Opt Out

I need to get a new job.  And the sole criterion I am going to employ, rather than salary, potential for growth, intellectual fulfillment or any of that bullshit is whether girls work there.

Because that’s the only thing that matters. If you are where the pussy is, life is great.  If you are not where the pussy is, life is horrible. And friends, I am emphatically NOT where the fucking pussy is. For how little I am exposed to women, it is a god damn miracle that I ever get laid at all.  I must be a world record holder for opportunity/ pussy ratio.  Like a one-legged marathon runner.  Lots of guys get laid a lot more than me, but I am pulling a pretty god damn respectable time for hopping along with a fucking stump.

The problem is, the way our society is built– what you need to do to be “successful,”  to be “prosperous–”  the fruit is hanging so high that getting to the respectable middle consumes your whole life.  And it starts about forty five minutes after you come out of the womb. You need to work your ass off in high school and get into a good college. People talk about grade point average and SAT’s, you know– as though I worked hard, did well in school and killed that standardized test, now i’m going to get into a good college.  Bullshit.  All that stuff, those years of labor, homework and toil at the one time in your life when you have social and sexual access to fourteeen year old girls– all that just gets you to zero.  All that gets you to the point where you won’t be instantly eliminated from the first round of applicant pool.

To actually get in, you better also be captain of the handball team and president of the debate club– and I’m not talking about just being in these things, you have to be in fucking charge.  You can’t just spend three hours per day after eight hours of class and before two hours of homework merely participating in the chess club or the champion water polo squad, you better also be organizing that shit, taking a leadership role– better still, you need to found a new team in some obscure but respected sport– Mayan lacrosse or something. You better put funding together and get a faculty liaison and etc.  You can’t just be the guy who played Banquo in the school play, you gotta be the guy who put together the bake sale to prop up the whole operation and baked the most delicious souffle from a recipe you invented and then directed the thing and played fucking Macbeth.  And preferably Lady Macbeth as well. You better not just be “liked” by your teachers, you better have deep, profound  relationships with them so that when they write a recommendation for you they will say that you touched their lives and of all the students they’ve had in their many decades of teaching, you are one they will remember until the grave.  And when you’re done doing all that shit, you better go build latrines in Guatemala.  You better rehabilitate injured horses.  You better be reading bedtime stories to the hollow-eyed uncomprehending elderly.  You better be suckling some Rwandan orphans at your teat. And all this better have real meaning to you.  If it is merely a mercenary chore in order to get into a good college, they will know, and you will be fucked, because your three hundred word essay better fucking distinguish itself from every other three hundred word essay about your time on the volunteer horse farm.  Just like we distinguished our essay question from that of every other desirable college just enough so you can’t copy and paste.  You have to write a whole new essay about how these things are deeply meaningful and you would have done them all for nothing; getting into college was an unintended side effect. In other words, you better bust your motherfucking ass and do perfectly  in school, and you also better be well rounded with thousands of hours of institutionally-approved hobbies and do-gooderism, but you better not look like you’re trying.

And then you better intern; you better work for nothing, emerging from four years of school at sixty thousand dollars per year paid with loans– now you have to pay for an apartment and make no money.  Then you gotta get a shit entry level job, and if it’s a “cool” job, that means it pays nothing.  Everybody wants to work in “cool” fields like doctor, lawyer, movie producer, etc., etc.  Everyone wants jobs you see on TV, not boring lame stuff like your dad did as a claims adjuster for State Farm. So everybody goes after these jobs and the wages are suppressed and there’s no job security because fifteen thousand people are gunning for your shit job and everybody thinks they can do a better job at your job than the job you’re doing and you gotta watch your back; you better excel, you know, but more important than that is you better give the person who can fire you the constant unwavering impression that you’re excelling.  Often this is in direct contradiction to the way you might actually do your job best.   You gotta figure out how to take credit and give blame while appearing to give credit and take blame.

And part of this, part of merely getting you to zero, is showing up and putting in the new 9 to 5, which is 8 to 8, and then “networking” afterward and reading and studying materials pertaining to your job after that.  And none of this networking involves you meeting attractive interesting people you might want to have sex with.  They are all ugly like you because if they weren’t, what the fuck would they be working so hard for.  You are inextricably trapped in this ugly overachieving social ghetto, this caste of people whose social life is giving you their resume for 45 minutes before heading home to pass out at 10pm and get up and read work related shit before going to work.  If you ever met somebody who was more fuckable than Rocky Dennis, there would be nothing you could do about it.  Those people have lives where they can have a couple glasses of wine on a sunday night instead of reading twelve terrible screenplays on the off chance that one of them might be good. You don’t. They will not understand that you have to be in bed by 10PM because if you are not functioning at one hundred per cent cognitive capacity the next day you will do a less than perfect job on some tiny detail of some tiny task and the whole thing will hideously snowball into some fucking international crisis in the minds of the people who oversee you, who seem to have no analytical ability or memory except for a savant-level skill at cataloging and deconstructing everything you might have fucked up.

The point is, there is absolutely ZERO compatibility between the allegedly glamorous “career” world and a romantic life.  None.  Every single person I know who is in a relationship is a part time barrista or some shit.  A failed actress who gets plum gigs pouring wine in Napa Valley on weekends.  Things like that.  If you don’t live where the food is, you are going to fucking starve. And by the time you have clawed and bootstrapped and sharp-elbowed your way into this underpaid hellscape so you could have a pale nimbus business card, you have burned away whatever might have made you a desirable person to begin with.

So don’t do it, kids.  That gut instinct that is telling you to slack off and play Xbox and get a gig out of high school tending bar at Chili’s where they make the girls wear tight shirts, and maybe sell a little weed on the side– that instinct is right. Fuck what other people say.  That guy is digging out a nineteen year old on a palette of iceberg lettuce while I’m at my desk weeping into my keyboard on a Saturday.  Opt out, you fools. This here is no life at all.

Tags: chili's, college applications, my fucking job, what if birds had dicks, work