Penelope’s Crucifix, Part 3
I apologize for the delay. I hemmed and hawed over this entry for a while before abandoning it. I don’t like the notion that the moral of this story is that I got to spew vitriol all over some fat bitch’s face. I don’t like the notion of adding hate to the world for the hate’s own sake. But a lot of people contacted me and a few commented wanting to hear how this incident ended, so I’m going to finish the story in earnest. Pardon my unseemly combination of perfectionism and procrastination.
“Your eyes are still laughing!” the Circe said. ”You should be an actor,” she said. “I almost believe you.”
Appealing to her basic human nature didn’t work. If you don’t go to clubs and bars regularly you might not be aware that there’s this segment of the population with empathy levels that put them on par with Kony and Ted Bundy.
Saying something like, “Come on. You know you’re being a dick. Knock it off and come back to humanity,” doesn’t work with people like that. Perhaps I should have known. Perhaps I should have taken a cue from her tedious friends and the mixture of drunken haze with obvious bitterness. At some level I think I did, but I always try to make an appeal to people’s better graces.
At first.
But there would be no reconciliation, I had come to realize. There was but one course of action, and that was to cut her in a soft spot. A very soft spot. Soft because of all the ham she’d eaten that had tenderized that spot.
“I get it,” I said. I was still staring at my boots, and the words formed right as the intent solidified. “Your personality is just toxic because you’re so fat and disgusting.”
She took a step forward, and I knew I’d hit pay dirt. I braced myself for a meaty, wet palm across my face, but I stood my ground. “What the fuck did you just say?” she squealed. The air between us smelled faintly of pepperoni mixed with Red Bull vodkas.
“You know exactly what I said. You’re a disgusting blob of a person, and your friends are getting all the attention, and all of you know the score, so you just decided to go for scorched earth because the only way you’re going to eke any pleasure out of this evening is with a little bit of sadism.”
“Oh, you have me figured out, you’re so right. I’m so insulted,” she said. Her nostrils flared.
“That’s it. You don’t need to confirm it. Neither of us need to hear your friends talking shit behind your enormous ass to know they’re doing it. Get whatever pleasure you can from insulting an awesome guy. It can’t last. Because you know already how this is going to end. You see it every time you choke your pain with a tub of ice cream: whoever you end up with is going to be settling for you.”
“Oh, you know exactly how it is,” she said.
“I do. And so do you. Whether he’s a banker or a garbageman, you’re not what he had in mind. You’re no one’s first choice, because you’re a disgusting bitch. You probably weren’t even your parents’ first choice, if you knew your parents; you damned sure have no idea who your father, and neither does your whore of a mother.”
“Oh, yeah. You’re so right,” Circe said.
As I lit into her, Lefty walked over to see what was happening. Before I could see him or know he was there at all, Big Business yanked him by the shoulder. “No, no, no, no,” he said.
“What’s happening?” Lefty asked.
“Thompson’s ruining a bachelorette party,” Big Business said.
“Oh, cool,” Lefty said.
Back in gravy town, I said, “Wow. Zing. That’s what you got? You’re stupid and fat? Wow. Somewhere, there’s some guy who knows that he should have jerked off that night, because you’re a waste of time, a waste of a lot of space, a waste of oxygen, and a waste of the two pumps it took your dad to make you. This entire planet would be better off if you killed yourself quickly instead of the slow death by diabetes you’re planning right now. Burn in Hell, you cunt!”
Then I walked away. As I was heading to a different part of the venue I found Odysseus. He was clearly rattled. No surprise there. I told him that he could take whatever time he needed, and if he wanted to leave or come back or get one-on-one time with me, I would back whatever he decided.
The bachelorette party was in disarray. Sides had been chosen, from the looks of things. The fat chick was holding her ground, but some of the other girls were clearly spelling out that she was out of line, most notably the bachelorette. As I walked away to deal with other students, Circe approached Lefty, whom she remembered, and said, “Your friend is a huge asshole.”
Lefty said with his irrepressible smile, bright eyes, and a friendly wave, “I think your friends are leaving, you fat bitch!”
As I watched another student work magic with less bitchy girls, Odysseus came to me. Tears were pressing at the edges of his eyelids.
“I don’t think I can do this, Thompson,” he said.
“Dude, I understand,” I said. “Are you sure, though?”
“Yeah. I just. I was doing okay. But I just… I didn’t realize anyone could be that mean. I mean, for no reason. She just… I wasn’t prepared for anything like that.”
“Dude, I have great advice. I know what the right thing to say to you is. And you know, intellectually, that she’s a pin-prick and this is a moment when your ego needs to be resilient because, finally, that dumb bitch doesn’t matter. She doesn’t know you. She doesn’t know a fucking thing about you. And you can’t give her that kind of power. That’s the right answer.”
“I know, but–”
“But I’d be in jail if I were you.”
“What?”
“I would have headbutted her. I wanted to headbutt her just now, make her little pig nose explode all over her face.”
Odysseus laughed.
“What you’re going through, man, that’s the end of the fucking world. I am amazed you had the guts to show up at all, to be productive at all this weekend of all weekends. I’m fucking honored. I mean it. Honored. That you would choose my workshop to help you heal, and I am mortified that I wasn’t up to the task.”
“No, man, you’ve been great.”
“I know it’s not actually my fault, but you’re a top notch guy, and that girl was a monster. I repeat what I’ve already told you: any time, any way we can work it out, you let me know, and you’re welcome to whatever education I can give you. Understood?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I’ve since stayed in touch with Odysseus. He has been with other women since the workshop, and I don’t know if I have the stomach to take credit. He was already turning down sex. I only pointed out that women have a sixth sense for who’s getting laid, and he would be more attractive to women if he gave off the vibe of someone who treated sex like it wasn’t such a big deal. As you can see, that’s the sort of advice I can give out in the trailing end of a blog post. I’m happy for him, but more than that I hope he’s okay, that when the demons visit him in the dark of night he can find some solace in being one of the good ones.
Odysseus, the offer still stands, brother. I hope you’re kicking ass at all your endeavors.
Circe, wherever you are, I hope you are something less of a monster than the night I met you.
Penelope’s Crucifix, Part 2
Can you imagine the scent of Odysseus’s twisted potpourri of emotions this weekend, one year from his wife’s death? If you can, I salute you and bow my head to your experience with sorrow. There is so much sadness from the loss of his twelve year partner, the reservoir for all his love. There is anger and betrayal, too. They are there, flitting through the shadows in the temple of his heart and leaving tracks of blood in their wake. He’s unused to their passage. Odysseus isn’t an angry dude, you see. Quite to the contrary, centered would make for a perfect concise description.
