Thinking about going down to Occupy LA today.  Not that I give a shit. Or rather, not that I think it is a meaningful movement with any concrete goals. And if they did have concrete goals, they would be impossible to achieve. 

Not that I’m against them either—while the “I am the 99 per cent” people complaining about student loans seem dopey to me, far worse is this “I am the 53 per cent (of legitimate income tax payers)” canard; the people holding up signs that say  I bootstrapped my way to the bottom attending a state school while working 30 hours a week at a minimum wage job and never having an instant of freedom, now I will buy a shitty house in Phoenix and have kids who will also have to work 30 hours a week getting yelled at by some undereducated jerkoff because they didn’t adequately mop down the little channel between the beef and chicken grills at Arby’s — congratulations, you’re a fucking idiot.  I wasted my youth grinding myself down to the bone in the most debasing manner possible and now I insist that people with billions of dollars be able to contribute nothing, is what you’re saying. 

So I’m not going down there to yell at them or argue with them.  Like most people, I am going down there because I think there will be young pretty girls in revealing outfits.  I won’t talk to them, because they need a guy who sings for a band about communism or something, but you reach a certain age and just looking at a nineteen year old’s barely clothed tits and ass is enough.

And you know, it does suck to have just got out of college right when the price of education reached a high water mark; it cost you a quarter million fucking dollars to go to school for four years, and you got out at the exact moment when the job-getting value of all this education became utterly meaningless.  Or, for certain “desirable” white collar professions this fancy education is necessary,  but it is no longer even close to sufficient. You have graduated to a snowball’s chance in hell of being able to work in any kind of meaningfully air-conditioned environment.  And in fact this fancy education now works against you at the kind of it-sucks-but-at-least-allows-basic-life-sustaining-expenses kind of gig that might be available— management at these places thinks you will get bored and move on; they don’t want to waste the time and money training you.  And they’re right, you would move on.  Except there won’t be any place to move  to  for at least a decade.  The shortsightedness of these HR professionals for shitty jobs is that they fail to see that the guy out of Berkeley is going to have nowhere to go for ten years, and hell yes you want him telemarketing.

It’s funny, the 53 per cent movement seems dedicated to painting the 99 per cent movement as rich, elitist snobs.  Overeducated, over-worldy layabouts.  They are saying “we are even poorer than you, and we are proud of it.”  Not necessarily monetarily poorer but somehow culturally poorer— we are the real blue collar bedrock of this country and blah blah blah, and so stop complaining, you lazy rich people.  Stop complaining and let the really rich people keep their money.

I mean, what the 99 per cent movement wants, at least the college kids, certainly is some kind of socialist, redistributive shit to happen.  In their bones, that’s what they want.  Give us money.  They want a jubilee.  A forgiveness of debt.  I don’t know why they have to be so cagey about it, and couch it in demands for nitpicking banking reforms— we all know that’s bullshit.  They want money.  They should come out and say it. French people aren’t chickenshit about this type of thing— they say “we want the government to give us money.”  And good!  Fucking give it to them.

The last bag of Doritos I ate before the death of Arch West were the best I’ve ever tasted.  We were up in the mountains, me and my fake girlfriend.  Smoggy and hot in the city but up in the Sierras it was cool, clear day, and we stopped at the Native American Cultural Center to check out some artifacts—longbows and shit made from pelts.  It was a welcome relief from a tough week, and the two stoned Mexican guys running the federally funded shack and posing as Native Americans had a cooler of soda and basket of various chips for sale.  We chose original flavor Doritos and a Coke.  The classic American snack. 

Something about the mountain air, the rigors of the wilderness; something about the long grueling week— the experience of eating those fucking Doritos was magnified.   I could taste freshly harvested corn pulled from a heartland field in the dawn.  Chilis hand dried in an adobe marketplace by a Toltec woman with hard, withered fingers.  Salt delicately culled from the nurturing bosom of the sea.  These Doritos tasted like life, seriously. 

