The Seven Deadly Sins (12 page)

I said, “I am the guy kicking you out of my fucking show.”

With that, four security guards filled in the empty area behind Len. His bimbos did not know what to do, so they left. Len stood there, getting more and more red in the face. He threw his head back and let out every vain cliché you can think of: “Do you know who I am?” “I can do what I want, I am a guest!” “I can have your fucking jobs!” There was more, but I will spare you the stupid details. Suffice it to say, he was angry because people were treating him like a regular person at a rock show. But the facts are that it was not his band playing, so he
was
a regular person at a rock show. So I had security throw his fucking ass out of my show. They were also instructed not to let him back in, no matter who tried to countermand the order. The moral of the story is watch who you fuck with; you are not always in your territory, even if you think you are.

Len has a good excuse to act like the Sultan of Shit I guess. He was a once A-List, became a B-List, now resides somewhere between D- and F-List celebrityhood, and he felt that because he felt he was in his element, he could get way with it. Then again, it was my own vanity that triggered my anger. So I guess I am just as much a fuckhead as he was. But like I said, it was my show. Right? No? Aw, shit. Honestly, I just wanted to prove a point. I mean I
was
in L.A., and that place is fraught with frivolous feeling. So to hell with the overabundance of underachievers; this should be a world where those of us with the strength and talent go exactly where we want as fast as our dreams can carry us. The best quote I ever heard was Kevin Smith talking about how people get ahead in L.A.: “In L.A., people just fail upward.” That is painfully accurate and it makes me sick, but I am still here so it cannot always be that way. There is still a contingent of discontents who would rather fight for every crumb than whine for the leftovers. Shit may roll downhill, but when everyone has gas, you can smell it everywhere once it rises.

Metallica are a perfect reason to never give up hope. They are one of the greatest and most consistently creative bands on the planet. Sure, you may not agree with some of the musical choices they have made—even I was scratching my head about “Hero of the Day”—but they had the drive, the intelligence, and the fucking huge balls to do what they wanted with their career. Oh, and one more thing, you would be hard-pressed to find a band that does more for their fans than they do. They are still brilliant, even all these years after I first discovered them in my friend Che Schmitt's basement, and they still have the fucking balls to say and do what they want.

“Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“When I grow up, I want to be in Metallica!”

“Sure thing. Did you take out the trash?”

What is it about fathers and trash day? I know, you do not have to remind me. I am about six years from that very same conversation with my kids. That is fine with me. I look forward to it.

Irony, as always, surrounds each of the so-called Deadly Sins. As I have said, rage is fairly funny. Envy and greed leave you with nothing, and gluttony leaves you hungry for more. Lust fills us with emptiness, and sloth takes more effort than you could ever imagine. Vanity makes us ugly. It leaves you alone in a multitude. It whispers until all you hear are poison tongues. It will destroy everything you have until you are engulfed in ashes. It will twist your hope into a murder of crows. Then it will peck your eyes out so you can see nothing.

Fuck me, that was heavy. Maybe it is a sin after all. Nope, I'm still not convinced: Just because it makes us act like selfish cowards does not mean we are selfish cowards. We must take responsibility for our actions at some point, or someday soon there will be nothing left to blame. Humans are empty glasses with vast reservoirs of endurance. We can beat anything in our way, as long as someone stands in the way of the mirror to distract us. We are so caught up in ourselves. Between pushing up cleavage and wetting down cowlicks, it is a wonder we have time to wipe ourselves properly. St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. But no cause is lost if there is still one person devoted to it. So Jude might as well be the patron saint of us all.

The devout are vain in thinking they know any better than we do. I mean, let's face it: We are all mice on the wheel just trying
to get a lick from that infernal water bottle. Just because they believe they have the Bat number to the Bat phone wired to God's palace in Fort Lauderdale, that does not mean they have any more answers than we do. They just pretend they do. Good for them. I hope they get that part in the Wendy's commercial.

I will always be fascinated and repulsed by this sultry sense of personality. I guess if I were a little bit shallow and a little less hungry, I would not be addicted to KFC. But as terrible as I feel afterward, I love the things I love and that is that. Doing what is right by you is a slippery slope to doing right by others, and that is a point of view the truly self-obsessed cannot abide by. Helping and sharing not because you are on camera but because you want to do something for others is just about as far from the vanity train as you can get. So tell me: What is stopping them? I think if they had one pure stimulus cross their emotional compound, they would be forced to send the guards in with dogs and mace. The ability to drop whatever it is you are doing and chime in for your neighbor is a luxury the sociopaths cannot afford with any credit card in their deck. It takes too much out of them to do something so small, and that makes them small people. And there are small people everywhere.

You would think they would feel bad, but you assume they feel. You would think they would try to correct their course, but you assume they care. This is nothing more than a clock that works and reads backward. Just when you think the alarm will wake most of us up, it lulls you back to sleep. The Beautiful Ones—they hurt you every time, as Prince once sang. Their minds were made up the second somebody gave them negative approval. Things like malice and vindication are not even in their little black books—again, you assume they care. They do not. They are only interested in what steps inside their one-foot
by one-foot diameter. In other words, if they are not exclusive, they are not included.

