Bastards
It's never truly appreciated how difficult it is to break out of a rut.
I'm coming to realize that coping with success is actually more difficult than coping with repeated failure. More often than not, failure is is simply laziness. Once you succeed, everything really is your responsibility. You aren't able to shift blame, or claim helplessness, or wallow in the comforting familiarity of of the miserable blanket of FAIL.
Once you cross the threshold of WIN, self-pity is ridiculous; if you have half a brain, you're suddenly confronted with the realization that all the suffering you endured, everything that you railed against, and all of the wrongs others inflicted on you were simply you wasting your own time. You have to admit that the sins you ascribed to others were, in the end, your own. The defining moment of adulthood, no matter how delayed, comes when you accept that you are the one to hold responsible for not taking care of yourself, not the ones who exploit you.
From your first success onward, it is your job to accept that the time you spent in the Kingdom Of Shit was a self-imposed sentence in a prison with an open door.
Some people can't take it. Sometimes they become successes but waste it by holding onto their childhood hates and hurts and fears. Sometimes they make even worse choices. I've known people who, rather than turn around and confront the fact that the quality of their life is their responsibility, would rather jump off of a bridge.
Literally.
One thing in particular that makes it difficult to quit the bastard industry is that there are a lot more beautiful losers then there are beautiful winners. It's depressingly easy to find attractive, clever people who are suffering or lost because they're 'misunderstood' or 'unappreciated' or because 'they were born in the wrong time/place/body' or because 'everyone else sucks/is an idiot/is boring' than it is to find people who have accepted what miserable bastards they are and always have been, and taken it upon themselves to change that.
I used to be a beautiful loser. I was certainly a bastard. I may still be the latter.
Because of the awesome amount of work involved, and the questionable benefit to doing so, people accept the challenge of accepting personal responsibility for their own sheer bastardy. There are very good reasons to avoid the question. Change is hard and the rewards are scant, from the viewpoint of the true shithead. Accepting that you're a bastard is difficult. Taking on the responsibility of criticizing and critiquing yourself with brutal honesty is challenging as well. Even after the process is complete, it's hard to let it go and move on. It's difficult to accept that you've punished yourself enough, that you have earned the privilege of being loved and treated well. Not only by others, but finally, in the end, you deserve to be treated well by yourself. And it continues to be challenging even after that, because you're usually pretty much alone; you've surrounded yourself with sycophants and people with as little reason to criticize themselves as you have to criticize yourself. If you've been a bastard of any quality whatsoever, you've probably already driven away most anyone worthwhile that you've come into contact with. And to top it off, your dating pool melts away like a Rocket Pop in the blast furnace of the desert sun. You're lonely, and scared, and you can't follow your old habits; you have to either stand up against what you used to support, or turn and walk away; you can't sleep with 'people with potential', or 'struggling artists', or 'free-thinking-rebels' anymore. You have to find people whose identities aren't euphemisms. You have to find lovers and partners and friends who've erased (or never had) the quotation marks.
For a demonstration of my point, here are some de-quoted definitions for ya:
"Hot and well put together": Spoiled rotten. Typically shallow. Little or no personal development since they developed cheekbones at the age of fifteen. If you're a bastard, you're pretty much looking in a mirror. You'll fail to notice this, however.
"People With Potential": good bone structure, utter lack of responsibility. You will eventually break up, and wonder where the hell the years went. If you are not a bastard, this is when you actually begin to pursue a career.
"Friend With Benefits": Cockholster/Stuntcock. Someone who thinks you're hot enough to fuck, but too much effort to date. Bastards tend to do this when they're temporarily too tired to be a bastard for a bit, usually after being fucked up by a bigger bastard. They will never admit this, claiming instead to be "growing up" or "taking a break".
"Aspiring Musician": A drug addict with a bass. Their parent/partner/stripper/dealer© inevitably pays the rent. And no, they will never leave their parent/partner/stripper/dealer©. And yes: parent/partner/stripper/dealer© is a single individual. Do you really want that job title?
"Struggling Artist": An aspiring musician with an easel. Considers themselves a 'libertine'. Considers Burning Man a 'Herpes Exchange Program'. The significant differences between the Struggling Artist and the Aspiring Musician is that the S.A. yells louder, cries more often, and (stunningly) does more crystal meth than an A.M.
