It's amazing to me the kind of things I can find to waste time that would be better spent working on my movie script. Like writing this for example. Or playing Galaga and Elevator Action on an arcade emulator with a joypad that is awkward and frustrating to use, thus killing any actual enjoyment I might've experienced from playing them.
My neighbors are probably still wondering why screams of "Cunt!" and "Motherfucking Dickbag Jizz Eating Horse Twat!" were echoing through the hallway from my apartment a few minutes ago. It's a miracle I didn't break anything but I'm getting better at that, and getting into a baseless rage just seems like an awful lot of work nowadays
So that being said, I'm going to explore things unrelated to strip clubs and my occupation in general that aggravate me. Why? Because I'm bored and seem to enjoy doing stuff that makes me no money over things that might actually make me wealthy.
Fucking weird, huh?
So let's jump in, shall we?
Pop Culture
When anything starts to get really popular in America, I generally start disliking it. Since I have little to no respect for humanity in general and Americans in particular, I figure if a large portion of the population likes something then no matter my previous inclinations on the subject, it must suck. Into this category I can confidently throw things like beards, music, craft beer, cocktails, our national obsession with food, skinny jeans, eyeglasses one doesn't actually need, headphones, tattoos and designer anything.
There's so much here to cover I don't even know where to start. So, in the continuing theme of this blog to avoid any kind of involved and cohesive narrative, I'll just break it down in one of my sorta famous lists.
Beards) So facial hair has become popular again for the first time since the 80's told us that a nice even face full of stubble was pretty fucking cool and the 90's convinced everyone that sideburns (in the face of all available evidence) looked good on a man. Now we have shows about facial shrubbery and get to look at all kinds of dudes more famous than us sporting some hairy faces.
So like all things the public at large embraces, if everyone else is doing it, especially celebrities, then it must be awesome to do and will make you more awesome by imitating it. Nothing lower primate/ovine about it at all!
Let me put it this way; for some reason many dudes feel completely comfortable approaching a total stranger and saying something like "Dude, you're beard is awesome!" because beards are now popular and no one thinks anything of it.
But suppose a random guy came up to you and said something like "Dude, your eyes are enchanting!" You may feel slightly less OK with a statement like that because it would be weird.
Music) I realize that beauty is in the eye, or ear, of the beholder and at a base level I respect that. No matter how much I rail against the travesty that the American music scene is, there's a small voice in the back of my skull which acknowledges the right of anyone, anywhere to like whatever kind of music they wish and that my opinion is completely irrelevant on the subject no matter how much their musical tastes suck sloth cock.
I blame this voice on either a tumor or an extradimensional entity who inhabits my brain whenever it can be bothered to do so. I don't enjoy listening to the voice, but will grudgingly admit that maybe it's right every now and then.
It still doesn't explain, to my satisfaction, why large amounts of the human population will willingly, nay eagerly, listen to and enjoy music that sits like a hot, steamy pile of runny shit-pudding on the brain. Music that has nothing meaningful to say and requires very little musical talent to produce.
Now before I go any further on this topic, I'd like to throw out a little disclaimer:
I am forced by my occupation to listen to music. Forced I say. I have no choice and don't seem to possess the filters that some titty club employees have that allows them to virtually be oblivious to the ravaging effects of horrible music. I wish I did, but there you go.
So having got that out of the way I hope that you, Venerated Reader, may have a more sympathetic ear for the approaching tirade.
I respect musicianship above all other attributes when it comes to, you know, music and stuff. This is not to say that there aren't many bands out there comprised of highly skilled artists who nevertheless manage to churn out crappy music. Take the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Rage Against The Machine for examples. All the dudes in these bands can fucking play, but still I hate all of their music.
Part of this can be blamed on repetition or course. Listen to a song you love 50 times a week for a year and chances are that you'll be OK with not hearing that song again any time soon.
I don't blame the artists for this, I blame the public. If, as an artist, someone came up to me and said I will give you ungodly amounts of money to make simplistic, repetitive shite that takes virtually no thought whatsoever to create, I'd say sign me up.
