Black at a White Party. No Drinking: Future Defies Social Convention While Longing for a Hot Nerd
I am on my way out the door. Tonight I have three parties to attend and a liaison with one of my favorite people on the planet, fresh from Los Angeles. Today is Day 15 without alcohol, exception the tequila shots a student bought me in Atlanta, the net effect of which were not drunkenness but a frigging hangover the next morning that plagued me well past sundown.
One of the parties is a “white party”, the mentioning of which prompts all my friends and family to ask various race-related questions. I am assuming it’s not a Klan rally, but if it is you bet your ass I’ll write about it. Regardless, I had a minor laundry emergency today, and while dressing found myself utterly without the eponymous clothing requirement. I will descend on this partie blanche clad entirely dans le noir. Naturally, if my host or fellow debaucherites ask me to leave, I will accuse them of racism.
I am also tempted to bring my messenger bag and tool with my Kindle. A gorgeous girl opened me on the subway the other day to ask about my Kindle—usually it’s homeless people, oddly, who ask me about the device—and she wanted to know if The Time Traveler’s Wife, which she had in her hand, was available. Time Traveler’s Wife was a fucking terrific book (and a movie so crappy words fail me), so we ended up in an enthralling conversation. An odalisk I am seeing also approached me to ask why I was carrying a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion in a bar. I don’t recommend it for everyone, nor does every book work. Psycho-Cybernetics, although a fantastic book, was extremely counter-productive. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian was excellent, as long as I didn’t mention the part where the one character gets sodomized to death.
So the main question for the evening is whether or not Future can a.) have enough willpower to abstain from drinking and cetera for the duration of the evening and b.) whether tripling up on parties and then some will even be fun without the chemical boosting. I predict strongly wanting to play Fallout 3 or Batman: Arkham Asylum by 0330. Actually, as usual, I’ll be WANTING to play Dragon Age: Origins, but that won’t happen until Bioware does whatever they need to do. Atlanta was delightful, but I wish I could have made it out to PAX.
Okay. Skin and whispers, serchez la femme, etc.
Tags: alcohol, batman, blood meridian, cormac mccarthy, david foster wallace, dragon age, dungeons and dragons, fallout 3, kindle, nerds, oblivion, psycho cybernetics, qualification, standards, video games
I’ve never heard anybody in the community not laude Psycho-Cybernetics. What made it counter productive? I’ve read it and found some stuff valid and other stuff innocuous.
I hate recommending any kind of self-help books. Not to state the obvious but there are a lot of idiots selling snake oil to other idiots in the self-help industry. It’s hard to recommend many of them to people with a clean conscience. Pretty much anything that pulls from NLP makes me cringe even though I had an NLP experience with Hypnotica that pretty much changed my life (and one of my best friends once said, “Tony Robbins is never wrong.”). One of the parts of the SUISC that always makes me wince is seeing otherwise intelligent people recommending garbage like Tolle for the two paragraphs of useful information the book contains.
Obviously there is a strong overlap between self-help and the SUISC because there is a lot of sense in the inactionable advice of “be confident”. Whatever path a person takes to reach his Truth is the best path for him to take. Whatever a person does to reconcile himself with the potential/real/imagined/imaginary misery of his existence, that is what he should do. For some people, this means sucking from the tit of mewing idiocy and joining the Church of Scientology. For some people, it means years of therapy. For some, it means attending a Love Systems boot camp.
I can’t speak for others, but the reason I recommend Maltz is mostly because he doesn’t seem as insane as insane as other self-help writers. I haven’t read the newer versions, but I actually LIKE where he goes off the deep end and ties his advice back to God. That said, some of his stuff still seems like madness. YMMV.
Oh, and the one community book I can recommend to anyone without any reservations* is The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida. The man’s a frigging genius.
*– I might bitch that it’s a shame that he’s not much of a writer, but only if I’m being EXTREMELY picky.