The Blessed Beauty of Shutting Up

What has the Internet wrought? A pointless, ego-fueled logorrhea. With no end in sight.

Beware the savage jaw.

The lifecycle of an unpunched jaw was played out every night, or at least every night I was there, at the curiously named Paradise Beach. It was a club, dancing and drinks, and it served the wind down from a week spent in Silicon Valley doing whatever you were paid to do to advance the fortunes of all of the little technology we’d soon come to carry in our pockets.

MC Hammer was on regular rotation and when I wasn’t cruising the club for those whose capacity for alcohol consumption had been exceeded, courtesy of the club that hired me, I was sitting astride a lifeguard chair looking for the same. Festooned with palm trees, and dioramas of sand, beach balls, and fruity drinks with saucy names, it was all very…happy. In a contrived and corporate way. Like Disneyland. For drunks.

It seems that, if you’re in the right frame of mind and present in all of the positive ways, you might have had a good time at Paradise Beach. Case in point: as one evening wore down and people were being given the “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here” speech, one of the more attractive women I’d ever seen walked up to me and asked if she could use the restroom before we closed.

“Sure,” I said. Then pointing: “The bathroom’s back there.” The other bouncers looked at me, a mix of shock, disgust and amusement.

“What?”

“What do you mean ‘what’?” Scarmis, one of the other bouncers shook his head and raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to walk her back there?”

You want to know what that sounds like?

It sounds like a room full of people screaming, “EUGENE!!! NO!!! STOP!!! OH G-D! EUGENE!!!! PLEASE STOP!!!!” All at the same time.

“And what? Listen to her piss?”

“No. Walk her back there. Talk a bit. Maybe get a number.”

I shrugged. Getting laid at Paradise Beach, something from the looks of it many people did, interested me not at all. I was knee deep in dour and just in the early stages of a long distance relationship, so I could claim no interest. But even without the long distance romance I’d not have been interested because when you step behind the curtain the way you often might do in service jobs, it all becomes…sad, after awhile.

The same people doing the same things to very similar outcomes, really the very essence of the human dilemma: we’re destined to do as we do and that’s all we can do. But watching the unpunched jaw end its reign and yield to the punched jaw, a nightly event, always amused me.

You see, drinkers pass a point where they’re able to see it coming. They lose the ability to tell when one polite chuckle at a borderline offensive joke has crossed the line to where people are no longer willing to humor you. Enter: punched jaw. And then, of course, like a firefighter, exactly when we were launched into action. With highly predictable results.

I don’t ever remember really no longer working as a bouncer but I feel, for certain, that it was the night when I started to see every unpunched jaw as a jaw that would eventually need to be punched and wasn’t I the one best suited to make this happen?

You want to know what that sounds like?

It sounds like a room full of people screaming, “EUGENE!!! NO!!! STOP!!! OH G-D! EUGENE!!!! PLEASE STOP!!!!” All at the same time. And all while I was punching three men in the face. Three men who had decided that taking a swing at someone behind me was for the laughs. I was more punishing them because they could have stopped at any time before this time and gone home happy. And alone, excepting for their crew of no-date-having pricks. All they had to do was to keep their mouths shut. But noooooo….

That is, we’re a nation of people who haven’t learned that the better part of valor is keeping your g-ddamned mouth shut.

The year was 1990, which means, for those keeping count, that the Internet was not a widespread thing yet. So, then, imagine the surprise when the Internet did become a thing and what had transpired on the sandy club floors of Paradise Beach every weekend night had now gone national every week and every day of that week.

That is, we’re a nation of people who haven’t learned that the better part of valor is keeping your g-ddamned mouth shut. Oversharing leads to overconsumption and me spending the better part of yesterday watching videos of Madonna dancing that either show or don’t show that she’s neurologically diminished after her last hospital visit.

She shared this with me, now I am sharing it with you, and before you can share it with someone else, someone is trying to engage me in an online argument about the validity of RFK Jr. as a viable political candidate, and wondering why I’m not more upset about the whole “Hunter Biden deal”.

Non-doctors are giving me medical advice based on “something they heard” from “some guy they know,” broke fuckers are seeking to offer me financial advice and guys who haven’t had a date in years are trying to tell me “what women want.” A nation of amateurs masquerading as professionals all because they have a mouth, and a few ideas.

So few ideas that when someone says, as someone just did say, in The Atlantic no less, that homelessness is caused by the lack of homes. A nice re-casting of the Reagan jibe that he didn’t know what people meant when they talked about homelessness because he saw LOTS of houses in the newspaper for sale. Which is around the time that the terminology changed and it became an issue of “affordable” housing.

But I know a few unhoused humans. Humans who used to have houses and now no longer do, and their problems are in no way going to disappear if you build an affordable house. You see, crystal meth doesn’t care what’s affordable and what’s not, as long as you can afford crystal meth. Or whatever other drug that seems to be a ready and steady handmaiden to homelessness.

But this is not about that. This is about the endless chatter that presumes to have uncovered real solutions to what we generally really feel are real problems. This is about the fact that when you don’t value expertise and everyone can become an expert in everything through dint of pure acts of will, knowledge is no longer power. It’s just…information.

This is about the fact that all of the information in the Internet world doesn’t seem to be divinely suited to telling us what the real difference is between our asses and holes in the ground. That is, between shit and shinola.

And yet…and yet, we just keep talking and talking (like me here now, I guess. Text book definition: part of the problem), filling up Meta, Twitter, TikTok, MySpace and just about every other space with endless chatter about everything, with no regard for anything other than an aversion to having this place be empty. Or full of…quiet.

But hey, have you heard: Taylor Swift is engaged to Jason Aldean and they’re doing a concept album about how wokeness caused some Chinese dudes to lab create COVID to battle pizza delivering pedophiles?

You haven’t? Oh. You will. But first…look at this dance!

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You will in all likelihood get it before the August 29, 2023 release date but you’ll need to have read it before the BOOK TOUR reaches your town. Just so’s youse know what I’m talking about. Got it?

SOOOO….30 DAYS LEFT TO BOOK RELEASE!!!

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