“If you can’t do this, I understand,” I said to Odysseus. The break seemed too short now, the seconds seemed to be cheating.
“I’m good,” he said. “I need to learn this, figure this out.”
“If at any point you are not okay, let me know,” I said.
“I will,” he said. I looked into his eyes. No sheen. He would make it through the class. The night went well, and when he came into class he was all smiles. He wrote exhaustive notes on story-telling, on the right time to compliment, on the proper timing for sexual escalation both conversationally and physically. All the students left with eager looks in their eyes. When we gathered later in the night for the in-field portion, the others were gushing about Odysseus.
“He forgot something back in the classroom, and when he came back to us he had this incredibly beautiful Indian model with him, and she just loved him. He had approached her when he was back upstairs. We talked for a little bit, but she walked us nine blocks out of her way to show us a great Indian restaurant. It was so cool! It probably would have been easy to get her to stay for dinner with us– she didn’t seem all that eager to leave– but Odysseus got her number, and the food was really good!”
I smiled. I liked the world a little better if women were into Odysseus. Whether or not I deserved any credit whatsoever is a matter for debate, but I felt nonetheless very proud of him, although I’m unsure if such an emotion is even my place.
As usual, I patrolled the bar as my students approached girls. I had a wonderful conversation with a group of hilarious girls from Florida. I had an ongoing flirtation with a sexy pair of Koreans. Then I saw Odysseus and another student with a bachelorette party:
PRO-TIP: That girls on a bachelorette parties will be easy to bang is an urban myth. Yes, there will be some girls in some parties that are just sluts (God bless them), but for the most part they will not separate from the group. For girls that would be a grave insult to the bride-to-be, most of the time. They can be fun for flashy game– and you want to keep an eye peeled for the lusty looks around the room, especially as you’re being successful socially with girls in the orbit of the bachelorette party, but don’t be shocked if those girls won’t leave their friends for any reason outside the Cloverfield monster attacking, and maybe even then. If you’re really lucky, one of the girls in the group will reveal who the sluttiest girl is and explain if they have any pacts as a group to stay together– as you can imagine separating those girls from an explicit, spoken agreement is even tougher to penetrate (huh, huh) than the more general tacit and Byzantine laws that govern how girls define each other’s social worth and loyalty. Lucky you in that case. All this does not pertain to weddings themselves, which are a sperm-soaked other matter entirely.
There was the bride, two gorgeous bridesmaids, an ordinary looking bridesmaid, and a woman I am going to call Circe because, you see, someone turned her into a pig. Or a boar.
photo I took that night
I entered the group and surveyed the territory. My students, including Odysseus were flirting with the bachelorette and one of the gorgeous bridesmaids. The other gorgeous one was standing with her arms crossed looking for something better to do.
“Are you not entertained?” I asked her.
“No,” she said.
And so it went. I wish I could remember more of the conversation. I wasn’t in top form– which never feels great on workshop– and she seemed to be the sort of person whose aloofness was a well-practiced social strategy casually allowed due to the chest-seizing extremity of her beauty. I am no flawless pussy sniper. No matter how awesome and mind-bending some of my crazier exploits have been, they have always been accompanied by a fusillade of rejections, some of them quite withering. This one was merely the maintenance of icy disinterest and a careful aversion to my touch. I withdrew and returned to the instructors and used a pantomime finger to blow my pantomime brains out.
“Damn,” I said. “She was gorgeous. But whatever personality she has is locked in a vault, and I didn’t have the key.”
“Can’t win’em all, maniac,” Lefty said.
And so I went to work with my other students. It’s true. Rejection is a necessary element of getting better at seduction. Failure is integral to improving any skill. Live it. Love it.
I walked toward another student who was talking to a girl near the bar when a different student approached me and said, “Hey, man, you gotta go check on Odysseus. This girl started saying all this shit about him, that he was bald, that he shouldn’t be bald if he didn’t have cancer.”
“What‽” I said. Writing that just now I Googled interrobang specifically so I could have the perfect punctuation for that expletive of disbelief.
“Yeah. He told her not to joke about cancer because his wife died, and she kept saying he didn’t have a wife. He went downstairs. You gotta find him.”
Anger rode alongside hemoglobin in all my veins, and I sifted through bodies and faces as I searched for Odysseus. No dice. I could do the next best thing, though. The bachelorette party hadn’t moved, and new idiots had flown into their Venus fly-trap of hateful bullshit. I advanced on the pig. I know that being confrontational is rarely the way to effect strong action. Belligerence usually begets belligerence. When I spoke, my voice was fueled not with my contempt for this girl, but with my empathy for Odysseus. “Hey, I heard what you said. You really need to find Odysseus and apologize.” She looked at me and a fifth of a smirk bent her mouth. This wasn’t going to end well. She had made up her mind.
Let’s take a little trip over here to Theory Land. Back in the day, Mystery used to teach that you ought to approach the heinous girls in the group first because they would be grateful for the attention and the hot girls would be put out at the lack of attention. By the time you shifted to the hot girls the beast women would be on your side and you’d have a smoother time getting the girls you actually wanted. This was a good theory. In truth, hot girls would often just get fed up and look around and use their social weight to drag the rest of the group off, or the fat girls would do the same once they realized they’d been pawned off. Sometimes it worked, and it was beautiful, but just as often you could just isolate the girl you wanted, and she could handle the group’s logistics. In this instance, the student inadvertently went old school, but the real problem was that he was that neither of them were calibrated enough to know the fat girl was prepared to take her weight issues out on the world that night. I got some sense of her being an asshole when I first approached her hot friend, but that’s normal because the entering wingman always inherits the value of the guys already in the interaction. Turning around girls who are teetering over the edge is how I pay my rent; it just didn’t happen here. So when you read the events below, take note:
a.) If I had been more sensitive to the Circe’s belligerence– which I felt upon entering– I could have probably changed the night. I was too focused on getting interest from her beautiful friend and had a knee-jerk, impatient response to Circe. Looking back, I am certain I could have made the night a little better for the her and thus for everyone involved. Instead, well… we’re getting to that.
b.) The same goes for either student. Except they were students, both with fairly limited experience in lounges/bars/night clubs and one night of experience using LS, so it’s unfair to expect them to see the cracks in the foundation.
By the time I returned to seek apologies, she had already had enough of being something resembling a nice person. She was pissing gasoline on everyone’s campfires, and she had run out of fucks to give. All this went through my head in an instant when I saw the smug look on the Circe’s face. I was undaunted. ”I know you were just being drunk and fucking around, but you really crossed a line, and you can make it right.”
“Oh, I’m suuuch a bitch,” she said.
