I don’t know why this is the most important August song, but it is, because it is full of the theme of this summer, which is white trash.  The thing that nobody mentions about being white trash is that it is awesome, because it is all about beauties that are very fleeting.  13-year-old girls with perfect faces that will be ordinary and swollen next year; Cheeto dust dissolving in brilliant orange rings in an oily slick of swimming hole water; picnics in the middle of blooming weed meridians.  Dirty feet and bum parties on bank parking lot lawns.  Bruised peaches and smashed blueberries getting all your papers wet.  What did you need your papers for anyway?

The other thing that nobody mentions about being poor is that you have to look at a lot more buildings than rich people.  Rich people only have to look at skyscrapers and houses; poor people have to look at the back of 7-11s all the time.  And other buildings, like apartment complexes where all the dumpsters are locked.  And franchises.  It’s a cheap world of stucco and plastic, and it’s so ugly, and the lighting is bad so you have to look at it.  But that’s what makes it beautiful, too–it’s a world where everything is disposable, so everything is free.  You can smash up your whole damn house if you want to, because it’s not actually your house and because none of your things are that nice.  You can throw away anything.

There’s an obscene luxury to buying single-serving cigarettes in plastic cases; it’s the kind of thing that only a madman or a king–or a poor–would do.  When you give up, when you accept your bad teeth and cut-up hands, you can smile at anybody, you can pick anything up.  You don’t worry about what they’ll think of you; you worry about what you want and if you like it.  And if you can’t afford anything, you want everything, it all gets leveled out and no one thing is more particularly desirable than any other thing.  It all falls into the category of “not yours,” which makes it easier to let go of.  That is the Zen of poor–a cut crystal brandy snifter becomes equal to a beach house.  If you’re middle-class, you might save up for brandy snifters; you might deny yourself simpler pleasures so that you can obtain this stupid glass set that you’ll never enjoy drinking out of, because you’ll be thinking about what it costs and what if it breaks and so on.  The unobtainable fantasy tastes much sweeter than the achievable goal.

“Sweet Virginia” is a great song about drugs.  It’s a fantasy about being very strung out but sort of comfortably country about it.  When you’re tired and strung out, it never feels good, but in retrospect you can cast a glow over it.  Poverty is not actually all that freeing or wonderful, but the idea of poverty is intoxicating when you have access to food and shelter.  Sometimes I think human society is just one giant D&D game, a bunch of nerds sitting around and pitting their fantasies against each other.  When you consider how the world is just some stuff that some people made up, this begins to seem less implausible.

(”Time to have earthenware pots in our early human culture.”  “Why?”  “Because I think they’re cool.”  “Okay, I hope somebody writes a textbook about this, and then another person can make it a choice on a multiple-choice test for some kids who are just sitting around.”  “Sounds great.”)

2. Embrace Chicken Fandom.

They're coming for you, but they don't know why.

Why chickens?  What are they up to?  Why are people obsessed with chickens?  Why am I obsessed with chickens?  All they do is root stuff out.  All they do is taste delicious.

It seems to me like if you like chickens enough you can make your life like a storybook all the time.  I don’t know if that’s a good goal, but I have it.

3.  Wonder What “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” Is About.

I mean, I love this song and all.  Not sure what it’s about, though.

4. Ride the Bus

Everybody on the bus is fantastic.  I recently started a new bus route and already have many regulars that I am consumed with observing.  They are:

1. The lazy anorexic.
2. The Dutch goth.
3. Face War.

The lazy anorexic is a very small, frail type who frequently wears her hair in a complicated braid bun.  She mitigates this with gold platform fuck-me sandals, but further complicates things by wearing many tiny children’s sweaters (no doubt purchased at Baby Gap, for real.)  I do not mean to mock her; of course it is horrible that she is anorexic but my job is to report the news, and that is what she is up to.  We both have poor circulation and give each other the side eye when others complain about the bus being too hot.

The best thing about the lazy anorexic, besides the fact that she has a very mannered and disdainful way of holding herself, is that every day, she rides the bus from the downtown Bellingham station to the downtown library–a mere eight blocks or so.  Why does she do this?  Does she have a bus pass, or is she paying a dollar a pop for her three-minute morning ride?  Does she ride the bus back to the station?  Every time she gets off, she gives me a dark and flirtatiously defiant look, as if she knows what I am thinking but rejects my peasant’s inclinations towards thrift.  I think she is very glamorous.

So sulky.

The Dutch goth has that broad Dutch bone structure that can be so pretty, and a wool coat always and sunglasses always, and he works at the mall, and he hates his life even though he has everything.  He doesn’t even know, and he’s wasting his life riding the bus to the mall when he could be brooding around Copenhagen, wasting his life in a much more Continental way.  Anna and Nora and I have a plan to ride the bus with him all the time and give him a lot of side eye; he would not be able to handle strong flirting because he is so death-oriented and takes himself so seriously, and he would probably get very upset and then we could laugh and laugh.  He is a Dull Boy, and no mistake.  Take off your coat, dull boy!

Fuck you, I have a peacock.

