The Seven Habits of Highly Defective Pupiks
12/10/02
The Seven Habits of Highly Defective People
Habit #1: Writing books like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Only someone who is irreparably defective would presume to codify success.
Habit #2: Selling books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Only someone who is deluded or profoundly cynical would foist such a scam on the desperate, the gullible, the hopeful, and the desperate to separate them from their few and hardwon bucks.
Habit #3: Buying books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Of course, anyone defective enough to buy such a title for anything but laughs is dim enough to deserve to be doomed…..and ripped off.
Habit #4: Reading books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Fortunately, most people defective enough to buy The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People are too defective to actually read said book. They’re content to put the book on their coffee tables and imagine that its sage advice is magically permeating their brains as they watch Monday Night Football. The title itself is a fetish, a mantra, and certain defectives have gone so far as wear the book, like an albatross, around their necks while endlessly repeating its title to themselves. As for the text itself, well, nobody knows WHAT the book actually says. Most who have bought it never read it, and the few that do can’t remember what it says, which is just as well.
Habit #5: Believing books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Everybody’s got to believe in something. And I believe I’ll have another beer, even as millions of others invest their faith in how-to books.
Habit #6: Asking what highly effective people would do before deciding what to do yourself. This leads a highly defective person to the question: Was JESUS a highly effective person, even though he got himself nailed to a cross? If the answer is yes, then it follows that one must get ONESELF nailed to a cross, because this was one of Jesus’s habits, along with carpentry and raising the dead. If the answer is no, then one must ask “What would the anti-Christ do?” Because if Jesus WASN’T effective, than his polar opposite must certainly have been. And I can tell you what the anti-Christ would do. He would have a good laugh at you for being so desperate and pathetic that you have been driven to take a how-to book, especially THIS how-to book, seriously.
Habit #7: Asking if Hitler and George W. Bush are highly effective people. Only an extremely defective person would even ask. Of course Hitler was highly effective. He was extremely effective at murdering those he deemed highly defective, which was just about everybody. And W. is indubitably highly effective at failing upwards, at snatching victory, in the form of defective elections and massive intelligence failures which lead to massive public relations successes, from the jaws of defeat. Whether he can also snatch his defective domestic policy from the jaws of defeat remains to be seen. And in any case it may not matter to him, as he and his cohorts are positive geniuses at making the highly defective appear highly effective to the electorate.
Habit #8: (OK, I’m aware I only promised 7. But I’m giving you a bonus habit of highly defective people because you’ve been defective enough to read this far.) Coming to the defense of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People when somebody mocks it. Come on, admit it. You got defensive about the book, didn’t you? You started making little speeches in your head about all the good you got from buying it and reading it and believing it and making it transform your little world. Lord have mercy on your soul. I won’t mock you or torture you or put down your how-to savior any longer. I don’t have to. Your existence is its own punishment.
The 7 Habits of Highly Infectious People
Habit #1: Noseboring, especially while using a motel room remote. Next time you check into a Marriott, remember what the previous occupant was doing with his nosepickers before he grabbed the remote and then don some surgical gloves and a mask and spray that baby with Lysol or worse before flicking on the news. As for the stains and pubic hairs and secretions/excretions/suppurations/expectorations/ejaculations on the bedspread, try not to think about them.
Habit #2: Making burritos or falafels or crepes suzettes by hand immediately after NOT washing those hands in the men’s/women’s room of your favorite restaurant. And why was the erstwhile foodworker in the hombres’ or mujeres’ room in the first place? Because he/she is suffering from a witches’ brew of dysentery, hepatitis, mad cow disease, Mongolian tape worms, and the screaming scabies, and passing them most handily from butt to hand to crepes to your mouth. My suggestion: sand blast your teeth and tongue and steam clean your lips, then spray your face with lysol, before and after every delicious bite.
Habit #3: Building housing projects on landfills composed of non-biodegradable diapers. While you’re sitting up watching Leno alone in your new condo, you ever smell something funny? Something that smells like baby made a poopy, or rather ten million babies made 10 million poopies…..back in 1957? Now think about it: If you, with your snotted up schnozz, can still smell it, do you think you can also still be sickened, not to say killed, by it?