“Are you serious‽” I said. Fury was bubbling beneath the surface, but my tone was still plaintive. “His wife died a year ago. This weekend. Of cancer. It’s a horrible thing. You know this. You need to own your shit and apologize.”
“You’re fucking ridiculous,” she said. Her tone was wavering. She sounded tipsy but not drunk, but she might just be an All-Pro drinker like me. “Your voice is mad, but your eyes are laughing. He didn’t have a wife, and she didn’t have cancer. You’re laughing with your eyes!”
The guy hitting on the friends piped up, “Hey, man, these girls–”
“The fuck about these girls, man? Did you not hear what this one said to my friend? What if she’d said it about someone you care about?” I pointed to the friends, including the two hot ones, who were huddling together uncomfortably. Silently. “You should be jumping down her throat and either dragging her out or explaining in no uncertain terms that she is out of line.”
“Your eyes are still laughing!” the Circe said.
No, they weren’t. “Instead you just stand there. You should be ashamed of yourselves. I hope you are, despite being too pussy to say anything right now.”
“You should be an actor,” she said. “I almost believe you.”
I remember staring at her fat belly. Appealing to her empathy didn’t work. Calling her out didn’t work. This wouldn’t work either. But it would damned sure hit her in the teeth. It was time to ruin their night…
The final chapter: Penelope’s Crucifix, Part 3
Penelope’s Crucifix, Part 1
It makes me sad to write one of these again so close on the heels of my last tale from the trenches of a Love Systems workshop.If you’re just joining us, the friend of a girl I was hitting on last week said I reminded her of James Holmes, the suspect in the Aurora, CO shootings during the Dark Knight Rises premier last weekend. Let’s be clear: I’m not suggesting for a moment my shock at hearing what that woman said last week is comparable to anything that has transpired in Colorado. My most abject sympathies extend to the families who have to sift through all the shattered pieces of their hearts gathered together in collective misery. Nasty words hit me. Words ain’t bullets. It is because of those extended sympathies that I was so aghast to hear such a grave comparison spat in such a trivial way. As in act of expression I believed it in the poorest of taste and a sign of the worst class, the worst reflection of parenting. I was wrong. I have a student this weekend we’ll call Odysseus. I don’t want to compromise his identity for reasons that will soon become clear, but I will attempt to furnish you with a mental image suitable to the man. He is an acupuncturist, and he sells herbal medicines. He practices meditation. He exudes an air of relaxation and warmth. He’s one of those people who is instantly likable. When he introduced himself on the first day of class, he announced it was a year to the day that his wife had died of lung cancer. He just didn’t want to sit still, so he came to my class to learn how to interact with women again in a way that is both romantic and sexual. Preferably both. A few women in his life have offered him their bodies since his wife died– I know not the extent to which they offered their hearts– but he has eschewed their advances in an effort to honor the extent to which his heart still ached for his wife. That is why I call him Odysseus, for his ability to resist the sirens’ call.
my student from this weekend, pictured, lashed to the mast
But it’s not that simple. I didn’t tell you everything, just as he didn’t tell the class everything. When we took our first break the class was empty, and I was offering the helpful relationship hint that was on my mind at the time. “You have to make an effort to change up the routine, especially if the routine is passive,” I said. “If you two love movies or, like my girlfriend and me, you like video games, you have to take special care to go out. To go to a museum or go dancing or rock climb or something that isn’t the advancing national habit to sit and absorb all life through a screen.” “What if it’s active,” Odysseus said, “like a sport or hiking or something?” “Even so. I’d say that then you should do something where you can slow down and appreciate time together. Keep both yourselves guessing. Maybe a picnic or a museum trip.” As I spoke, a whir of caution vibrated in the back of my mind. It’s hard to avoid relationship talk when you’re teaching a course on relationships, but it still made me uncomfortable. If I were in his shoes, I would be a wreck. I cry during movie trailers. I cried in Toy Story 3, Tarzan, The Notebook, Les Miserables, and the first time I heard “I Love the Way You Lie” on the radio during a San Francisco sunset. Also at the end of Thor because I am lame. Seriously. There weren’t full blown tears and mascara running down my face, but I definitely had to wipe the brine away. At the end of United 93 and again after Warrior I was truly a wreck. I was sobbing with heaving breaths, rocked to my core by events that never happened, people never born. Real life can rarely if ever hit me with such force. But I’ve never been married, never raised a baby girl like Odysseus. She’s four, and they live in the city together. Imagine you’ve found the woman of your dreams. You marry her, and you love her, and she turns you on, and you think you’ve won the game of life, like maybe you had cheat codes or something. Eight years in, the stork drops an A-bomb of love in your life, and you have a little girl who takes the prism of this world’s possibilities and focuses everything into a laser of purpose: it’s all for her. First, it’s cancer. Then it was cancer. During a natural lull in our conversation, Odysseus said, “Since we’re on break, I wanna fill you in on the rest of my story, something I didn’t feel comfortable telling the class. The same day I found out my wife died of cancer I found out she was in love with another man. And she was carrying his child.” To be continued…
IMPORTANT: A Disease Sweeping the Globe
Big Business and I were flirting with some girls, and I admit my yellow fever was overtaking my senses. Some guys mistakenly believe that guys like Starlight and me, who are afflicted with a taste for Asian girls above all other contenders, think ALL Asian girls are in fact Asian hotties. This is not so. To wit, my girlfriend’s roommate is– this is true– closely related to the monsters that kids think hide under their beds at night. But with a worse personality. That said, sometimes I will look at a girl, want a girl, and I KNOW it’s just my body’s tendency to give Asian girls a second and third glance. There have been more than a few times when I’ve looked at some 6 and said to my wingman, “Wow. This is why I don’t trust my yellow fever.”
This wasn’t quite one of those times. This girl was zaftig, clearly a week of pizza away from being fat, but now just squarely in the realm of big-boobed and curvy. She was Australian and of Chinese descent. Things were heating up– or so I tell myself– when her friend pulled her away, doing a pee-pee dance to signify she needed to go to the bathroom.
“Ugh,” I told Big Business. “She was so hot!”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Dude?”
“I know, I know. A little thick. But I just wanted to get in there and motorboat the shit out of her,” I said.
“I wasn’t thinking about her weight, homeboy. Didn’t you notice that she had Accelerated Gene Entropy?”
I gasped. So much of my conversation with the Asian chick made sense. That explained it.
“You think?” I asked Big Business, still struggling to handle how I had missed the obvious signs.
“True story.”
That’s how close I came. You’ve probably been there yourself, maybe using alcohol to mask your body’s natural desire to run far, run fast. Your body knows better. You see it more and more these days. There used to be a time when people with Accelerated Gene Entropy (AGE) wouldn’t go out to nighttime hotspots, but times, they have a-changed.