But then again I wouldn't know a chord if it leapt out of a cave and savaged me, so what do I know?
Craft Beer) I love beer. I love drinking it, I love consuming it and I love pouring it down my throat. I like the way beer tastes but would never drink it at all if it didn't get me drunk. Being a high functioning alcoholic has it's pros and cons, chief among them being an utter lack of regard for the craft and art of creating alcohol.
Oh I dabbled with being a beer snob back in the early 90's when the first microbrew revolution hit America and suddenly you could get any number of tasty, sophisticated beers that weren't Bud, Bud Light or Miller. It was like a whole new world for practicing boozers, full of flavor, character and a sense of superiority over others who stuck to their mass produced garbage-water. It was the first time in US history that the rest of the world took us seriously as a beer producing country, and I proudly waded in and drank a bunch of expensive beer.
That was then and this is now. Today I mainly stick to Labatt Ice as my beer of choice for three reasons: 1) It's $3.99 for a six pack of 16 ouncers. 2) It's 5.6% ABV which provides a bit more kick than your average shit beer. And 3) It is slightly more beer flavored that anything else you can get for a comparable price.
What bothers me about the popularity surge of craft beer is that it somehow becomes a badge of belonging to certain elements of society. Take IPA's for example. IPA's taste like gnawing on the side of a hemlock tree. They're bitter as an old nun's taint and flat as Kansas in every other flavor category.
They fucking suck.
But Jebus-onna-stick they are very chic at the moment if you happen to wear plaid shirts, brightly colored pants, retro jackets or a particularly gay hat.
Seriously, if these are the advocates of IPA's then I can't think of a better reason to avoid them.
Craft Cocktails) While the idea of paying $20 something dollars for a drink that takes a long time to make sounds kick ass, I'll take a pass on it. I figure if I'm buying something that's really just hastening my death, I don't want to overpay for it. But if it's your thing, then run with it I say. Some sort of carefully prepared cocktail may very well be the tastiest drink I've ever had, but unless someone else buys it for me I'll never know because paying that much for a drink is fucking idiotic.
I simply don't care if it contains fresh shaved ginger, locally grown fruit, premium liquor and the bartender hacked the ice cubes out of a giant block of ice harvested from an Icelandic cave instead of some made from an ice machine. Details like these are irrelevant to us HFA's. I don't drink to experience astonishing flavors, to have credibility within my chosen subculture, to say I've done it, or to feel a vague sense of smugness at my own coolness.
Tattoos) This one's probably going to irk at least a few of my friends who work in the tattoo/body mod field. Sorry, just my feelings on the matter which are as valid/meaningless as anyone else's. The bottom line is I don't like tattoos anymore and will probably never get any more ink.
Once again pop culture has killed something I used to love.
When I got my first tattoo way back in 1990, it was still a pretty uncommon thing to do to yourself. At that time only people with a rebellious spirit who were willing to put themselves at odds with mainstream America got tattooed. It stigmatized you, set you apart from the ordinary and if it couldn't be hidden under a tee shirt, severely limited your job prospects unless you happened to be a criminal or a tattoo artist.
Nowadays however, celebrities and reality TV have shown us that getting slathered in ink is actually super cool and that you can sport full sleeves openly so that people will know that you're:
A) A super rad hipster in touch with all that is cool in America who in addition to being a walking doodle, probably owns many interesting and totally ungay hats.
B) An NBA player
C) Someone so edgy and atypical that you have to mimic what other edgy and atypical people do so the public at large will know what an edgy and atypical kind of person you are. Understand and respect!
I especially enjoy tattoo trends, because it reinforces my point that humans are much more lemming-like than any individual human will ever admit. We're masters of self rationalization. We can look upon something stupid that a thousand other homosapiens are doing and can construct in our own minds a personally valid reason that we should do it as well.
