You're Making Me Hate You (29 page)

I know what you’re thinking, and I completely concur. This is indeed my Angry Old Man book. That’s okay. I went through the same stuff when I was your age. Sure, I lived with my Gram off and on for a long time after being kicked out of school and living on the streets—she was my savior. But I always had a goal in mind: music. I got to the point at which I could make a bit of cash at it even before I got signed with Slipknot. I had a job for rent and shit, but I played gigs for myself. I had an eye on the prize, and I never let that get away from me. Nobody has a prize anymore. All they want to do is have fun, be with their friends, and do stupid shit. How do you know you’re having fun if you have nothing to compare it to when all you do is fuck off? And don’t give me that teenager shit that “no one understands me.” Of course they don’t: you’re a teenager. That is by definition the state in which you do your very best
not
to be understood and thereby never understand anyone in return. Granted, there are teenagers out there living incredibly brutal lives and yet somehow they keep it together because priorities are real. So not being understood is low man on the totem, right above giving a shit whether One Direction stay together and go the distance. You really want to be understood? Take a minute and pitch in; we might stop and give you a chance to vent.

It’s a confusing fucking time in the world today. People still hate as much for color and twice as much for creed. They kill each other for gods they’ve never met. They hurt their women according to books written by those who might not have known any better. They hate based on biased faith instead of
understanding based on accessible fact. I’m no better; you’re no better. We’re none the better until we try to do something about it. Until we put down the smartphones making us dumber and do something that has nothing to do with ourselves, we have a snowball’s chance in an oven of achieving anything tangible in our lifetimes. The shit we do today makes as much sense as adopting an untamed baby puma. Sure, it bundles security, wanting a pet, rodent control, and exercise motivation into one nice furry switchblade package. But that’s dumb. Anything that will eat your face whether you’re alive or dead is not a good choice to have roaming around your house while you sleep. I think that metaphor says it all.

It’s not just the young who are in danger of stepping on their own dicks, male or female alike. Oh no—this is not an isolated incident. I have several acquaintances who I’ve known for several years now—I say “acquaintances” because they give me gas, rash, and nothing but headaches. They’re older than me but act just a shade older than my daughter, Angie, who turned twenty-two recently. They have kids but don’t give a shit. They run in and out of “relationships” and look like an utter dick lip doing it—like, not even a boner either. At least a boner has a use. They make themselves look like the infected lip of a flaccid penis, only good for peeing if it ain’t spitting stones. The thing is, they’re so fucking oblivious to their own sucky state that they preen around “peacocking” like a dildo that sprouted legs. This is what thirty years of no responsibility looks like: their kids are older than they are, but their boyfriends and girlfriends never will be. It used to make me angry and embarrassed of them. Now I just avoid them like a pube on top of a urinal cake.

Once again the devil may be in the details, but the minutia is where the monotony lies.

Like I said before, I’m just as guilty of the cognizant atrocities I’ve described in this book. I guess one of my worst habits has to be constantly using the phrase “nobody gives a shit …” for this or that, in context with popular entertainment in our culture or anything else currently on the radars of the zeitgeist. But that’s incorrect, isn’t it? Because obviously someone or something
does
give a shit—that’s why there appears to be so much focus on trivial clutter. I immediately assume people have the same state of mind and taste as myself, so I fling around definitive judgments like a discus thrower trying to qualify for the next Olympic trials. I’m an unapologetic asshole—this is what me and my kind do in the face of change or exasperation. So I suppose I need to check my shit. I need to think a little quicker on my feet before my mouth runs away with itself. I need to use the phrase “nobody
should
give a shit …” about this or that, because that’s what I mean. That’s what I hope. It’s never true, but I tend to trend on the more hopeful side of possibility, contrary to what my street cred and Wikipedia says.