Face War is an older woman, generous of frame and tall like an overgrown myrtle bush, and she likes to yell.  She is like a matriarchal Greek goddess, except for being poor and yelling.  There are all these lines Renaissance-ish/new Romantic poetry about Juno’s wide white brow and so on, and I think of this when I look at this lady’s face.  If she relaxed her face, it would be beautiful–it has very clean, broad lines, like something drawn, and she also has what the poet’s called “cow eyes,” like they are always referring to “cow-eyed Hera/Juno,” and they mean it as a compliment, even though it sounds like the worst, but if you have looked at cows much (as I have), you know that cows have lovely big eyes.  But this lady is always moving her face around and yelling, so that is why I call her Face War–if she would CALM DOWN, she would have a pleasant face, but she seems intent on ruining it.  And she moves like somebody who thinks their body is an axe instead of a body–like she flings it around hilariously, but she is not trying to be hilarious and reckless–she really just does not think about it as anything visual.  I think it’s more of an instrument for her (for yelling with.)

Rod Stewart is important for helping you transition from winter to spring, because (like early spring), he is sort of sad but real into stuff.  It’s like how everything is very grey and brown right now, but there are still lupines poking up from under the dead blackberry leaves.  His songs are usually about relationships not working out, but instead of seeming sad about this he seems to feel melancholy but also hella angry and relieved.  Unlike my winter friend Bob Seger, Rod Stewart doesn’t want any of his girlfriends back.  He just wants to tell them about how they hurt his feelings and he is so over it, which seems like a healthy reaction.  I feel like if I dated Rod Stewart he would put up with my crap to a certain extent because he would be confused, but then one night he would go out with his girlfriends and he would describe my behavior to them and they would be like, “Oh girl,” and then he would decide that maybe he should dump me and they would agree and get him real whipped up about it and they would drink so many Cosmos and trash my name and then he would come home and I would be lying around in a white chair drinking melted chai tai ice cream and pushing on my cuticles with a file and he would say, “It’s over, dude,” and I would be like, “Whatever, get out of my house,” and he would be like, “It’s my house, weirdo,” and then I would throw a heavy thing through the bank of windows behind us and it would shatter and he wouldn’t say anything. And then I would call my friend Pablo and we would go on a road trip and Rod Stewart would write a song about it called “The Last Window,” or something.

2.  Look at pictures of horses on the Internet.

HORSES

One thing that you might have forgotten about, due to winter and tromping around and feeling pathetic, is that it is important to be proud, like a horse.  This country America is a very beautiful country, which you might not be proud of because of politics or personal problems that you have.  But you should probably be proud of America because it is an exotic place with many horses and grasslands in it.  Maybe you should put on some clean clothes and go fight someone in a field instead of feeling sorry for yourself all the time.  Maybe you should oil up your limbs and grow your hair out and run around being spooked by things and also disdaining bridles.  Have you ever read the book “Black Beauty”?  That’s a hell of a book.  Take a page from it–go eat an apple and kick somebody’s uncle in the head.

3.  Walk by some lakes or streams but not ponds.

Ponds are stagnant.  What lakes have are birds and what streams have are plants that the water pushes back, but it doesn’t uproot them.  You can look at the tendrils of the plants floating and bobbing in the water, and you can also see some rocks.  Maybe you’ll get excited by some rose quartz and bring it home.  Big mistake–nobody is ever impressed by rose quartz.  Better throw it back in the stream and/or river.  Blue rocks are good, even though they are common.

4.  Learn how to frame pictures.

I bet you have a bunch of damn posters lying around your house in disarray.  Maybe you should pretend to care about life and frame them so that they look less dumb.  You can use an X-acto knife to cut the mats and you can also use that to make little cut marks all over your house.  Do this on the underside of things, so that nobody else knows about it.  You will know about it and it will make you feel as if you are the true master of your environment, a wizard unto your own furniture, and that pride will translate into an increased self-confidence that will have you winning over strangers and confidants by the dozen.  Never tell them about the source of your power; they wouldn’t understand.

5.  Listen to “Thunder Road” over and over again.

“Thunder Road” is a song that Bruce Springsteen wrote about getting his high school girlfriend to do something.  You probably think that Bruce Springsteen is dumb, and he is, but you should love him for being a Dutch/Wop American who has felt some fucking emotions in his time.  If you don’t believe me, listen to any of his songs.  Anyway, “Thunder Road” is a good song because it is about overcoming obstacles like porches and not being good-looking in order to be in a car.  Being in a car is a very American thing to do, so if you want to actually understand your personality you should probably do this as often as possible.  You don ‘t even have to buy a car if you are afraid of fossil fuels; just rent one and then get in it and then make a turn and then make another turn and then get on a straight road and then see how the wind smells.  You may end up seeing a number of towns, or better yet, seeing them vanish behind you.

6.  Plant a magnolia tree.

I like magnolia trees because they have no leaves when they’re in bloom, just flowers.  Pink ones are preferable but white ones will do.  If you do this I will walk by your house A LOT.

7.  Listen to Nick Cave’s non-ballad-y albums constantly.

I feel like if I went to Nick Cave’s house, it would be similar to going to PeeWee Herman’s house, in that all the objects in the house would be animate.  It would be dissimilar to going to PeeWee Herman’s house in that all the objects would have bone-chillingly cool personalities, so you’d feel way too intimidated to get particularly intimate with them.  The only friend you’d have would be the back porch, where there would be a lot of broken green chairs and you could maybe whittle on them a little.

8.  Get in fights.

You’ve probably never been in a fight.  Maybe you’d be really good at it?  Maybe somebody could knock the books out of your hands and then you could take off your shirt and go into a hayloft and just hit somebody for a while?  Maybe there would be lots of dust rising around you, catching in the sunlight coming through the gaps between the boards of the barn, and he’d catch you a good one, right under the jaw, and your teeth would crunch a little and you’d nip your tongue slightly and the blood would fill your mouth in a gush of copper and lime, and you would feel strong and angry and you’d wrest that other guy to the floor and pound on his ears until he yelled and then you’d both collapse and look at the ceiling, and the blue sky behind it, and all of your limbs would feel tired and full?

