| the blog of human failure
I’ve always been an especially lazy man, a man who has no interest or ability to develop his personality or exercising and grooming in a way that will make himself more attractive to women. I bring this up because I’ve always had a fantasy of going to another country where the standard of beauty was such that I, as I am right now, would just naturally be a very handsome man to the local inhabitants. The good majority of us know, that as things stand right now, we are only considered relatively unpleasant to look at in the eyes of our fellow countrymen. But does anyone else’s mind contemplate these things? Maybe someplace where the people look completely different like Africa or Japan. Because you look so completely different from the local people there, perhaps they don’t understand that you’re an ugly one of whatever you are. You might be as handsome or beautiful a specimen as your race has to offer. The problem is with globalization, they’re seeing advertisements and movies with your Angelina Jolies and your George Clooneys. Our corporations are unfairly informing these cultures what the American standard scale of beauty is when 50 years ago a guy like me could go to Sapporo or Ghana and be considered the epitome of attractiveness to the local eye. My only hope is that despite our best efforts to inform them of what Americans find attractive, they simply have too deeply an ingrained sense that the way I look is a mysterious and beautiful vision of masculinity. Until I have visited a greater swatch of countries, I’m not ruling this scenario out. I just have a beautiful fantasy of going somewhere like the Solomon Islands and having every woman there instantly taken with this unique looking stranger. Having the world retrofitted to all of a sudden imagining you in the popular consciousness as a beautiful person would be too glorious a proposition to pass up. Your ego would never let you get back on the boat.
It is this sort of missed opportunity that reminds me of another scenario. Each of us probably has a number of things we would be immensely talented at but because we’ve never discovered them or nature does not allow us the capacity to exercise them they are lost on us forever. It’s interesting to think how many of us have the specific musculature and flexible cartilage that would have made us Olympic quality gymnasts but out of sheer bad luck we never took a class or even tried to do a cartwheel. I always imagined that I would be excellent at giving blowjobs, but I was born bearing the unfortunate cross of heterosexuality. Not once have I been receiving a blowjob and not thought that I could have done a better job blowing myself. The worst part about it is the knowing. The knowledge that you could be traveling the world giving premium quality blowjobs but trapped in your straight solitary confinement, watching through the window as a lifetime of squandered talent plays with its friends in the prison yard. I suppose I could go around blowing guys despite my heterosexuality, but without the gusto of sheer felatic enjoyment I don’t think my blowjobs would be any better than that of your average enthusiastic however tragically unskilled woman. A homosexual who loves blowing guys doesn’t know how good he’s got it, really being able to apply such a strong skill set to an avocation he relishes in. These are the kind of missed opportunities that the lazy man will contemplate in his ample time off.
Now I’ve never been raped before, but I can only assume that when you get raped somewhere you immediately develop a negative association with that place. For instance if you were to get raped at a movie theater you would have a continuing aversion towards movie theaters or if you got raped at an Ultimate Fighting Championship you would have a lifetime aversion to octagons. I can’t help but think that with a constructive imagination and a few helpful friends, you would be able to apply this special brand of aversion therapy towards all the negative locations or associations in your life that you would just as soon rid yourself of.
The most obvious example would be if you were an alcoholic. If so, it would be advantageous to have a good friend, or at the very least a discreet acquaintance, rape you at a bar to help you firm up a nice negative association with drinking alcohol. Just imagine yourself sitting slant backed on a bar stool or quietly tucked into a corner booth by yourself, drowning your sorrows in alcohol for the umpteenth time, resigning yourself to a lifetime of negative repetitive afflicting behavior, only to have a good friend with your best interests in his or her heart come in masked or mustachioed and rape you into the next stage of affirmative and forward thinking behavior. When you measure the continuous cycle of gin soaked broken dreams versus a painful yet quickly executed rape in the right direction, this seems like a clear case of ends justifying the means.
Get raped out of smoking. Get raped out of biting your nails. Get raped out of those extra pounds around your tummy and thighs. A guy or gal with a devoted best friend could infinitely improve his or her life and further mold formerly bad habits towards a new self-construction. The only negative effect I can foresee is the possibility of forming an inextricable positive association with getting raped. Though always painful and unpleasant, after seeing good results pile up on top of each other it will be difficult not to at least form a strong intellectual connection between the misfortune of rape and the new and improved you.
But I’ve got the solution. So there you are almost completely a changed person, having had all your negative traits mentally associated with the horror of rape and therefore held forever in submission. The only thing left is that you’re a terrible procrastinator. So there you are surfing the internet instead of completing a work assignment that you’ll need for the following morning when in walks a masked assailant who starts raping you as per usual. “Oh great,” you think. “Although this rape is certainly unpleasant, I know that from now on I’ll sure have trouble procrastinating when I’ve got important work to do.” As soon as that thought starts forming in your head, you know what happens? Bam! Another person comes in to rape you at the same time, to break you of your positive associations with rape. Swiss fucking watch baby.
As the last matter of course I suggest having only one or two friends in your circle do the raping for everybody else. The problem is that they will develop very strong positive associations between the rapes they are committing and the warm glowing feeling they get in their hearts from doing so much to help their friends. That is why when they are perpetrating their last rape on another one of your friends, you must disguise yourself and then rape them while they’re in the middle of raping another. This will leave them with, at best, a lukewarm feeling about rape in general. And there the last loose end has been neatly tied up.
I’ve got a fuzzy memory of being about 6 years old at the beach, playing in the waves and riding them back in towards the sand. I caught the crest of an especially big wave and immediately in my feeble young mind I knew I had, in the sage words of my father, started something that I couldn’t finish. This wave was big and it took me and slammed me directly down into the glittering foggy bottom of the surf and held me tight under six feet of water while it slowly dragged me on my supple young belly towards land. After what felt like over two full minutes completely submerged and helpless I arrived at the shore with the recumbent waves lapping at my feet, blood and pebbles covering my chest, my swimsuit pockets filled with sand. And I cried. I pulled myself up and brushed my off my raw front with pruned and salted fingertips and wandered up and down the shoreline crying. Crushed and bleeding, young and confused at the time I needed them most. Where were my parents. Where were my parents? My parents had gone back to the hotel restaurant to have lunch. This was not some Partridge Family/Mormon pick nick-sized congregation of relations. I’m an only child. Besides their five dollar deposit resort towels, I was all they had to remember to bring along. It was only 45 minutes later when my mother had finished her club sandwich and couldn’t find her room key card that she came plodding back to the life guard station to retrieve her kin.
It’s been two weeks since the last time I addressed you folks. Are you battered broken? Have you wandered out of the woods of isolation where I had so startling plopped you down in the center of? Has the experience allowed you to build character and trap, kill and clean small game? I can’t imagine that it has. Here you are, sitting on the same stump where I left you. And how was my club sandwich, and didn’t I think you would want lunch too? It’s all too obviously that I abandoned you not out of some altruistic attempt to encourage you to develop into adulthood, but out of simple neglect. Neglect of a kind ubiquitous in this lazy solipsistic and fast paced culture. Was the life guard nice to you? How long did you have to wait for mommy? Oh, baby how’d you cut yourself; do you want my pickle?
Of course you don’t want my tragically nonsensical pickle of self redemption. You want loving arms waiting at the shore to run into: a bosom on which to cradle your weighty water logged head. You want consistency and I failed you. Well, the future of the Blog of Human Failure is pledging itself to the fraternal order of consistency, to be here for you several times a week when you need us. We’re at the beginning of a long sturdy effort to rebuild your trust and comfort. We promise never to leave you on your own without explanation again until we do. And I was on vacation, so blow me.
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