The Mallet of Loving Correction Part 5

31.

2008.

Once these get out, the electoral map will run red!

Election List VII: Bombsh.e.l.ls the McCain Campaign Has Yet to Drop About Barack Obama 1.Obama actually 63% black, not 50/50 as previously reported 2.Has not only started measuring the White House drapes, but has already sent them out to be dry cleaned ("to get rid of that horrible Dubya stench") 3.Not just a socialist, but a Fabian 4.Feeds kittens to alligators, and then those alligators to pit bulls, then the pit bulls to sharks 5.Born not in Hawaii but in The Land of the Lost 6.Grandfather actually a Sleestak 7.Is so poor he only owns one house 8.While high on poppers, had a threesome with Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi, while Bill Ayers recorded it on video. The LA Times has the tape but won't release it 9.Totally told the McCain campaign that he doesn't actually like any of the voters in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Florida or North Carolina or Colorado, and that he's only being friendly to them for right now, but when the election's over, it'll be, like, yeah, don't even know who you are, so get away from me, losers. And that's just not nice 10.Found the change he needed in the campaign bus seat cushions, used it to buy cigarettes Election List VIII: Instances of "[Name] the [Occupation]" That Have Yet to Be Used By McCain or Palin Oct

31.

2008.

This goes out to all the plumbers named Joe out there. I love you, man.

Election List VIII: Instances of "[Name] the [Occupation]" That Have Yet to Be Used By McCain or Palin 1.Brad the Milkman 2.Sid the Deli Owner 3.Bryan the Surly Indie Music Store Clerk 4.Kim the Overnight Wal-Mart Stocker 5.Hakeem the Halal Butcher 6.Aloysius the Chicken s.e.xer 7.Carol the Humorless, Cavity-Probing TSA Agent 8.Klaus the Eurotrash A&R Man 9.Craig the p.o.r.n Reviewer 10.Markos the Blogger 11.Jim the Former Securities Trader, Now Best Buy Appliance Department Sales Trainee 12.Jesus the Lettuce-Picker 13.Ted the Secretly Gay Televangelist 14.Patrica the Humanities Degree Wielding Starbucks Barista 15.Steve the Attack Ad Coordinator 16.Phil the Philatelist 17.Tom the Torturer 18.Sarah the Self-Serving Rogue Campaigner 19.John the Wholly Disappointing Top of the Ticket 20.Barack the President Election List IX: The Rationales Each Party Will Give If They Lose The Election Oct

31.

2008.

Because it's important to have an excuse.

Election List IX: The Rationales Each Party Will Give If They Lose The Election Republicans: 1.The black vote 2.Also, the youth vote 3.And the elderly 4.And the Hispanics 5.And the gays and lesbians 6.And the women 7.And the early voters 8.Jesus, who did we have voting for us?

9.White dudes with Sarah Palin MILF fantasies? Really, that's it?

10.Give me that gin. And that Ambien.

Democrats: 1.Racism.

2.Diebold.

3.Karl Rove. Somehow.

Libertarians 1.Dude, we're Libertarians.

2.We never win.

3.We can't win.

4.And frankly, if we did win, we'd probably all pee ourselves in terror.

5.And so would you.

6.Now, let's smoke a bowl and watch some p.o.r.n.

Election List X: Some of The Horrible Things That Will Happen To You If You Don't Vote Oct

31.

2008.

This is all true.

Election List X: Some of The Horrible Things That Will Happen To You If You Don't Vote 1.Your p.e.n.i.s will fall off. If you are a woman, you will grow a p.e.n.i.s, which will then fall off.

2.Your peers will point and laugh at you more than they already do.

3.You will have to listen to smug voters say "if you didn't vote, you can't complain" for at least two years.

4.You will be consumed by pillbugs whilst you sleep. They will leave behind nothing but your p.e.n.i.s, which as you'll recall, has already fallen off.

5.You will smell of sour b.u.t.termilk until the next New Hampshire primary.

6.Uncontrolled flatulence.

7.Cars will swerve to hit you, even when you are inside your own home.

8.Your World of Warcraft party will turn on you and smite you mightily.

9.Impotence. And not just because your p.e.n.i.s has fallen off.

10.Stairs will rise to trip you.

11.Boils. In Biblical plague amounts.

12.Static cling that no amount of Bounce sheets will ever cure.

13.Your cat will take a dump somewhere in the house that you will never find, and the smell will be carried through the air vents for months, all the while the cat will stare at you with that "you're a real a.s.shole" look they sometimes have. If you do not have a cat, one will be provided for you for the length of time required for it to c.r.a.p in said undisclosed location.