9.  Watch “The Dogfather.

Just do it.  How else are you supposed to find out whether or not your dog is actually a father, and vice-versa?

10.  Learn falconry and/or make a hammock out of a barrel.

Realistically, you probably want an army of falcons.  Barring that, wouldn’t you like to have a beautiful barrel hammock that you strung between two birches?  You could lie in it and think about colors like ochre and slate, or you could drink mint tea in it and throw the ice at all the handsome people who might be playing badminton in white clothes nearby.  They would get angry at you and then you could run and run and run into the woods and go hide under some maidenhair ferns and then get up and keep going.  They’ll never catch you now.

Male Heterosexuality: A Celebration

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Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, creators of "Go Fug Yourself."

“Go Fug Yourself” recently named Amber Rose, a model best known for being Kanye West’s paramour, the winner of their annual “Fug Madness” contest, which uses reader voting to name this year’s “fugliest” celebrity.  This development reveals exactly how pernicious this silly little celebrity gossip website really is.

If you are not personally familiar with “Go Fug Yourself,” a brief explanation is in hand.  In short, “Go Fug Yourself” is a website where pictures of celebrities (mostly women) are posted daily, and made fun of.  The factor supposedly guiding the selection of said pictures is the relative level of “fugliness” exhibited by the celebrities’ appearances.  “Fugliness” is a portmanteau term; it refers to things or people which have quality of being being “fucking ugly.”  You may be forgiven if you find this term to be tiresome at best, since it’s one of the trashiest linguistic manglings extant on the Internet today.  The creators of the site, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan (the self-dubbed “Fug Girls”) make lots of shitty puns with this term–individuals are determined to be worthy of “fugging”; items of clothing judged to be founts of “fug”; outfits that are deemed marginally acceptable are deconstructed in order to figure out how to make them wholly attractive, in a process called “unfugging”; and so on.  This cheap wordplay is characteristic of the site’s writing, which tends to mistake heavy-handed sarcasm for wit.

Those of you who are familiar with the site are no doubt asking yourselves why I am bothering to criticize it now, since the “Go Fug Yourself” backlash is “so 2006.”  Were it not for recent events, I would agree with you.  While I’ve despised the site for a long time, it’s been in the same casual way that I despise gas station point-of-sale cologne displays, or Starbuck’s biscotti, or people who pronounce “forte” like “for-tay”–as one of the world’s many small yet avoidable evils.  However, this last iteration of “Fug Madness” opened my eyes to latent sexism and racism hidden behind the site’s usual misogynistic assholery.

“Fug Madness” is run in the same manner as the NCAA college basketball tournament–it is an elimination-based tournament that pits various celebrities against each other in brackets.  There are four brackets, each named after an iconic “fugly” celebrity–namely, Charo, Cher, Madonna, and Bjork.  Celebrities are individually ranked in order to determine which ones will face off, and there’s an Internet randomizer involved.  If this all sounds ridiculously ornate, that’s because it is.  The amount of energy that the Fug Girls put into organizing and maintaining this system is symptomatic of their lack of self-awareness regarding the entire exercise.  Sports teams are ranked based on their respective skills and performances; “Fug Madness” ratings are based on subjective perceptions of various celebrities’ failure to meet the Fug Girls’ standards of chicness and attractiveness.  It perpetuates the idea that it is a woman’s obligation to do a good job of being a sex object; it’s woman-on-woman violence at its worst.

This is real.

What’s so wrong with Bjork, or Madonna, or Cher, or Charo, anyway?  In their own ways, these women redefined what it means to be a woman in the public eye.  Bjork, Madonna, and Cher are all incredibly talented musicians and actresses, boundary-smashers who refused to fit into traditional entertainment industry molds.  (Okay, Madonna’s not that good of an actress–in movies.  But she did a bang-up job of playing herself in the doc “Truth or Dare.”)  Even ol’ Charo is a pretty talented guitarist and comedian (and one of the first Latina entertainers to make it in the U.S.)

Role model

The point is, these women should be celebrated, not denigrated.  And that’s the problem with “Go Fug Yourself” in a nutshell–its most common targets tend to be strong, unconventional women whose only crimes seem to be (in the eyes of the Fug Girls) straying from traditional gender norms.  Some of their favorite targets include brilliant actress (and noted androgyne) Tilda Swinton; Oscar-nominated actress (and icon of aggressive female sexuality) Sharon Stone; the magnificent Helena Bonham Carter; avant-garde bastard actress Chloe Sevigny; the delightfully off-kilter musician/actress Juliette Lewis; sly and intelligent actress Maggie Gyllenhaal; performance artist Lady Gaga; fearless musician/actress Courtney Love; and comedian/style icon Sarah Jessica Parker.

What do these women have in common?  Well, when surveying the list, the most noticeable commonality is the fact that most of these women are not conventionally attractive.  Don’t get me wrong–they’re better-looking than you or me, but by Hollywood standards, they’re straight up jolie laides.  They also have extremely distinctive personal styles, which tend to go against the grain of mainstream fashion.  Swinton is fond of futuristic, mannish clothing; Stone dresses in a flamboyant parody of old-fashioned stars like Rita Hayworth or Joan Crawford; Bonham Carter tends toward stylized, witchy couture; Sevigny wears bleeding edge styles; Lewis dresses like a rock star, because she is one; Gyllenhaal wears 70’s-style anti-chic; Gaga’s outfits are all elaborate jokes; Love just doesn’t care (in a good way) what you think of her; and Parker takes breath-taking risks.