It brought to mind how about every three months for the past several years I’ve thought, apropos of nothing: who is the guy who invented Doritos?  This man will get no Nobel Prize, but what he gave the world brought more joy than virtually anybody.  In retrospect, I might have known that the universe was giving me a chance to truly taste the man’s masterpiece before he passed to the great beyond.

Arch West, the inventor of Doritos, died last Tuesday at the age of 97.   West was a marketing exec for Frito Corp. (soon to become Frito–Lay after a merger), and on a trip to California, sampled some tortilla chips for the first time from a snack stand by the beach.  This was in the sixties.  Mind you, tortilla chips themselves hadn’t been invented until 1944, so, the idea hadn’t really spread around, and West, according to lore, instantly knew he was onto something.  He took his idea of a spicy version of the crisp fried corn chips to the higher ups at Frito Corp, and they laughed at him. They laughed.

So West invested some of his own money into developing the chip, presumably bested further hurdles in an inspiring manner, and brought Doritos to the world.  Fucking Doritos.  He was a marketing guy, too—it wasn’t even his job to sit around a test kitchen frying big batches of corn batter ad infinitum until some catchy new snack was created by accident.  He was “outside the box,” going above and beyond the call of duty; when he found something genius, he believed in himself and fucking saw it through.

And we got Doritos. Doritos!  Remember, children of the eighties—for our whole lives there was one Dorito, now known as Zesty Nacho Cheese or “Nacho Cheesier” or some whored-up shit but back then known simply as “Doritos.” And then in like 1985 Cool Ranch came out and it was fucking Martin Luther nailing his proclamations to the church door.  A shattering of worlds.  Because as delicious as the Ur-Doritos had been, these Cool Ranch Doritos were, to a child’s palette, even more delicious. Now the Doritos family has splintered into a thousand different flavors; Doritos is the mockingbird of fried corn snacks, mimicking the flavors of every fatty food, cross-branding with Pizza Hut, dolled up as burgers, burritos, guacamole, hot sauce.  Most of them aren’t worth shit.  Arch West tasted every flavor of Doritos before he died—weeks before his death, in decrepitude at ninety seven years of age, he was given a Rip Roarin’ Cheezeburger flavor or something to try and he spat them out.  I like to think that he shed a tear at how his brainchild had been profaned.  I like to think he impaled the kneeling Frito-Lay messenger with a spear, sent his head back to corporate as a warning.

But the bigger point here is— Arch West invented fucking Doritos, and this is a greater contribution to our lives than James Joyce.  Bigger than like, Luciano Pavarotti— if Pavarotti hadn’t sung those songs some other fat guy would’ve.  Arch West made a  bigger contribution to the life of the world than all but maybe five U.S. presidents.  Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson— and him, more for his accomplishments outside of office than in— Franklin Roosevelt, and maybe Truman ‘cuz he dropped the bomb.  That’s it.  Fucking Warren G. Harding didn’t do shit compared to the invention of Doritos.  Most presidents are simply place holders, kept in check by congress by design and vainly making noise about making big changes when in fact their job is to just check the country’s oil once in a while and then hand on the keys to the next caretaker.  John F. Kennedy would have done better to stop at a snack stand on his many travels to the beach and identify a fried bread product that had not yet caught on with most of the country, add some salt, color, and distinctive spice, and kept the courage of his convictions against his chip overlords until his creation had spread joy and delight to BILLIONS of people.  Instead he partially instigated, then subdued, the Cuban Missile Crisis.  A wash. 

Anyway.  Arch West.  Goodnight, crunchy prince.

