?”

“Sure,” I pant, trying to sound relaxed and full of oxygen. “That’d be awesome.”

I’m exhausted and distracted. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

Ignore her. Ignore her. Feel the moment. Ignore her.

She picks up a hand towel and waves it like a white flag. I concentrate on the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

The sound becomes the crash of waves. I’m sailing on a Greek dingy in a story beyond time. I am Odysseus. My men have their ears plugged with beeswax. We sail by an island. The boat is so close to the island that I can count the leaves on the swaying trees.

Then, I hear it. Singing: The most beautifully seductive sound to enter man’s ears. The siren’s song tempts me off course, makes me want to jump overboard. Its pull is like gravity itself. Pulling me away from my purpose. Pulling at every fiber of my being.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh goes the waves.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh goes the treadmill.

She carries the towel, swaying her hips in a singsong motion.

Ignore her. Ignore her. Feel the moment. Ignore her.

That evening, S the ENLIGHTENED ONE points to five girls by the bar. We’re at a lounge on the top floor of a hotel. It feels like we’re at a lounge in a space station. The bar top glows blue. The open roof displays a vast, colorless night sky. White tables and chairs dot the balcony. The people that come here are eccentric, dressing as if they’re ready for space travel, as if they’re impatient for the future.

I walk to the girls and explode, “HEY GUYS!” My voice is strong. It cuts through them like radiation. It cuts through their stomachs, their bones, their vaginas.

I walk into the middle of the cluster and introduce myself. They don’t care, yet. My name falls like a piece of litter. It falls, flits around, and attaches itself to their ankles like a discarded sheet of newspaper on a windy day.

I keep talking. I don’t mind talking. I play with these girls like I once played with G.I. Joe action figures. I point to them and give them voices. I make up stories for them. I imitate them. I mimic their stiff facial expressions. I laugh at their coldness, mocking them for not enjoying the freedom of self-expression. Mock them for not feeling the moment.

They warm up. Now they like me. Now they want to play with me like they once played with Ken dolls. They pick at my clothing. They touch me and ask silly questions.

I throw my arm around one. She’s small and Asian and laughs in a bizarre way. Her body vibrates when I make a joke. It’s as if the laughter cannot escape through her mouth. Like it bounces around inside her, tickling her. She feels like the buzz of a refrigerator. I keep making her laugh because I’m amazed at this.

Then I excuse myself.

I lie to S the ENLIGHTENED ONE as I lie to myself, claiming none of the girls were cute enough for me. One of the might’ve been.

I grab another two girls. I ask them if they’ve seen my friend, he’s lost. They don’t respond so I add that my friend is the Hamburgler. Look out for him, I warn. One girl laughs so hard she doubles over. A squirt of drink may or may not have blasted from her nostril.

It’s on.

I spit words. I introduce S the ENLIGHTENED ONE. We become four people, on a hot summer evening, enjoying ourselves. I hear this sentence in my head: We are four people, on a hot summer evening, enjoying ourselves. I tell one of the girls she’s a Powerpuff Girl. I immediately want to put the words back in my mouth. The girl says someone else told her the same thing a week ago. I say, “See, it must be true” when I know it’s not true at all. Nothing about that statement had a shred of truth.

I’m reacting. I’m not escalating. I realize this. It makes me react more. One moment, I’m not putting my hands on my girl, but should’ve been. The next moment, I shouldn’t have been putting my hands on my girl, but did. My spirit shrivels inside my body.

The sweet shrill of the siren call pulls me away from my purpose. Pulls at every fiber of my being.

For a moment, I defy gravity and step back. I tell my girl I want to get a look at her. I command her to spin for me. I stare at her ass. I want to feel animal desire. I want to feel the flow of sexuality. Because I want to feel these feelings, I don’t. They’re there but I’ve buried them under words like ‘gentleman’, like ‘disqualification’, like ‘indirect’.

I’m not a man.

I’m a neutered talk show host.

I’m fun. I’m asking questions. I’m making lol-worthy jokes. But I’m not cutting to the core. I hear the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

And I jump to meet the waves: We eject.

This is third of fourth group of girls S the ENLIGHTENED ONE and I have walked away from. We’re behaving like castrated locusts: descending on women, eating their time and attention, but leaving fields of sexual desire untouched.