Tilda Swinton, in a shoot for "Another Magazine."

Making fun of how any of these women look is pointless.  None of them are trying to look like Jessica Alba; indeed, their personal style is often predicated upon highlighting their unconventionality.  It’s like making fun of David Bowie for not sounding like AC/DC.  By mocking Parker or Sevigny for looking “weird,” the Fug Girls are merely demonstrating their cultural illiteracy.  Even worse, they’re enforcing sexist conceits of beauty.  They reserve their praise for dull, cookie-cutter cheerleaders like Reese Witherspoon and Amanda Seyfried–blondes with boobs and a high quotient of straight white male approval.  Through their very popular website, the Fug Girls reinforce the idea that the only valid metric of beauty is predicated upon traditional male standards of desirability.  In a culture where eating disorders, cutting, and other self-destructive behaviors run rampant among women, this is a very harmful idea to promote.

I mean, seriously, would you rather be Cher or Reese "Pudding" Witherspoon?

“But wait,” you’re thinking.  “The Fug Girls don’t just make fun of awesome bitches.  They also make fun of dumb skags like Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian!  You’re cherry-picking your examples.”

Ah, but I’m not.  While unconventional women come under frequent fire by the Fuggers, they’re also fond of a different sort of target–the easy target.  They enjoy making fun of clinically depressed, the mentally ill, and the drug-addicted.  Like the aforementioned Lohan and Kardashian, troubled women like Mischa Barton, Bai Ling, Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, and Tara Reid are common “Go Fug Yourself” targets.  It’s all too easy to make fun of them, since they often appear in a state of sartorial (and physical) distress.

Ha, ha, this woman's alcoholism is totally hilarious!

This needs to stop.  It’s not funny that Britney Spears had a nervous breakdown.  It’s not funny that Lindsay Lohan is a drug addict.  It’s not funny that body dysmorphic disorder has led attractive women like Simpson, Kardashian, and Heidi Montag to undergo surgical procedure after surgical procedure.  These women are mentally ill, and by criticizing their appearances, you’re feeding their disease.  This is exactly the same as if “Go Fug Yourself” posted pictures of the uproarious outfits sported by mental patients, or the misguided togs of the mentally disabled.  In other words, it’s not funny, it’s sick.  If you care about feminism at all, you should stop reading websites like “Go Fug Yourself.” They seem like innocent fun, but they’re actually extremely destructive.

Finally, I have to address the depiction of minorities on “Go Fug Yourself.”  Beyonce comes under scrutiny by the site often, due to her choice of “unflattering” ensembles.  This is another way of saying that Beyonce’s figure is a little fuller than the white, heteronormative standard.  Similarly ample African-American entertainers, like Leona Lewis, are sometimes criticized for wearing clothing that makes them look “dumpy” or “squat.”  The projecting of white standards of beauty onto these women is more than a little offensive.  Worse is the site’s “coverage” of Jennifer Lopez, which often takes the form of monologues written in a parody of Lopez’s persona.  These monologues are written in a sort of pidgin, generously sprinkled with Spanish malapropisms.  I’m not sure how the Fug Girls get away with this; it’s pretty much verbal minstrelry.  Perhaps it stems from the fact that “South Park” went there first?  I don’t get it.

Finally, we circle around to this year’s “Fug Madness.”  As mentioned above, the winner of this year’s “Fug Madness” was Amber Rose, an African-American socialite and model.  The runner-up was Barbadian singer Rihanna.  I have a huge problem with this.

Amber Rose.

Rihanna and Amber Rose are both unusually attractive women of color.  Neither of them fit the typical mold for female entertainers of color, much less female entertainers in general.  Neither of them can be easily classified–they’re both racially and culturally diverse.  Their personal style quotes a number of influences, from Robert Palmer videos to “Mad Max.”

Rihanna.

Both women enjoy flaunting their admittedly fantastic bodies.  This is entirely appropriate–they are, after all, a rock star and a model, respectively.  If rock stars and models aren’t allowed to wear exotic, glamorous clothing, who is?

I’m highly suspicious of the fact that these women were voted the “fugliest” celebrities of 2010.  It just doesn’t make any sense.  For one thing, both of them are actually quite well-dressed.  For another, could you really, rationally, accuse either of them of looking “fucking ugly” at any time?  Objectively, the answer is no.

Look at this ugly woman. Wow, she is so fucking ugly.

So why were these women voted the winners of “Fug Madness”?  The answers, I think, are “fucking ugly.”

Oh, look, another fucking ugly woman.

I can’t help but suspect that the Fug Girls and their readers find these women threatening.  They are amazingly beautiful, they’re culturally complex, they’re unconventionally chic, and they’re leading much cooler, much more fabulous lives then they are–or you are, or I am.  I also suspect that tearing these women down online won’t do much to dent their confidence.  However, if we really care about celebrating the unique and the beautiful in all of us, then we need to stop denigrating it in the larger culture.  “Go Fug Yourself” is stupid.  Quit reading it.

First of all, quit trying to hack things, weirdo.  You can’t hack a holiday or a life or your mom or nothing, I don’t care what Slate told you.  But I do have some Thanksgiving tips!

Thanksgiving is not that hard of a holiday.  All it is about is eating food and watching football.  There are no weird religious connotations or political issues to navigate, unless you are going to get weird about organic vs. free range crap, in which case you are Jonathan Safran Foer and you need to get off my lawn.

