You're Making Me Hate You (25 page)

The saying used to be “Shit happens.” I added to it in my own way: “Shit happens—just don’t let it happen all over you.” Now, with the way of the world and the world in the way, it’s time for a new saying: “SHIT SELLS.” That’s right: you all love your shit. From your derivative music to your shiny hollow movies, from those videos displaying your idiocy on the Internet to your addiction to fake reality on TV, that saying is a fucking fact. Shit sells, and it sells really well. That’s because the people slinging that shit around know their audience. They know that you’ll buy, watch, and listen to shit if it’s shiny enough. They all think you’re dumb, and it doesn’t bother them in the slightest. They will suck content and intelligence out of their products happily,
keeping the costs low, so they can get a deeper yield from their product. That’s all it is: product. No art, no heart, no goals, and no soul. Just straight, unadulterated garbage for your pleasure. If I were you, I’d be insulted. I’m not insulted because I don’t buy their shit. I boycott it.

You want to feel better about yourselves? You want to prove that you’re all not eating shit? Then grab a placard, stand your ground, and boycott as well. Make a statement that has nothing to do with voting for some shit-kicker on
The Voice
. Choose carefully when looking for movies—don’t just rush into the latest YA (that’s “young adult,” parents) movie that sucks so hard the actors all have Lemon Face. Avoid crotch-shot vids and YOLO comps on YouTube, Vine, Insta-crap. Feed your brain something other than vacuous chaos and mediocre drivel. Challenge yourself to read a book with no pictures in it. Find a show that has some substance that might actually make you think. Listen to some music that doesn’t just repeat the word “Baby” 23,457 times. Your brain and intellect—these things are a lot like your body. If you feed it well, it blossoms and grows and gets stronger. If you feed it nothing but empty fast food calories, you’re gonna find yourself breathing through your mouth and dragging your knuckles on concrete as you make your way to the unemployment office.

Ask yourself this: after we’ve killed each other off or reached a point in our technology at which we can leave this planet and populate the universe with our nonsense, when the aliens come to sift through the wreckage of our civilization in the aeons to come, what do you want them to find? Do you want them to judge us by Bach or Bieber? Do you want them to read Victor Hugo or
The View
’s
Summer Cookbook
? Do you think they’ll assume the greatest of us all was Stephen Hawking or Johnny Manziel? Based on what they find, will they come to hunt us
down so we can’t spread our buffoonery across the cosmos? Or will they simply look around at all the garbage left behind, contemplating the shit we used to distract ourselves with, scratch their tentacles, look at each other, and say, “Really?
This
is what they thought was good?”

Yes, I worry about what the aliens will think of us. I’m no “ancient astronaut theorist.” I don’t think we’ve been visited by a more advanced species. I don’t think they’re plotting to come invade. I think that if they’re watching, they’re doing the same thing I am: wondering why the fuck you people are mesmerized by all of this half-assed entertainment. They’re sitting in their spaceships, watching our habits, and they’ve come to the conclusion that we’re all apes in designer clothes. They think we’re fucking dumbasses. They are amazed that we can feed and shelter ourselves with all the stupidity we involve ourselves with. Worse yet, they believe our stupidity is contagious. They think that if they come here to make contact, they might catch our “dummy” virus. It scares the living … well, whatever they call their poop, that’s what gets scared out of them. And these amazing beings, beings beyond our capacity to understand, are leaving us alone. They have quarantined themselves from us. They ain’t coming back until the house is empty and the lights are all off, and only then will they wait to see whether there’s still any “stupid” blowing around in the wind. They’re keeping their distance, which is a disappointment to me. That’s because I really wish they’d come back to pick me up and take me with them. With all the brain damage in the world today, you can’t blame me.

The world’s IQ is approaching single digits. The looks in people’s eyes are glassy and glossy, staring past the person next to them and out into the distance at nothing in particular. The bastard thing about it is that I’m getting too tired to fight it.

Who will help me?