Habit #4: Spontaneously laughing while being extremely gorgeous and curvaceous and hothothot while sitting at a bar alone at last call. Think about it. Does such a woman EVER laugh alone? Even if her laugh sounds like the death rattle of a cave bear, any horndogs within earshot will feign to find it infectious and laugh along with her, hoping against hope that their mock mirth will win her to their heretofore desperately solitary beds. But then, when have you ever seen a really greatlooking nubile babe sitting all by herself at a bar at last call? Even if she IS greatlooking, she’s probably not laughing. And even if she IS laughing, she’s probably a serialkiller, a homicidal hooker waiting to lure you into an alley outside the bar where her cohorts, a coven of carnivorous, manhating diesel dykes, will descend upon you and devour your gonads from your living body. But that won’t stop you from finding her laugh infectious. In fact, laugh fever will rage through every cell of your body as soon as you hear her witch’s cackle, and you will laugh as you have never laughed before. You will laugh your head off. You will laugh your guts out. You will laugh still your eyes pop out on your cheeks and your teeth rattle onto the bar. You will laugh yourself out of your shoes and socks and underwear right as you stand there with Guinness in hand. You will laugh yourself buck naked and erect, infected as you are by her infectious laugh. Then she will stop laughing and you will realize that she wasn’t laughing at all. She was just coughing and hawking and gobbing. And you will desperately try to stop laughing. But you will find that the laugh machine, once set into motion, is not so easily stopped. And a variety of snickers and sniggers and chuckles and guffaws will burst from you like emanations of gas from a three week old corpse which has been cooking and swelling under a tropical sun. And you will realize that you have been very uncool and that the lion will sleep alone, once more, tonight. And you will stumble out of the bar alone and forlorn, no longer shaking with infectious laughter, but incubating a virus which has jumped into your nose from that moment when she seemed to be infectiously laughing but was actually infectiously coughing and spitooing. And within a week, this virus will make its way into your cerebrum, drilling it more full of holes than a loufa sponge. And you will end your days in a quarantine ward, a hospice for sufferers of Viral Hebephrenia, and you will laugh yourself sick, you will laugh until you can no longer breathe, you will laugh yourself to death.
Habit #5: Wearing an infectious habit and passing it on to the next nun without first giving it a vigorous washing. This happened a lot in the Middle Ages, before convents had Maytags. With what were the nuns’ habits infected? The usual. Small pox. And big pox. And middlesized pox as well as extremely small pox and extra extra large pox. The extra extra EXTRA large pox was usually passed on to the nuns by a member of the NBA or the NFL or, rarely, by a Sumo wrestler. But it’s extremely sad to think of that other nun, the virgin nun, the unsuspecting nun with not a stain of sin on her soul or body, whose only real sin, if sin it can be called, is to borrow the infectious habit of her sister nun without first having it steamcleaned and irradiated. And next thing you know that pox is getting all UP in the girl, and she’s dancing madly, dancing St. Vitus’s Dance and the hootchygootchy and the Charleston and the mashed potato and the froog and the pony and the makarena and the lambada and the lindy and the samba and the rumba and the mambo and the chachacha and the dirty dog----right there in the convent! Before the horrified eyes of the Mother Superior! Before the sad sad eyes of the polychromatic statue of The Virgin Mary. Before the lecherous eyes of the visiting Monsignor. Before the furtive and uncomprehending eyes of a tiny church mouse, who was just then nibbling at a communion wafer. And by and by this wacked out nun dances till her feet are bloody, dances still she’s a skeleton of her former self, dances until the only light in her eyes is the light of madness. And the clerical powers that be take a look at her, and then estimate how expensive it would be to check her into a sanatorium, and they instead declare her a saint, who is dancing because she is infected with the Holy Spirit. She’s got dance fever! But the nun who lent her her unwashed, infectious, habit knows better. That poor girl’s dancin’ because she’s got all sizes of the pox! Let the wearers of infectious habits beware!
Habit #6: Sharing dirty needles.
Habit #7: French kissing visitors to your tuberculosis sanatorium.
