657660 How to make love to thirty-three famous women and not die: lostcosmonaut

lostcosmonaut

657660 How to make love to thirty-three famous women and not die

May 14, 2013 16:49

The first trick is to stay alive for 40 years. Do not under any circumstance commit suicide; succumb to a terminal illness; drive an automobile by carelessness over a sheer cliff; or get murdered by a thief, disgruntled loner, enemy combatant, or jealous spouse. Begin making love to famous women when you turn 14. Fourteen years allows more than enough time to enjoy a normal childhood and to build up the volume of lust required to sustain a serious pursuit of famous women's love over the course of a quarter of a century. Making love to 1.269 famous women per year for the next 26 years yields a total of 33 famous women made love to (FWMLT) by age 40. Advanced students have been well capable of surpassing that number in a far shorter timespan, at the expense of a declining capacity to experience psychic intimacy with each lover. It depends on what you're into, really.

"I had a bad dream about you."
"Uh-oh."
"We had a very long sofa which we slept on opposite sides of. One night you wanted to have sex, but I was too sleepy. In the morning you said, 'I had sex.'"
"I said it just like that? I had sex."
"Yes, you were angry. And I said, 'What do you mean you had sex?' And you said you had gone to the other side of the sofa and had had sex with another person. That's how long the sofa was. It didn't even wake me up."
"That is a long sofa."
"Don't try to do that in real life, all right?"
"Don't worry. Defying th laws of physics is against my upbringing."

Of course I'm depressed. Or was, until about a week ago, at which point the cloud lifted with no warning -- as mysteriously as it had descended -- after a month of ceaseless dark weather. Of course it was about NOLA and about capitalism, love, and suicide. Today's Mothers' Day. Three suspects opened fire on a Mothers' Day second-line parade, injuring 19, and even the people who are surprised are not that surprised. I don't care, because I don't know the people who got shot, because I have been successful at not making friends in New Orleans, which success might on its own explain my depression. There's nothing extraordinary about any of this. Were I more practiced at being depressed, April could have been just another stupid and uneventful month in my life. Instead, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine is almostly certainly dead, and I am the one who almost certainly killed him.

It started in 1973 when my mother 3D-printed a baby, thereby creating a unpayable debt. Never mind for a moment that neither she nor my father expected anything from the baby in return. Never mind that existence is a gift that tends to be repaid to future offspring. They gave the child piano lessons and soccer seasons. They sent him to a private school. "All we want is for you to be happy," they said. Never tell that to a child without also providing a strict definition of happiness. He will spend the rest of his life believing that he owes you a reflection of a shadow of a fast-moving cloud. Nobody is to blame for depression except for you, your parents, God, the American healthcare system, your spouse, your pet, the president, social media employees (That's me and you and everyone we know.), capitalism generally, and anyone or anything that gets on your nerves. It's nobody else's business.

Some people sleep when they're depressed, or drink, or have sex with other depressed people. Others commit acts of terrorism or never leave the Internet. Others pour themselves into their work or into prostitutes (that they found on the Internet). Some people play ABBA only when they're depressed, while others play anything but ABBA. Some people look exactly the same when they're depressed and when they're not depressed. Look around: anybody could be a Cylon. Writers who get writer's block get writer's block. Comedians who get funnier get funnier. Addicts get dead. That it's important to have one word that encompasses any of these symptoms means that we're all deep down the same, or that we're being marketed to. You seem depressed. Whoever can sell you a cure that works well enough that you can go to work and make more money to buy more of the cure -- though not so well that you never want the cure again -- is a rich man; and a rich man has so many cures available for his own depression that he never has to wonder whether any of them work. Y'ever get the feeling y'been cheated? Y'ever get the feeling that placebos grow on trees?

Web ads are tested by getting people to click on ads for a free personality test and then giving them a personality test with your political ad along the side and asking them some political questions. (Ever see ads for a free personality test? That's what they really are. Everybody turns out to have the personality of a sparkle fish, which is nice and pleasant except when it meets someone it doesn't like ...)