It may just be a case of this: reality is really just a reflected dimension of who we are as people. Maybe the music sucks and our driving sucks and our clothing sucks and our habits suck and our manners suck and our intelligence sucks and our relationships suck and our love sucks because … WE SUCK. God, could it really just be that simple? Everything sucks because we suck. We have all lost potential and gone coast to coast on a genetic road trip toward the barren wastelands of wasted space and cell deterioration. We’re mental flunkies who can’t pass the physical. So … does that make this book a moot point? Does this mean I just wiped my ass with however many pages and words in a futile attempt to get past the garbage dump only to realize this road only goes to the cemetery? Have we peaked in the past, making the future into nothing but a foreboding
foregone conclusion? Is there anything worse than a paragraph that stretches just a little too long and is loaded with a ton of rhetorical questions that have no way of being answered right away? Can you see up my nose? Do I have a boog hangin’?

As a self-professed “negative moose knuckle,” I have to proceed based on the facts at hand, which is to say that everything is going wrong and no one can agree on the right way to get back on track. As an “author,” I have a sort of masochistic need for these calamities, for things to continue down the current path of destruction, because it provides me ample fodder for shit to write and rant about—in other words, your stupidity keeps me in business. But inside, deep down where I know no one can see or reach me, I
have
to believe things can get better. I cannot allow myself to descend to the depths of this hellish pragmatism that we as a species will never get back to a point at which we innovate instead of inundate with painful dumbness, that we as a whole will cut ourselves into halves then cut those into quarters just to prove the point that we can. At some point it has to stop just being the case of going against the grain to show the world we exist. We
know
you exist; we’re looking at your stupid fucking pants and face. But it’s not enough to exist; if we plan on getting together on another planet in a thousand years, we have to learn how to
coexist
.

That means thinking about others a little more often and thinking about yourselves a little less.
That
is what’s really making me hate you the most. You’re all in your bubbles, obsessed with what
you
need
right this second
. You’re all shoved so far up your own asses you can get a good look at last night’s gluten-free faux-turkey grinder sandwiches. You’re all so busy typing away on message boards and social sites that you forget that not everyone needs to hear your pathetic excuse for an opinion every second of every day. You’re all so glued to your phones, tablets,
and computers that life isn’t even running away from you at this point; it’s strolling, taking its own sweet time because it knows damn well you’re not going to pull your nose out of your Facebook page long enough to realize it’s already gone. It has plenty of time to slip by in the night, making every morning blue and every second left just another countdown to the buzzer. Why the fuck should life wait for you? You’ve ignored it every chance you get.

You squander chances to celebrate by looking for the best way to tear the party down. You heap praise on subpar personalities while truly gifted talents waste away in obscurity. You flounder in the face of challenge because you’ve never had to think or fend for yourself in real life. You take advantage of every loophole and exit clause in the book. You change direction when it suits you and barrel into opportunity when you’re not wanted. You act as if whatever is going on
right this second
is the most important thing in the world, even if it means you ignore what’s on the horizon and never get past your myopic sense of right, wrong, and history. You’re all just a bunch of fucking mayflies, living for a day, caught in the moment, only really interested in what the world can do for you, not what you can do for the world. You know what the “great” thing about being a mayfly is?

Nothing.

You can write down their achievements on the back of a matchbook and still have enough room for a grocery list.

There comes a time in a person’s life when they have to find out what the future has in store. That used to be an exciting time for people: it meant they could relax just a little as they headed into the distance with the thrill of the hunt and a sense of direction. But it seems that in the last ten years the young are terrified of the future unless it has to do with social gatherings and gala events. Now, some of this anxiety may be because it seems like there’s not a lot of chances to succeed out there. But
I think that for the most part people are just plain daunted by the looming specter of … responsibility. It freaks people out to think they will be shackled to a decision or a role for the better part of their lives. So they drive themselves to distraction with bullshit. Listen: if you have no responsibility, you have no room to grow or develop any sense of character. Character means not only who you are but also who you can be when the shit hits the fan. If you have no responsibility, you have no character. You’re just a kid in grownup clothes. Sorry if that’s a bit harsh, but it’s true. I know it’s true because I lived it.

