Damn, I don’t know what I did to myself, but my body is shot to hell. I can barely walk, my head feels like it’s going to break off… Want to know what dinner was? A grilled cheese sandwich, a glass of wine, and an Advil. No, I don’t care if that combo will make my stomach do flip flops. (Yes, earlier today my digestive system took a nose dive.)
You know that book, The Reader’s Manifesto, that I urged you all to read in an earlier post? Udolpho went and reviewed it. I agree with just about everything he says, except his blaming the popularity of the Oprahfied victim-of-the-week lit crap novel on dried up, bitter old post-menopausal women. Actually, what the world needs now are more dried-up, bitter old post-menopausal hags. (And when I am at last post-menopausal, there will be.) No one suffers fools less gladly than a tart, astringent crone who is no longer in thrall to her hormones and thus has gained mental strength to compensate handsomely for the wasted years she spent dripping and seeping. However, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine [/SARCASM ALERT], there are fewer of those every year. No, most women these days, far from being dried up, are far too moist for longer than God and nature intended them to be, in fact they are positively drenched with the stolen juices of other womens’ youths. Elizabeth Bathory used to bathe in the blood of young virgins in order to stay perpetually young — today’s Modern Woman v. 2.0 soaks in a daily bath of the slaughtered innocence of society, where thanks to the zombie stinking of the grave of dead philosophies that is the contemporary “feminist” movement women are free to be sluts and nothing else. And paired with this evil liquid substance is the older, yet no less poisonous, potion that is traditional female morbidity. Too many women of my acquaintance (young and old) are addicted to those creepy medical shows that seem to only feature children with deforming diseases or people who have been in horrifying disfiguring accidents. They are also fond of those shows that feature another kind of deforming disease, the Jerry Springer-type trash talk show. And of course, there is that old standby, the soap opera. And these “likes” carry over into what they read; and that fact combined with the hold Zombie Feminism has on the literary world, has produced the Oprah-approved victim-novel.
Now it is true that men have their own character flaws when it comes to entertainment — the undisciplined (I’d say “uneducated” but the idea of “education” has been too debased these days) male tends to glom onto fantasies of sexual pleasure and pointless warfare. But at least these fantasies have life and vigor to them. The morbid nightmares that too many women are attracted to all have the smell of hospitals and the grave about them. I’m not sure why this should be — maybe because women, being the ones who give birth, are closer to death and therefore more fascinated by such things. This may also explain why I’ve never wanted to have a child. I’m not good at medical business about myself — to me a doctor is where you go when booze quits working — and the idea of being a subject of medical attention in nine months has all the appeal that going to a dinner party hosted by Karl Rove has for a member of Democratic Underground.
When I think of how old, post-menopausal women, if they should be so lucky to live to that great age (fifty or so), once were careful to cultivate reputations as formidable harridans with whom younger people messed at their peril, I want to tear out my hair. Today when we think of a woman with character we think of Martha Stewart, who does good soundbite, or Katie Couric, who is so cute we should drop her into the middle of Iran — they’d endure about five minutes of her hectic perkiness before committing suicide en masse just to get away from her and her Photoshopped hips. I’ll bet you that Couric loves the “literary” mushtomes that pop up regularly in the stinking fields of the New York Times bestseller lists, assuming that anchorbots read. A mean, shrivelled, dusty-vagina’d spinster, on the other hand, would take one look at, say, the latest collection of typed pages to bear the approving stamp of Oprah’s book club and drop it disdainfully back on the pile of other crap literature.
Update: why I will never be a teacher, Reason #27645. Talk about doubleplus ungood. Perhaps in my country (the dreaded Fascist Amerikkkka) you can still say whatever the hell you want to say and not be threatened with “appropriate seminars,” but I am sure that will be changing if it hasn’t already changed. I will come clean now: I don’t hold it healthy to love a career. It has been my observation that for too many people their wonderful careers, to which they aspired all their lives, have turned them into prostitutes who will sell anything to be able to keep their kewl job. Teachers and reporters (I will not call them “journalists”) seem to be particularly susceptible to this, as are, of course, politicians. I am sure that the fact that a certain amount of power over other humans isn’t low on the list of attractions to these jobs. (For example, teachers: “my students need me!” On the contrary, Mr. Chips — your students will most likely forget about you as they pursue their own lives. If you are lucky some will have a couple of reminiscenses that they’ll tell around the family dinner table at holidays while the kids are in the tv room watching cartoons, like the one about this teacher they had who got almost canned because he said “homos think they all that but they ain’t” on his web page so they had him go to a seminar and he had to wear a pink triangle on his shirt collar the rest of the year.) Anyway, I am glad I’m a little office flunky in a job I can forget when I go home.)