I’D LIKE TO
use this opportunity and platform to fill in the blanks about some unknown facts regarding the handsome author of the book you hold in your hands. That would be me, if anyone was wondering. Cheeky bastards—you try to slip one nice thing about yourself onto paper, and they pounce on it like a rat on nipples …

Let me just set the record straight: I have never knowingly eaten my own boogers. That might be contrary to popular belief but it’s true—they were all by accident, and let me say, I didn’t enjoy them. Seriously! A few have indeed made their way into my mouth via running or vigorous sweat rotation. However, I’ve never done anything to hasten their descent, like tilting back for easier access. Having read that last sentence, I can honestly say that could be taken a lot of different ways, and I’m embarrassed to have written it. Then again, as you can see I haven’t deleted it, so I must not give a runny-thong stain whether anyone cares—either that, or I need the word count. It’s getting harder
and harder to space these fucking books out to the appropriate length. So just to sum up: I have never eaten my nose resin of my own volition, but in certain circumstances I have come to know (and appreciate) the taste and color. I’m not sure what bearing that has on what we’re here to discuss, really, but the point, I guess, is to show that I am no Zeus lording over the council; I am just as horribly fucked up as you are.

I have a long-standing relationship with idiocy. We go way back. We’re “totes close,” as people who will outlive me might say. However, I am not oblivious to its existence like some folks are. I am well aware that I have blank patches in the rearview image of my mind, sort of like the blind spots where you can’t see the other cars or, in this case, the places where your intelligence touches cotton just before the know-how takes a shit. Think about those moments when you’re just about to do something, probably something you’ve done a million times, and suddenly your brain plays a game of Files Not Found. You find yourself standing in the middle of the kitchen, wondering why in the sheer fuck did you wander in there in the first place. Until you reboot, that’s exactly where you stay, twisting a bit with a quizzical look that conveys to everyone who sees it that you are confused and need an adult. That happens to me a lot. Welcome to the Hell of Duh.

The Hell of Duh is a fixed point on a moving moment: it is able to cut across every single smart thing you have ever done and make you feel like a moron who still needs supervision. Every man, woman, and child through history, from Gandhi to Gulliver in his travels, has had to dance at the barrage of bullets called the Hell of Duh, prancing to avoid getting shot in the toes. We are just as prone to Kemp as we are to Kemper—such is life as a slack-jawed human looking for sustenance and satisfaction.
I am no stranger to these proclivities; as smart as I purport to be, I am just as much a fuck-up as I am a purveyor of frivolous writ. We all have a golf bag full of crosses to bear. Mine resemble the rakes I’m too stupid to walk around in the yard, ensuring that the big wooden handle smacks me right in the fucking face. It’s been a problem as long as I can remember … in fact, let me tell you about the time I shot a hole in my grandmother’s wall and blamed it on an unfortunate vacuum cleaner accident.

Every word of that sentence is true: I’ll explain …

I must have been twelve years old. My sister Barbi and I were in Des Moines for the summer, staying with my Gram and hanging out with our cousins from Indianola. It was the day after a sleepover at Gram’s house. We’d spent most of the time at the cousins’ house, so we gave my Aunt Sandy a break and went to Des Moines. It was my cousins Craig and Todd, my sister, and myself alone in my Gram’s house while she was at work. Now, I’m on record about my Gram being something of a collector—not a hoarder, just too stubborn to let go of anything. This means her house is a bit of a treasure trove, full of wonders from every decade and the various generations who lived there. To a group of young kids with nothing to do, it’s basically an open-season challenge to see what you can find. Everything from artifacts from the sixties to fancy dice brought home from Vegas were up for grabs. So the scavenger hunt was on.

We fanned out around the house, intent on discovery and a tiny pinch of mischief. My Gram’s house is a fairly simple format: through the front door is the living room. Heading to the left takes you to the kitchen, with access to the garage (to the left) and the basement (down the stairs to the right) through their respective doors. If you turned right through the living room, you gained egress to the bedrooms and the bathroom,
all built around a tiny hallway that separates them. You could literally leave one bedroom, take a step, and be in another bedroom—it was close quarters living, but it was and still is a very nice house that I enjoyed living in. Until I bought my own houses, my Gram’s place was the longest I ever lived in one spot, and to this day I still consider that the house I grew up in.