"Free Thinking Rebel Poet": Unemployed. Homeless. Will continue to become more homeless, more unemployed, and write less poetry over time. Studies indicate a possibility that the Struggling Artist is the larval stage of the Free Thinking Rebel Poet.
"Refreshing And Low Maintenance": Fifteen years younger than you. If you're a bastard, you're having a mid-life crisis. And if you're dating someone fifteen years younger than you, you're definitely a bastard.
"Easy": Ain't nothing easy about easy, in the long run.
To clarify, nothing of the above is intended to denigrate the genuine artists and musicians and free-thinking rebels out there. Nor is it intended to insult the sexually liberated or the polyglamourous. Or myself for that matter, even though I've been each one of those bastards at one point or another. We need artists, and poets, and people to fill the world with words and sex and love and beauty. I love and adore and need the people who live to create, and maintain, and destroy.
But my rule is pretty straightforward: If you actually deserve a title, you can't be the type who needs one.
Reframing your definition of yourself is the ultimate defense and cowardice of true bastard. Being able to hurt others, and still perceive of yourself as the victim. The ability to steal, and explain afterwards how you had the right. To passive decision to make the world that much worse of a place simply because you don't have the balls to stop seeing yourself as the only misunderstood little soldier on the battlefield. As a recovering bastard, the most difficult thing for me to accept is the reality that most bastards genuinely believe that they are blameless. Without a trace of irony, they can claim to love themselves while tearing apart everything around them. This illusion is maintained by a stubborn refusal to actually look in the mirror, or to measure themselves by their own standards. Your average bastard has never allowed themselves to see anything that contradicts their carefully protected self-image, their core image of themselves as The Absolute Perfect Shit. Those few, hard-working bastards who have taken the time to construct a bulletproof rationale for their behavior have worked hard for the privilege of seeing themselves as nothing less than bad-ass angels of righteous misunderstoodliness, whose occasional "rough patches" are nothing more than the vicissitude of incomprehensible fate.
In a way, I envy that refined breed of bastard. Their twenties and thirties will be awesome, despite the occasional conflict, and the fleeting, half-felt heartbreaks. Aside from those rare hiccups, a bastard's life will be a rose; sex and drugs and rock-and-roll, rolling out into the world every night with fabulous hair and dancing with the beautiful people. But at some point, the ground will begin to subtly shift beneath their feet, and the party, sadly, will inexorably begin to grind to a halt.
One of the hardest things to accept about being a bastard is that honestly, the only genuine pleasure you ever experience is the vindicating rush of your insecurities being briefly assuaged. It's like a rush of heroin to your average jerk. If you sleep with the hottest people, it reduces your insecurity. If you jump out of an airplane, you get to pretend you're a badass for a day. If you win yet another fight, then it means that you're not constantly living in a seething vortex of insecurity and failure.
That's how the free-range bastard thinks. But the truth is, for every time Your average bastard get a minor hit of security, there's a roly-poly geek out there who doesn't give a shit about how there hair looks or who they're going to sleep with next week. And that roly-poly geek has already had a hundred times more fun than the bastard has, while the bastard has been busy masturbating their insecurities to sleep. There's a reason pretty people end up being dissatisfied, serial monogamists: they're SPOILED. They expect everything they desire to be placed at their feet by a rainbow pony with a bow in it's hair. Bastards are bastards because they are ENTITLED. And because of that sense of entitlement, the constant feeling that they 'deserve' more, the beautiful people end up being flighty and picky and bitchy and unpleasant, and having much more miserable lives than the lowly proletariat that they consider themselves superior to.
In a nutshell:
"Yes, you are having hot sex with a pretty partner that you fight with often and treats you with contempt, and who has little in common with you beyond being a pretty bastard just like you. And while you're doing that, there's a roly-poly geek who has been having brilliant conversations, hanging out with their friends, learning how to knit, cooking great meals, and generally gaining more life experience this week than you have since puberty. That's because they don't give a shit and due to their lack of social skills, they have developed interests, and friends, and personalities, and hobbies. Have a nice hair day."
