I Drink for a Reason (6 page)

You can see it in the perpetually empty smile of the models performing mundane, everyday tasks in the ads throughout the Sharper
Image or Sky Mall catalogs or in any given infomercial. Folding an easier to fold ladder, storing something under your bed
with ease that up until now was not possible to store under your bed without fifteen seconds of focused imagination. The joy
of finally cleaning your gutter without having to stand on something to elevate you. Making pancakes without all the muss
and fuss that you used to endure with the new “30 Second Pancake Batter Thing!” How did the pioneers ever do without it!?
Jesus, we are a lazy, gullible, mindlessly consumptive culture, aren’t we?

I
DON’T GET IT
. W
ELL
, I
GET IT IN THE SENSE THAT
I
UNDERSTAND
what it is. And I get why, given the intelligence and gullibility of Americans, it not only exists but also truly thrives
as a business. But, come on, paying money to a suspiciously generic-sounding company called the Universal Star Council to
have a star named after you or a loved one?! You’re kidding, right? You’re not? Go to
www.yourstar.com
, you say, and I’ll see what you’re talking about? Okay, fine! I will!

The home page of
yourstar.com
features the sentence “As your star shines… your love will last. Eternal beauty, and infinite possibility mingle among the
stars, and now, one of them can be yours… 30 day guarantee—imagine the look on their face when you give them their very own
star, officially recorded with the International Star Council!” (At least it did before I started making fun of this.)

Okay, I’ll do just that. All right, give me a minute here to let me stop laughing. Hang on. Man, this is taking longer than
I thought. Okay, here we go. Nope, still laughing. Need another second here. I snotted myself a little. Let me wipe. All right,
I’m done. Let’s see now, hmmmm, I’m imagining a look comprised of a mixture of incredulous outrage and pity. Is that right?
A look that says, “How motherfucking dumb are you? You named a star after me? Which one? Point it out. Oh it’s “up there somewhere”?
Wait, you can narrow it down to the Crab Nebula? Well, that’ll save some time in finding it. What the fuck is wrong with you?
I’d rather have a gift certificate to Shit Farm Indian Food Diarrhea Outletters. I’d rather have forty dollars’ worth of henna
tattoos on my face. What does that even mean, you named a star? Why not just name a microbe after me? Or anything else equally
intangible and impossible to see after me? What happened, they ran out of cubic inches of Atlantic Ocean to name for me? How
about a “patch of air” over the Rhine? What about the Queen of England’s next fart? Can I get that named after me as well?
Why stop there? What about truly imaginary things that, for a nominal fee, can be named after me? I’d like to name the next
sighting of the Loch Ness Monster after me, for $39.95. How about the whisper of an angel? For an extra fifty bucks I’ll throw
in its celestial “aura” up to, but not exceeding, a radius of six inches. And seriously, the “International Star Council”?
Again, you’re joking, right? What do you have to do to be a part of that “Council,” provide proof of citizenship from a country
on Earth, while being able to look up and point? What kind of scam is this?!

I’ll tell you what kind. The sweetest of them all—the perfect kind. Is this for people who don’t believe in angels (because
“believing in angels is ridiculous”) but do believe in the power of transcendental meditation to create an energy shield that
would turn back nuclear missiles? Because that makes complete sense. First of all, who’s going to dig around to find out who
to check with about whether there’s really a star named for you, and then actually check? No one, that’s who. And if anybody
does check, all you have to do is show them some bullshit certificate-looking thing that you can print off of your computer
at home with a heretofore unknown font declaring that your star name is sanctioned by the “ISC”? They actually have a thirty-day
guarantee. In case you get a sudden case of the “What the Fucks”? or “your” “star” red dwarfs and explodes in the next few
weeks.

I’m imagining something like that. Am I close?

R
IGHT THIS VERY SECOND
I
AM SITTING IN THE BAR AT THE
Sheraton in Novi, Michigan, just outside of what used to be Detroit. The name of the bar is 21.1.11, which is the zip code
for Novi, except broken up by periods. The bar is very much your typical corporate hotel bar. It is just off the lobby and
visible to everyone from every angle. There are two flat-screen TVs showing various football or baseball games. In between
the games they show FOX News. I’ve been a regular here for the last two months while I shoot a movie here in Michigan. Like
pretty much every hotel, the drinks are outrageously overpriced. But I get them back by never paying any money for the coffee
that’s set out in the morning at their “honor bar.”

