| the blog of human failure
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.
Bon jour one last time from Paris my friends. I’ve got 13 minutes and this ridiculous metal keyboard again. Plus this terminal keeps lagging while the clock ticks. Light the fire; we’re going to burn it down.
Funny Things About Madrid:
1) I’ve found it. The last country. You can still smoke indoors in Spain. It’s the final frontier. Smoke’m while you got’em Spain. If they can get Paris, they can get you.
2) With every beer you order, and I’m talking about a Mahou here, you get a free tapa. Chorizo, potato salad, pistachios, fresh made potato chips, anchovies, quiche, friend potato chunks. You advance a level with every beer you order, and if they have to repeat themselves before you run out of money, then you win.
3) It’s hard to get drunk enough to fall asleep in a room with 14 other people in it and no air conditioning when the bar tender keeps feeding you potato salad.
4) No one is in a hurry to take your money. It always feels like you are bothering someone to pay for something. I guess they figure you have nowhere to go. And in fairness they are right.
5) In Madrid, napkins have the texture of credit card receipts.
6) There is a restaurant by my hostel named Museo de Jamon. My Spanish is rusty I admit, but I think that translates to Ham Museum. And it’s a chain. A chain of Ham Museums. I think that gives you an idea of the kind of city we’re dealing with here.
7) If that doesn’t totally get you there, I went to a bar and behind the counter there was a sweating pig’s leg in a wooden vice-clamp so tapas could be sawed right off of it. Oh, and on the way there I passed protesters in front of a McDonald’s complaining about their treatment of animals. Seriously.
8 ) Last food thing: creamed salami sandwiches, creamed ham sandwiches, creamed anchovy and cheese sandwiches. Like salami put in a blender with heavy cream and put on white bread. Very tasty. Seriously.
9) At 6 AM on a Friday, what sounded like hundreds of drunken Spaniards stood under my window banging on garbage cans for 40 minutes, slurring an espanyol only version of “We Will Rock You.” I love that song!
10) There are lots of deformed beggars in Madrid, and also you’re not supposed to drink the tap water. I’m always suspicious of the correlation.
11) Hey El Grecco. It’s Jesus; we get it. Next topic please. That goes double for you Velazquez.
12) The pedestrian traffic lights beep at you like smoke detectors.
13) And we have a winner. .80 Euro for a Coca-Cola light at a Madrid bodega. At .73 Euros to the dollar, that’s just about Manhattan prices. My new home away from home.
I’ll be back in the USA tomorrow. We’ll make a new plan for going forward together from here after that.
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