But holidays can still be awkward, because people can be weird about their families.  This is because of the nuclear family system, which will be torn down in two years if all goes according to my plan.  In its place will be a bunch of cults, by which I mean groups of relatives and friends who live in Melrose Place-esque complexes but with a garden instead of a pool and cool, inter-dependent relationships instead weird Tolstoy relationships.  I will accomplish this by destroying the economy and the environment, which will force the dissolution of the suburbs and thus of suburban nuclear family angst.  Don’t worry, my plan is already working!

Meet Your New Apocalypse Mom

In the meantime, however, I have some sweet tips.  They are divided according to whether you are going to be a host  or a guest or alone.  (Ha, ha, just kidding.  The joke here is that we are always essentially alone, a fact of which we become most aware when we are striving the hardest towards togetherness.  This is called situational irony.  If you would like to know whether your life sucks or not, you should try to measure how much situational irony it contains.  The more hilarious your life is, the more depressing it is.  Now that you know that, be careful not to think about it too much!)

Anyway, here are my Top 5 Hosting Hacks:*

1.  Go Potluck

Unless you are a really, really good cook, most of your food will not be that good.  It helps if you have some professional training, but even then, a few of your dishes are going to fall flat.  This chart breaks it down:

In any given dinner, one dish will be okay, another really good, another lousy, and the last good.  The reasons why might vary, but the formula never does.  Maybe it’s because you’ve never cooked something before, or you had too many things going at once, or you skimped on ingredient quality.  Who’s to say (besides your guests, to each other, in the car on the way home)?   This is not a big deal normally, but Thanksgiving is a meal freighted with expectation.  If the turkey is “just okay,” everybody will get sad, because they will decide it is a symbol of how their family is “just okay.”   The way to get around this is to potluck the flip out of your meal.  Have your guests each make their specialty, whether it’s candied yams or tomato jam or pot brownies.  This will make them really invested and competitive, resulting in lots of delicious food (and tasty savings for you!)  At the very least, you are sharing the blame, which is a good life technique in general.

2.  Don’t Make a Turkey

I know that everybody says they want to eat a turkey, but what they really want is to feel that the Barthian sign of the turkey is present.  To put it another way, people are way more excited by the idea of the turkey than by the turkey itself.  Turkeys are difficult to cook because their breeding has gotten all perverted.  Their meat is dry and flavorless and it’s almost impossible to cook it all to the same degree of doneness–either the breast meat is perfect and the dark meat is underdone or the dark meat is cooked well and the breast is dry as hell.  The turkey is really just an excuse to eat lots of stuffing and gravy, which people crave because they don’t eat them very often, because for some reason most people are embarrassed to make stuffing and graving a part of their regular diets even though they LOVE IT MORE THAN ANYTHING.  Perhaps they feel like they must “suffer” through the turkey in order to get to the sweet, sweet stuffing and gravy, and that if they just went around cooking stuffing and gravy all the time all willy-nilly-like, they would lose their Protestant Work Ethics and immediately turn into hobos, in which case they would never get their sweet, sweet stuffing and gravy anyway.  Or perhaps it’s the ritual of smelling the turkey all day and worrying about it that they like–anointing the fatted calf with oils and ungents and whatnot.  Or just the sweet visuals.  BEHOLD:

Here is my true solution to this problem: Make lamb or salmon or ham or chicken, something that actually tastes good.  But to appease weirdos, roast a neck or some giblets or whatever that you gank from somebody who’s actually purchased a turkey.  That way, the magical turkey smell will still be present while your guests sit around watching football.  Enhance this illusion by blowing up the above picture, framing it, and hanging it over the dinner table.  The important elements of the turkey illusion will still be maintained, without the pesky presence of the turkey itself to contend with.  If anybody questions you, lecture them about semiotics until they cry.  Then pass the stuffing.

3.  Bake, Bake, Bake

The other main things that people like about Thanksgiving are biscuits and dessert.  When the conversation stalls, stuff the silence with warm, buttery crumbs.  Example:

Some dad:  “I can’t wait to read ‘Going Rogue.’”

Some offspring:  “That’s dumb.  I hate you.  I hate life.  Do you understand life?”

You:  “I made pecan pie!”

Other guests:  “Eff yeah!”

Some offspring:  “This doesn’t change the fact that I hate you all.”

Some dad:  “Why I oughta–”

You:  “There’s real whipped cream!”

Some offspring:  “Oh, OK.”

Your cat, your dad, and your sibs all have one weakness . . .

4.  Watch ” The Beastmaster”

In this section, I was going to talk about the importance of background media–how it provides a handy  conversation piece, which is convenient, but also how sad it is that the art of conversation has declined to the point that we need external sources of entertainment in order to interact.  I was going to discuss how weird it is that Americans have collectively lost their social skills over the course of only two generations (just think–our grandparents used to get together for neighborhood cocktail parties and have weird Lions or Eagles clubs and just, you know, interact for fun, whereas us and our parents can’t get through a conversation without texting or fact-checking some dumb point via imdb.com, assuming we’re even having conversations, instead of just sitting around absorbing warm TV rays, which is crazy–we’re a nation of hikikomori.)  I was going to ask if anybody you know has actually gone on a real date in their life (”date night” doesn’t count),  and then I was going to contrast all this “The Internet and Media in General Are the End of Culture” sturm und drang with this awesome Clay Shirkey essay about how technology makes everybody crazy at first but then we adjust: just look at the Industrial Revolution, which made everybody just get drunk for a really long time before they figured out how to be awesome again, which is going to happen to us someday at some point.  But screw it–”The Beastmaster” is really good, whether it’s a crutch for interaction or not.  He’s a master of beasts, you know?  Look at him:

Get it together, animal friends. NOW.

