Reductio

Men.

All we want is a fine piece of ass and some god damn respect. It’s all we want. And ALL of us want it. And there just ain’t enough fine ass and respect to go around. And thus the game board is set.

What ensues is some fucking bullshit. It would be funny if it wasn’t so much like, what’s the word? Oh yeah. HELL. We can talk all day about how it got this way. And at some point I’m sure I will. But the vantage point I’m harping on at this moment is from the streets. The nail stores, the liquor stores, the hair salons, the smoke shops, the massage places, the shitty optometrists and dentists that I suppose poor people go to? In fact, yeah, who GOES to these places? I certainly don’t know anyone who does, and yet they’re everywhere. Shitty little burned out places in every strip mall. Laundry places, dry cleaners, the occasional furniture store with the chain link sliding door thing that’s up most of the time these days.

Who goes to these places? Especially in a neighborhood like this, where the rent is sky high? Where the office buildings tower and the chic hotels and restaurants puff out their opulence, and the theaters buzz with action, and the car dealers move their Audis and Beemers? Who the fuck GOES to the shitty strip mall places?

Ah yes, the workers, the staff at the hotel, the waiters and bussers at the fancy restaurants, the nurses at the hospitals, the people who work in retail at the mall, the rabble.That’s who. They’re the ones patronizing these cheap, tacky, seedy stores. Got it.

But I’m off track. What I really want to say is that men, all we want is some fine ass and respect.

From the moment I saw my first playboy and my brain churned with opiates and my dick sizzled with a pleasure-imperative that can only be described as one-hundred-fucking-percent non-negotiable. And then that first smile from the cute girl on the bus ride to camp, the girl whose name, face and personal goddamn brand was drawn pure and freckled neat like a Disney character, teeth, ankles, pupils, pigtails, curves, neck, and nails, all in perfect golden harmony like a foolproof logo drawn by a sadistic God, telling me exactly how I was going to be voting with my hard-earned dollar. Girls like that are all over the fucking place. They grow up to be impossibly hot women that may as well be Sirens with clawed hands. And most of the time they ain’t smiling at you, and it makes a little boy crazy. That famous YMI ad that says Wanna Betta Butt? It really says Wanna Richer Boyfriend? But only women can see that message. The men remain stupid and mesmerized.

But it gets worse.

RESPECT. Which is really just a form of safety, without which you really don’t have a life, you can’t take a breath or enjoy anything. Without safety you’re in peril of losing it all, including the non-negotiable things, along with everything else, too. To get respect you are either born with it, or you fight for it, you win all of it, some of it, scraps of it, or almost none of it. If that happens, you’re dead, or crazy.

Every guy’s mind is swimming with candy-electric imperatives that confuse the hell out of us, and at some point, early on, the way you dress or look made the alphas call you out and pick on you. You take your blows, and promptly conform and dress like them and act like them and hope you can be one of them, or you opt to be one of the second echelon wannabes; or you refuse to even fight and instead find a tribe of misfits and gain safety that way, detaching from the more animal and urgent and self-evident fun and pleasures that belong by right of strength to the alphas, and you retreat into the realm of the cerebral, the escapism, the abstract. One way or another you’re going to find that safety, you have to, and some respect, you must, and once you get it, you’ll have a second to breathe, and then scan around and assess the damage, and see which ass is the finest possible ass available to you. You’d better be ok with it, or else it’s back to the fucking drawing board.

It sure helps to be hot and smart. Not ugly and dumb. The hot smart people got that way only because somewhere in the past some guy had major balls and took massive action to earn huge respect and get the hottest girl to fuck him as his reward. They naturally, by dint of biology, had hot/smart/ballsy kids, for the most part. And these kids gravitated to their own kind, and soon you have a ruling class of elites.

But I digress. What I’m after here is that you’ve got the ground level strip mall crap, and the high-rise level fancy business crap. You got the franchises that figured out how to make little stupid shops succeed, and desperate people named BOB clamoring to own a piece of the American Dream will license the methods so they can also make some money and get some respect. Some shop owners don’t buy a franchise. They go it alone and figure out how to make it work. Good fucking luck with that. But they get SOME respect, that is, if they don’t get boarded up and wind up sweeping Bob’s floor.

Ever wonder how people own stuff? Or make a lot of money in a specific industry? The answer is simple. It’s almost always cause of their dad. Every fucking time. Every single fucking time. Nobody knows shit, everybody is lazy. And then if you’re lucky, your DAD puts something valuable in close, realistic reach, such that it becomes worth the effort to get up off your ass and take it. And then you take your fine piece of ass and it’s all giggle for you, while the rest of mankind suffers. And the stupid cycle continues. That’s it.