S the ENLIGHTENED ONE and I sit at a table, sip water. He’s an intellectual yet he can beam his personality without pretension. He’s achieved all society’s superficial standards, yet he never talks about these things. We clink our glasses and he laughs, frustrated I don’t make my targets obvious to him.

“How can I be a good wing,” he asks, “if I don’t know who to distract?”

I tell him I don’t care. I tell him if I open a set and he ends up with the cuter girl, consider it an early Christmas present.

He reminds me he’s Jewish.

He has admirable integrity. He insists: if I open, I pick the girl I want.

I smile. I assure him: if I open and really want one of the girls, he’ll know. I wander if that’s true. I hope so.

A Denigrating Friday

We meet on a rooftop.

Silhouettes of skyscrapers surround us like jagged teeth. The starless summer sky hangs over our heads like a blank canvas. I throw my arms up and shout, “Glory!” A bombshell waitress snaps to attention. She warns us: Buy a bottle or don’t sit down. She damns us to nomadic wandering. We don’t care. She scowls.

We move through the crowd. Rubber-faced men wear suits and laugh without humor. We sift across the rooftop like acid. I feel like a pirate. We are pirates who have jumped aboard a hijacked a ship and are drawing our swords. Fight or die.

We scatter.

It’s THE KIDD and I. THE KIDD is impressive. He grins and I see his eyes glint under his long, shaggy hair. He pirouettes and grabs two girls. He says something I don’t hear, but feel. He radiates. THE KIDD is impressive.

We tap girls. They turn. We talk. My spirit rises out of my body. Faces blur like dotted yellow lines on a highway: They are individuals, but I see them as a straight, singular line.

THE KIDD and I move by the bar. He says there’s a gorgeous girl behind me. In a single motion I turn and tap a bare white shoulder. I smile. She faces me. She’s beautiful. Literally, beautiful in the most obvious sense, how you’d imagine a princess.

I extend my hand and tell her my name. I look so deeply into her eyes I can count the hazel specs. Her hair shimmers in shades of chestnut. She smiles, her skin shines. I want it to click that she’s a girl and I’m a man. But it still feels unreal, impossible.

I speak to her from my spirit. People shoot by us like white-hot comets in a distant galaxy. I hold her hand and our fingers lock. Our conversation has no logic, has no right to exist in a place like this. Beyond us, pretension fills the rubber face of every suit-wearing man who laughs without humor.

But there is no world beyond us.

It’s just me and this girl. This beautiful, beautiful girl.

But the outside world is determined to destroy us, to destroy this moment outside time and logic. Her friends tap her and declare it’s time to go. These girls are monstrous. These girls are not cock blocks. These girls are dream destroyers. It’s two of them. Two miserable chodettes who don’t want to be here, don’t want to be anywhere, who can’t want live in a world where moments like this exist. They are determined to denigrate anything that shimmers with beauty.

They pull her arm. As they pull, the motion feels like the chirp of an alarm clock awaking us from an inky, restful sleep.

“In a minute,” my girl says. She turns back to faces me and smiles. The moment descends on us like dew baptizing the glow of morning. The world becomes a backdrop. We are actors in a two-person play. We are finally performing a scene we’ve rehearsed for our entire lives. I narrate our adventure through Brooklyn that involves underground clubs with secret handshakes and smoking flapper cigarettes and us putting on disguises to fool the world. She laughs and laughs. She loves disguises.

Again, the claws of the dream destroyers paw her elbows. “Let’s GO!” they beg.

Then, it happened. If our conversation were a glittering Christmas tree, this would be the resplendent angel to crown our moment together. She pulled her arm away and said, “You guys go. I’m going to stay here.”

The words floated above us. They floated and revealed everything that’s possible. Floated in defiance of all that’s ugly and dream destroying to reaffirm everything that’s beautiful and Romantic and worth living for.

“Don’t worry,” I say, feeling (me) betray everything alive inside me. My heart beats but the words come from a corpse. “Go with your friends. I should find the rest of my friends, anyway. Give me your number. We’ll talk some other time.”

“Definitely,” she says.