He’s objectively cool, and it’s objectively okay to love him.  END TRANSMISSION.

5.  Act Right

Okay, here’s the deal: sometimes things don’t work out.  Sometimes, despite all your little “life hacks” and “time management tools” and “I-statements” and whatever, the course of true love does not run smooth.  That is to say, sometimes things are sad or awkward.  The turkey burns, or your uncle gets drunk, or your sister says the wrong thing at the wrong time and makes everybody else feel like shit.  These things happen.  And when they do, you have a choice: you can get all crushed and flail about and store up the bad feeling so that you can make some of your precocious art about it, like some poem about how nobody is real but you or whatever, or you could Act Right.  You can pretend that you don’t know what Acting Right entails, but that’s a flipping lie and you know it.  Acting Right means committing to the situation.  You accept that the situation is a bad situation, and you don’t lie to yourself about it.  You let it be sad.  Then you look at whether there is anything you can do to improve it, if there are any elements of the situation that are under your direct control.  Some might be, some might not.  Focus on those elements which you have power over, and exert that power.  It will mean doing things that you don’t want to do–it will mean making conversation with people you don’t want to talk to, or spending money you don’t really have to spare, or sucking up some crap you don’t want to take.  It will not feel good, and you will not receive points.  But you will have satisfaction, of a sort.  You will know that you did what needed to be done.  You will know that you are not a douchebag (see Fig. A.)

Fig. A

And you will give thanks.

*Seriously, I’m not doing tips for guests or loners.  If you are a guest to a Thanksgiving you don’t want to go to, simply arrive late and leave early.  If you are alone, get some takeout and eat it in the bathtub with lots of candles.  IT IS BOTH GOOD AND DISGUSTING AND COOL, WHICH IS A GOOD LIFE PLAN.

Look at these effing hipsters.

There are a small number of situations in which it might behoove you to pretend to be good at wine.  These are the situations:

1.  You are on a date with a man or lady and you want them to think you are “discerning” even though you are not discerning and you want them to think you are “sensual” even though you are not sensual.  People like to think that they are attracted to “discerning sensuals” even though that is code for “promiscuous snobs.”  When pursuing a long term relationship, it is to your advantage to present yourself as being more attractive than you actually are because then it is easier to trap someone into entering into a co-dependent spiral with you, after which you can present your true, repulsive self and enjoy the “intimacy” that ensues.  People would rather foster destructive psycho-sexual bonds with “that cultured man” than with “that man over there.”

Look at that cultured man!

2.  You are at some kind of company event with alcohol and you want your co-workers and superiors to think that you are “educated” and “have good taste” instead of that you are a “wino” and “have an alcohol problem.”  There is a fine line between these personality traits; I contend that it doesn’t really exist.  Middle-class people like to think that they are “scholars of viticulture” instead of “total alcoholics,” and the way that they propagate this myth is to make comments like “Woah, I can really taste the malolactic fermentation in this Chard” and “Straw wines are totally overrated, y’all.  Recioto della Valpolicella is the rich man’s Mad Dog 20/20.”  This strategy is actually amazingly effective, and allows your petit-bourgeois colleagues to act exactly like homeless people with no social repercussions.  So if you’re the kind of person who finds getting tanked in front of their boss “enjoyable” rather than “nerve-wracking,” and you’d like to be able to do this “fairly frequently” without implicating yourself as a “loser,” oenology may be for you!

Company event with drinking

3.  Same as above, except substitute “increasingly brittle wife” for “co-workers/boss.”

4.  You’re one of those people who like to be “on-trend” and “up on the latest craze” and “part of the zeitgeist.”  You like to talk about “seizing the cultural moment” and “the big buzz in the hive mind.”  If you’re not sure if you’re one of those people, here is a simple test.  Don’t lie.

a.  Have you ever, for any reason, worn a fedora on a day other than Oct. 31?  (NO EXCEPTIONS FOR ANYBODY OTHER THAN DON DRAPER.)

b.   (Ladies only) Have you ever worn a bandanna on your head in a non-housecleaning/painting context?

c.  How many times have you gone swing dancing?  Is it “a bunch”?

d.  Do you own a Jetta?  Have you in the past?

e.   Have you ever owned a “crazy” pet, such as a pig or ferret?

f.  Do you want to work in PR?  Do you already?

Congratulations!  If you answered yes to two or more of these questions, you don’t have a personality: you have a conglomeration of current and outdated marketing campaigns.  In the part of your leg where a personality would normally live, you have a Tazmanian devil tattoo.  If you think wine is “cool” and that it might be a good “hobby/personality trait” to develop, this article can help you.

Black hole of marketing trends

Now that we’ve established all the reasons that one might need to pretend to be an aficionado*, on with the “life hacks” and trickses!

Trick#1: Ask Dumb Questions

Here are some dumb questions:

1.  “Was this wine estate-bottled?”  Estate bottling means that the wine in question was grown, made, and bottled all by the same company.  The vintner has controlled the wine-making process from top to bottom.  This is not as significant a factor as people like to think it is.  Small wineries like to use “estate bottled” as a kind of folksy marketing ploy, much in the same way that potato chip or soap companies like to have little stories on the backs of their products about how it all started in Old Man McManus’s penny kitchen or whatever.  The fact that their wine is estate bottled is supposed to mean that it is higher quality and more authentic.  This is not necessarily true–there are some great wines produced by committee–but, as with all snob hobbies, it’s important to pretend that you’re some kind of flipping historian from down home on the Grand Cru, i.e. that you are disgusted by the faintest whiff of fabrication and you just want things to be pure, man, like way back when it was just you and Iggy Pop hanging out in a basement, shooting heroin and rubbing noble rot all over each other’s faces while Emperor Lothair I sat in the corner and made rag rugs.