Seriously, as I get older, I'm starting to see a lot of rather self-satisfied looking long-term couples who might be carrying a few extra pounds on them around here. I've also been noticing that the wilderness is filled more and more with the lonely mating calls of the super-hot-but-way-too-much-baggage-asaurus.
It's called evolution.
But the unrepentant bastard doesn't want to hear that. Considering the possibility that perhaps their bad attitude and unresolved childhood issues have brought them to this point is too practical; it's strips the veneer of romance away from their tragic existence. They ignore the fact that everyone had a hard time in high school, that plenty of people had rougher family lives than they had (and many have survived, and found a way to help others, and conquered those issues, and feel pretty fucking good about it) or that being an ugly duckling when you were a kid is a fucking cakewalk compared to living your entire life without ever turning into a swan at all. But still finding a way to be happy.
Bastards ignore these things, because acknowledging them would make the past (at least the last decade of it) their own responsibility. It would deny them the role of victim. And so, like some kind of Chevron-Of-Shallow-Life-Experiences, they use every trick they can come up with to drain the party dry.
And once the party pump burps out it's last breath of cocaine-and-dead-hooker-scented success, the average bastard's unconsidered life will be reduced to the occasional incomprehensible conflict, a lingering sensation of heartbreak, and the vague memories of meaningless acts of self-aggrandization. Often posted on LiveJournal.
They may have had the foresight to get a dog, or a cat, or a hamster. They may have all of the rationalizations in the world cocked, loaded, and ready for bear. They may have gin! Or, at the end of the day, they may have nothing but their confusion, and their fear, and always, a whispering voice asking an unanswered and unacknowleged question deep in their mind:
"If I ain't never done did no wrong, then why am I alone?"
------------------------
I hope I started changing soon enough. I hope that that particular bullet is another that I dodged. I hope that, in the end, I end up with more than a hamster.
you see, I was just being a bastard to make ends meet, it was a day-to-day thing until something better turned up. I never intended to pursue it as a career.
But I can't seem to quite get out of this rut.
* CAVEAT: This post is in no way targeted towards any one person. Nor is it caused by any particular event, although many people (myself included) came to mind while it was being written. This post is the fundamentally like yelling "Hey, BIMBO!" in a crowd; anyone who reacts with scorn or anger is only accusing themselves.
I'm coming to realize that coping with success is actually more difficult than coping with repeated failure. More often than not, failure is is simply laziness. Once you succeed, everything really is your responsibility. You aren't able to shift blame, or claim helplessness, or wallow in the comforting familiarity of of the miserable blanket of FAIL.
Once you cross the threshold of WIN, self-pity is ridiculous; if you have half a brain, you're suddenly confronted with the realization that all the suffering you endured, everything that you railed against, and all of the wrongs others inflicted on you were simply you wasting your own time. You have to admit that the sins you ascribed to others were, in the end, your own. The defining moment of adulthood, no matter how delayed, comes when you accept that you are the one to hold responsible for not taking care of yourself, not the ones who exploit you.
From your first success onward, it is your job to accept that the time you spent in the Kingdom Of Shit was a self-imposed sentence in a prison with an open door.
Some people can't take it. Sometimes they become successes but waste it by holding onto their childhood hates and hurts and fears. Sometimes they make even worse choices. I've known people who, rather than turn around and confront the fact that the quality of their life is their responsibility, would rather jump off of a bridge.
Literally.
One thing in particular that makes it difficult to quit the bastard industry is that there are a lot more beautiful losers then there are beautiful winners. It's depressingly easy to find attractive, clever people who are suffering or lost because they're 'misunderstood' or 'unappreciated' or because 'they were born in the wrong time/place/body' or because 'everyone else sucks/is an idiot/is boring' than it is to find people who have accepted what miserable bastards they are and always have been, and taken it upon themselves to change that.
I used to be a beautiful loser. I was certainly a bastard. I may still be the latter.