The 7 Habits of Highly Depressing People
Habit #1: Devouring most of the world’s resources while bombing the tar out of 3rd World nations, yet describing oneself as the Arsenal of Democracy rather than the Arsehole of Demogoguery.
Habit #2: Refusing to do even simple things, like limiting gas consumption in SUV’s, to slow global warming.
Habit #3: Looking for any and every excuse to give tax breaks to the upper 1% and to giant corporations even as the economic and social and medical conditions of the average American deteriorates.
Habit #4: Making policy decisions purely for political and electoral reasons rather than for the good of the nation and the world.
Habit #5: Stealing presidential elections and cynically using the judiciary to pursue a narrow agenda that frequently subverts the letter and the intent of the Constitution.
Habit #6: Looking for any excuse to rape the environment, including handing the national parklands over to lumber and oil cronies.
Habit #7: Making a mockery of the highest ideals of the land, including the principles economic and social justice, by using highsounding words like Freedom and Peace and Equality and Compassion to manipulate the public and ram through a narrow political agenda of Avarice, Aggression, Atavism, and Aryan Supremacy.
Bonus Habit #8: Pretending as if a stolen election is a mandate for change.
Double Bonus Habit #9: Exploiting the populace’s fear of international terrorism to advance one’s narrow political agenda.
Triple Bonus Habit #10: Skittering around the country like a scared chipmunk in Air Force One on 9/11, and then, when it’s save to come out, struttin’ and swaggering at Ground Zero like John Wayne himself.
Quadruple Bonus Habit 7 come #11: Being quick to risk the lives of your fellow Americans in combat though you yourself were a chickenhawk who slithered out of combat in Viet Nam.
(You can count the last few as some of the 7 Habits of Extremely Hyocritical People if you prefer.)
The 7 Habits of Highly Reckless People
Habit #1: Skydiving, surfing, and hangliding in hurricanes.
Habit #2: Driving the wrong way on the Santa Monica Freeway.
Habit #3: Pretending as if America is so powerful it doesn’t have to pay attention to the wants and desires of the other 94% of the human race.
Habit #4: Pulling out of nuclear test ban and environmental treaties while nuclear weapons proliferate and the global environment deteriorates.
Habit #5: Undercutting United Nations efforts to control the exploding birthrate.
Habit #6: Selling tens of billions of weapons to the world’s nations, including to unstable dictatorships ruled by ruthless tyrants, while at the same time doing nothing to control the dissemination of guns among already heavily armed citizens of one’s own nation.
Habit #7: Putting the narrow economic interests of one’s political cronies before the welfare of the nation and the world.
Bonus Habit #8: Always taking the short view, never the long. Acting, in fact, as there will be no longterm future, or at least as if the longterm future doesn’t matter. Not admitting that man is responsible for the welfare of the earth and is his brother’s keeper, rather acting as if mankind and earth are merely targets to be exploited. Seeing Mother Earth not as home, but as a target-rich environment.
7 Habits of Highly Unsuccessful People
Habit #1: Some smoke.
Habit #2: Some don’t.
Habit #3 : Some are in the habit of snoring.
Habit #4: Some are in the habit of waking up in the morning and blowing their noses in the sink….and not washing the gobs away, but rather leaving them for their housemates to behold when they go to the sink to brush their teeth or wash their faces.
Habit #5: Some are in the habit of serialkilling. They start out with small neighborhood animals, then work up to larger neighborhood animals, such as Labradors and mailmen. Now there are some that say that successful serialkilling is a kind of success, and that Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacey belong in the subgroup of very SUCCESSFUL people. But I’m of the other school of thought, namely, that serialkilling, while a challenging career, is not socially beneficial enough to merit the adjective successful, even if done very well.
Habit #6: Some roll through stop signs.
Habit #7: Some run up excessive balances on credit cards with high interest rates and don’t make their monthly minimum payments on time and get penalized for late payments. Some are running fastforward yet falling back as they desperately struggle and strain to service their credit cards.
Bonus Habit #8: Some make u-turns in business districts and at lighted intersections.
Bonus Habit #9: Some have difficulty parallel parking.