Sometimes the signs of AGE are subtle as the disease affects different people differently. Asians, Indians, and blacks are notably spared some of the most harmful effects of this affliction, but once the disease reaches its final stages, called Optical Limit Deficiency (OLD) by the medical community, no one is spared.
I’m sorry if I’ve spoiled your weekend by reporting on this phenomenon. It makes me no happier to write about it than it does for you to read it. Good luck avoiding girls in the advanced stages of AGE this weekend.
Love Systems in the Washington Examiner
A reporter stopped by my workshop in Washington DC last weekend, which resulted in this review of Love Systems in the Washington Examiner.
Quoth she:
“At the end of each day, all of the guys go home and prepare for a night out at the hottest local bars to utilize the skills they learned. The next day starts off with a debrief of the previous night’s activities then more lessons and tips. The guys get another chance to try out the skills they learned with the Love Systems instructor providing tips and guidance throughout the night. The final day consists of even more lessons and tips, including seduction, one night stands and image and identity. As many previous boot camp members have said, your dating life ‘will not be the same after attending a boot camp.’”
I’m just sad she couldn’t make it to more of the workshop so she could actually see the mind-blowing changes we LS instructors see over the tiniest time frames.
DC was a great workshop. Some truly awesome guys were on board. Granted, I respect all of our students for taking that hard look in the mirror and daring to take steps toward healing such a raw wound in their spirits, but every now and then we get a group that is greater than the sum of its inspiring parts. It was such a neat group that I actually summoned the guys from the last DC workshop to connect with my heroes from this last weekend because I wanted them all to be each other’s very best wingmen.
Fingers crossed about the guys later on today in my NYC workshop. Oh, and if you’re in the New York area, this is my second to last workshop in a long, long while, so you should either run to get the last spot this weekend or sign up for the one in late October.
Rejection: A Case Study in Disgust
Mystery teaching that he could go 5 for 5 was one of the most toxic pieces of education ever issued by someone in the community. In my classes I am quick to dispel the notion that I am going to be walking out of the venue like the Pied Piper of pussy. Far from it. I get rejected all the time. Accepting, embracing, and internalizing the inevitability of rejection is so central to my teaching that it’s the second thing my students hear about after everyone introduces themselves.
Saturday night was special, though.
As I was talking to my DC students I saw a truly stunning black woman. She was wearing a red dress that was more of a sheath, and the inner fringes of her hair were dyed pink. Her eyes had a vaguely Asiatic quality, and her skin was the color of caramel and milk. I grabbed her by the wrist and said, “You are stunning. What’s your name?” She gave me a once over and sneered before beginning to pull away. No sweat. Hardly the first time that’s happened. (See Rule #9: Everything I Say is Right; Everything is Going According to Plan). Again: rejection is just another part of the game.
“To be continued,” I said, and she smiled as she looked back.
Later on, she passed as I was in conversation with some girls, and I immediately ejected to pursue her. I forget what I said to reengage, but she was having none of it. When this happens, a switch goes off. I will usually just plow forward because 20% of the time I can turn it around. 60% of the time I’ll just be so persistent the girl and her group have no choice but to leave. 19% of the time the girl will say something so awful that I unleash every savory combination of hate and wit I can muster on the girl in question. Sometimes THIS is a boundary establishment so powerful that it turns the set around. I’m rarely going for that, though. I’m usually trying to ruin the girl’s night at that point. It’s not solid game, but I’m not a perfect person.
Then 1% of the time a girl sends MY night into a talespin. Maybe this was comeuppance for the time I destroyed the fat girl. Or the time I convinced a girl I was a British Marine and never changed my story even though she was falling for me. Or any number of times I was a fuckhead.
This was late on Saturday night, officially early Sunday morning, 22 July 2012. The day before I had woken up and discovered the awful news about the Batman Massacre in Aurora, CO. Anyone who knows me knows I can be a pretty intense guy, and that story fucking leveled me, and I just cried and prayed and tried to make sense of the world, tried to see the slivers of light in the dark canopy that seemed to envelop the world. I’m getting misty typing about it right now.
The girl’s friend was tired of me hitting on the black stunner. She had been cock-blocking with eye-rolling to that point. She said, “You know who he reminds me of?” she asked her friend.
Stunner stayed quiet but gave a receptive look.
“He remind me of that guy in the Colorado shooting, James Holmes.”
I could barely process what I was hearing. This wasn’t rejection. This was social violation just under physical assault.
“Yeah. Nigga called himself the Joker. Turned himself into the police with his hair dyed red. This that kind of dude, see?”
And of course I ate the frame for breakfast. Rule #9 out the window. Hate and confusion squirted through me with every systole. I just stared at her.
“See? This nigga psycho like that,” the friend said.
One of the students came over to me, “Have you seen Michelle?” he asked me.
I looked at him and said, “You don’t want any part of these girls, man. This is a fucking war zone. These girls are bad news. Bad people.”
I think my lips curled into a scowl. I’m pretty quick. I’ve honed my responses with drunk hecklers in New York’s stand-up scene. I’ve been in thousands of sets in a few dozen cities. One of the most consistent compliments I get is how quick I am. I was dumbfounded though. I was found dumb. I couldn’t process what an evil, disgusting thing this girl had just said. It was so mortifying, so utterly classless, I couldn’t muster a response.
The correct thing to do in this situation is to slug her, I thought. This is such a wild social violation that it demands a brutal response. I should scream and yell at a minimum and, truly, drive my elbow into her fucking temple. Then I prove her right, of course. She has engineered a wildly effective double bind and completely neutered me. Nothing I can do will win this set, and no response will do anything but prove her point.
I don’t really remember what happened that made them leave. I stuck it out, because I just refuse to bow to social pressure, also because she had more or less rooted me where I was standing.
After they walked away, the dude they had been sitting with was still there.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“Yeah. Fuck those bitches,” he said.
“Did you hear what she said to me?”
“No,” he said, “But they’re retarded. Why you wanna come out if you don’t wanna have fun? Stupid. The ugly one’s my girlfriend’s cousin. The fuck am I supposed to do, you know?”
I toasted him and another dude with whom I had discussed the black stunner earlier. Later on I used the conversaton with a gorgeous girl who was appalled and seemed ready to kill the girl for saying that. This girl was, among other things, a boxer. Her forearms were corded with muscle, and her triceps rose from her arms as she held me hand. Even though my feelings were still hurt– or whatever you’d call the weird, horrified fucked up emotion I was working through– I had to restrain this drunk beauty from scouring the bar for the asshole cock-block and trying to rip her throat out.