I ran through life like a child through a sprinkler, throwing caution to the wind, never really bothered about anyone but myself for the better part of the first thirty years of my life. I broke people’s hearts and destroyed people’s trust. I took way more than I gave, including giving a shit about the damage I was doing. I hurt my friends. I never knew my eldest daughter until she was eleven. I was a horribly selfish person—talented, driven, angry, intelligent, and yet so narcissistic that I couldn’t see through the haze enough to realize that none of my friends trusted me, none of my family took me seriously, and no one I worked with could rely on me for anything. Sure, when it came to what I wanted or needed to do, I was all about it, throwing myself into the work with a frenzy and a concentration that bordered on manic. But if it was outside my range of motion or vision, I could only really muster a passing nonchalance toward helping or giving a good goddamn.

Life has a way of shaking the shit out of you—right out of your head, right out of your mouth, right out of your body. It will shake you like a shark, grinding the grist to shreds in the pressure and cut of its teeth. Life has no need for you, you see. Life goes on with or without you. So it would only stand to reason that if you don’t take up the fight, it will leave you as a casualty.
You want to know what the secret is? I figured it out, you know. I figured it out a long time ago. It was so simple that I can’t believe it took me that long. You know what it is?

It’s all about nudcnienoNJWV.

Sorry, my finger got stuck.

So what’s the fucking moral of
this
goddamn book? “Everything sucks, so fuck it”? “Your music makes my balls drop”? “Dipshits should be forced to take busses, not planes”? “Movie nachos are
still
not real nachos”? “Honey Boo Boo’s so bad, she makes me miss Snooki”? I could do this for a while. I often get stuck in these loops and find it very hard to get myself out sometimes. This is the price of hours spent picking up weird crumbs that are tumbling around my head and throwing them up in word form onto fake paper. Side effects may include rambling, runny nose, upset navel, Pica, incessant scratching, dizziness, and flared nostrils. Anyone who experiences these symptoms longer than forty years should definitely see a doctor … or a shrink … or at least talk to one of the dudes who spin the signs on Hollywood Boulevard—you know, the big arrows that say, “Gigantic Sale! Come On In!” Those guys are like wizards with those things! Some of them are hacks, of course, but that’s because they never had the
training
! They never had the proper
training
! How are you supposed to twirl those things so effortlessly if you don’t have the
training
? It’s a goddamn
skill
! Skill takes
TRAINING
!

Yeah, even I don’t know what happened there …

The moral. That’s a little harder to find here than in my other books.

With
Sins
, it was all about getting people to ease back on their guilt, to cut themselves some slack. With
Heaven
, I wanted to answer my own questions about spirits and make myself feel
a little better, that I’m not crazy. With this one? Christ, that’s murky. I’ve often heard that “dumb don’t wash off.” If only it were that simple, we could run the whole planet through a few million car washes and be done with these shenanigans. But the cold fact is that we are a global, multicultural, rainbow-hued tribe of fucking dicks. We have no chance to stop being this way because, quite frankly, we are worse than dumb—we’re incompetent. Incompetent people don’t know they’re incompetent. They just blithely blunder through their day-to-day with no care for any damage that happens in their wakes. When the mishaps are pointed out, they see the issue but don’t do anything to adjust and fix their ways. Why would they? It didn’t occur to them that what they were doing was wrong to begin with, so why would it occur to them to figure out what the right way would be to avoid another confrontation altogether?

We don’t behave very well in public anymore; between snatch selfies in clubs and young ignorant cunts playing something as obscene as the Knockout Game, it’s no wonder more and more fairly intelligent people are “living” through
Second Life
. When we do go out in public and, perish the thought
travel
, we fly like we’ve been drugged and act like Justin Bieber demanding free entrance into Disneyland at 1 a.m. People in airports are as vacuous as patients after med check and minutes before bedtime. Whether we’re out and about or walking around our houses in private, we only really have two looks to go by: uncomfortably hip or just woke up. For us, it’s either suave couture or sweatpants central. We’re either going out on the town or in to the DMV to renew our fucking tags. You know where we find that in-between place, where comfort and decency come together a little closely? Ironically, it’s simple: when we’re older and we’ve stopped giving a shit, one way or the other.