-- Aaron Swartz, technology freedom activist (and depressed person), excerpt from a letter to Cory Doctorow on how to win an election on a low budget

Of course, the trouble with depressed people is not that they are sparkle fish. It is easy enough for a depressed person to avoid or limit contact with people he doesn't like. The trouble is that he is incomplete without people he doesn't like. The trouble is that a person who's nice and pleasant -- who's invested in being seen as nice and pleasant -- lives in denial of the dark half of his nature. Children are monsters half of the time because they haven't mastered hiding their dark halves. Evil exists. Satan is real. Powerful people often appear to be more evil than powerless people in the same way that pit bulls appear to be more evil than pomeranians, which doesn't mean that a pomeranian wouldn't shake a baby to death if it could, which is why revolutions have always tended to lead to despotism. That there's a bell curve for evil doesn't mean that evil doesn't exist at every point on the curve, or that most of the world's evil isn't perpetrated by those in the thick middle. When anyone tells you different, that the world's evil is primarily the domain of tail-dwellers -- the desperate and mentally ill on the left, the callous and Machiavellian on the right -- that means you're being marketed to. Your vote is being courted. Jesus didn't say, "Don't have enemies" or "Befriend your enemies." He recognized the inevitability and necessity of enemies. "But I say unto you," he said unto us,

Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you ...

-- which ought to be easier for a person who has admitted how frequently he has been his own worst enemy.

Speaking of worst enemies, anyone who asks me about Kevin Shields in person will receive the same lie: "He escaped." The truth is that I released him into the wild, knowing that the probability of his finding his way back to me would be next to nil. The truth is that my setting him free was probably a death sentence. He knows how to kill, but we were associates for 16 years; now he's old and soft. I released him into the wild on a sunny Saturday a.m., and that night a violent thunderstorm hit New Orleans. He hid in a storm drain until he realized that that was where all the water went, whereupon he decided to move to the under-porch area of a rich family's house, somewhere Uptown. There was another feral cat taking shelter under there. They fought. Kevin slew his enemy. He spent a noisy, wet, sleepless, hungry night under the porch, unfazed by the corpse of his enemy. In the morning, the rich family fed him real tuna. He thought he would stay with that family, until he met their dog, a rottweiler who was hostile to him. They fought. Kevin slew his enemy and ran away. He moved from house to house, having to slay any hostile pet or stray who challenged him, subsisting on verminflesh, scavenged human leftovers, and the occasional charitable tin of real tuna. He became again a wild and conscienceless thing with no voice, his memory of me reduced to an identifying scent whose owner he swore he would slay if their paths crossed. Let's be real. He starved to death or was slain by a larger predator. He got depressed and ran under a car. He got captured by an animal control officer and put on death row. He got a job at Schrödinger's. He decided to be female again. She went back to her planet and reclaimed her slave name: "Heaven". Nothing's funny. It doesn't matter why I did it. It doesn't matter if I'm lying to you about my depression. As long as depression's a valid excuse for destructive behaviour; as long as depression's a valid excuse for reflexive avoidance of unpleasant realities; the world's evil can't decrease. In other words, as long as depression is the enemy, to love one's enemy is a non sequitur. Said Momus,

Every lie creates a parallel world -- the world in which it's true.

As luck would have it, this version of me doesn't live in the world where I'm a good guy beset by evil forces. In this world, the good and the bad sleep in the same bed.

The trouble is that a human is an ant as much as he is a sparkle fish; and as E.O. Wilson put it, "An ant alone is no ant." As pleasant as he might be in his own castle; surrounded by furnishings of his own choosing; playing a playlist shuffled from a handpicked selection of 30,000 songs; reading only articles that might reflect his own beliefs back at him; in short, being both the projector and audience of his own movie; a human being alone is no human. He approaches his full human potential only through a continual exposure of his clean self-image to the dirt of other people.

Ah, but you have your depression, and I have mine, and let's not let language fool us: we might not be talking about the same thing. You sleep. I get up in the middle of the night and pace. You see a therapist. You vent and then announce that you were just venting. I adjust my diet to include more protein and fat. You run a 5K. You buy a sexy automobile. You recline on the couch and play first-person shooters. I take my cat for a long walk off a short pier. Our solutions are destined to have nothing in common. It might be that depression as a concept has outlived its usefulness. We might as well call it "that which stops us from making the necessary changes". Fourteen syllables. My advice is useless to you, except for this: whatever you do, don't forget to make love to famous women. This is not a euphemism for masturbation. An image must never be mistaken for a woman -- not even an iconic image, especially not an iconic image. I've made a list of 33 iconic women to help you identify what a famous woman might look like in the wild, but ultimately you'll have to trust your own judgment:

Martina Topley-Bird (7 May 1975 - )

When you spot a famous woman in person, make love to her by any means necessary, in a manner that will satisfy both of you to your cores. Do not hesitate. Do not inundate her with minutiae concerning your more arcane or boring interests. Do not let her bore you with her minutiae. Do not act as if she is a space alien from a more advanced planet, unless you are from that planet, too. Do not pour your thoughts and feelings out like water from a tap, as poor Alfred no doubt did. Who values tap water? Let her discover your heart and mind at her own pace. She will be thankful to have met such a judicious individual.

Rosemary Elizabeth "Posy" Simmonds, MBE (9 Aug 1945 - )

It doesn't matter if you have not heard of her or are unfamiliar with her work. She is famous. It is possible that she has been knighted by the Queen of England, or that she is the Queen of England. What've you done that might stack up to her accomplishments? Probably nothing. Nevertheless, in order to make love to the Queen of England, you have to act as if you're the Queen of England, too. Or the King of England. Whichever.

Lena Herzog (1970 - )

A lot of times, a famous woman is married to a man who is even more famous. Do not let this fact undermine your love for her work or her way of looking at the universe. Moreover, do not let the existence of her famous husband (or your admiration for his work and his way of looking at the universe) stop you from making sweet love to his wife. It doesn't matter whether you're physically attracted to her or to women generally. You must not let this opportunity to get loved by a famous woman who has a famous husband pass you by. It is not unlike making love to both of them at once.

Nadezhda Andreyevna Tolokonnikova (7 Nov 1989 - )

Show the depth of your love for and allegiance to a famous woman by paying her a conjugal visit. Demonstrate respect for her religion, even if her religion requires odd moments of sacrilege relative to your religion. Never tolerate gratuitous sacrilege, though. Your steadfast respect for yourself and for her and for your respective religions will engender a continuous boomerang of respect and affection between the two of you.

Jennifer Herrema (1972ish - )

Cultivate fearlessness in your pursuit of the love of famous women, even in cases where that love is likely to destroy you completely. Rather than cling desperately to such destructive love for fear of its loss, allow it to blow itself up again and again, letting it go each time in order that it might rise from its own ashes, before grasping it once more.

Veronica Sawyer (29 Oct 1971 - )

Don't try to be a cool guy.

Taylor Alison Swift (13 Dec 1989 - )

Anticipate, accommodate, appreciate, and ameliorate her feelings of vulnerability. Avoid punishing her for displaying genuine vulnerability, even when her display borders on bad taste. Beware the temptation to abuse the power that you have when she behaves in a vulnerable way in your presence. When it comes time to part ways, have no regrets about the time and love you shared together. Your love has immortalized both of you.

Polly Jean Harvey (9 Oct 1969 - )

A famous woman is often defined by a powerful sound erupting from a fragile-looking container. When making love to such a woman, behave in ways that complement and enhance those qualities; but remember to flip the script once in a while. Through subtle signals and telepathy (not words), let her know that you know exactly how powerful is the container, how fragile the sound.

Gena Rowlands (19 Jun 1930 - )

If a famous woman happens to be your soul mate (a.k.a. spirit spouse), go ahead and make a lifelong commitment. Know full well going in that if you are crazy, and she is crazy, things will be crazy. Make crazyade.

Hillary Clinton (26 Oct 1947 - )

That you and she are both powerful does not make you a power couple, especially if your respective powers are wasted on cancelling each other out. Use the sum of your powers. Better yet, multiply the factors of your powers. Use the product of your powers. Your enemies will have reason to fear your love.

Kylie Minogue (28 May 1968 - )

A famous woman's persona may be so well beloved throughout the world that it threatens to swallow up her humanity and replace it with a pair of angelic wings. Do not fight this process, and do not compete directly with her by attempting to become more saintly. Instead, cultivate an outsized devilish persona of your own, for balance. Your wings will be darker and uglier than hers, but they'll be fully functional.

Beyoncé (4 Sep 1981 - )

She works hard for that money. Work hard for yours, or get the hell out of the game.