Tattoo fashion is a brilliantly illustrated example of this. Remember 'tribal' tattoos? Know anyone who's got one of those in the last decade? Didn't think so. How about asian symbols? So five years ago....
Today's tattoos are much more well thought out. No, really. Stop laughing.
My favorites are:
1) Angel wings: You saw some other silly twat with tiny, cherub sized wings tattooed on their back and thought to yourself, "I am going to get those imbedded in my skin too, but bigger and for much more meaningful reasons than that dumb skank."
2) Memorials to the dead: "I am pretty likely to forget the death of someone very close to me, therefore I shall have a reminder of them etched into my forearm so that I will never forget them and so others can see that I've known someone in my lifetime who has died. Because that's instant fucking street-cred, yo!"
3) Anything on your neck: Nothing says 'parolee' like having a sweet neck tattoo. All of your peer group have one and they look fucking bad-ass, mowwa-fakka.
Feathers look like loaves of French bread and Blessed is, for some reason, correctly spelled.
Headphones) How did we manage to survive as a species from 1997 when the Sony Walkman died out, until 2001 when the iPod came out? How could anyone manage to exist without constant and instant access to music? It seems impossible...
But for four long years we did it. That and the rest of pre-1980 human history of course.*2
Thankfully today we know that it's OK to be a self absorbed, distracted and hopelessly cool person who escapes social interaction by not being able to hear the world going on around us, thereby saving us from unnecessary human interaction while damaging our hearing in a totally cool way.
Two dozen professional athletes in inspiring commercials can't be wrong...
Thankfully these very same athletes are now letting us know that headphones with wires aren't cool any more and that to be more like them you must upgrade your headphones to wireless. Because being cool is sweet as fuck!
Potential Gunfire And The Lack Thereof) This is kinda a long story so I'm just gonna go ahead and shorten the living shit out of it. If I had to get into every subtle detail of each time there was the possibility of gun violence rearing its ugly head in my occupation, I would spend a whole lot of time writing the words 'motherfuckah!' and 'Go ahead and skin that smoke-wagon and see what happens.'
So to not belabor the point, we had a situation tonight where a customer lost the keys to his ghetto-wagon and after we exhausted every possible means of finding them for him, he got all hostile and stuff. We didn't let this bother us too much on the surface because there were four of us and I alone outweighed this guy by 150 lbs and he was unaware I was behind him as he threatened my fellow Floor Guy.
Picture Great Dane vs Surprised Corgi and you get the idea.
So after all was said and done the Floor Guy who got threatened wanted to blast the windows out of this dude's Hood Cruiser with my handgun at around 5 AM. I was willing to entertain the idea at first but realized that I was the only one of the three of us who could hit the asshole's vehicle at 150 ft which is how far we had to go to get out of surveillance camera range.
At this point, despite my alcoholic impairment, I decided to do the responsible thing and declare the whole concept a bad idea. I don't own small cute guns that go 'crack' and 'pop' and wouldn't be noticed by the surrounding apartments. I own giant, death spewing shit-cannons that make jolly fucktons of noise and fire and put massive holes in stuff. Because...
If I am ever forced to shoot something, by God it's going to stay shot.
So we hid behind a parked Suburban and threw rocks at it until all the driver side windows had been broken, totally without gunfire.
Safety first.
Well folks, that's it for this one. I apologize for the slow down in recent posting, but I have other irons in the fire and someday you may be able to enjoy one of them in a classy theater near you. Maybe even in 3D or TittyVision™!
Until the next post I'd just like to thank all my loyal followers who stop me in the street and ask me for money and then tell me how much they enjoy my blog when I tell them I don't carry cash. It means a lot to me that you thought I was so good I actually made money from writing the Plight.
Warms me bollocks at night.
Peace, Rihanna and Reasonably Priced Love-Substitute,
-The StripperHerder
*1 I realize that this is a horrible caption. I accept it. I acknowledge it. And most importantly, I embrace it.
*2 But who cares about that?
*3 Enya has zero street cred.