As she programs her number into my phone, I can smell my rotting stench. I’ve joined the dream destroyers, the rubber-faced men wearing suits and laughing without humor, the bitchy waitresses who expect us to pay a month of rent for a bottle of alcohol and a seat. I’ve joined all those who denigrate anything that shimmers with beauty.

She walks away and I stand on the twentieth floor of a skyscraper, feeling like an ant on a concrete molehill. The starless summer sky above my head is a shade of blue that’s blacker than the blackest black.

I feel failure.

Day Three: Humiliation exfoliates the ego – July 9

At 5:50 am my alarm clock chirps and I rise with a singular purpose: Today I will humiliate myself.

I button up a wrinkled shirt. I pull up a pair of frayed jeans. I pour my coffee and sip, slowly. I walk to the window and gaze at the lifeless apartment building across the courtyard.

I contemplate the myriad ways of embarrassing myself. I want to look like a fucking idiot. I want people to stop and point. I want tourists to snap pictures of me. I want them to talk of me, in strange languages, back in their foreign homelands.

Before I leave, I give my bookshelf one last glance. I search for something I don’t want to find. I skim. Not a single book charts a journey of humiliation.

My story is a journey of humiliation. My story unfolds in the present moment. This is a narrative forged in life. Mortification is glory. Humiliation builds character – real character. Embarrassment is virtue.

I am not my humiliations, but my humiliations will become me.

I walk to the train. The dawn-lit streets are desolate. I get on the train and sleep. I’m at the gym. I’m benching more weight than my fragile frame can handle. I fall asleep at an office meeting. I doubt anyone notices. My eyelids are burdensome. Foggy mist shrouds my thoughts. Like looking at a cloudy swimming pool and not seeing the bottom. Only seeing cloudy muck. The time ticks like teeth of a gear. The minutes wilt without thought or purpose, simply routine. I fall asleep on the train ride home.

Emerging from the train station, I inch towards progress. I embarrass myself. As a warm up, I pretend I know the city-walking denizens. I pass them, look into their eyes, and give them a name and story.

.

-Hey! Tony! How’re the kids?

-Roger! What’s new? How’s the car working out?

I want someone to call me out. I want an indignant demand for an explanation. I want some belligerent to shout: “Who the fuck are you? My fucking name isn’t Jacky. And I didn’t just have an operation you piece of shit!”

But no one does.

They just politely nod and scurry on their way.

I sidle up to one guy and ask, “Chicken or quesadilla. What should I have for dinner tonight?” He responds like a bitchy girl. He pretends he doesn’t hear, or he doesn’t speak English.

I go on to list the pros and cons of quesadillas. I purposely pronounce them “case-ah-dill-ers” like I’m retarded.

Finally, he smiles and says, “Go with the chicken.” It’s a small victory for both of us. I nod and walk away.

I trot around, spouting irrelevant bullshit. I feel insane. But, after a while, I feel good. No. Not good. I feel fun. Can fun be an emotion? It should be. That’s how I feel: FUN. It’s a feeling like everyone is stuck in miserable bumper-to-bumper traffic and I’m ramming with a bumpercar.

Wee! Fun!

This is self-amusement. This is a start.

I get stares of concern and stares of hatred. Exactly the reaction I wanted. I’m breaking polite society’s rules. I’m rising up. I’m becoming ME.

Later that night a girl comes over. We watch a science fiction movie and have sweaty, hard sex. After an hour, I climax and feel instantly deflated, lifeless. I peel off the condom and examine it like a dead jellyfish. It sapped me of my spirit.

I muster the energy to crawl into an armchair.

I speak at random. I’m not aware of my nakedness or my tiredness or my complete lack of sexual desire. I just feel like talking. I talk about Shakespeare and aliens and homeless people and coffee. There is no reason for this conversation to exist other than for the words themselves. My voice fills the quiet moments of our lives with something utterly genuine.

This is self-amusement. This is a start.

The Next Step

Alright guys, I know I haven't posted in a while so I'll update you really quick.

First of all. For all of you who don't have a personal journal or blog or something...I definitely recommend it. I think it plays a large part in reflection on my life and has a large impact on my game.

Summer is going great, I've been out in the field lots. I got to take another shot at night game on Canada day (like independence day for Canada) and it was AWESOME! After 11:00 everyone started leaving and we hit probably ten sets in about thirty minutes. Every set we opened hooked and were a lot more receptive than a normal day game set. It was the best game I have ever ran, sets were fluent and when we got bored we simply merged to another set. I don't think I've ever gotten more attention from women in my life.