LOTHAIR I (as opposed to Lothair II)

2.  “Can I smell the cork?”  Smelling the cork proves nothing, but it looks fancy.  Ostensibly, the purpose of smelling the cork is to see if the wine is spoiled in some way, but the way you determine this is by smelling and tasting the wine, not the flipping cork.  If you wanted to know if a Twinkie was bad, would you ask to smell the wrapper?

3.  “Is this wine [adjective]?”  The fastest way to trick people into thinking you know something about a topic is to use some buzzwords.  So throw some adjectives around–it doesn’t really matter which ones, because–at heart–wine is always “wine-flavored.”  When faced with a bottle of wine, go ahead and ask if it’s “big” or “fruit-forward” or “possessive of slate-tinted undertones.”  You will always be safe if you remember that Merlots are “tannic,” Cabs  “complex,” Chards  either “oaky” or “crisp,” Pinots  “light and delicate,” Rieslings “apple-y,” Shirazes “berry-inflected,” Cote du Rhones “full-bodied” or “gamy,” and Zinfandels “fucking grape soda.”

I gave Zin to a baby once and the baby spat it out and said it was "too under-developed."

Trick #2:  Act like Martha Graham

I am so intense. I am so intense that my ghost has a ghost. This Malbec is fricking sweet.

Tasting wine is ultimately all about theatre–it’s the way you swirl the glass, peer at the label, swish the wine about in your mouth.  The way you lean back and hold your glass up to the light, twirling its delicate stem in order to watch the way the wine clings to the side of the glass, contemplating the colors hidden in its depths.  You roll your shoulders about, sighing and exhaling, rolling and closing your eyes in ecstasy.

In other words, it’s a big bullshit performance.  You have to act EXTREME and INTENSE and PASSIONATE and LIKE YOU INVENTED A NEW LANGUAGE OF MOVEMENT.  What you have to do is become Martha Graham.

Martha Graham was the Chuck Norris of dance.  Everything she did was unbelievably hardcore.  She started dancing when she was totally over the hill for a dancer (late twenties) and went on dancing on stage until she was 76.  At the point, she tried to kill herself with alcohol, because she was pissed that she was too old to dance.  She got wasted all the time until she was 79, after which she got her crap together and went on writing new ballets and choreographing until her death at 96!!!  She basically invented modern dance.  When she wasn’t freaking people out constantly she was freaking her young male co-stars.  She was totally awesome.

Watch this video below (start at 1:15.)

Her dancing is tense and visceral and very Expressionistic.  This is who you must become when you drink wine.  Manhandle that glass like it is some ripped avant garde dude.  Toss your head around like you are trying to rediscover your primal drives.  Flail around like this wine is reconfiguring your very relation to time and space.  People will think you are serious, rather than just a serious tippler.

Trick#3:  Engage in Some Hard-Core Negging

Negging is such an effective technique that it even works for THIS “man,” who is some fucked up shit my cat dreamed up.

This isn’t a very complicated trick, but it always works–not just in the case of wine, but in the case of LIFE ALL THE TIME.  All you have to do to impress/manipulate people is neg them a little bit.  People hate being negged because it makes them feel insecure.  Their solution for this is to try to impress you forever until you yield and validate them.  Just not being that into them makes them totally into you.  This is how to apply that to wine:

1.  “You’re having [name of wine]?  What an amusing choice!”

2. “I think it’s so admirable that you’re not really up on all the latest trends.  You always make such classic selections.  Some might call them boring, but I think they’re real homey.”

3.  “Oh you don’t know about [wine term]?  Hmm.”  Here is a nifty list of terms to use!  Make sure that you remember the meaning yourself before dropping them.  Try such bon mots as “I suspect the hand of carbonic maceration in this Lambrusco–it’s just a touch too sparkling,” or “What a charming monocepage!  I had no idea that a Grenache  could be so delicious on its own.”

Trick#4: Just Throw Money Around

So many tips!  Here they are:

1.  Build a wine cellar (or have one built.)  Spend tons of money making it all temperature controlled.  Make guests look at it every time they come over.  You’re not a souse, you’re an Edgar Allen Poe guy!

2.  Or you could install a wine rack.  This isn’t as impressive as a whole friggin’ cellar, but it still proves something important about you, namely that you have enough self-discipline to not drink a bottle of wine on the same day you buy it.  There’s an old, annoying wine saying that “Americans age wine in the backseat of their cars on the way back from the store.”  It is annoying because it is true.  If you have an actual wine shelf, and fill it with actual bottles of wine, and let them stay there for actual amounts of time, like a whole week or whatever, it will signal to people that you are a high-falutin’ collector.  Awestruck, they will start whispering questions to you about your collection, to which you will simply nod and smile, and say something about young wines being “too tightly knit,” which is why you need to allow them time to “bloom.”  You get extra points if you manage to talk about aging your wines in the exact way a pedophile might talk about a particularly hot 11-year-old girl.  In wine circles, this is not considered “creepy”; rather, it comes across as endearingly “European,” which is important because the whole goal of all wine people is to go back in time and get born in Europe, thereby becoming “actually European,” instead of just “aspirationally European.”