Usually in this situation I would be brimming with comebacks. Obviously I should not have let it get to me. Duh. She’s a random in a bar. She doesn’t matter. To even say something like that automatically makes her so far beneath me that she doesn’t rate consideration. But instead of being a misquito buzzing in my ear she was more like a black widow on my neck.
What would you have said or done in that situation?
Sydney, Australia: Still There
This last trip to Australia left a rotten taste in my mouth. I’ll start with the good stuff:
(All the above images are mine and taken by me and are published under a Creative Commons license, freely usable with proper attribution.)
There are a lot of beautiful Asian women in Sydney. That part I liked a lot. Australia is also one of those places where being laid back appears to be the rule. There’s a general atmosphere of relaxation that sometimes dips into what might be deemed languor. There’s also a vibrant night life with all the granular distinctions in quality you’d expect to find in a large city. I think my favorite site is the stretch in King’s Cross where Hugo’s and the World Bar sit. Hugo’s is for fancy fucks. We didn’t get there this trip, but I visited on my last Sydney adventure, and I was impressed with the quality of women it attracted. Right across the street is the World Bar, where you go if you are getting too smashed for Hugo’s or if you aren’t pretty enough/vaginaed enough to get in. It always tickles me to see what sorts of rat nests crop up next to places reserved for the pretty folks.
That said, fuck Sydney. Amusement aside, fuck Sydney right in its stupid goat ass. If we’d booked enough spots, Sydney would have been at the tail end of a raging Asian adventure, no doubt accompanied by Starlight, where we would have, as usual, done our best to leave Singapore and Hong Kong as smoking ruins. That didn’t happen, so Sydney was it. We had a terrific crop of students– minus the one guy who decided he couldn’t hack it and bailed after the first night (it happens)– so that wasn’t it. No, I think the right place to begin railing against Sydney is with the prices. I’m not the sort of person for whom money is no object. No, sir, money is QUITE an object for me, a veritable albatross dangling around my neck and slapping my knees while I try to walk. When I have to pay $16 USD for a standard English breakfast, something is broken. Locals say the domestic salaries make the absurd prices a non-issue, but that doesn’t remove the sting. I know there are more expensive cities, guys. I’ve been to London and Stockholm, and I live in New York. I guess that’s the thing that grated on me: Sydney may be the largest city in Oz, but it doesn’t have that sizzle that forces you to nod in agreement with every purchase and say, “Well, yes, but then again I do live HERE, so it’s okay.” In Sydney the prices just seemed like a cruel joke. Chicago is cheaper AND cooler.
Then there are the fucking humans. The women were lovely, to be sure, and for the most part the men were pleasant, too. But the anomalies stood out. It’s like every place we went had at least one Long Island/ Jersey Shore refugee with a snoot full and a yin for violence. After seeing two fights break out in the same evening, I started to feel less safe in Sydney than I do walking down the streets of Manhattan! Since the men can be dick monsters, the security, of course, has to step up their game. If there’s any reason I’d never return to Sydney, it’s the security at night. Don’t read this and take it to mean I don’t understand how the velvet rope game is played. I’m not saying the mean, mean man yelled at me when I was trying to get into S&L in the Meat Packing District without a girl to my credit. No, I’m talking about just the overall attitude. The smugness. The willingness to discard good and eager business for what seemed like arbitrary reasons. This is my favorite exchange, from the Orient Hotel. I was walking with two girls to catch up with the workshop students. It was about 2:15am, so most things were still open, even if they had already started to die down. The girls had walked ahead of me and were already returning.
GIRLS “They’re not letting anyone in.”
ME “You’re kidding. Lemme try.”
I walk to the entrance, and the bouncer is shaking his head at me. One of the two girls I have next to me is pretty hot, although she’s brown, which makes a difference in Australia. Did I not mention that there’s a casual, acceptable racism boiling under the surface of the country? Once I heard about this from a girl I used to date there I confirmed it with every single Asian and Indian girl I talked to. Racism can be hilarious, but only when there’s a punchline. In Australia I’ve seen it empirically affect my ability to enter a club or bar, and I have it on many points of strong authority that it affects hiring and promotion practices even more dramatically than in the U.S.
ME “Hey, man, it’s my first day in Sydney. I’m still on New York time. All my friends are inside, and I don’t have a cell phone. You gotta let me in.”
I’d never try something like this with a bouncer at, say, Hugo’s or the Ivy. This was just a hotel bar. The place we went after the place we went.
BOUNCER “Sorry, mate. You’re outta luck tonight, then.”
ME “Come on, man. Literally my only tendrils of connection in Australia are behind you. I’m in a foreign country at night, and if you don’t let me in I’ll be lost and out of my depth.”
BOUNCER “Not gonna happen.”
ME “You’re just being cold. Human to human, you know it’s not going to make a difference. In my shoes you’d make the same pleas,”
BOUNCER “It’s a cold, cold world, mate.”
I was going to try for more, but the girls escorted me to an all-night dinner place. If a bomb explodes the Orient Hotel, don’t be shocked if I’ve gone underground.
I was set to write off Sydney entirely, but then I saw the Vivid Sydney display.
Holy.
Shit.
That was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life. I almost didn’t go at all, but I was forced out of bed and into my clothes despite it being a Monday, aka the Love Systems instructor Sabbath. I am ridiculously glad I did, too. Vivid Sydney is like the Grand Canyon in that no image or movie you see can quite capture how amazing it is. It was a perfect collaboration of graphics, animation, architecture, music, and city planning. I have a strong mind to plan a trip next year explicitly to catch the show several nights in a row. Here’s the premise: different artists and design firms come together and blast their ideas on different buildings. It sounds so simple, but I found myself wishing every city had something like this. I mean, I would pay good money to see some crazy ass communist propaganda blasted against the Statue of Liberty or seeing an anime-style show that leaps around one of the buildings in the South Street Seaport. There were other things besides the lights on the buildings, but none of them were skull-singing affairs.
So there you go. Sydney sucked, except the women were great and I saw one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life, which definitely did not suck. So Sydney was actually pretty awesome. Go figure.
Video Interview with David Tian of Aura Dating Academy
I can’t say enough nice things about David Tian without venturing into seeming hyperbole. If you’ve never read his blog, you should. He is incredibly smart, and he understands the intricacies of seduction and game and girls with nuance and depth. When I was last in Singapore, he and I recorded an interview in front of a standing room only crowd, and it went very, very long. I think there should be more videos, and when there are I’ll update this post accordingly. Anyway, for the time being, here’s the link to their location on the Aura dating blog, and here are the videos themselves:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Oh, hot chicks
This video made me giggle and grind my teeth at the same time.