So that was some wicked fun. Another huge thing that happened was the Orleans meeting. One of the members of our local community got in touch with Orleans, a VinDicarlo guru who was born here and was doing a workshop in our town. He mentioned that he wanted to meet up with his hometown community while he was here. Now the local community is kind of disorientated and it took a while to organize everything but Me and another PUA rented out a room in a library basement and set a date.

This was amazing, I never met anyone else in my life who was not only into pickup but was GOOD at it. When he entered the room I could almost feel the charisma emanating off of him.

He talked to us for a while and one point he really stressed was taking the next step. Although his ideas on Natural Game were interesting, this is really what hit me. He was telling us to stop thinking about what to do now, and start thinking about what you need to do next to get the girl.

It really made me think. Us newbie PUAs need to really start thinking about the next step, It's the only way to get better. After Canada Day my game seemed to step down. Why? Because I was focusing on what I could already do: Get a phone number.

Fuck the phone number.

The next step is getting k-closes and lays. Orleans walked in being the same exact height and weight as me, there is no more excuses why I can't do this.

I really want you all who seem to be stuck to think: What do I have do next to step up my game to the next level.

Orleans really opened my eyes to quite a few things that day and I think this is one of the major point in my journey right now. However I still don't think I've hit that PUA level yet. I don't feel like everything has "clicked" entirely. But I know what I have to do to hit that level and I'm going to do it.

Thanks guys, I'm out.

P.S. Nice to see your back TJ, I was a little worried.

Day Two: The Virtue of Self-inflicted Humiliation - July 8

It begins.

My body is pale and thin and angular. It’s way past midnight as I study myself in the full-length mirror. I sift my thoughts down to a single word: VAMPIRE.

It was going to be a night of pushing comfort zones. We were to meet at The Club of Elite Glorification.

I took the subway, talking to no one. My thoughts were singular: I’ve discovered a virtue in a trash pile.

My feet clopped on the broken sidewalk. People passed me, wandering aimlessly. They always move with such ferocious indifference, like a parade of windup toys.

I realize: I’m just a windup toy, too.

The lamplight of The Club of Elite Glorification glinted from blocks away, its orange glow making the crowd look ominous, satanic. Giggling knots of girls flitted past me. A thought sparked but didn’t catch: I am the cheap Zippo out of lighter fluid. My desire flicked in clumsy sparks but kindled no flame.

In that moment, I’m useless.

I sat on a bench.

A silent basketball court looked like a pool of oil. Weeds poked out of sidewalk cracks. Half-broken bottles littered the street like glass skeletons, like fossils of a long lost good time.

Where are they?

I turned and saw The Club of Elite Glorification had become a medieval castle. Gates and velvet ropes fortified the entrance. Battalions of black shirted bouncers circled the parameter. It’s a scale-balance of conquest: glory and honor on one arm, humiliation and chodeliness on the other.

They arrive. We high-five. We smile and we walk. We are denied entrance to The Club of Elite Glorification. We drive somewhere else. No girls. We sit. I sip water. Then I get back on the subway, come home, and peel my shirt off. I examine myself in the full-length mirror.

VAMPIRE.

I dissect the metaphor. Vampires are not human. They look human. They once were humans. But they’re not human; they prey on humans. They’re anti-human.

I was human, once. Back when I was little and my identity didn’t rest on a foundation of bullshit. (Bullshit is anti-human.)

But I was bit. We were all bit. Vampires only survive by biting humans, by turning them into vampires. In less abstract terms, someone hurt me. Someone hurt you. Someone transformed ME into (me).

But vampires cannot survive the light; vampires cannot live under the glow of twilight.