Bonus Habit #10: Some subject their children or stepchildren to physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse. Some act out, victimizing the vulnerable while failing to confront the traumatic abuse they themselves once suffered. Some are cruel and malicious not because they themselves were damaged, but because they are possessed by demons.
Bonus Habit #11: Some take the name of the Lord in vain. Some pepper their conversations with profanity, even in mixed company.
Bonus Habit #12: Some are in the habit of getting swelled heads at the least little bit of success. They can’t handle it. Soon as they get on a roll, they careen out of control.
Bonus Habit #13: Some don’t get out of bed in morning most mornings and show a marked aversion to labor of the hand or the head.
Bonus Habit #14: Some are bad planners and fail to keep their desktops straight.
Bonus Habit #15: Some are in the habit of getting crushed by the least little thing, such as life.
Bonus Habit #16: Some declare moral and intellectual bankruptcy and are forced to auction off their reputations, their ethics, their personalities, their idle thoughts, and even their most cherished memories. Others in arrears have their cultural heritages, ancestry, and religious beliefs confiscated by the IRS or foreclosed by banks and other large lending institutions.
Bonus Habit #17: Some, such as Malcolm X and MLK and Anwar Sadat and RFK and Abe Lincoln and John Lennon, become great spirits who are murdered or martyred by mean or mad spirits. There are some that see this martyrdom as the crowning successes of their careers. But I am of the other school and see getting murdered as a form of Unsuccess, as in: He tried to continue living and was highly unsuccessful, thanks to the assassin’s or assassins’ bullet or bullets.
7 Habits of Highly Lowly People
Habit #1: Getting killed when tornadoes roll through their trailer camps.
Habit #2: Keeping a low profile.
Habit #3: Standing in unemployment lines when they’re lucky enough to qualify for unemployment.
Habit #4: Standing in soup kitchen lines when they’re not, or even sometimes when they do qualify and are receiving unemployment compensation and decide to cadge some free soup as well.
Habit #5: Kowtowing. Inclining their heads from the neck and their bodies from the waist.
Habit #6: Keeping large vicious dogs in small grassless fenced-in yards filled with dog turds.
Habit #7: Failing smog tests.
Bonus #8: Not qualifying for medical or dental or pension benefits.
Bonus #9: Getting kicked out of this country and sent back to scary impoverished 3rd World nations roamed by death squads.
Bonus #10: Getting beheaded and otherwise mistreated by potentates.
Bonus #11: Having to dig their own graves before being shot into them.
Bonus #12: Not standing up for their rights.
Bonus #13: Having difficulty with the subjunctive and conditional tenses.
Bonus #14: Lacking grace or fluency in French, even if they are French.
Bonus #15: Drinking from fingerbowls and being unsure of which fork to use for which course at state dinners.
Bonus #16: Never getting off their knees.
Bonus #17: Never pinpointing the political bias of network newsreaders. Pretending or assuming that they have none. But mostly never even thinking about it and simply believing.
7 Habits of Highly Obnoxious People
Habit #1: Some gob with gusto into gutters.
Habit #2: Others lob juicy loogies into public drinking fountains.
Habit #3: Some nose pick obliviously while waiting for lights to change at busy intersections.
Habit #4: Some chose to eat what they pick.
Habit #5: Some try to control dinner conversations by talking more loudly and frequently than anyone else and by not really listening to anyone but themselves.
Habit #6: Some take off their shoes and bang their heels on lecturns at the United Nations and promise to bury their adversaries.
Habit #7: Some interrupt.
Bonus Habit #8: Some pick their teeth while you’re trying to unpack your heart to them.
7 Habits of Highly Lovable People
Habit #1: Being pitiful and embattled yet cheerfully keep on keeping on.
Habit #2: Spending their last dime to buy you extravagant birthday gifts, even as they also spend your last dime and plunge you irretrievably into debt.
Habit #3: Some are good with large animals, such as Labradors, dugongs, and leopard seals.
Habit #4: Pretending so well to understand you that you never realize they don’t.
Habit #5: Losing their edges and becoming sweet and dithering.
Habit #6: Being maddeningly and indiscriminately encouraging.