There have been many groups that have come in and out of the hotel for a day or two or three while I’ve been living here.
Nothing too exciting. A wedding occasionally will liven the place up, but mostly it’s groups of people belonging to the Michigan
Psychoanalytical Foundation, or a company of regional tire salesmen, or Peggy Hartford’s 85th birthday party or some such
thing. But today is different. Today promises a wealth of emotions and involuntary judgments. Today there is a scrapbooking
convention taking place. The name of the company holding the convention is Close to My Heart, and they use the word
convention
in a literal sense. It’s less of a celebration of great scrapbookers or a sneak peak at some of the new items in the scrapbooking
world that will soon be entering the market, but more of a get-together of women who would normally be doing this at home
by themselves or with a couple of friends. But here, for an all-inclusive fee, they scrapbook with hundreds of like-minded
strangers. All women. Not even older gay gentleman who dress like Mr. Rogers and whistle Lerner and Lowe tunes while wearing
half-glasses. Not even one! There’s nothing really on sale here. No new scrapbooking technology being shown off, just the
scrapbooking itself. There are a couple of seminars throughout the day, but outside of that it’s pretty much just the act
of scrapbooking. That is to say, pasting photos on pages and then decorating the edges around the photos with various seasonal
or occasionally appropriate stickers and cutouts. Is it a photo of last Halloween? Then add a pumpkin! Are you memorializing
Brittany’s baby shower? Then add a cartoon of a stork and a pacifier!

Scrapbooking seems to me one of those things that you don’t really need any help with. It seems like something I could figure
out on my own without having to spend ten hours in a seminar. I’m a heterosexual male, but still.

I met two of the several hundred women in town for it here at the bar just last night. They were very excited to take a picture
with me even though they weren’t exactly sure of who I was. They were, however, confident that I was on TV or in the movies
or both, so the picture was requested. I commented on what I saw as maybe being unnecessary—the need for “instruction” in
scrapbooking—but they assured me that it was all part of the process. Now I am going to have to stop for a bit because they
are coming out of the ballroom where they were “cropping” (which is when everyone scrapbooks amongst each other in a fun way
to bond after a long day of seminars). I mean they are pouring out in droves and are now starting to swarm the bar in the
way that only large groups of middle-aged scrapbookers from Ottowa on one of the few “vacations” they’ll go on this year can.
I better go upstairs lest anyone see what I’m writing and get upset. Okay, I just read this over and I want to say that it
was rude of me to put quotes around the word “vacation” back there. Just because they’re not scaling Machu Picchu or exploring
the Cenotes of Mexico or having their senses ramped up to 1,000 at a Russian disco in Ankara, Turkey, as the very large man
who literally pulled you in from off of the street now grips your thigh under the table so hard it’s bruising while promising
you that the women who are trudging about unsuccessfully pretending that they aren’t high and/or sex slaves are clean and
love Americans
^*
doesn’t mean that they haven’t in the past or won’t in the future. These scrapbooking women
are
on a vacation, even if only in the sense that they are away from their families or solitary, unexciting lives back in Grainy
Lakes, Ohio.

There is more than a little irony to the fact that this very event is something that one would imagine would merit being “scrapbooked.”
That the time being spent here by these women (and one gay man—I was wrong), hunkered down over an officially sanctioned “scrapbooking
scrapbook,” remembering better times that, obviously, weren’t spent at the Sheraton Novi, remembering other memories. I walked
down to the Grand Ballroom where they are all meeting and I am going to take a rough guess that there were about 350 women
seated at the long tables that had been put into rows stretching from one end of the hall to the other. Were it not for the
faux gold leaf on the walls and fake crystal chandeliers, you might think you had stumbled onto some room in China or Mexico
or the Mariana Islands where the local ladies were assembling vibrators for a penny a day. And in what could be viewed as
either irony or unremarkable happenstance, depending on your view of all this, “Almost Paradise” from
Footloose
was playing at full volume as the ladies unwound from the day-long seminars (including one called “Crop Talk”—no kidding)
by applying their newfound pasting skills to photos of them drinking margaritas at newly single Tonya’s apartment, where they
all watched the
Project Runway
finale.