He’d had a very different life than me.  I lost my virginity at seventeen; at that age he had been picked up for dealing heroin and given the choice of going to the clink or enlisting in the marines at the height of Vietnam.  He told me stories like “one time I beat up this black guy so bad that I was checking the papers the next day to make sure I hadn’t killed him.”  He had a tough, colorful life.  I was on scholarship to a prep school where they had not one but two competing a capella groups that in any sensible community would have had the shit kicked out of them on a daily basis.  I was going to a school where they flew in math geniuses from China and all the girls wore docksiders and no makeup and were second cousins with Winston Churchill and if they ever saw a penis they would explode.  The occasional accidental erection of their horse was the only stiff penis they had ever seen, and they had absolutely no curiosity about expanding their experience.  A rich new England WASP girl is basically born elderly, in terms of her sexuality.  This is why she has time to focus on things like perfecting her application essay to intern at the U.N.  When I started at this fancy school, it was immediately clear that none of these girls would ever show even the remotest interest in me; they barely showed interest in boys at all.  

But still, I got talks from my Mom about always respecting women.  I was assiduous about respecting them, when I couldn’t even get them to notice me or my fucking respect.

But my Dad— I had always assumed that, you know, the tradeoff to being the kind of person who might go to jail at seventeen is, you get to be the kind of person who’s around girls who will fuck you when you’re fourteen. But no, he told me- I used to worry about girls all the time, you know. It took a while before I got laid a little bit by accident and I started to realize: hey, I’m not a bad lookin dude.  I could do all right. Same shit will happen with you.

This was precisely what I needed to hear. 

I’m back from the pussy war. This is the war that men fight for 20 years, starting at around age 15.  Maybe sooner.  You spend 20 years thinking about nothing but pussy, how to get pussy, I need new pussy, where is there going to be pussy.  You get out there in the trenches and you battle for pussy, you learn about the enemy, you try to take them down.

Now I’m thirty-five and a half and some hormonal switch has been thrown.  Maybe it’s just age, maybe it’s my job crushing it out of me—who knows.  But I no longer give a shit about pussy. I’m back from the pussy war.

I did well.  Lots of confirmed kills.  Not, you know—I didn’t take down the Osama of pussy.  I didn’t fuck a lot of nineteen year old supermodels, but I did my part.  And I didn’t get hurt.  Didn’t get the wound that would take me out of the game—no STD that ever stuck, never impregnated a crazy chick, etc.  If they gave out medals for the pussy war I would be decorated.

But I didn’t WIN the pussy war, either, because the objective was to go out and meet and get down with tons of girls, and one of them would be my future wife.  I could retire from the pussy war honorably, having attained victory.  But none of them were.  I just went out there and killed a lot of pussy and it was ultimately for nothing.  Pussy Afghanistan is relapsing into anarchy. 

So what now? Like a regular war, the pussy war is dangerous, and depressing, and can hurt you, but it’s also exciting.  And there’s nothing that can stack up to that now.  One must seek out meaning and joy in other areas of life.  The taste of food.  A hummingbird drinking from a flower.  Things that old people like.  You are supposed to, at this phase in your life, begin eschewing cheap excitement for the contentment of hearth and home, and children.  But I have no children—I lost the war, and now, you know, I’m getting so fucking old that the prospect of meeting someone and having them seems impossible.  Like peace in the Middle East.

The stupid fucking barking dogs.  Incessantly, always barking.  They begin at about seven every morning.  Must be when they’re let out of the house.  They walk out the door and down the steps to the front gate and just stand there and bark without ever stopping even for one second.  Bark bark bark.  Bark bark bark.  And of course, there are fifteen other houses on the street with multiple loud, unruly dogs, who all join in a chorus of bark bark bark, bark bark bark.  But these two, this neurotic border collie mix and his little white terrier buddy— the smaller dog, as is often the case, often seeming like the boss—  these two are the instigators.  These are the guys who will bark at anything, must bark at everything.  If you are in doubt about whether you should bark at something, you better bark at it. 