I crawl into bed: Dreams fall onto my thoughts like raindrops. I can feel words like humiliation and identity. I am a man. This statement is simple and obvious. But somewhere between waking and dreaming, I feel its meaning. It feels the same as identity. Manliness has identity traits. Those traits are virtuous. Virtue is the cornerstone of everything: books, movies, advertising, life. We gaze upward at narratives to let us see life as it should be. Great heroes embody manly virtues or manly virtues embody great heroes. The semantics don’t matter. Only virtues matter. Stoicism is a virtue – perhaps the manliest of virtues. Odysseus was stoic. Rocky was stoic. Those beefy Greek dudes from 300 were stoic. They endured pain. But they didn’t endure embarrassment. Humiliation is not stoic. It’s pathetic. It’s something we laugh at. A narrative journey of humiliation is comedy, is satire. We have no words that virtuously describe embarrassing yourself. I try to think of a hero that embarks on a virtuous journey of embarrassment. I can only think of the 40-Year-Old Virgin. Then I fall asleep. I dream of castrated vampires.

Day One: Decision chisels fate – July 7

She sways her petite Latin hips for me.

I hold her waist and gaze into the soft brown of her almond-shaped eyes. She’s Spanish and Brazilian but her eyes look Asian, look beautiful. She smiles coyly but the little dimples that appear around her mouth betray her pleasure in this moment. I clasp her hand, our fingers interlock. She cocks her head sideways and poses in a way she probably learned while modeling.

I know I want this girl. Know what I want to do, what I must do…

Decision chisels fate.

Earlier that day, I stood in a grassy field with my phone pressed to my ear. Sweet beaded my forehead as I listened to a voice that sounded like me, could’ve been me. The voice didn’t pressure me, even though I sort of wanted it to.

I felt the ambivalence that comes before approaches, before makeouts, before extractions, before life-changing decisions.

Decisions that chisel fate.

“You know what, fuck it,” I heard myself say, the words surprising me, the sentence escaping my mouth like a locomotive suddenly detaching from its freight and speeding away. “Sign me up.”

Five minutes later: I’m going to bootcamp.

I snapped my phone shut and sat in the field. I looked up at the blue, cloudless sky. What does this mean? I wondered as my eyes lazily followed a fleet of birds.

Later I walked down a long hallway, my footsteps echoing off walls dotted with inexpensive art. The art remains in perpetual flux because my coworkers never stop complaining about it. Last month, they deemed an instillation of nude portraits highly offensive.

Photographs of dogs in bowties replaced the nudity.

One picture suddenly stopped me. It was a black-and-white scene with two dogs dancing in a glitzy ballroom. The upright dogs have their paws unnaturally pressed together. The viewer can imply the gender of the dogs by a bowtie and hair bow.

I’d passed this picture twice a day and just thought it was sort of hilarious but now everything – the dogs, the scene, the art – became incredibly uncomfortable and unnatural.

It became threatening.

For the first time I realized under that bowtie, under that idiotic toothy grin, that dog was actually a dog. And he probably wanted to fuck that hair bow-wearing female dog.

The security guard scampered up to me.

He’s a fat, old, and looks ridiculous to the point of absurd in his security outfit. His white hair is airy, hanging over his fleshy skull like a blank thought balloon in a comic strip. His red face never stops smiling. He makes me think he should be an ice cream man for no apparent reason.

“Great stuff, huh?” he laughed as if me, him and the dog were sharing a conspiracy or inside joke. “Next month they’re bringing out the rest of the exhibit. I hear there’s one of a dog driving a Cadillac. How funny! Dogs driving cars, what’ll they think of next?”

He exploded in laughter then clapped me on the back.

I wanted to tell this man these pictures were fucking revolting, were an atrocity, were cruel – but crueler to humans than to dogs. I wanted to explain that at least when the bowtie came off, that dog could go back to walking on all fours, eating dog food, and licking his doggy balls.

Instead, I chuckled and said, “Yeah.”

I might’ve even added, “It’s a dog’s life!”

There’s work to do.

I returned to my desk and pulled up my calendar. I clicked on The Date and typed BOOTCAMP. It became more real on my calendar. But real in a way that light is real. Light takes up no space yet surrounds and defines us.

The Date beams off my calendar like a spotlight, like twilight. It shines from weeks in the future, illuminating all my indecision. The shitskin that covers (me) will not survive under the white light of The Date. Seeing BOOTCAMP written over The Date has my fears scampering into the cracks of my character like scurrying cockroaches. Either I exterminate these fears or The Date will reveal them. Make a decision. Cleanse myself of my weakness or be destroyed on The Date. I write under The Date:

-Am I always positive?

