Truesday: Now With Guilty Fresh Scent!

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*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors

I would like to believe that the top three methods of measuring a man’s true worth would be, in no particular order, but without trade or exception:

1. His ability to handily operate complex electronic devices without the aid of a directions booklet or the complete use of his left hand.

2. The number of stories involving the accidental sitting upon of his own testicles, replete with exaggerated inflections, historically accurate-and-ironic references to cultural heroes, and faked nagging-tone women voices.

3. The height of his collection of outstanding unpaid parking tickets from multiple municipalities/nationalities.

But alas, I realize that my particular take on man-value likely puts me in a sad minority. Most others will, quite predictably, prefer to include vaguely trite shit like “honesty even in the face of opportunity for self-ingratiation”, “ability to provide stable support and steadfast dedication to family, friends, and significant other”, and the ever-pressuring and paradoxically applied “fifty states: fifty babies fertility”.

Man, fuck that noise. How pedestrian can you get? “Stable support”? “Fertility”? Are you kidding me? Is this really the way to measure a man? What about the guy who picks that foot-long strand of straw-grass from the pinched lips of a whining dog’s ass? It’s not like the dude was stupid enough to eat a whole bush, but there he is, pulling fouled roughage from the pulsing rear of a house-pet in dire need. How long can that variety of selfless humiliation go unrecognized?

Or the guy who craftily memorized someone else’s AAA number so that he not only doesn’t have to drive out and meet you to change your busted tire, he also doesn’t have to cough up the cash necessary to have someone else do it. That’s some sharp smartitude right there. Efficiency! Why is this skillset left so blatantly unrewarded, if not scolded for representing a “shameful lack of moral backbone”?

Okay. I could continue to list reason after reason here, in clutching hope that my own crybabying will eventually convince my own brain of its relative innocence. But really, I don’t see that happening, so I just need to cop a plea and get past the whole issue…

Apparently I hate the environment.

As if by some evil sorcery, I’ve become my own enemy. A lazy killer of all that I've staunchly defended in the past (in my mind). The trees, the indigenous naked-living peoples of faraway places, future generations of humans, penguins dancing on ice caps, and all that other Disney trademarked shit.

Apparently I have no room for such sentimentality in my life, as my recent actions have so unpleasantly illuminated.

It’s a couple of days into the whole Bike To Work Week thing, and even though I’m an ardent supporter of a Biking Society, I myself haven’t put foot-to-pedal in MONTHS. That’s right. MONTHS. I’d like to say I simply enjoy the road rage. But honestly, I can seethe in solitude with violent thoughts, and perhaps commit a periodic assault, without the pussy-ass use of a locked-safe automobile.

Try that snarky-ass Bill Hicks shit on the Chicon bus, tough guy. Face punch; tooth loss.

No, no, no. My reasons for torching our current environment and collective future are far more mundane.

You see, when you’re barely twenty and going to Psych classes or some chilled job hosing down vegetables at Whole Foods, it’s plenty alright (if not expected) to traipse into your place of day-happenings whilst smelling of rotting-broccoli pig-farm. But in the world of starched shirts, initialed cufflinks, and specialty hair products, it simply isn’t acceptable to reek of “dude” at any point during the day. It’s more than frowned upon. If it isn’t a sign of fear-fueled weakness that might get you stabbed, then it’s at least a whimpering cry for multi-layered demotion. It may even cause Building Sickness for those with delicate allergic afflictions in the Secretarial Pool.

So, really, I’m just doing the appropriate thing for my career here. I’m bucking up, and buckling down. Buckling down into the padded/shaded driver’s seat of a car with cool-breeze a/c so my pits won’t cause eyes to water in the closed confines of the office parking garage elevator.

Plus I get like, a whole extra thirty minutes to sleep. And if you're a sleep lover like me, and you do the math on how much your last thirty minutes of sleep is worth, it will come out somewhere between two and seventeen thousand dollars. In effect, on the low end, I am “making” over eighty grand a month JUST by driving myself to work during the week. The brain-meter gets blow’d off of the charts by smartness like that! It’s like my skills in economics are unparalleled by even the bestest math-to-utility geniuses!

Oh, who am I kidding. I’m really just scared to start falling down all over the pavement again. That, and my newfound fear of careening dumptrucks.

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