Schadenfreude

"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like bananas"

-Groucho Marx

It astounds me how fast time flies. Why just yesterday I was a young rapscallion; full of piss and vinegar. Actually, mostly just piss, although I did eat a lot of pickles.

It was New Years 1999 and I was psyched: Yes, this was the first "grown-up" party I had ever had.

I remember the conversation with my mother, when I asked her if I could have the party in her somewhat swanky Central Park West digs.

"Mom, can I have some friends over on New Years"
"I don't know; is there going to be alcohol?"
"Yes"
"I don't think so."
"But mom, we're old enough!"
"I was in college before I ever went to parties with alcohol!"
"Mom, I'm in college"
"Oh..."

So with my air tight logic, I convinced mom to let us have some alcohol. Of course "some alcohol", by her standards was the one bottle of Champagne she left for us, to be divvied up among 6 people. Needless to say, my friends brought two bottles of Vodka and a bottle of Jack.

So I drew up a list of people to invite; had to make sure the boy/girl ratio was 1:1, which is the key for all good parties and most good scrabble games.

So starting my list was my overweight, extremely awkward Jewish friend. Who to pair him with? Oh right, the borderline retarded girl with a crippling overbite.

The jock frat boy? The brilliant bookish girl who was, coincidently, a huge whore.

Me? Well, I figured, now was the time for me and Girl to finally, as politicians say, "have an unfortunate sexual indiscretion; but I had nothing to do with her disappearance".

Now, if you read my last blog, Girl was most likely a broken depressive with a potential history of inappropriate sexual encounters. In other words, my perfect girl.

The night started well enough; my two male friends and I "cooked dinner", which, for a few 18 year olds, is defined as "undercooked spaghetti and overcooked chicken".

That's when we started pouring the booze. Keep in mind, a teenager has no actual concept of booze; it's more of an abstract idea; something to glug because you're not allowed to glug.

To that end, my drinking at dinner has changed over the years; at age 28, I will "carefully sip a glass of port", at age 18 I would "take 12-14 shots of whatever was put in front of me". I drank about 3/4ths of the bottle of Jack that evening.

So...

At some point, we all decided it was time to walk my dog George, who btw, was absolutely adorable.


I believe it was about 20 degrees in Central Park when I decided to remove my pants. I have pictures of this, but unfortunately they are laying in a closet in NYC somewhere. I can assure you it was hugely embarrassing.

Feeling absolutely wonderful, I lit up a Cuban cigar and did my best Castro impression. Did I realize then that over-consuming alcohol and over-consuming tobacco was not a good combination? Not so much.

Anyway, we got to my house; my nerd friend and the retard locked themselves in my bedroom and started having Lynchian intercourse on my childhood sofa.

The frat boy and the closet whore took the dining room and began to sit on each other's laps, which isn't as easy as it sounds.

That left me and the Girl in the living room.

She looked outstanding; if she was a president, she would have been called "Babe-rack O-boy-mmmm-aaah", which is a pretty terrible joke if you ask me.

She was soberer than the last time I was with her (no "you remind me of my brother" larfs).

It was time to finally be a man and make a move on this most certainly broken person who would have sex with anything that owned a penis.

We talked and laughed and laughed and talked. These things were easy for me because I had no idea what I was talking about or why I was laughing. I was drunk and potentially high on highly dubious illicit cigars.

Then she looked at me. I looked at her.

Awkward silence means sex.

I moved in to her lips.

Then I felt a rumbling in my stomach which only implied one thing; its contents needed to be emptied immediately...any which way that was possible.

My lip maneuver b-lined into a quaint forehead kiss. She looked at me quizzically as I excused myself.

I spent the next 45 minutes in the bathroom, aternating between lying desperately on the floor and vomiting uncontrollably.

When I came out, I could barely see straight; I walked into my bedroom, where I saw my fat friend and the retard doing the "reverse cowgirl", which made me have to run back to the bathroom and vomit for another 20 minutes.

When I came out again, I noticed the Jock, Whore and Girl all hanging out in the living room.