-Do I always feel comfortable?

-Do I act through my intentions with congruence and confidence?

-Do I push myself into mixed sets?

-Do I always try and escalate when I want to?

-Most importantly, AM I AUTHENTIC?

I look at the words, at the question marks. They sting of truth and its implications. I fool most people into believing I’m a huge pimp. Into believing my authenticity. But I live with my thoughts. I live with my feelings. I know my core self and know there’s work to do.

At the bottom of the calendar, I write: I WANT TO BE BROKEN. I hope I mean it.

Later, I meet the half-Spanish, half-Brazilian model. I knew very little of this girl aside from her name, heritage, job, phone number, and a time she was free to meet.

She struts into the bar and hugs me.

“Hey! Que pasa?” she smiles. Her accent makes your dick hurt.

I want to spend the evening playing pool, drinking fruity beer, and fucking.

And maybe she did, too.

We run around hand-in-hand. We play pool. We drink each other’s fruity beer. We laugh and pick songs on the jukebox. We are unaware this is a shitty old man bar on a Monday night and the clientele follows suite. Men stare at her. They follow her body out of habit, not desire. Desire has long become an abstract quality to these men, something felt through magazines and masturbating. “An itch,” they call it.

Itches are not enjoyable. These are defeated men.

She wanted to teach me salsa dancing. I laughed and let her body sway rhythmically in front of me. I felt intense desire recoil through my body, the timeless echo that marches generations forward. The echo is life itself.

I knew I wanted this girl. Knew what I wanted to do, what I must do…

But I decided to do a clownish dance move instead.

She laughed, told me I’m so funny.

We spent the evening playing pool, drinking fruity beers, and not fucking.

There’s work to do.

Preface: Ghosts

Bootcamp: a date on my calendar, a charge on my credit card. I must prepare. I must destroy that which obscures my identity. I must let my instructor see ME, not the dictated (me), the (me) grafted over ME. I don’t want to be a chode, anymore. And I like writing.

I have seen MYSELF – known MYSELF – in blinks of glory, then, nothing.

“Don’t give a FUCK!” is a slogan I’d really like to adapt. A slogan I’d like to tattoo. I once met a woman who didn’t give a fuck. She was so devoid of a fuck to give, it radiated off her. She tattooed it on other people, tattooed it on the world.

I want that.

Her name was Dr. Greene. She was an endocrinologist.

The grassy sigh of late summer wisped through the windows. We sat in neat desks, in neat rows, making neat, little small talk.

The neat little small talk whispered with two recurring words: bitch and cancer. These words would gestate into a theme, into inspiration.

A fragile old lady floated through the door, snapping our bodies to attention.

She possessed a delicate cartoon quality. She looked like the granny owner of Tweedy Bird. A gray knot of hair hovered over her head, tied with a lavish blue ribbon. At the time, I found this comically cute.

It wasn’t.

It was her idea of a joke.

She beelined across the front of the class, distributing neat stacks of paper to eager hands. “Take one,” she commanded in a booming voice. “Then pass it back.” Her voice contradicted her grannyness. It cracked in a throaty way as if a demon shrieked cranky orders from her belly.

"This is Comparative Endocrinology. If you’re not here for Comparative Endocrinology, leave. Now.”

No one moved.

“Good. My name is Dr. Greene. I am an Endocrinologist. Before we discuss the syllabus, let's briefly go over some housekeeping. As some of you know, I have cancer and will die shortly. Probably before the end of the semester. Should that happen, Dr. Hanson will finish teaching this course.”

Someone made a noise, a murmur. It was a girl named Gracy. Not Grace, Gracy. She may or may not have wanted to become a veterinarian. She loved showing people pictures of her sister’s baby. She loved babies.

“How…” Gracy tried to say, justifying the murmur. “How…that’s so sad…how….”

Dr. Greene gazed at Gracy. Her eyes appeared huge and monstrous behind her glasses. Then she waved her hand and said, “See me after class.”

Gracy never came back.

The semester progressed and I displayed my dazzling mediocrity as a science student. Dr. Greene regarded me merely as a name that got 70s on exams, until one morning in late October.

We were in lab. My lab partner was a chubby girl named Lesley who wore beaded jewelry and was only capable of talking about the MCATs and her future career as an optometrist. I humored her for weeks with head bobs and “uh-huh”s.