Habit #7: Displaying breathtaking patience and dignity and stoicism and compassion and even good cheer at moments of intolerable suffering, including those of their own death throes. Their deaths become an inspiration to those of us who survive them.
Bonus Habit #8: Being beautiful to look at and listen to and touch. And when they touch you, their touch is like a benediction.
Bonus Habit #9: Some come running.
Bonus Habit #10: Getting you in touch with your own best self and make you feel larger than life and seem larger than life themselves and if and when they pass away the world feels poorer and darker for their passing, though richer for their ever having been here at all.
Bonus Habit #11: Having tender looks in their eye.
Bonus Habit #12: Having soft warm hands and odd, blocked shaped feet covered with warts but smelling of cloves.
Bonus Habit #13: Never looking the same way twice.
Bonus Habit #14: Always leaving you stronger.
Bonus Habit #15: Offering you dazzling insights.
Bonus Habit #16: Gently, softly, playing their guitars during blackouts.
Bonus Habit #17: Having an antic quality which makes you laugh just to see them move. They make the whole heavy world seem somehow lighter.
Bonus Habit #18: Not being hung up on their own beauty, but give it freely, expecting nothing in return.
Bonus Habit #19: Making a house a home.
Bonus Habit #20: Always being there for you, even when they’re not.
Bonus Habit #21: Remembering what matters, and at least pretending to forget what doesn’t.
7 Habits of Highly Duplicitous People
Habit #1: Forgetting all the things you did for them as soon as they decide they want somebody or something new.
Habit #2: Being brilliant and entertaining mimics. Perpetual impostors, they are never really themselves because the real-est self they are IS an impostor.
Habit #3: Cultivating an initial charm which wears thin in moments of great stress and import.
Habit #4: Rarely, or never, taking responsibility for the consequences of their acts.
Habit #5: Seeing others as mere extensions of their own emotional needs. They never realize that other people have existences of their own.
Habit #6: Thinking, when they have betrayed a trust, that they have outsmarted the victim.
Habit #7: Always being on the run, even when they’re standing still.
7 Habits of Highly Ineffectual Boyfriends
Habit #1: Paying off girlfriends' maxed out credit cards---over and over and over--- without demanding that the girlfriends becoming financially responsible.
Habit #2: Allowing themselves to get sucked into neurotic lovers' verbal labyrinths. Calling said bloodsucking labyrinths "therapeutic dialogues."
Habit #3: Carrying on a prosperous accounting business in Los Angeles while one's wife works, and secretly dates, as a showgirl in Vegas. Her secret dating is only secret from her accountant hubby. In fact, she's in the escort section of the Vegas yellow pages if anyone besides her spouse should care to find her.....and they do.
Habit #4: Playing Mr. Mom on the homefront, raising the toddlers, while wifey pursues a career as a pornstar.
Habit #5: Not asking wives where they've been when they get home at 4 AM…..with jism dripping down their thighs.
Habit #6: Remaining hungup on broads who have resoundingly and humiliatingly dumped them. Carrying torches for the old which blind them to the new.
Habit #7: Going round and round the wheel of suffering with women who will never change.
Bonus Habit #8: Loving madwomen for their madness. Being deeply touched by blackbirds with broken wings.
Bonus Habit #9: Helping estranged wives and lovers buy mattresses upon which they will fuck their new lovers.
Bonus Habit #10: Not asking what the used condoms are doing in the backseat of her car.
Bonus Habit #11: Waxing romantic and sentimental over women with adding machines for hearts.
Bonus Habit #12: Finding human trainwrecks sexy.
7 Habits of Highly Ineffectual Parents
Habit #1: Never having children in the first place.
Habit #2: Letting demon children call the shots and rule the roost.
Habit #3: Letting children dis them and others and not calling those children to account.
Habit #4: Never fostering their children's intellectual development themselves yet always blaming teachers, never themselves, for their children's academic failings.
Habit #5: Having more and more and more children in hopes of making a fresh start with each new one while writing off the old ones…..and rationalizing that quantity trumps quality.
Habit #6: Not standing up for a child who has been bullied inside or outside the home.
