Stupid Things to Do

The couches at the Driskill Hotel bar are fake leather and the guy at the Honda dealership said the extra twelve hundred was for a premium tire service in which they’d fill my tires with nitrogen. I asked why nitrogen while I was asking the same of the internet. He said it’s better than air and the internet tried to sell me a bottle of nitrogen.

I did a stupid thing on Monday. I don’t mean that I paid the twelve hundred bucks. I even got him down another thousand because the paint’s fucked a little on a door and around the bumper. I don’t care. I’m tired of nice cars with good paint. But I did a good job of pretending I’m a person who cares about paint. Or he was tired of my synopsis of the plot of the much maligned James Bond film, A View to a Kill, in which James Bond, played by Roger Moore this time is knocked out in the back of a Rolls. Then Grace Jones rolls the Rolls into a pond, with James Bond in the backseat. James Bond forces the door of the Rolls open and swims out but he can see Grace Jones standing on the shore with the bad guy, played by Christopher Walken.

If he comes up for air right away, Christopher Walken and Grace Jones will know he’s not dead, and then he really will be dead. But he’s double oh seven. Christopher Walken should know better. He takes the cap off a valve stem and uses the tire to breathe until they walk away. Could he do that with nitrogen?

But that was Monday. On Saturday, before I decided to do the stupid thing, I was sitting at the Driskill hotel bar, a place I imagined as dimly lit smokey room of oil lobbyists and lawyers in cowboy hats and monogrammed boots sitting wide-legged on supple leather couches. But I think I was the only one in a cowboy hat and the only smell of smoke was the half-burnt joint in my pocket.

I like to bring a joint to writer shit. I need a hit anyway, and inevitably, I end up sharing a joint outside. It’s still fucking cool to me, that I get to hang out with writers, who say the best shit when you’re smoking a joint, that I end up at the Driskill with three other writers who’ve known the absolute torture and absolute bliss, but mostly torture of working with the same editor.

We ordered old fashioneds. The Driskill, the goddamn Driskill, should have a good old fashioned. We were sure of it, those of us who’d gathered to commiserate on infuriating book notes. But the Driskill is now owned by the Hyatt because three companies own everything in this fucking country and they’re too fucking cheap to pay a skilled bartender and the couches are peeling plastic. I’m glad LBJ didn’t live to see this.

These days all I’m writing is shit I can’t finish. It doesn’t matter what I write about it. Or it does and I’m not the person to say it. I don’t even want to read about it so it’s hard to imagine anyone else wants to. I scan the Guardian every morning. Then I scroll through the home pages of a few others but I rarely skim past the headline and I’m looking at it sideways anyway. With a gun to my head, I wouldn’t scroll bluethreadsx. Last I saw, before I deleted my account, we were already starting with the conspiracy theories, like it fucking matters. It doesn’t. I haven’t seen their evidence, made-up or otherwise and I don’t care, because it doesn’t matter.

You want a theory? It all went to shit because somewhere along the way, a few shitweebles (probably on Twitter) decided they can say the most vile fucking shit to or about another human being and they can’t be held responsible because they wrote “lol” at the end of it. They’re not serious. They’re rolling their eyes really. And it caught on. God forbid anyone be fucking real or earnest or show a moment of weakness or use a period to indicate the end of a goddamn sentence. lol cringe

Someone else was shocked, absolutely shocked that Genx went red. I’m guessing they were some sort of freak who enjoyed high school. The rest of us remember we were outnumbered even then. I wrote about it once or twice.

We’ve all agreed social media is fucking killing our ability to converse and see the world. It’s destroyed our mental health and attention spans. Why the fuck are we signing up for another round. I know. Our friends are there. We have to stay informed.

But they’re bait and you’re bait and the information is suspect, at best. A world of information at our fingertips but we can’t tell what’s real. We don’t trust each other. We don’t trust the experts. We don’t even know what one looks like anymore. Who needs ‘em. Go down another rabbit hole looking for the truth, the real truth this time. Look at where it got us.

I keep forgetting my editor has my book now, or most of it, or the goddamn mess of it anyway. No one congratulate me, please. This isn’t a cause for celebration. It should be cause for deep anxiety, for cleaning the fridge and the baseboards. But it’s not that either. It was the same during the pandemic. Hard to panic about a book when it looks like the world is falling apart. And it’s hard to get too freaked out about the world falling apart when, well, you kinda figured it was a matter of time. Depression’s a fucking nihilist. And I’ve spent the past couple years writing a book about how it’s all coming apart.

Which seemed a little harsh, or a little defeatist a month ago, and two years ago, which is why we’re still talking about writing this goddamn book. Hard to write when I don’t think I have anything to say and who gives a shit if I do. I was talking about this guy who lives in Florida, who never took his wife to see the Grand Canyon. Didn’t have the time off. Now she’s gone, and he’s in a book because he was lonely and struck up a conversation with the wrong asshole, and I know how he voted, if he voted at all.

I’m not mad at that guy. You can be. I’ll understand. But I’m not. I’m mad at the people who hang flags and people who wear hats and people who should fucking know better. We’re about to spend another four years talking about how Democrats should move to the right, maybe be a little less gay. But we’re so fucking far to the right, that guy doesn’t know the difference except that whoever’s in charge is fucking it up. And he’s right. Because 8 years of Clinton and 8 years of Obama and no one bothered to tax the ever-loving shit out of the rich and do a goddamn thing to improve his life or anyone else’s.

They defunded the schools for forty years. Then they told you our kids are falling behind China in math and no one, not even in the back of the room, said, who gives a shit. So now we have standardized testing and less funding and one in five Americans is functionally illiterate. You can do your 12 years and 8 more and never learn critical thinking. Perfect. Well trained little worker bees ready to sell the best years of our lives to one of three companies that own every goddamn thing so they can jack up the prices of everything, but slap a different label on it so you think you have choices.

It feels like a time to do stupid things. A friend of mine is buying a horse. I’ve got another friend who bought a plane before she signed up for flying lessons. Another friend deleted everything and put her house on the market to move to Ecuador. Someone else is moving to Ireland. One friend told me a sailboat costs 10k and he could check out forever. JUST 10K. I thought he was kidding. Then he booked a flight to Miami. All I did was buy a truck so I can do the Alaskan Highway. I feel like the calm stoic one in the group. I can’t even start driving until May. So I’m driving to the East Coast, for the holiday, maybe longer. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It’s better than joining another fucking social media site.

In the meantime, I’m reading the Air Conditioned Nightmare again. I wonder what he’d think of us now. Maybe I should switch to fiction.

I can’t stop thinking about the guy I met in Florida. Trump won’t do fuckall for the guy in Florida, but he told the guy he’s on his side and made him feel like someone listened for once and someone gives a shit about it. And we don’t do that. We don’t. We talk about how great the economy’s doing while everyone just gets deeper in debt buying shit we don’t need for a moment of relief from the weight of it all.

You’ll never see the Grand Canyon and your wife will die and you’ll never get a vacation even after, to maybe fucking mourn, because those fucking bills will crush you if you take so much as a long weekend. But you can buy nitrogen for your tires for $1200, or a 60 inch TV for $300 and watch the only thing on—ripped good guys vs ripped bad guys, sponsored by the United States Army, definitely not for propaganda purposes. Talk about it on a website we built that’ll fucking addict you so you forget how to think and you forget what’s real and what matters. It’s free. You can stay connected. You can stay informed.

They’re fucking farming us and they can’t even be bothered to give us real couches.

If you need me, I’ll be doing something stupid that requires at least three months of late-night dissociative planning, money I don’t have, a caffeine-overdose of paperwork, and some power tools.