Anyway, they start barking at seven a.m., which means their owner, a spinsterish 45 year old woman, must know that they do this.  She must at least hear it on her way to the car, if not from the house as she prepares her bowel-cleansing yogurt and granola.  These dogs barking impossibly loud. Loud enough to wake my entire apartment complex two doors down and certainly the other, much larger apartment complex right next door to her with many large windows facing her property.  She knows, and she doesn’t give a fuck .  One of my neighbors once  complained to her and was given the “oh yeah, they’re just territorial.”  She was given some very meek, polite version of “these god damn barking dogs are bugging the fuck out of me, ruining every morning, fucking with my sleep; you fuck with my sleep, it fucks with my entire day, every day—“ seriously, have you ever had a great day without having at least seven hours of undisturbed sleep?  Never. Anyway, she was given that, and came back with a “well, they’re just that way.” At face value, this means that she thinks that she has no hand at all in the way her dogs behave.  That they’re not pliable obedient creatures bred over tens of thousands of years to be spineless and retarded in the face of commands, to basically see you as the Führer and do exactly what they think you’re telling them.  Or that just going out to the thousand acre park behind your fucking house and running the little fuckers around until they’re tired, letting them smell a gopher hole, dig up he corpse of a squirrel— giving them something to think about and look forward to besides looking at the one walled off square of gate, listen for footsteps and then OMIGOD SOMEONE’S WALKING PAST THE HOUSE, A CAR IS DRIVING PAST THE HOUSE OMIGOD: BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK— they are not “just territorial.”  They are like this because of you.  That fucking border collie could probably do calculus if you taught him; there are sheep farmers in Scotland who have a whole goddamn sign language with these dogs where they can flick their pinky and the thing will steer 500 sheep precisely 30 degrees to the left— it’s not that they’re “just territorial,” it’s that you want to have a dog in your leathery old age where no man will come near you but you don’t want to do the work to make sure the dog has adequate shit going on in his life where he won’t just scream his head off and turn around over and over in a compact circle whenever a leaf falls off the tree across the street. 

But that’s not what she really meant anyway, that they’re just like that. What she meant was: fuck off.  Because basically, people who live near other people, when they choose to get a dog— what they are really saying is: I do not give one single fuck about the people around me.  Someone who gets a dog in a densely populated city and does not take great care to follow the exact instructions of Cesar Millan and run that fucker around for hours every day and show him who is fucking boss and learn how to make him shut the fuck up, someone who is not fastidious about picking up the beast’s shit, who does not immediately punish the animal for snarling and threatening people— remember, we are talking about city dogs here, not some cur chained to your lot full of cars in Alabama to guard your gas— someone who does these things does not give a fuck at all about other human beings.  And I get that some people feel the same way about kids, you know, but if your kid ran up and punched someone in the nuts you would fucking discipline him.  Well your fucking dog is kicking me in the nuts of my mind with his god damn seven in the morning barking.

Anyway. Once in a while I go over there and dump a five gallon bucket of water on them.  No lemon juice in a squirt gun to the eyes or anything cruel, you know, but just toss a bucket on ‘em and they run like hell, and shut up for a while.  And I’m not going to lie, I enjoy seeing them wet, cowed and terrified.  It’s horrible, but you know— they’re dicks, and they fucking deserve it.

So a woman went on a date off match.com; the guy was a convicted sexual batterer, and he went ahead and sexually battered her, too.  So she sued them and now match.com is screening out sex offenders:

http://jezebel.com/5792045/women-sues-matchcom-after-date-leads-to-assault

Match.com is screening out sex offenders to avoid bad PR about a chick getting raped by a repeat offender.  This is their 9/11 and the screening is their terror watch list, and soon we’re all gonna have to take off our shoes and have a stout Dennis Franz looking dude forage around our taint at the airport of internet dating.  And you know what?  Fine.  This is one of the few areas in life where whether you’re a sex offender SHOULD matter.  You should be kicked off match.com if you get convicted of rape, and you should not be able to be a mall Santa if you did three years for fingerfucking your niece.  But frankly, these are the ONLY things the sex offender registry should be used for, instead of its current overreaching fucking miasma of public humiliation, baiting of vigilantism, crushing of lives and careers, banning public urinators from living within a thousand feet of schools in cities where there’s a fucking school every five hundred feet, etc.  The sex offender registry is a cruel and unusual crock of shit and should have been completely done away with BUT not now, because they’ve finally found a legitimate use for it.  I give a fuck about sex offenders in two areas of life: being around kids and being in the dating pool scaring the girls, and that’s it.  I don’t give a shit if the guy at the muffler shop likes the bald pussy. 