Aspirationally European

3.  Buy expensive wine.  Buy it in a restaurant, buy it for your parties, buy it at the store while a sexy individual looks on.  There are two great reasons to buy expensive wine: one, it makes you look committed to wine, because Americans equate money with love.  Two, wines over $30 always, always taste good.  If you spend the money, people will think you have good taste, because the product will be high-quality.  There’s an important exception to this rule, which is: never buy wine by the glass.  I don’t care if it costs $20; it will be bad unless it comes from a previously unopened bottle.  This is because wine by the glass usually comes from open bottles, which means the wine has been exposed to air.  A little air can be good for wines, but over time, it causes them to degrade.  It’s also a crappy value.

4.  Go to wine tastings.  That way you can casually mention that you go to wine tastings.  You will get to know the wait staff at the restaurants that host the tastings, which will increase your cred when you strategically take your date there.  He or she will feel like they’re really getting “a taste of the wine world’s underbelly,” although we all know that all they’ll be getting is “a taste of how customer service people are super willing to pretend to like people who are fiscally indiscreet.”

5.  Buy a Moleskine notebook and put your “tasting notes” in it.  Again, this speaks to the need to elevate wine-drinking from “carousing” to “total science, man.”  It’s a great prop for when you are out at bars alone: people will think you are a food critic, rather than just a guy or gal who can’t get a date and thus is drowning their sorrows.  A guy with a notebook isn’t a drunk; he’s a professional!

6.  Staying with the theme of props, you should also buy some handsomely photographed wine books.  Display in your home or upon your person.  Be all blase about them like an Antonioni character.  You’ll have to use a sander to scrape the babes off you.

Scraping babes off you

7.  If you are really poor and have no other option, you can always resort to . . . .

. . . buying wine with a cool label.  This is a very entry-level trick, and won’t work with advanced bourgeois people, but in a pinch it suffices.

Thus ends my guide to pretending to be good at wine.  I hope this was a helpful guide.  I hope it helps you hide your alcoholism from yourself, your family, and your friends.  Cheers!

*For a full discussion of why trying to be an aficionado turns you into a hell person, see The Sun Also Rises.

To describe a thing accurately, he thought, you must know its trajectory.  This is why he dropped everything he ever cared about.

He thought that if he did not tend it, and it still flourished, that it must be true.  But the only thing that ever lived in his garden was morning glory, and the only actions he ever performed were based on fear of consequences.

So he thought he was a morning glory and fear type of person, but actually, he was.  He did not have to be, but he happened to be, because he did not try to become anything else.

So he built for himself a robe of morning glory and burrs, and swanned around in it, shouting “I am the only realistic person who ever thought, lived, or felt!  Pale before me, for I am you.”

Then he was upset because no one liked his art.  So he wove strands of grass into it, saying, look, I have varied myself.  I have become more complicated.  Are my complications lovable?  I cannot speak to you until I have told you all about myself.

But the breadmakers and cobblers of his town disdained this, and so he built a castle out of morning glory and copper, and it burned him, and to him the burns said, I am real, because suffering is the most real thing, because it is the thing that always remains, when I am not trying to avoid it.  Only the unavoidable is real.

And no one wanted to go inside of his castle, because it was muggy inside, but he said, You are afraid of the truth.  No, they said, I am just avoiding your castle.  You will never avoid my castle, he replied.

And then he built a tin army, to make it true.  He made everyone work in his copper castle, for tin soldiers, and he said, How fortunate they are that I care so much about them -  I do not allow anyone to live in ignorance.  I am the epitome of reason.

Able Chip was a highly capable learner.  This is what he learned in five years:
1. How to speak
2. How to read
3. How to suffer
4. Colors

Face Moods

The next five years he spent learning the following:
1. Nothing is fair, to the extent that an obsession with fairness is seen as immaturity
2. Long division
3. Face moods
4. That his penis was, indeed, alive.

This is a girl and this is how girls are.

Then another five years, and the following:
1. Drugs
2. Love
3. Trade-offs – passion for survival, and so on
4. Are vaginas sentient?  Discuss.

LOOK A COLLEGE COLLEGE LOOK AT IT SAVING YOU

Then after that:
1. Hate
2. How hate eventually becomes indifference, to the extent that you no longer care about anything, because you do not, in your heart of hearts, think that you can truly affect anything
3. Shades of fear
4. Types of port/college

Let's go buy a house.

Then again:
1. That you can age
2. That truth is elusive
3. How settling feels
4. Carpenter ants

Let's go to work.

Then:
1. Affairs and their aftermath
2. Types of massages
3. How to process TPS reports
4. Under-eye softness

After this, Chip went crazy.  He went to the desert to draw and be naked.  He was naked and alone.  He tanned off all skin that did not appeal to him, that did not fit.  He became other to himself.  Then he ran still further.  He is jogging round the globe, sighing; I hear him in the night.

“What?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Okay.”

“I made you a death-trap.  It’s a fun trap!”

“Why did you do that?”

“If you don’t sit in it, I’m going to throw some babies in.”

“Why-for do you – what do you want?”

“I want you to sit in a death-trap.”

“Why do you want that?  What do you get out of it?”

“If I don’t make people sit in death-traps, I won’t have anything to do.  If people don’t have to sit in death-traps, then nothing I have ever done makes any sense.”

“Maybe you should change.”

“If I change it will mean that I am not inherently lovable.”

“But if you are not anyway, then what do you have to lose?  In fact, you may have everything to gain.  You could stop being crazy.”

“If I don’t believe in me, who will?”