Habit #7: Not giving every child unconditional love 24/7/52.
Bonus Habit #8: Not drawing a line in the sand.
Bonus Habit #9: Seeing a child as an extension of one's own unsatisfied emotional needs rather than as an autonomous being.
Bonus Habit #10: Foisting their children and their children's problems off on more responsible and functional adults----and never admitting that's what they're doing.
The 7 Habits of Highly Defective Teachers
Habit #1: Constantly trying to keep their students, especially their brightest students, on the defensive because they know, in their hearts, they're dumber than their students.
Habit #2: Using their brilliant intellects, if they have them, to rip their helpless students.
Habit #3: Trying to work out their frustrations and failures at the expense of their students.
Habit #4: Caring more about grades than about how much their students learn.
Habit #5: Talking over, under, around, or through their students' heads.
Habit #6: Getting lost in the trappings of academia and losing sight of the spirit of the subjects they're supposed to be teaching.
Habit #7: Lecturing with bad shaves, open flies, magic circles, chalk dust stains, and same old lame old jokes.
Bonus Habit #8: Cultivating savagely suffocating halitosis.
Bonus Habit #9: Infecting their students with their own sense of defeat and hopelessness and cynicism.
Bonus Habit #10: Never trying to learn from or surprise oneself with the act of teaching. Always teaching the same old thing from the same old notes & texts & printouts.
Bonus Habit #11: Seeing themselves as standup comics and using students as a captive audience in order to test new material or to retest fantastically stale material. Blaming the students, not the material, for lack of laughs. Playing a laugh track and installing an applause sign to cue students for the proper response.
Bonus Habit #12: Envying and resenting and hating and tormenting students for having youth, sex lives, and futures.
The 7 Habits of Highly Defective Academic Administrators
Habit #1: Junkets, junkets, junkets.
Habit #2: Caring more about their office decor than about their faculty and students.
Habit #3: Doctoring their resumes and having regular nightmares that they'll be found out for the semi-literate snake doctors they are.
Habit #4: Behaving like game show hosts.
Habit #5: Sowing dissension among colleagues, faculty, students, and alumni in order to consolidate personal power.
Habit #6: StromThurmondizing: Trying to hide symptoms of early Alzheimer's by hiding from colleagues, faculty, and students. Then forgetting to hide and forgetting one has something to hide….and not realizing that one is being found out. Or realizing it and then forgetting it and remembering only a vague feeling of unease. And finally remembering nothing at all. Yet still clinging to the seat of power.
Habit #7: Skinnydipping at midnight in the school pool with Betty Coed.
Bonus Habit #8: Playing doormat to the football and/or basketball coach.
Bonus Habit #9: Playing pinochle nightly, till 4 AM, with the custodial staff at the heating plant.
Bonus Habit #10: Joining the local Aryan Brotherhood Chapter in burning library books in the campus quadrangle at a pep rally for the upcoming homecoming game.
The 7 Habits of Highly Hobbity Hobbits
Hobbit Habit #1: They have the habit of reappearing in blockbuster movie sequels around Xmas, sequels I definitely don’t want to see, though I’m getting an awfully hard sell from whomever’s marketing them.
Hobbit Habit #2: They have cute names like Smegma, Barf, Carbuncle, and Suppurating Pustule and are, I believe, short round and hairy yet tonsured like Jason Alexander and Wally Shawn.
Hobbit Habit #3: They live underground, like rabbits and the homeless guys in the train tunnel under Park Avenue, but they’re far less interesting than either of the aforementioned. OK, OK, maybe they DON’T live underground. Maybe they live in cute little round thatched huts shaped like their cute little round thatched heads. I don’t really know for sure and I don’t want to know.
Hobbit Habit #4: People that are at least as creepy as Trekkies seem to adore Hobbits and like to dress up as Hobbits and maybe even want to be Hobbits and may already be on their way to becoming Hobbits. These people may also be, in their away-time from Middle Earth, Trekkies. Perhaps they regularly commute between Outerspace and Middle Earth. OK, fine. Just so long as they stay out of my neighborhood.