I mean of course, any sense of security you get from this is false, you can be sex offended at any time by anyone, the call is coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE, etc. And there’s no way they execute this without some poor John Hodgman-looking schlump with the same name as a rapist getting tracked down by a match.com torch mob and strung up.  And sex crimes are overrreported as well as underreported, so a bunch of these guys probably did time for nothing because some child psychologist had a hard on to find some Satanic Ritual Abuse, and now this dude is out and he can’t even go on a date.  And even TALKING about sex offenders, even doing something that ostensibly makes online dating MORE SAFE, just by bringing it up you are making every girl think that their date is going to show up with a nylon stocking over his face and a boxcutter.  But still.  Why the fuck not.

So, no one who is possibly reading this post has not heard about this:

http://gizmodo.com/5833787/my-brief-okcupid-affair-with-a-world-champion-magic-the-gathering-player

The girl who went out with a guy off OKCupid, found out he was a world champion Magic: the Gathering® player, was ostensibly appalled and wrote a Gizmodo article about how she was stunned and it’s a huge dealbreaker and etc.

Couple things.  First, as Forbes was quick to point out, of course this is an obvious troll.  This woman, desperate to make a living in the non-lucrative world of blog writing, has just said “fuck it,” you know, I need something that gets a million hits. So I’m gonna write about how I’m a chick who was appalled to date a nerd, thus getting the two commentingist, complainingest groups on the planet to catch fire over my article.  Chicks and nerds.

And second, yes, ultimately her beef is bullshit, the fact that he’s the world champion Magic: the Gathering® player being a huge dealbreaker and etc.  I mean, millions of people play Magic: the Gathering®.  It’s not really that big a deal to be a nerd anymore; it’s just its own subculture.  It’s not quite a sexy one like punk rocker or whatever but it’s its own thing and nerds can get laid now.  So at face value her point is really bitchy, and her whole hedging about getting on OKCupid in the first place—her whole thinly-veiled I’m-too-good-for-this thing— while, again, a deliberate troll, well, yes, it’s twatty. She is a twat, and she should be called a twat.  So Sharon Bezefrnak or whateverthefuck your name is, you are a twat.

BUT people are failing to read between the lines here.  Because people are getting hung up on the Magic®-being-the-dealbreaker thing and not looking at her whole description of the date.  Which—he is a hedge fund manager.  Only two kinds of people do this— drunken date rapist frat boys, and cold, Aspergian number-crunching nerds.  Of course he is the latter.  He manages a hedge fund, but he is not the smooth guy out there hobnobbing with the nephew of the Sultan of Brunei over martinis at the titty bar, convincing him through camaraderie to sink $200 million of oil money into a Brazilian ruby mining concern with high upside potential.  There is some other guy, probably a lacrosse player of some kind, who does this, while Jon Finkel sits back in a cramped office with one buzzing florescent light and pores over 12,000 page excel spreadsheets looking for some curvilinear regression formula that will add .0002 cents 8 times out of ten to the result of an equation with 47 variables.  Or coming up with some piece of code that will robotically act on some stock price information transmitted from the Nikkei to make 4,000 fake transactions per second that it stops short of actually executing so it can artificially drive up the price of Philippine corn commodities by one one thousandth of a penny a million times per day.  You know he is this guy, because he plays Magic: the Gathering®.