Joan Didion (5 Dec 1934 - )

Knowing your famous woman inside and out is to everybody's benefit, but don't mistake knowing facts about her (or knowing her work) for knowing her. Read up on her, but do not be nerdy, ever. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever be nerdy. She doesn't need you to be another fan or another reader. She needs to love you and get loved by you.

Possibly the best living American essayist and probably the most influential, Didion has always maintained that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it down.

... “Writers are always selling somebody out,” Didion wrote at the beginning of her first essay collection, 1968’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

... (Didion and Dunne had tried and failed to conceive for two years.)

... If Didion was remote with Quintana, she was consumingly close to the third member of the family, her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The central, immutable premise of both memoirs is John and Joan’s idyllic marriage-the one Utopia in which the skeptical Didion placed her faith. “They were always together,” as their old friend Calvin Trillin puts it. “They could finish each other’s sentences.” Working on screenplays together, they did.

... Both The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights are recognizably memoirs of grief, but they’re rendered in Didion’s familiar remote voice. It’s an oddly effective fit: Her coolness plays against the genre’s sentimental excesses but still allows her to avoid argument and indulge in open-ended reveries built from repetitions of painful facts.

-- Boris Kachka, New York Magazine, 16 Oct 2011

Helen Gurley Brown (18 Feb 1922 - 13 Aug 2012)

Just because she is world-famous and by her very existence pleases billions and billions of people worldwide doesn't mean she has no hunger to please you, personally, one on one. Allow her that happiness.

Lillian Diana Gish (14 Oct 1893 - 27 Feb 1993)

There are some famous women who will appeal to you more as a mother than as a lover. No problem. Make love to her with great tenderness or with animal fury. When she is happy, she will be happy to mother you, which will make you happy. When you are happy, you will be happy to make fierce, tender love to her. It's a tender, vicious loop. If you are lucky, she will love mothering for its own virtues, and you may skip the animal step entirely. See a therapist if need be.

Barbara Stanwyck (16 Jul 1907 - 20 Jan 1990)

Visualize a famous woman with her fists on her hips and a look on her face that combines "world-weary" and "sweet". Are you ready to deliver back-and-forth comedic banter of a sexually-charged nature? You had better be.

Monica Vitti (3 Nov 1931 - )

Knowing that being enigmatic cancels age, preserve as much enigma as possible into your septuagenarian years. Your love will be demanded by famous women right to the bitter end.

Susan Sontag (16 Jan 1933 - 28 Dec 2004)

When you have little information on a famous woman other than that your best friend is her biggest fan, make love to her with all your heart for his sake. He will never forgive you if you had a chance to get loved by her and chose the coward's way instead.

Frida Kahlo (6 Jul 1907 - 13 Jul 1954)

Although a high percentage of famous women are space aliens, some are conspicuously more space alien than others. To improve rapport, learn at least a few important phrases in the language of her species.

Kara (21 May 1988; 24 Jul 1988; 13 Jan 1991; 7 Oct 1991; 18 Jan 1994 - )

In Korea, famous women tend to operate as teams. To preserve the harmony of the team, it's imperative that you make love to all of them, though not necessarily all at once. You will have favourites, but you mustn't play favourites unless you want the whole enterprise to blow up in your stupid face. The head that sticks above the others gets lopped off.

Chaerin Lee (CL from 2NE1) (26 Feb 1991 - )

You may meet a famous woman whose good nature seems inexhaustible, in spite of her tough-girl stage persona. You may test this good nature to discover its limits, but do not abuse it. Her good nature is a gift, and gifts must be accepted graciously.

Kate Winslet (5 Oct 1975 - )

Famous women whose main selling point is how classy they are may appreciate a lover who's a little rough around the edges, but don't overdo it. Balance your vulgarity and your humour with a deeper seriousness. Deliver your lines with a deadpan mien and unflinching eye contact. Belly laughs are welcome; nervous giggles are not.

Lynda Barry (2 Jan 1956 - )

Should you meet a nerdy famous woman, it is acceptable to mirror her nerdiness with your own. Don't exceed hers, though. Your patience for the accessories of nerddom will often be rewarded with invigorating conversation, emotional catharses, and the sturdy furniture of wisdom, not to mention the sweet making of love.