14.Your credit card will be canceled and your creditors will send someone to repossess your p.e.n.i.s. Which has fallen off.

15.Your favorite TV show will be canceled and every time you try to buy the last season on DVD, retailers will be out of stock.

16.Your children will disown you. If you have no children, you will be summarily adopted by a family, and when you attend Thanksgiving at their home, you will be told how disappointed they are in you. For six hours straight. After which they will disown you.

17.Your cabbies will henceforth always take the long route to any destination to which you travel.

18.Zombies, and you without a shotgun.

19.Everyone on your street will win the lottery. You will get a rock.

20.I swear to G.o.d, I will learn your address, come to your house, and when you open the door, I will totally kick you in the nads. Which will hurt even more because they're the only reproductive organs you have left. Because your p.e.n.i.s has fallen off.

I trust now you will be sufficiently motivated to vote.

The election lists are now completed. Thank you for your attention.

Emo: Older Than You Think Dec

10.

2008.

It comes as no particular surprise that my writing advice to teens occasionally irritates teenagers, many of whom do not take kindly to someone telling them their writing likely sucks and the only thing for it is to keep at it until it doesn't suck anymore. They also occasionally get annoyed when you suggest to them (as I do in the follow-up to the original article) that the condition of being a teenager now is pretty much the same as it was 20 years ago (or 40 years ago); the trappings may change (iPods instead of Walkmans instead of transistor radios) but the basic concept is pretty much the same, so despite their feelings that ZOMG EVERYTHING IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT NOW, it's really not so much.

This was brought to mind when a teenager, blogging on her own site (no, I'm not linking to it; I don't think this unsuspecting teenage girl needs her site to be overrun by Whateverites, do you?) detailed the various ways she's offended by my advice piece and how it is wrong, and in pointing out how her generation of teens is drastically different than any other, a.s.serts (and this is an intentional paraphrase) that when people her parents' age were in school, they didn't have Emos skulking about in the halls.

This made me giggle. I'm old enough to be this girl's dad (or at least her dad's slightly younger brother) and I can a.s.sure you that 20+ years ago, we certainly did have Emos, i.e., sulky and morose teens scribbling bad poetry into notebooks and retreating into their music because no one understood them and so on. Our Emos listened to British post-punk rather than American post-punk by dint of British post-punk hitting a couple decades earlier, but, otherwise, yeah, pretty much the same concept. We had Bauhaus, they have Fall Out Boy, and both bands just really want to go back in time to the Weimar Republic, what are you going to do. And I'm happy to say the emo-iest folks I knew in high school have acquitted themselves pretty well. Every picture I have of them in the 1984 yearbook is of them dramatically gazing down at their shoes through their hair. I should really dig that yearbook out. It would be instructive.

And of course, we didn't invent the dramatically moody young person, either. If you want to take it all the way back, I submit to you that the true G.o.dfather of Emo is not Kurt Cobain or Robert Smith or David Bowie or even Brecht/Weill, but Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1774 unleashed The Sorrows of Young Werther upon the world, with its oh-so-artfully despairing young protagonist doing everything he could to make himself absolutely friggin' miserable, because it was so much more interesting than being happy. The novel helped to kickstart the Sturm und Drang movement in German literature and music, and what was the Sturm und Drang movement-a movement devoted to wrenching every single possible emotion out of words and music-if not the very proto-est of proto-emo movements?

Sturm und Drang in its turn motivated the Romantic movement, giving us Sh.e.l.ley and Byron and all those other poetic shoe-gazers, and so on and so forth and blah blah blah blah blah until you suddenly find yourself wedged up against the stage at a The Academy Is...concert with a bunch of sixteen-year-old girls screaming their lungs out at William Beckett, who, I gotta admit, has got a whole adorable "Suburban Sh.e.l.ley" look going for him. To be clear, I'm not comparing The Sorrows of Young Werther with, say, Fast Times at Barrington High; one's a landmark of world literature and the other's a decent alb.u.m of power pop. I'm just saying you can get from one to the other and recognize them as appealing to more or less the same audience, albeit 234 years apart. So, yeah, Emo's been around, folks.

This is not to trivialize this girl's experience of being a teenager, mind you. Being a teenager is powerful thing, because every single d.a.m.n thing that happens to you happens to you turned up to 11, which is a fundamentally different experience than being an adult, in which most things have happened to you more than once, and you've generally found the volume k.n.o.b and cranked it down a couple of notches simply to keep yourself sane. And of course her experience of her teenage years will be different from anyone else's not in her age cohort; she'll have different music and movies and world events and generational issues and so on. I for one would not wish late 80s hair metal on anyone else; I'm glad no other teenagers will have to take that bullet.