So my guess is he is some kind of socially hobbled Aspergian. And therefore I speculate that he fucked up not by dropping the Magic® bomb, but in HOW he dropped the Magic® bomb. Because there is no piece of information EVER, ANYWHERE on the planet that will make a chick recoil if you deliver it confidently, like it’s no big deal.  Murder, sex offender registry, Magic®: the Gathering, whatever.   I routinely tell my dates that I have to turn in early to get up for an eight hour Dungeons and Dragons session the next day. ROUTINELY.  NO ONE ever has any real issue with this.  Because I say it like I have no fucking problem or insecurity with it, because I have no problem or insecurity with it. Lots of girls sarcastically take the bait, go for some easy dig, and I tell them to fuck right off. I’m gonna take you home and rawdog you, and then I’m gonna get up and carefully optimize my enchanter spellbook. Because Dungeons and Dragons is fucking FUN.  And I am not afraid to say so, with confidence. 

So when the issue of Magic: the Gathering® came up, you KNOW he was hemming and hawing about it, or worse, he was deliberately holding it back until he could smugly declare that he was the world champion, hoping this would impress her. Either way he was THINKING about it, thinking in advance about what to do when it came up, or how to make it come up, and the fact that he even had to think shows that he was already dead to all pussy, now and forever. 

Plus, he took her to a one man show about Jeffrey Dahmer.  And he went on a second date with her, even though she looks like you put a wig on Albert Finney:

Which makes me think maybe the dude doesn’t have a ton of options. Nothing against him— it’s hard when you have a job and time-consuming hobbies, etc.

Anyway, yes, the chick is a twat, but they’ll get like that if you don’t man up about liking wizards.  Just my two cents.

I’ll be having a sex dream, right?  Usually this starts as a regular dream, but then an attractive chick shows up and I just grab her to start fucking.  Last night the scene was that I was back in my college looking for my dorm room, but the doors were all sci-fi futuristic and I couldn’t find mine.  I went into some random room and there was a hot blonde chick in there and I pulled up her skirt and bent her over her bed. This is what happens, whenever a hot chick shows up in my dream- the narrative of the dream, whatever emotional message it was trying to tell me, goes out the window and I just grab her and rip off her clothes.

Anyway, I had this chick bent over with her rump exposed, and she was all giggly, and I got on top of her and lined up my dick and went to push it in, you know?  Except my body pantomimed this thrusting motion in my sleep and my boner rubbed gratingly against the sheets and it woke me up.

And this happens to me EVERY FUCKING TIME.  Only ONCE have I ever had actual intercourse in a dream; this was, interestingly, in the selfsame college dorm room heretofore mentioned when my roommate’s bed was right next to mine and I couldn’t jack off for like a week.  I guess I was so horny that I just powered through it.  But anyway- every time, my boner grinds against my mattress on the first pump and wakes me up instantly.  It is the most frustrating thing in the fucking world.

and “there,” “their” and “they’re—” I need a chick who throws a diæresis in “coöperate,” and an “æ” in “diæresis,” but doesn’t use a diæresis in “diæresis” because you are not, without this forewarning, going to pronounce “diæresis” as though “iæ” were a monosyllabic diphthong. I need a chick who carefully searches for the correct combination of keys to make a circumflex over “rôle,” but ONLY when discussing a part played by an actor.  I need a chick who says “AN historian.”  In fact, she better really hammer the “ANNNNN” in a sly nod to anyone else out there who thinks someone who says “a historian” is an illiterate savage.  I wouldn’t date anyone who says “I would like” unless they’re talking about some counterfactual fantasy universe.  I wouldn’t like to date that person.  See, I can say it, because I’m not really ever gonna hear someone say “I would like to go out with you” outside of a counterfactual fantasy universe.  I’m never gonna hear someone use the correct “I should like to go out with you,” either, but I WOULD really fucking like to date that person.  She’d have studied classics and she’d use words like “Grecism” pronounced as though it had a cédille, but she would cringe a little every time because pronouncing a “c” like that is the fucking opposite of a Grecism.

Also, no fat chicks.