Then again, times and people change, but the world never does. It keeps spinning, no matter who it revolves around in that moment. So my advice is simple: Do not waste your breath until you see the whites of their flags. It takes too much to deal with them, even more to pity them, and exactly $25 more to pay for anything they involve you in. You have enough to worry about. Let the pretty people talk themselves into debt for a change, huh? More has been made out of less, and they are walking, talking, fucking proof. I will wait forty-five minutes for most to figure it out, then I leave it up to them. But it was always up to them. I just let them try to figure it out with someone around—they always do their best work when someone is paying attention. That is vanity, right there: If you are looking, they are heroes. The minute you turn away, you are treated like a hooker on her birthday—you look like shit and you never changed clothes. Trust your instincts, hail Mary, and remember one thing: We all look the same after eight shots of Jack Daniels, even the ones who never changed that much from shot number one.

What time you got, bartender?

S
loth. . .

Are you fucking kidding me?

Sloth?

He was the guy from
The Goonies
with the crooked face and fucked-up chick-lets, right?

Sloth
!

I cannot believe I even have to write this fucking chapter, let alone defend it.

Sigh.

Okay, here we go....

Sloth for the layman is laziness, albeit extreme laziness. Some might say it is more complicated than that. But really it is merely being lazy. It is that simple: no weapons, no drugs, no fucking. . . just laying there. It is doing nothing, pure, unadulterated trueblue sweet sassy American nothing. It is the vacuum of the human propensity for innovation, the other end of busy. Sloth
is absence in attendance. Sloth is the leech on the heart of ingenuity. He also loved Chunk and helped stop the Fratellis, which was kind of heartwarming because he
was
a Fratelli, but he helped the kids get away and held the rock so the kids could escape and. . .

If I were a real man, I would leave you with ten blank pages. Or maybe just type this out using only one finger. I could take pictures of myself doing so as proof. Holy living fuck, that would take me forever. I would have to cancel all kinds of shit, like my fencing and clog dancing classes. I do not think that is an option; I am all-state in clog dancing. But imagine it, me in all my glory, lying prostrate on my bed, curled up in my Spiderman Underoos and my leopard-print Snuggie, aimlessly punching the keys with my index finger, or better yet my middle finger. That is some slothful shit. But because I am a loquacious blowhard, I will rant for a while. I did not earn the nickname Great Big Mouth for nothing, and hey, at least I am not being lazy. So I guess I will put some fucking pants on and get to work.

This is one of those concepts that just straight bother me on both sides of the debate. On one hand, yes, it is not good to be a wistful fuck with no drive and no dreams. If we were all just slovenly pigs, we would have been conquered by aliens or at least by Canada years ago. Alaska would just be another frozen province near the Pacific Ocean. But on the other, what is wrong with doing dick with your time every now and then? Are we expected to be seminal broke-back creatures of industry, trying frantically to grab a deep breath to savor before going back to the grind? And why is it a deadly sin? Why is it such a turnoff to turn off the engines once in a while? Who can you possibly hurt by running on reserve power?

The argument can be made that being lazy does nothing for the people around you and your family by and large. You can
also say that the world is a much better place because people get out of their habitual holes. As the saying goes, idle hands are the devil's playthings. So by virtue of listlessness, diabolical comeuppance can really only come from do-nothingness. Now personally, I could not give a fat fisted lady on pay-per-view if someone chooses to be slothful or not, just as long as my French fries are in the bag when I exit the drive-through. But some take it to a level that requires so much effort that it cannot be considered slothfulness by its very definition. Like Bill Cosby said, “It takes hard work to keep from working.” If Daddy Huxtable said it, that is good enough for me.

So let's start with all the inventive things that we would not have in our lives without a little kind-hearted sloth to play with: hammocks, La-Z-Boys, waterbeds, motorized Rascals, those grabby things they make for people with short arms, microwaves, beer hats, Lazy Susans, that new-fangled set of fingernail clippers that has more attachments than a Swiss Army knife, extra value meals (actually, fast food in general would only be a working mother's wet dream), auto tuning, automated car washes—Are you starting to see a pattern? Without a sense of sloth, the remote control would not exist. Without sloth, we would all be busy doing standard-issue horse shit with time that could be better spent text voting for the next American Idol dipshit.

And yet people are horrified by inactivity. They condemn those lay-about fuckers who take a load off and do their very best to appear busy at all times, by any means necessary. Is it that frightening to be doing fuck all? I do not understand it, but I have another one of my controversial theorems. And much like Raymond Chandler, it just might blow the lid off of this kooky little mystery. I used the very best techniques and technology to come to this earth-shattering hypothesis: silly putty, moon sand,
and those blow pens you can order on Cartoon Network. Before you say anything, my son left that shit out, and instead of cleaning it up, I put it to work. Do not judge me. Anyway, after crunching all the data, this is where I am on the subject.