But at the end of the day, and when you peel away the effects of one year or another, the teenage experience-the ma.s.sive highs, the crushing lows, the frustrations and irritations and alienations and deep friendships and crushes and riotously funny moments-is what it is, and remains fairly constant. Put a sixteen-year-old from 1968 in a room with one from '78, '88, '98 and today, and after everyone stops laughing at everyone else's ridiculous clothes, I think we'd find they shared a commonality of experience and outlook. And they would all know an "emo" kid, whether they called him emo or not.

The Failure Mode of Clever Jun

16.

2010.

So, apropos of nothing in particular, let's say you wish to communicate privately with someone you've not communicated with privately before, for whatever reason you might have. And, wanting to stand out from the crowd, you decide to try to be clever about it, because, hey, you are a clever person, and as far as you know, people seem to like that about you. So you write your clever bit and send it off, safe in the knowledge of your cleverosity, and confident that your various cleverations will make the impression you want to make on the intended cleveree.

Two things here.

1. The effectiveness of clever on other people is highly contingent on outside factors, over which you have no control and of which you may not have any knowledge; i.e., just because you intended to be clever doesn't mean you will be perceived as clever, for all sorts of reasons.

2. The failure mode of clever is "a.s.shole."

Allow me to offer a suggestion. If you are privately communicating with someone for the first time, as a general rule, the best course of action is to be polite and to the point. This is particularly the case if the reason you're communicating with that person is because you are hoping to get them to do something for you, i.e., you're asking for the favor of their time and attention and even possibly their money. That is not a situation in which you want to risk the failure mode of clever.

This is not to say that your cleverness should not eventually come out in your private communication; there's a time for it, and usually that time is after you've established enough rapport with the other person that you know their receptiveness to cleverness in general, and your brand of it in particular. It's "third date" material, as it were, not "first date."

Indeed, the most clever thing you can do with your cleverness is to know when is the right time to use it. When in doubt, don't. And if you're not in doubt, ask yourself if you should be, especially if you're communicating privately with someone for the first time. It's just a suggestion.

A Fan Letter to Certain Conservative Politicians Oct

25.

2012.

WARNING: this post is going to be oh-so-very-triggery for victims of rape and s.e.xual a.s.sault. I am not kidding.

Dear certain conservative politicians: Hi! I'm a rapist. I'm one of those men who likes to force myself on women without their consent or desire and then batter them s.e.xually. The details of how I do this are not particularly important at the moment-although I love when you try to make distinctions about "forcible rape" or "legitimate rape" because that gives me all sorts of wiggle room-but I will tell you one of the details about why I do it: I like to control women and, also and independently, I like to remind them how little control they have. There's just something about making the point to a woman that her consent and her control of her own body is not relevant against the need for a man to possess that body and control it that just plain gets me off. A guy's got needs, you know? And my need is for control. Sweet, sweet control.

So I want to take time out of my schedule to thank you for supporting my right to control a woman's life, not just when I'm raping her, but for all the rest of her life as well.

Ah, I see by your surprised face that you at the very least claim to have no idea what I'm talking about. Well, here's the thing. Every time you say "I oppose a woman's right to abortion, even in cases of rape," what you're also saying is "I believe that a man who rapes a woman has more of a right to control a woman's body and life than that woman does."

Oh, look. That surprised face again. All right, then. On the chance that you're not giving me that surprised face just for the sake of public appearances, let me explain it to you, because it's important for me that you know just how much I appreciate everything you're doing for me.

So, let's say I've raped a woman, as I do, because it's my thing. I've had my fun, reminding that woman where she stands on the whole "being able to control things about her life" thing. But wait! There's more. Since I didn't use a condom (maybe I'm confident I can get other people to believe it was consensual, you see, or maybe I just like it that way), one thing has led to another and I've gotten this woman pregnant.

Now, remember how I said the thing I really like about raping a woman is the control it gives me over her? Well, getting a woman pregnant is even better. Because long after I'm gone, she still has to deal with me and what I've done to her. She has to deal with what's happening to her body. She has to deal with doctor visits. She has to deal with the choice whether to have an abortion or not-which means she has to deal with everyone in the country, including you, having an opinion about it and giving her c.r.a.p about it. And if she does have an abortion, she has to deal with all the ha.s.sle of that, too, because folks like you, of course, have gone out of your way to make it a ha.s.sle, which I appreciate. Thank you.