Anyway, Craig went into the garage. Barbo, as I called her, was in a spare bedroom. Todd was in the living room. I was in the spare bedroom closest to the living room, digging about. It was the room that had the most dressers and drawers in it, so I’d called dibs on it. One time I’d found an entire “Paint by Numbers” set in there. Upon completion I saw that it was a very sardonic representation of a clown woman, brown hair flowing back behind her head and white face paint running into her lipstick. Then again, that might have been because I’m terrible at painting or drawing, but to
me
, it was an unusually stirring example of the eternal struggle between happiness and misery. It was the best thing I’d ever attempted to claim as illustrative art.

My cat named Scratch pissed on it. It was thrown away. Long story …

So back to why I’m rambling in your puffy earlobes right now: the gang of family and I were nosing around the “catacombs” of the original Chez Taylor. While my familial colleagues were busy elsewhere, I was in a room full of wonderment, examining everything within or without arm’s reach. I looked up at the wall … and that’s when my eyes fixed on my Uncle Alan’s old .30-06, which for those not in the know is basically a shotgun.

A thought occurred to me …

Dudes and chicks, listen: I was twelve. I already didn’t know shit from shit. I could barely find my penis on a map, let alone
discern a good idea from a bad decision. So let me describe the carnage that ensued with what can only be called “journalistic integrity”—meaning I won’t sugarcoat my Hellish Duh for the benefit of the cameras and those watching at home. It’s quite simple: I wanted to hold the damn thing in my hands like a hunter. Any time this idea had come to me in the past, my Gram had always been there to thwart my stupidity. But now I was on my own, left to devices that were most likely running low on power. So with no one to stop me, I reached up and took the gun from its vaunted place on the rack, cradled it in my hands, and waved it around a bit. It was heavy—American steel and wood comingling in a classic fashion designed to make bad things disappear and living animals turn into dinner. Having that thing in my hands should have registered as a responsibility, not as a toy. But again, I was twelve—literally every idea I’d had up to that point was terrible. But none of them were as bad as the one I was about to make in that moment.

I pulled the trigger.

That’s how I found out it’d been loaded.

Why the hell was the thing loaded? I was twelve: I didn’t know that you always check to make sure that a gun isn’t loaded before you do anything with it. I didn’t know that it was an even bigger mistake to pull the trigger on a strange gun in an enclosed space. So you can imagine what happened next. The gun went off, blowing a hole in the bedroom wall and filling the room with noise and smoke. It was
extremely
loud. I didn’t hear myself scream bloody murder because it had scared the ever livin’ fuck out of me. I didn’t hear a lot of anything because my ears were ringing like the morning after they choose a new pope. I missed the cries of surprise from the other rooms from my sister and Craig, who I had also scared to death. But the real
panic set in when I realized that the wall I’d just shot through faced the living room. Todd had been in the living room. I froze. Suddenly this wasn’t just a mistake; this was turning into a fucking nightmare.

Two things were going for me that day: (1) luck decided to move Todd over a couple of feet just before I’d fired the gun, and (2) the gun had been loaded with weak buckshot, not a slug. So after the initial explosion from the gun and even though it had punched a hole through the wall, the energy was dispersed enough that it merely sent a spray of BBs across the living room. I think one hit Todd, but it was harmless. A few, however, did chip the TV screen a bit, and the carpet was littered with tiny metal balls and drywall. So as I was being screamed at by my family for nearly killing my cousin (I
said
I was sorry, but you know …), I pulled out Gram’s ancient-ass vacuum cleaner. It was one of the old ones you drug behind you, with a long hose that connected to a long metal tube that
then
connected to the sucking mechanism. It was a classic POS: tape had been used to keep the metal tube connected to the sucker because it was always coming apart, and the body of the vacuum was so heavy that you needed two hands to drag the fucker anywhere. It was while I was cleaning up the debris that I hatched an ingenious plan.