Because of the awesome amount of work involved, and the questionable benefit to doing so, people accept the challenge of accepting personal responsibility for their own sheer bastardy. There are very good reasons to avoid the question. Change is hard and the rewards are scant, from the viewpoint of the true shithead. Accepting that you're a bastard is difficult. Taking on the responsibility of criticizing and critiquing yourself with brutal honesty is challenging as well. Even after the process is complete, it's hard to let it go and move on. It's difficult to accept that you've punished yourself enough, that you have earned the privilege of being loved and treated well. Not only by others, but finally, in the end, you deserve to be treated well by yourself. And it continues to be challenging even after that, because you're usually pretty much alone; you've surrounded yourself with sycophants and people with as little reason to criticize themselves as you have to criticize yourself. If you've been a bastard of any quality whatsoever, you've probably already driven away most anyone worthwhile that you've come into contact with. And to top it off, your dating pool melts away like a Rocket Pop in the blast furnace of the desert sun. You're lonely, and scared, and you can't follow your old habits; you have to either stand up against what you used to support, or turn and walk away; you can't sleep with 'people with potential', or 'struggling artists', or 'free-thinking-rebels' anymore. You have to find people whose identities aren't euphemisms. You have to find lovers and partners and friends who've erased (or never had) the quotation marks.
For a demonstration of my point, here are some de-quoted definitions for ya:
"Hot and well put together": Spoiled rotten. Typically shallow. Little or no personal development since they developed cheekbones at the age of fifteen. If you're a bastard, you're pretty much looking in a mirror. You'll fail to notice this, however.
"People With Potential": good bone structure, utter lack of responsibility. You will eventually break up, and wonder where the hell the years went. If you are not a bastard, this is when you actually begin to pursue a career.
"Friend With Benefits": Cockholster/Stuntcock. Someone who thinks you're hot enough to fuck, but too much effort to date. Bastards tend to do this when they're temporarily too tired to be a bastard for a bit, usually after being fucked up by a bigger bastard. They will never admit this, claiming instead to be "growing up" or "taking a break".
"Aspiring Musician": A drug addict with a bass. Their parent/partner/stripper/dealer© inevitably pays the rent. And no, they will never leave their parent/partner/stripper/dealer©. And yes: parent/partner/stripper/dealer© is a single individual. Do you really want that job title?
"Struggling Artist": An aspiring musician with an easel. Considers themselves a 'libertine'. Considers Burning Man a 'Herpes Exchange Program'. The significant differences between the Struggling Artist and the Aspiring Musician is that the S.A. yells louder, cries more often, and (stunningly) does more crystal meth than an A.M.
"Free Thinking Rebel Poet": Unemployed. Homeless. Will continue to become more homeless, more unemployed, and write less poetry over time. Studies indicate a possibility that the Struggling Artist is the larval stage of the Free Thinking Rebel Poet.
"Refreshing And Low Maintenance": Fifteen years younger than you. If you're a bastard, you're having a mid-life crisis. And if you're dating someone fifteen years younger than you, you're definitely a bastard.
"Easy": Ain't nothing easy about easy, in the long run.
To clarify, nothing of the above is intended to denigrate the genuine artists and musicians and free-thinking rebels out there. Nor is it intended to insult the sexually liberated or the polyglamourous. Or myself for that matter, even though I've been each one of those bastards at one point or another. We need artists, and poets, and people to fill the world with words and sex and love and beauty. I love and adore and need the people who live to create, and maintain, and destroy.
But my rule is pretty straightforward: If you actually deserve a title, you can't be the type who needs one.
Reframing your definition of yourself is the ultimate defense and cowardice of true bastard. Being able to hurt others, and still perceive of yourself as the victim. The ability to steal, and explain afterwards how you had the right. To passive decision to make the world that much worse of a place simply because you don't have the balls to stop seeing yourself as the only misunderstood little soldier on the battlefield. As a recovering bastard, the most difficult thing for me to accept is the reality that most bastards genuinely believe that they are blameless. Without a trace of irony, they can claim to love themselves while tearing apart everything around them. This illusion is maintained by a stubborn refusal to actually look in the mirror, or to measure themselves by their own standards. Your average bastard has never allowed themselves to see anything that contradicts their carefully protected self-image, their core image of themselves as The Absolute Perfect Shit. Those few, hard-working bastards who have taken the time to construct a bulletproof rationale for their behavior have worked hard for the privilege of seeing themselves as nothing less than bad-ass angels of righteous misunderstoodliness, whose occasional "rough patches" are nothing more than the vicissitude of incomprehensible fate.