Hi Gamer. I won’t reply to all of your missive, but… We want a fine piece of ass? Nah. We take the best available 15 minutes before the bar closes and be grateful as hell.

Respect: There are two kinds and only one counts. First, there is conditional respect. I don’t know you but I’ll make the wild assumption that you are a reasonable human being deserving my respect. That’s an iffy proposition but one we usually go with. Real respect is EARNED, and that has nothing to do with the mouth, it has to do with actions. We don’t respect the hot alpha male no matter how entertaining unless their actions match their mouth. Again, real respect is earned.

Hot and smart, ugly and dumb. There is more to it than that. There are plenty of hot and dumb people just as there is a world of ugly and smart people. Most people fall in the middle somewhere. You know, semi-attractive and can chew gum and walk at the same time. Otherwise, how would it all work? The world has way more of the middle than the extreme ends. It’s called making the best you can with what you’ve got.

Your turn…

Yeah yeah yeah. I’m right there with you pops. Respect is earned but some people have to do less to earn it. Much less. Infinitely less. If you think respect is doled out according to some set scale of fairness, you are a fool. A man can break his back and be a good person for years and walk down the street and get little respect. A man can be a lazy prick and get tons of it. It’s a fucking mess. Often there is no rhyme or reason. Yes words and actions, more to life than hot and rich, yes, obviously, those are truisms, plebeian prayers, the song of the ascetic, the holy rapture of the loser. It’s the only song I sing and I sing it in many octaves, I own the shit out of it, I know it well and I’m on your side, but my point isn’t that. My point was more like: fuckin hell!

Puleeze! Don’t disappoint me. Who the fuck believes that life is fair? AT best, you get a near-miss at the brass ring on the merry-
go-round and the prick behind you gets it all and he wasn’t even trying. It happens all the time. Its a lottery. It has nothing to do with fair. Much of life (too much?) is just being in the right place at the right time, or born into the right family, or… who the fuck knows? So what? It is what it is.

Of course, it is possible that there is only one sort of respect that counts: Respect for oneself. If you can’t respect yourself you will never have respect for others. It is the lack of self-respect that is the root of fear, hate, and loathing of others. Gee, another cliche? OK, but that doesn’t make it untrue. That is how it becomes a cliche.

Wouldn’t it be great if merit was actually earned? That respect was universally available to all? Even if we devised some miracle way for that to happen we would fuck it up in a New York minute. Why? Cause that is who we are. We ain’t fair and we never have been fair.

ok I will grant you that respect for oneself must (possibly) be earned. However I fucking reject that getting respect from others has anything more than a passing occasional correlation with “earning” it. My guess is you’ll say that earning respect from others begins with first earning respect from and for yourself so don’t bother saying that because I ain’t buyin that. But if you’ll indulge me, tell me how one earns one’s own respect, regardless of what anyone else thinks about them, assuming they think about them at all, which they almost always don’t. I’m listening. And I’d be shocked if it didn’t include some bullshit stuff about conforming to a work ethic or milking cows at 6am or staying “true to yourself no matter what”, et al. Or organizing your sock drawer instead of cumming in them and tossing them on the floor all willy nilly, pell mell, tumble bumble and so forth.

Respect for self: There isn’t any outside criteria, it is uniquely within the individual. It is the collective nature/nurture/life experience that one summons to make their own determination. Even the process of determination is known only to the individual. But just to start an argument…

I AM A GOOD PERSON:

  1. All of the time
  2. Most of the time
  3. Some of the time
  4. Occasionally
  5. Hardly ever

After weighing all this in the internal balance scales, one says I deserve my respect or I don’t. If I don’t find self respect then I can’t believe that others are any different and therefore they do not deserve any respect no matter their public dog and pony show. It’s possible that some of them are deserving of my respect, but I can’t tell the genuine from the fakers in the short run. Perhaps I can eventually respect those who quietly go about their lives milking the cows at 6AM for years on end, consistently, without complaint, just doing what they do. Those who go about showing what is best of humanity can EARN respect without trying. They just are respected.

I will grant that what passes for respect is most often just reserved judgement. It is merely social convention - an interaction lubricant? Even an asshole like me can be respectful once in awhile. But I watch and learn. A person can lose my respect just as easily as I granted it in the first place.

So you’re right but I think your complaint is about social phoniness and less about genuine respect.