I blew my chance, I spent the next 48 hours lying in bed, watching VHS tapes of Newsradio, while my mom thought I had a "stomach flu". A "stomach flu" is college code for "I drank too much last night".

I never saw the Girl again, in fact I barely keep in touch with any of those people. But who really keeps in contact with anyone from high school anyway?

The whole point of high school is that you spend four years figuring out what kind of person you want to hang out with. Then you go to college and realize that you never actually liked hanging out with that type of person in the first place, and you only did so because you were stuck in the vacuous, mind-numbing prison known as a "parochial school".

Ten years later, you're 28 and you're writing a blog about it.

I wonder what sort of exciting things are waiting for me at 38? Dictating the contents of my belly button to my only friend, a computer known as "COMPANION BOT 200: YOUR POLYETHYLENE PAL"?

One can only hope: huzzah for rampant narcissism and the ever widening gap between real and online interaction!

Prom '99

Ahh, The Fall, a wondrous time of the year when our bleak mortality is brought into depressingly stark relief by the grim realization that yet another year is about to disappear into the Godless ether.

The years are like sex, they happen too quickly and at the end, all you can think about is death.

If I only had a nickel for every time I wished I was dead after sex, I'd have $1.15. That might not seem like a lot, but just imagine $1.15 worth tears, disappointment and apathetic emotional distance.

How has this decade gone by so fast?

I remember 1999 like it was 1999, which in my mind is at least 3 minutes ago, daylight savings time.

The last day of that year was a macabre charade. A potentially debaucherous night at my mother's house; 6 college freshmen, 3 girls, 3 guys. The odds were that each of us would meet up for what I austerely call "sexy time", or lacking that, three guys passionlessly giving each other handjobs while praying the the girls might "change their minds".

Well, neither happened.

The only thing that stopped me was 3/4ths a bottle of Jack Daniels. Let's take it back to the beginning:

There was this girl who was at the party, let's call her "Girl". I really thought she was quite attractive, not Mary Eaton attractive, but Lillian Roth attractive. If you know either of those references, you're probably older than dirt's oldest sibling.

Anyway, at my senior prom a few months beforehand, I had run into her...completely shitfaced.

We were at a friend's house and I was running a 102 temp. I had recently written and directed a school play and was feeling, as the expression goes, "FUCKING TIRED".

I was kicked out of where I was sleeping because my best friend was having loud sex with an overweight Norwegian in the bed next to me. I went down to the basement to find Girl, and another friend of mine who had taken her to the prom.

My friend was a nice guy, and to that end, was trying to get Girl drunk enough that she would have sex with him.

To be fair to my friend's clumsy sexual advances, Girl's nickname was "Loosey McSexPants".

But that night she wasn't biting...for him.

I sat down and she attempted to whisper in my ear, except she ended up just yelling loudly in my ear.

"He reminds me of my brother, he thinks he's going to have sex with me, but he's not!"

My friend, an amiable fellow, most definitely heard this, but continued to pour the whiskey.

"Uh, OK" I said, sweating, sick and petrified.

She put her hand on my inner thigh and squeezed, as if she expected some sort of sexy pheromone to leak forth.

"You remind me of my brother...have sex with me" she said.

"Uh, I'm just not feeling well", was my meek response.

"You're going to make me into a character in one of your plays, aren't you?!?"

"No, I'm not."

"You promise?"

"Yup"

"Great. You remind me of my brother; have sex with me".

Luckily, this Swiftian exchange was interrupted by a group of drunk 18 year olds who decided it was time to come down and blare some Pink Floyd.

At that point, I went up to the kitchen for some alone time. The next thing I remember was my petite Japanese friend Emiko running up the stairs yelling "my tummy's burning!", followed closely by Girl, who simply vomited all over the place.

The next time I saw Girl was New Years 1999. There was more vomiting.

What happened?

You'll just have to wait until my next post to find out.

The Boy With The Arab Strap

I wandered as lonely as a cloud, except I was surrounded by about 20 people that I knew, so I guess it was like "I wandered as lonely as a cloud with 20 other clouds that were wandering lonely" or something like that.

Except that it was my generation, so they were actually "LOL'ing as lonely as a cloud".