Endorsement: Patrice O’Neal’s Elephant in the Room
If you’re a student of seduction, I HIGHLY recommend you watch Patrice O’Neal’s Elephant in the Room. It’s easy to find on YouTube, but it’s also available without fear of it being taken down on Netflix.
He has uncanny way of cutting through the truth of human interactions with the same piercing precision as old Chris Rock. He died last month. A damned shame.
If you can track down his Black Philip series from Sirius it OOZES advanced knowledge about seduction. But if you find it, it will be a TORRENT of information for you.
The Price of Mastery
A simple truth of the human experience is that if you want to be master something, you must learn to equate the glory and satisfaction of achievement with the sacrifice it took to get there. If that sounds like medicine too bitter to swallow, you are beginning a conversation that ends with a life of mediocrity. You can get good at something by dabbling, but to rise above the hobbyists and the amateurs, you need to cut something out. Remember, if it doesn’t suck or doesn’t hurt or isn’t inconvenient, it’s not sacrifice.
In most areas of life, you pay this cost with your social life.
My friend Dan is the finest guitar player I’ve ever met in person besides Keychain. Dan can play alongside Steve Vai and Joe Satriani and Dream Theater, and he does so with a smile on his face. When I asked him how he reached such a high level of skill, he mentioned that he had very few friends growing up; guitar was his life. At a high school reunion I was agog when someone I played water polo with said he was training to row crew in the 2008 Olympics. When he saw my obvious amazement, he said with dark mirth, “I better make it. I’ve given up everything for this. No one sees me. My family and friends don’t know me. My girlfriend broke up with me.”
Love Systems readers and students tend to come from the ranks of the intelligent and successful, so sacrificing short term pleasure in the name of long term achievement is nothing new to them. Some of you can perform medical procedures that would have been considered miracles a few decades ago. Maybe you have a legal library of Alexandria in your brain. Perhaps understanding and navigating the world of finance and money is something like breathing to you, or you speak code better than you speak your native language. To do these things you missed some parties (or all of them) and disappointed some friends (or all of them).
Ironically mastering social skills also demands sacrifice, but it’s a sacrifice in the opposite direction. To get really good at dating and sexing beautiful women, you need to let other areas slip, and only you know whether that opportunity cost can be justified by the smell of a girl’s lightly perfumed hair clouding your nose or a sweaty sex mist clouding your windows at night. You have to put less time into making money. You have to study less. Read less. You have to go out and approach the task of enjoying yourself around strangers like a job. If that doesn’t come naturally to you it can be as grueling as practicing scales or putting those 20 extra pounds on the weight bar, yet it must be done to some degree. Our instructors come from many different reference points. Braddock was popular in high school, played football, and joined a frat in college. I was a drama geek, played Dungeons and Dragons, and joined the Marine Corps. Some of us have battled depression, some poverty, some weight loss. We are a motley crew united by zeal and aptitude for success with women, an enthusiasm guided by an optimism that is fundamental to everyone in the company. And we all worked very hard to get where we are with women. Whatever our goals were starting out, the Love Systems instructors refused to accept anything but the best results, regardless of the cost. Some of us lost money, some of our grades plummeted, most hid from friends and family while we practiced learning how to understand people. Yet none of us would return to the old way of doing things. We were sleeping and are now awake.
There are two particular sacrifices I want to talk about before I send you back on your way. The first is the cost of learning seduction to your friendships, and the next is the cost in girls.
Know Who Your Friends Are
If you want to know someone, get to know the five people they spend the most time with. We naturally seek people who most closely reflect the way we see the world, and we perform the same service for them. This is almost a worthy subject for an entire newsletter, but the point is that when you make the decision to get better with women, you are changing a core aspect of your life. Moreover, “success with women” is not a small thing. You’re not going to get it by learning a few routines and buying some new clothes. Success with women is the sum of your psychological health, your lifestyle, and your skills. You will still be you when you look back at your path with Love Systems, but you will be changed beyond recognition for some people, especially those people you selected as friends due to toxic thoughts and behaviors of your own.
We all know those people. They’re the guys who say messed up things under the mask of “only joking” or “just being honest.” They’re the people who always have a reason why something can’t be done. They are the victims who assign every evil or misfortune to an external locus of control.
This might hit way too close to home for some of you. This guy might be your oldest friend. He might be your dad. He might be someone who was there for you in a real time of trial. I wish it was as easy as just saying you need to cut the fat from your life, and that means that jerk first. But life ain’t that simple, and if you didn’t have reservations about it you wouldn’t be a very good person. The truth is that most of us want to see ourselves as loyal in some capacity. No one wants to be the guy who sizes up his friends purely for their utility. For most people the answer is to compartmentalize those people and not invite them to situations where their presence won’t grate.
But beware of the friends who make you feel bad about yourself. Beware of the girls who do the same. If you find that you have friends (or even family) who make you feel worthless or unimportant, cut them loose as soon as possible. Your self-perception of loyalty will be little antidote to the poisonous wear and tear on the spirit that toxic friends and lovers provide. It may seem hard, and you may wonder what to do next, but if it wasn’t hard it wouldn’t be a sacrifice.
Do You Keep That Girl When You Find Her?
Love Systems works. It works so much so that I have to warn you about a crossroads you will reach after you commit to learning it. You will meet a girl who is cooler and smarter and hotter and better than any girl you dated, most likely. I’ve seen it over and over again. The sex will be amazing, you will laugh at each other’s jokes, and you will think, “I did it! I won the game!”
Yeah, sort of.
The thing is, there are an awful lot of incredible women out there, and this girl may not be the actual second coming of Aphrodite so much as one of the goddess’s handmaidens. As you improve yourself with Love Systems you will naturally become more alluring to a higher caliber of woman. It can be dazzling when it first happens, disorienting even. Some guys cash in their chips right there and then. I’ve attended weddings and met babies who were the product of my teaching.
I’ve also heard sad divorce stories and bought cases of beer for former students whose hearts were rent asunder by a girlfriend who wasn’t quite right. With a lot of these guys, since they stopped their learning when the first high quality girl came around, they never really internalized the Love Systems materials, never dug deep enough to become more attractive people overall instead of merely manifesting the traits of truly attractive men. I’m not judging. If what I’m saying resonates it’s because I speak with experience.
You have to make that call, and it’s a hard sacrifice to make. I believe in my bones that intimacy is the real meat of all this stuff, but it’s dangerous to be intimate with someone who’s a reflection of your worst self. Moreover, saying that your heart is wrong or misinformed is like shooting a bullet at the screen at the end of Good Will Hunting when Matt Damon says he’s got to go see about a girl. It’s counter to what most people have learned about love and intimacy. It’s a hard road that people who haven’t walked it might not understand. And that’s why it’s a sacrifice.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Some of you might be all the way through your journeys, and some of you might be just beginning. If you’re interested in learning more about how Love Systems makes men into masters,
here’s my upcoming workshop schedule:
16 – 18 March – New York
23-25 March – San Francisco
30 March – 1 April - Los Angeles
13-15 April – Washington DC
18-20 May – Singapore
25-27 May – Hong Kong
1-3 June – Sydney
I hope 2012 is the best year of your life yet.