Phoebe Louise Adams Gloeckner (1960 - )

Make peace with contradictions and odd juxtapositions. A famous woman is likely to be full of them. How do you suppose she got famous, by being predictable and bland? by speaking in Venn diagrams? A famous woman might be full of energy but depressed, goofy but serious, respectful but resentful, submissive but full of power. It's not her job to make sense to you, her lover. She's naked and famous. She's wearing her heart. It's your job, as her lover, to make sense of it. In return, her peculiar brilliance will augment yours. You may ride that wave together into the moonset.

Q: No, it doesn’t sensationalize. It doesn’t have this “Oh, woe is me” feel nor “you bastards who did mean things to Minnie.” It doesn’t have a lot of self-pity, and not a lot of condemnation either. Is that how you would look at it?

A: (pause) Sorry, I’m just thinking. No, I’m a person who is generally full of hatred and venom. Honestly. And vindictiveness. And full of resentments of all sorts. But yet, I feel like it’s always giving me power. That’s a source of energy for me. I like feeling mad. And if it doesn’t come out in my books, I don’t know why.

-- excerpt from an interview of Phoebe Gloeckner by Sean T. Collins, 2003

Annie Nocenti (17 Jan 1957 - )

Other famous women will be childhood heroes of yours. Prepare yourself to make love to your hero by exposing yourself to radioactive waste, or gamma rays in space. At the very least, get bitten by a radioactive spider. Gain superpowers by any means necessary because only superheroes may make love to heroes.

Agnès Varda (30 May 1928 - )

Let a famous woman make a moving picture of you. Her eyes will see something in you that yours don't. You might enjoy knowing that there is a record of this moment, this world, and this body, whether or not you get around to re-living it. Make ordinary movies together. Your love will consist in large part of looking at ordinary objects through the prosthetic visual cortex of the other.

Eleanor Davis (16 Jan 1983 - )

Learn from a famous woman how to draw bodies on paper. Draw bodies entwined around one another in peculiar ways. Draw one box after another and fill the boxes with your filthy drawings to simulate the passage of time. Grow old together by reading left to right. Grow young together by reading right to left.

Laura Palmer ( - )

Some of your best famous women are fictional bad girls. You will have only a brief moment with them, and you will know, somehow, in the moment, exactly what and who you are dealing with. Your mission is to stay in that moment forever. Maybe meditating will help.

Dolly Rebecca Parton (19 Jan 1946 - )

Some famous women are gals. Do you know what I mean? In their presence you'll throw the word gal around willy-nilly. You'll throw the following words around willy-nilly: reckon, darlin', baby, y'all, come, back, now, y'hear, willy-nilly. Y'won't feel artificial doing this. You'll feel like a 100% natural person. A gal'll make you feel good and natural all over. Just standing there, winking, she'll make love seem like a joke you're in on. Here's what you do: without breaking the spell of your autonomous sensory meridian response, tell her that you're undecided about whether to worship God or Satan. Watch sparks fly like the Fourth of July.

Emma Goldman (1869 - 1940)

There are no pictures of some famous women on the Internet. When you find one in person, you'll have to recognize her by feeling, which shouldn't be too hard, since you have loved her since you were a child. Perhaps you'll find her one day, on a soapbox:

The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life's struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare ...

Propose marriage to her on the spot and hope for the best.

Ayn Rand (2 Feb 1905 - 6 Mar 1982)

In accordance with Christ's teaching, you need not like a famous woman to love her. Once in a blue moon, a famous woman will appear who loves to fight -- who really loves fighting, not just feeling righteous, but rather the act of stacking her argument up against yours, confident that you were sloppy and failed to perceive an important detail or nuance of human psychology that she was too perceptive to miss. Fight her. Satisfy her. Be selfish in your fighting style. If being selfish is the coin of respect in her universe, show her the money. She won't make it easy for you to love her. "Nothing good is easy," she'll say, moments before the two of you tumble into a sloppy heap.

Linda Susan Boreman (10 Jan 1949 - 22 Apr 2002)

Tragedy strikes the famous girl next door every day. Your job is easy and sanctified by tradition: save her. Not from herself; not from her laundry list of poor decisions; not from bad guys; but from boredom. She's done a lot of things that a lot of other people find exciting, but she's mostly dead in the eyes when she does them. Find a mountain or a cornfield. Awaken the human within you both by eating mushrooms together. Strap in for a rocky ride. When the human shows up, love it with your whole heart. Get loved by it with your whole heart. Don't do any other kind of drug together, though.