That's the problem with the under-30s. We're all connected to everyone, everywhere, everytime, yet we're as disconnected as we've ever been.

The Internet is fucking useless in it’s incredible usefulness; it connects everyone and disconnects everything. We’re one click away but we’ve never been further apart.

Friends who used to call me, now post a “Happy Birthday” on my Facebook wall. My mother didn't call me after an Earthquake in California, but she did message me she noticed that I hadn’t updated my status in a while.

There’s no reason to catch up with old friends, because everything you need to know is readily available. "How's your relationship going?" has morphed into a comment in reply to "Matt changed his Status To Single".

"Coming over and meeting the baby" is now "watching the video of the baby I uploaded on youtube". The urgency is gone.

In that same sense, intellectual discourse has been reduced to mind-numbingly simplistic arguments about who yelled at who, what hilarious gaffe was misspoken by what politician, what our president looks like without his shirt on. (by the way, the answer to that last question is "friggin' sexy", or sexaaay, as I like to say).

We look for information on Twitter's trending topics and every source of "news" is an op-ed by someone who is less informed than a particularly solitary hermit who wants more "alone time".

Have you read most blogs? They are the bane of the informed man's existence. For the most part, they are a list of hugely simplified talking points strung together with cretinous hyperbolic rhetoric. They make Rush Limbaugh look like Walter Cronkite the morning he woke up and said "hey, I'm feeling uniquely informed and adroit today".

Every idiot with a blog has an opinion and every person with a social networking website who doesn't communicate face-to-face with people should be ashamed. Where's the heart?

That said, thanks for reading CryingWhileMasturbating and please follow me on Twitter:

@Marxlennon

It's like Groucho Marx said; "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.", or in 21st century speak "Teh Interwebs Iz Good 4 Me, Even Tho I Hates It".

Overheard in Iowa

Iowa is an interesting place.

Everyone is nice, people wear overalls non-ironically, and "salads" are these weird things they sell in supermarkets with a pound of cream, rice and pink...covered in mini-marshmallows.

Oh, and Matzo is called "Bible Bread". Don't believe me?
In other news, Jews are called "what Jesus was before he done wised up".

In any case, I just spent a week in Iowa, and I awon't go into too many details, but here's a conversation I overheard:

Chubby guy with goatee and Harley Davison hat covering a mullet stands next to a chubby 20 something check out girl.

He reads her name tag.

"Jordan, dats a real interesting name. I don't know too many Jordans. Real unique name".
"Yuh, that's true dere".
"I mean, I've met a Jane, Judi, even a Jessica...but never a Jordan".
"Dats fer sure".

He notices a pregnant woman walking in the door and turns to his wife, a woman of equal Rubenesque stature as he.

"Oh hey look, dat's my cousin Margie Stockwell"

Margie walks in with another woman who is also pregnant.

"Hey Margie! How yuh doin' dere?"
"I'm good dere, Rich. Pregnant, yuh know?"
"Oh that's nice dere".

He looks at the woman Margie's with.

"I never seen you before"
"Oh no, we used to work together"
"Did we? What's yer name?"
"Jacklyn Montgomery"
"Are you related to Jason Montgomery?"
"No, I know Jason though; good guy...shame about his wife"
"Shame about his wife", they all repeated.
"Are you from the Charles City Montgomerys?"
"Oh no, the Oakwood Montgomerys"
"Really? I don't think I know any of you."
"I'm yer cousin, Rich"
"Really?"
"Yeah, from the other side of the family. Is Margie your cousin too?"
"Yuh".

Rich took a second to let everything soak in, so there was an awkward pause.

He looked at her and spoke:

"So yer pregnant then?"
"Oh yeah...finally gettin' my girl after two boys"
"So yer gonna get fixed?"
"Oh yeah, time to get fixed after this one"
"Well, I gotta get goin. Good to see you again Margie and Jacklyn"

Rich walked away into oblivion (actually the Chinese food counter at the Hyvee) and I watched a "Sunrise Salad" get prepared with a jar of whipped cream, white rice, an entire pineapple, and mini marshmallows.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was in what everyone else thinks is America.

It wasn't so bad.