Happy Hunting
Little Miracles #2: Polypropylene Underwear
Although it’s 81°F here in Singapore, back home in New York it’s 20°F. The days are falling from the calendar, and when I return to the USA, New York will be in its worst month, my birthday month, February. The bitch of winter. I’m not worried, though, because I have a secret weapon to fight the cold.
It’s called polypropylene. That link goes to the Amazon search for fabrics made of the stuff, but unless you’re itching to give me affiliate money (and why wouldn’t you be?), you don’t need to be overly concerned with clicking there. You can find polypropylene underwear at any Army Navy Surplus store in America.
I first learned about polypropylene when I was serving in the Marines. The winter of 2000 was a cold one, and the recruits were shown a rare mercy by the command (which the drill instructor staff, of course, took credit for) by being issued polypropylene underwear, a top and a bottom set for each recruit. At least that’s how it was for 1st Battalion. 3rd Battalion would probably tell you they were issued barbed wire underwear for training during the same period. What seemed horrific to us recruits was that we were not allowed to wear the stuff when we were undergoing the most strenuous outdoor training. This was true after recruit training as well, when our NCOs would check to see whether or not we were wearing the polypros because there was a risk of passing out from heat stroke in the winter weather because of how warm the things kept us.
I grew up in Florida and attended high school in New Hampshire. Some of my most vivid memories from boarding school are of trudging to class late in the morning as my body, especially my face, was pelted by miniature spears of ice. I remember sneering angrily at nature as my bike slipped and slided through snow on my way to a criminally early swim meet. Although I have lived through some cold winters, I was not born into it, and I have always hated it. I had worn long underwear before, and it definitely helps, but nothing ever solved the damned problem. When I learned about polypropylene, it was a seminal moment. Granted, recruit training had a lot of seminal moments, but the impacts from some lasted longer than others. I still wear polypropylene underwear when it gets cold, but I rarely* march in formation.
New York, where I’ve lived since 2004, has been the ultimate test space for my enthusiastic praise of polypros. Daily life has its share of miserable cold experiences when February comes, but the stuff officially made the cut to Little Miracle when I started performing stand-up comedy. Beginning comics need time, and many of the people who run shows around New York make the new talent pass out flyers to strangers on the streets. If you live in New York and have been in Times Square, you’ve probably seen my people. Some of those guys and girls are just working for a company, but a lot of them are hard-working comics trying to make it. The job is unpleasant enough as it is. You stand outside and bark at strangers who, by and large, seem to hate you. The cold, though, can make it into a soul-searing nightmare. I have stood outside in 10°F weather cursing the wind between overtures to strangers. If you want to get on that stage, though, you do what you gotta do. But I haven’t hated that assignment for a long time. Sure, my face gets cold, but I have a great jacket with a thick hood. And I have polypropylene underwear. I can stand around the entire day in weather that’s as cold as the continental United States has to offer and smile at what the elements throw my way.
I’ve never been to Alaska or Antarctica, never tested my thermal underwear against the likes of Nova Scotia, even. I’m sure in more dramatic environments more dramatic measures are called for, though. This blog, though, assumes you’re someone with access to considerable numbers of beautiful women, and that necessarily excludes extreme climates. If you’re living somewhere that gets freezing, your life will change drastically when you first start wearing polypropylene underwear.
Caveat Emptor
Women, of course, have their vanity to think about. I don’t really have a solution for you guys, except when you are slogging in jeans and a long jacket anyway, and looking cute isn’t your first priority. Men, also, need to recognize that these things work well, and if you wear them in a warmer environment (i.e. anywhere above 70°F), you are going to start sweating. It’s rare, but there have even been some Chicago and New York workshops where I’ve been forced to strip that layer away and check it with my outer coat.
Stay warm, readers. Now I’m going to head out and try to figure out how to handle the opposite problem as I lug my camera equipment all around Singapore looking for the perfect shot.
*– never
Little Miracles #1: Meditation
Little Miracles
I’m going to call the articles in this series little miracles because they are tiny changes in my life that have yielded huge returns. These are changes that hugely affect the way I live, and if I can share them with you guys and help you, I wanna do that.
The first thing I want to talk about is meditation.
No, Seriously, Meditation
There are a lot of schools of meditation. If you’ve learned your way and you haven’t seen the results I talk about in this post, I highly, highly recommend Vedic meditation specifically. That link goes to the New York Meditation Center, but I assume Vedic meditation is Vedic meditation.
I’ll start by saying I’m not a crystal-rubbing, tree-fucking sissy-pants. I put The Power of Now down the very first sentence he mentioned people’s crystal vibrations. Fuck your crystal vibrations. I was on board all the way up through then, but when I hear people talking about crystal vibrations I turn off. Heck, I’m a Christian, but when I hear people talk about the healing power of prayer I want to hit them with a bag of dicks (and then recommend a fucking specialist for their sick person). If you’re reading my blog there’s a really good chance you feel the same way.
So I want to talk to you about cold, hard results from meditation and why I am selling it to you. I’m not going to talk to you about feeling better or having more clarity. I’m not going to talk about calming your mind or handling stress better. All those things seem to have come from meditation, but I don’t trust woo-woo stuff, so I’m not going to sell you with that stuff. If you’re looking for those things, meditation helps, but it won’t make up for a lack of money, shitty relationships, and a life with poor diet and exercise.
No, I’m just going to talk two things that are just simple math.
First, with Vedic meditation, I sleep less. If I lag on meditation, it takes me about two weeks of forty minutes a day (two twenty minute sessions), but once I do that, I sleep about five hours a night and emerge completely rested. For reference purposes, I used to sleep eight hours a night, and if I got any less (and sometimes any more), I would be a mess. Daily meditation has added two hours and twenty minutes to every day of my life. That’s about 35 and a half extra days a year if you were wondering. By sitting still for twenty minutes twice a day.
As cool as that is, the next benefit is, to me, the better one. There are a lot of things I do that counteract a longer life. I drink a lot of soda. I have unprotected sex. I sometimes go to the Bronx. But I get by. No, this next benefit is a concrete counter to misery.
If you meditate, jet lag will be a thing of the past. The effect is nothing short of miraculous.