Then, I snapped. In a blink of glory.

After cataloguing the med schools she was applying to next year, she aggressively inquired what schools were in my “top five.”

I gazed at her. I hope my eyes appeared huge and monstrous behind my lab goggles.

“I don’t have a top five. I have a top zero.”

“Huh? What? But where are going to apply?”

“Nowhere.”

“Oh. So you’re going to take a year off, work in a lab, get some clinical experience then apply. That’s good for people who don’t have the GPA to apply right out of college. What kind of lab do you want to work –”

“I’m not working in any lab. I’m going to write a novel.”

She laughed. “No, seriously. What do you want to do?”

“Seriously. I want to be a novelist.”

She laughed again. “Then why are you a bio major? Why are you in this lab? Why would you –”

I flipped my hand up as if to stop traffic. “Look. Could you just shut up. You talk every week and I’d rather just do the lab. I want to be a novelist. You don’t understand that. And, in a way, I really don’t understand you. Let’s just concentrate on getting the lab done and cut all the nonsensical bullshit.”

It felt as if the words slipped out of me, like a burp. I immediately wanted to apologize, to justify my soliloquy, to blunt the sharpness of the truth.

But before the urge manifested into language, a cackle erupted behind us. It sounded like a witch flying away on a broom.

Lesley and I turned around. Dr. Greene hunched over our lab bench like a question mark.

“Ha!” she repeated, this time more for showmanship than actual amusement. Then her smile vaporized and she instructed, “Get your samples on the spectrometer.”

That moment haunts me like a ghost. Her witch-like cackle still echoes like a horsewhip. It reverberates in my hollowness, when I act like (me) rather than ME. Though, if that moment were a piece in the “Don’t give a FUCK!” puzzle, its conjoining piece clicked a few weeks later on the morning of The Lecture.

The Lecture was such an artful exemplar of not giving a fuck it warrants the reverence of capitalization.

It was a chilly morning but Dr. Greene came to class. She had cancelled the last three lectures because her health was failing. She died two weeks after The Lecture, but that morning she shined gloriously.

“We have a lot to cover,” she stated, placing her briefcase on the lecturing podium, “And very little time. I will only cover the most important and pertinent topics. You can fill in the other material with the assigned readings.”

We all perked up in our neat desks, in our neat rows, and quieted our neat, little small talk.

Dr. Greene went to the chalkboard and drew the L-shape of a graph, then two lines sloping upward. Both lines began flat then one shot up exponentially while the other line increased gradually then leveled off.

“Can anyone tell me what this graph represents?”

A bevy of nerd hands shot up. They spat obvious answers about hormones and chemicals and transmitters.

Dr. Greene didn’t even bother to say if they were right or wrong. She politely listened to a nerd answer then pointed to another hand. At one point she said, “This isn’t in the textbook. You have to really consider what this graph represents. It requires some inductive thinking.”

More hands shot up with answers less obvious and more absurd. When Dr. Greene heard enough, she informed us, "This graph represents the age which men and women masturbate for the first time."

A silent gasp flooded the room. Shock and fear eclipsed the faces of all those expecting a comfortable morning of note taking and fact regurgitating. Which was everyone.

I’d like to believe I was the least surprised.

The smile I saw so briefly after The Cackle remained plastered on Dr. Greene’s face the entire morning of The Lecture, which covered everything from the proper insertion of female condoms to using anal beads without injury.

At one point, she contemplatively raised a finger and said, “I brought some field equipment. Hold on.”

She went into her briefcase and produced a purple dildo.

An ostentatiously religious guy got up and stormed out.

Someone raised their hand and asked, “Is this going to be on the final?”

“No,” Dr. Greene snapped. “This is too important for the final.”

This woman, I remember thinking, truly does not give a fuck.

And her ghost haunts ME. It haunts every decision I don’t make. Committing to bootcamp is ME pulling a purple dildo out of a briefcase, it’s ME Cackling in the face of (me).

I can explain everything

Hey guys.

I'm here.

Why haven't I been posting?

It wasn't because I was being lazy.

It wasn't because I became gay.

It wasn't because I went to jail.

I'll explain everything soon. (As in this weekend, hopefully.)