In a way, I envy that refined breed of bastard. Their twenties and thirties will be awesome, despite the occasional conflict, and the fleeting, half-felt heartbreaks. Aside from those rare hiccups, a bastard's life will be a rose; sex and drugs and rock-and-roll, rolling out into the world every night with fabulous hair and dancing with the beautiful people. But at some point, the ground will begin to subtly shift beneath their feet, and the party, sadly, will inexorably begin to grind to a halt.
One of the hardest things to accept about being a bastard is that honestly, the only genuine pleasure you ever experience is the vindicating rush of your insecurities being briefly assuaged. It's like a rush of heroin to your average jerk. If you sleep with the hottest people, it reduces your insecurity. If you jump out of an airplane, you get to pretend you're a badass for a day. If you win yet another fight, then it means that you're not constantly living in a seething vortex of insecurity and failure.
That's how the free-range bastard thinks. But the truth is, for every time Your average bastard get a minor hit of security, there's a roly-poly geek out there who doesn't give a shit about how there hair looks or who they're going to sleep with next week. And that roly-poly geek has already had a hundred times more fun than the bastard has, while the bastard has been busy masturbating their insecurities to sleep. There's a reason pretty people end up being dissatisfied, serial monogamists: they're SPOILED. They expect everything they desire to be placed at their feet by a rainbow pony with a bow in it's hair. Bastards are bastards because they are ENTITLED. And because of that sense of entitlement, the constant feeling that they 'deserve' more, the beautiful people end up being flighty and picky and bitchy and unpleasant, and having much more miserable lives than the lowly proletariat that they consider themselves superior to.
In a nutshell:
"Yes, you are having hot sex with a pretty partner that you fight with often and treats you with contempt, and who has little in common with you beyond being a pretty bastard just like you. And while you're doing that, there's a roly-poly geek who has been having brilliant conversations, hanging out with their friends, learning how to knit, cooking great meals, and generally gaining more life experience this week than you have since puberty. That's because they don't give a shit and due to their lack of social skills, they have developed interests, and friends, and personalities, and hobbies. Have a nice hair day."
Seriously, as I get older, I'm starting to see a lot of rather self-satisfied looking long-term couples who might be carrying a few extra pounds on them around here. I've also been noticing that the wilderness is filled more and more with the lonely mating calls of the super-hot-but-way-too-much-baggage-asaurus.
It's called evolution.
But the unrepentant bastard doesn't want to hear that. Considering the possibility that perhaps their bad attitude and unresolved childhood issues have brought them to this point is too practical; it's strips the veneer of romance away from their tragic existence. They ignore the fact that everyone had a hard time in high school, that plenty of people had rougher family lives than they had (and many have survived, and found a way to help others, and conquered those issues, and feel pretty fucking good about it) or that being an ugly duckling when you were a kid is a fucking cakewalk compared to living your entire life without ever turning into a swan at all. But still finding a way to be happy.
Bastards ignore these things, because acknowledging them would make the past (at least the last decade of it) their own responsibility. It would deny them the role of victim. And so, like some kind of Chevron-Of-Shallow-Life-Experiences, they use every trick they can come up with to drain the party dry.
And once the party pump burps out it's last breath of cocaine-and-dead-hooker-scented success, the average bastard's unconsidered life will be reduced to the occasional incomprehensible conflict, a lingering sensation of heartbreak, and the vague memories of meaningless acts of self-aggrandization. Often posted on LiveJournal.
They may have had the foresight to get a dog, or a cat, or a hamster. They may have all of the rationalizations in the world cocked, loaded, and ready for bear. They may have gin! Or, at the end of the day, they may have nothing but their confusion, and their fear, and always, a whispering voice asking an unanswered and unacknowleged question deep in their mind:
"If I ain't never done did no wrong, then why am I alone?"
------------------------
I hope I started changing soon enough. I hope that that particular bullet is another that I dodged. I hope that, in the end, I end up with more than a hamster.
you see, I was just being a bastard to make ends meet, it was a day-to-day thing until something better turned up. I never intended to pursue it as a career.
But I can't seem to quite get out of this rut.
* CAVEAT: This post is in no way targeted towards any one person. Nor is it caused by any particular event, although many people (myself included) came to mind while it was being written. This post is the fundamentally like yelling "Hey, BIMBO!" in a crowd; anyone who reacts with scorn or anger is only accusing themselves.