Flying to London or Hong Kong, Moscow or Sydney, I’ve always had terrible jet lag. For my entire life, when planning international travel, I’ve always had to plan for a day or two of lying around useless, waiting for my mind and body to right themselves before taking part in whatever brought me to foreign soil to begin with (usually the hard labor of banging the locals). The last time I flew to Asia was a couple months after my class at the New York Meditation Center. Even though meditation had already been doing wonders for me, I still mapped out my sleep, stayed up the night before my flight, and carefully timed when I fell asleep (and strictly avoided sleep) on the plane. I also meditated at my normal East Coast times. If that sounds like a lot of stuff to keep track of, it’s because it’s a lot of fucking stuff to keep track of! Now, my meditation teacher had told me that jet lag would no longer affect me, but I was skeptical.
Neither when I hit the ground in Singapore, nor when I returned to New York did I have even a whiff of jet lag.
As I type this I’m sitting in Singapore. I’ve been meditating for nearly a year, and I’m very conscious of its power. I did no sleep prep or control whatsoever. In fact, I stayed up late playing a few last games of League of Legends with my girlfriend and my Teamspeak crew. I woke up like normal, meditated before I left, caught my plane, meditated four times during the flights over, and slept when I felt like it. No jet lag whatsoever.
Amazing. I’ve gone from truly fearing jet lag, planning around it and looking at it as a major imposition on my travel plans to scoffing at the very possibility.
How Does It Work?
I don’t really witness for meditation much. If people are interested I’ll tell them about it, but as a rule I don’t like to offer advice to people who aren’t asking. This is probably because a lot of people pay me for advice, and I appreciate the time off. But some of my friends clearly need meditation, so when they’ve mentioned how they’re panicked about work or feel overloaded, I mention that there are real, tangible benefits to meditation. Keep in mind, I don’t mention that it will actually help with their stress and ability to see the world with more clarity. I certainly feel like that, but I can’t measure it, and I don’t want to make a promise around something so nebulous.
Sadly, their responses are invariably along the lines of, “I could never sit still long enough to meditate,” or, “I could never get my heads clear.”
These are good friends of mine who know me, yet they act like I am not always sifting through a mental maelstrom.
If that’s what you’re thinking, I sympathize, but let me describe meditation and see if I can give you a clearer picture of how it works.
First of all, you don’t have to get your head clear.
As I understand it, Vedic meditation can be best summed up as “returning to the mantra.” When I went to the New York Meditation Center, my teacher, a really nice gay man named Michael, took me in a back room (NOW is the appropriate time for sophomoric jokes) and gave me a mantra. He always pronounced it with a flicker of Indian accent: “manth-ra.” It’s a two-syllable nonsense word that he apparently chose based on what he knew of me from the questionnaire I’d filled out.
Then we sat still and were told to repeat the mantra in our minds over and over again. If we started thinking about cheeseburgers or the effects of the beholder’s central eye,* no problem, just return to the mantra. Don’t focus on it. Don’t commit to it. No words that evoke the idea of effort. Just return to it. When (not if) you start thinking about other things, just return to the mantra. Do this for 20 minutes.
Sometimes I think of story ideas, sometimes I think about sex, and sometimes I think about writing blog entries about meditation. It still works. Sometimes I zone out, and the 20 minutes is gone like two minutes. It feels a little like falling asleep. You enter that hypnagogic state between sleeping and waking, but after a while you accept that you’re not napping, even though you might be concerned that you are at first. Take a two minute rest to settle back into normal thoughts, and go on with your life.
That’s it.
Maybe there’s some magic behind the mantra, but I doubt it. I think I just taught you how to meditate. It seems important to pick a thing that has no meaning, so the mantra is anchored only to the task of meditating. This is why you don’t tell your friends your mantra EVER. No one should ever, ever know what your mantra is, because it should be something solely for the purpose of meditation. Hence the nonsense word. I think it’s also helpful, probably, to blend consonants, because they get murky in the mind, and that’s a good thing. I’ll say that again: it’s all good in the hood if your syllables smear all over each other. As long as you return to the mantra, you’re meditating. So a word like “skarshlem” or “blorwem” would be good because their syllables are smeary. Swedes are probably badass meditators.
There’s more to it than that. A lot more. I have not yet reached the state of meditation where I’m conscious when I’m asleep, which sounds cool but a little scary, and I have not yet reached the state where I’m meditating all the time, even when I’m walking around. That sounds fucking awesome, though. If I hit those points, I’ll definitely write about them, but for the time being, I have real, hard, measurable results, and I wanted to share them with you.
And I’m not a professional. I’m just someone who has seen real results from meditation. The thing is, you can get these results VERY quickly. Try it! Make up a mantra with the rules above. If you start daydreaming, just go back to the mantra. If you persist in daydreaming, you’re just being idle, but as long as you return to the mantra, you’re meditating.
If you do this twice a day for 20 minutes each time, I predict you will see measurable results. Maybe then look for a more advanced teacher like Michael, the guy at New York Meditation Center who taught me.
*– save vs. death!
A Screed Against Boredom
There’s a lot I want to say about this, but I just landed in Singapore last night. The light is fading, the girls’ shorts are very short, and I have an itchy camera finger.
The flight here from New York is a long one. You probably know that. Mine was about 22 hours. 13 from NYC to Tokyo, 8 from Tokyo to Singapore. A lot of people hear that and blow through puffed lips before saying, “That’s a long flight.” And it is. Which is why I did the same thing* I do whenever I have a lot of time to kill: I read. I watched some movies. I meditated as long as I could (about three hours altogether). All in all, my flight was the same as any other time sitting around. Periodically I got up and did some stretches and some push-ups. Yes, on a plane.
That’s not the point, though. Periodically I walked around the plane and saw people just sitting there with their eyes open. They were bored. BORED!
If you are bored, it’s your fault. There is no getting around it. There is just too much to do. There’s NOTHING you can write? There’s NOTHING you can practice? There’s NO MOVIE you want to watch? There’s NO PERFORMANCE you want to see? There’s NO BOOK you’re interested in? There’s NO VIDEO GAME you want to play?
When people tell me they’ve been bored, it half confounds and half angers me. If you are bored, you are mocking your mortality. What do I mean? I’ve only typed it ten thousand times:
YOU ARE GOING TO DIE ONE DAY!
In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl says the sum of his teaching is: “Live as if you were living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act.” Every moment is the meaning of life for you, reader. Every second you get to be the best you you can be. You’re bored? You’re not scared enough. Give away your money or jump out of a plane. If you’re bored, you’re naive.
There’s always something else to learn.
There’s always something else to win.
There’s always someone else to know.
When you shut down your options in any given moment it is because you have grown fat and happy on the satisfaction of an easy life.
If you’re bored, it’s your own damned fault.