I was looking in through the open double doors from what I thought was a safe distance, in the hallway with my back against
the far wall, but the two ladies from last night saw me within seconds. We talked briefly and they filled me in on what was
going on. That’s how I now know the term
cropping.
It’s fun to have terms and abbreviations and just generally make up your own language for your hobby. It lends a sense of
exclusivity and insider standing. Earlier that day I had walked through the parking lot of the hotel so I could go across
the street to Best Buy and get a video game (my own stupid but fun time waster) and walked passed at least a dozen cars with
some form of “Close to My Heart” adornment on them as well as the Christian fish symbol thing that some Christians put on
their cars to let other drivers know that they don’t believe in most science. This does not in any way surprise me. In fact
it goes a long way toward validating my cocky, assured judgments. The kind that piss people off when you see a bunch of overweight
women in sweats and U of M (or W or O or I) T-shirts, reeking of drugstore perfume, lugging crate after crate of scrapbooking
paraphernalia and a case of Mountain Dew through the hotel lobby, greeting everyone by name in an accent that would make the
characters in
Fargo
seem like students of Henry Higgins, while a bag of Doritos and a six pack of Seagram’s Peach Fuzzy Navel stick out of their
homemade Kid Rock purse, and you say out loud, “I bet half of them have those little Christian fish things on their cars.
Wanna bet? Anyone?”

Hold the phone! It is now October 3, I’m still at the Sheraton, and the entire second floor and a couple of banquet rooms
on the first floor are being taken over by
another
scrapbooking outfit! This one is called “Creative Memories.” These ladies make the “Close to My Heart” women look like lazy
pieces of shit that just crawled out of an iron lung so they could go take a nap on the couch. These women are scrapbooking
on steroids and acid times ten meets the Wolfman!! As I said, they’ve booked the entire second floor and are having scrapbooking
sessions that start at eight in the morning and go to eleven at night! Jesus. What? I don’t understand.

I’ve met a number of these women in the past few days, and they all seem genuinely nice, but this is starting to feel sad.
I went walking up and down the second floor with its walls the color of blisters and it’s cheaper-by-the-ton, not-so-stain-resistant
carpeting, peering into rooms with titles like “The Charlevoix” and “Isle Royal” that seem more like prison rec centers and
less like “banquet” rooms. Barely anyone talking, all hunched over their scrapbooks, lifting their heads occasionally to nibble
on snacks. It’s easy to project “concentration” into robotic movements, but this is utter boredom at its utterest. And this
is, I suppose, a slice of the “real America” that so many Republican candidates have been prattling on about. Here in Novi
is where the values of small towns triumph over their big-city brethren through sheer moral force, reducing everyone in their
path to a quaking shell of a supposed human, boo-hooing apologies, bent in contrition, while the weight of all their elitist
wrongs renders them in mute awe of the righteous. Well, I’ve seen enough. I wish these women well, not only on their current
projects but also in the sufficient attainment of future memories. At least as much as necessary to bring them back to the
Sheraton Novi/Detroit next month.

Go Lions!!!

I
WOULD BE THE SHITTIEST SURVIVOR IN HISTORY
, I
DO BELIEVE
. Not that this is something I’m proud of—more like an ambivalent realization I came to while in line at Whole Foods. I was
buying twenty dollars’ worth of olives—that is to say four ounces of olives, but it’s worth the exorbitant cost to lessen
my carbon footprint. (I’m concerned what people six thousand years from now may think of me.) Anyway, lately, for no specific
reason, really, just pure coincidence, I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries and Discovery Channel and History Channel
shows that have a “survivor” theme or are simply “tales of harrowing survival.” Whether it’s one person stranded by themselves
seriously injured in a forest buried under a mountain of fire ants or a small group of people who run out of gas in an arid,
unforgiving desert or a large group who get stuck in a surprise killer storm on an icy mountaintop, I’ve witnessed dozens
of reenactments and even actual footage that the survivors had the wherewithal to document. Brutal, torturous, forever life-altering
struggles to live. And I’m not talking about that silly TV
Survivor
reality nonsense where the winner gets a million dollars for basically going without chocolate for a month and shitting in
a hole in the ground. I’m talking about people who, less then “cheating death,” survived on a courage most of us will never
know—a staggering primal fortitude that is often said to be inherent within us all but, for me at least, is highly doubtful.
I’m talking about when a plane crashes and there’s one survivor, lost at sea, freezing cold, holding on to a floating chunk
of foam core trying not to think about sharks too much but rather concentrating on figuring out the best way to drink their
own urine (much harder to do if you’re a girl).