Hobbit Habit #5: Once upon a time Hobbits lived in tiresome books written by J.R. Tolkein. These books were read and enjoyed by creepy college classmates of mine who seemed to have once had good minds that were destroyed forever by attacks of terminal Anglophilia and rodentia-philia and Midlotho-philia. They wore Birkenstocks and lederhosen and said they enjoyed living in the universe that Mr. Tolkein created for them. I wondered why they couldn’t remain in that universe forever.
Hobbit Habit #6: Now that we are firmly in the Post-literate Age, when even reading cheesey fantasy novels is too much of a challenge for the masses, Hobbits appear primarily in films and are in the habit of being played by young English public schoolboys who used to be nobodies but who now must be somebodies because they appear constantly on American talkshows flogging their goddamn sequels. These unprepossessing boys, who vaguely resemble the equally uninteresting child stars of the Harry Potter series, say they were all down in New Zealand together, shooting an apparently infinite number of sequels which promise to haunt American theaters and TV’s forever. And they all bonded beautifully down there, with the sheep, and the sheep flies, and the kiwis. But they won’t keep their bonding to themselves. They’re determined to share it with me, and with you, forever.
Hobbit Habit #7: Hobbits are now one of the prime motors and money trees of a giant media conglomerate. I forget which and it doesn’t really matter which one it is. But that conglomerate is going to shake that money tree until every Hobbity dollar has fallen from it if that shaking takes a thousand years. And even if the shaking doesn’t take a thousand years, you can be sure it will feel like a thousand years.
7 Habits of Highly High People
Habit #1: Heroin. When she hugs you, you don’t want her to ever let you go.
Habit #2: Laudanum. They don’t make it like they used to and they don’t take it like they used to.
Habit #3: Cocaine. Running all round your brain.
Habit #4: Crack Cocaine. Jimmy crack coke, and I don’t care.
Habit #5: Crystal Meth. Live a lifetime in a breath.
Habit #6: Caffeine. Seems tame. But doesn’t leave you the same. Hurry. Scurry. Don’t expect me to stick around to pick up the pieces.
Habit #7: Jesus. Jesus will get you high. But how high did Jesus get? High as the cross on Calvary Hill.
Bonus Habit #8: Speedballin’. Great balls o’ fire!
Bonus Habit #9: Alcohol. Our old friend. Which we embrace with misgivings.
Bonus Habit #10: Maryjane. Only LOOKS plain. She’ll take you where you want to go if you let her and maybe even if you don’t.
Bonus Habit #11: LSD. You might just see God. But you gotta drop from 10,000 feet without a parachute. When you see yourself falling, you either sink, or swim. What’s that you see through the clouds? Is that Him? Or sudden impact? Or both?
The Seven Habits of Highly Defective People
Habit #1: Writing books like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Only someone who is irreparably defective would presume to codify success.
Habit #2: Selling books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Only someone who is deluded or profoundly cynical would foist such a scam on the desperate, the gullible, the hopeful, and the desperate to separate them from their few and hardwon bucks.
Habit #3: Buying books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Of course, anyone defective enough to buy such a title for anything but laughs is dim enough to deserve to be doomed…..and ripped off.
Habit #4: Reading books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Fortunately, most people defective enough to buy The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People are too defective to actually read said book. They’re content to put the book on their coffee tables and imagine that its sage advice is magically permeating their brains as they watch Monday Night Football. The title itself is a fetish, a mantra, and certain defectives have gone so far as wear the book, like an albatross, around their necks while endlessly repeating its title to themselves. As for the text itself, well, nobody knows WHAT the book actually says. Most who have bought it never read it, and the few that do can’t remember what it says, which is just as well.
Habit #5: Believing books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Everybody’s got to believe in something. And I believe I’ll have another beer, even as millions of others invest their faith in how-to books.
Habit #6: Asking what highly effective people would do before deciding what to do yourself. This leads a highly defective person to the question: Was JESUS a highly effective person, even though he got himself nailed to a cross? If the answer is yes, then it follows that one must get ONESELF nailed to a cross, because this was one of Jesus’s habits, along with carpentry and raising the dead. If the answer is no, then one must ask “What would the anti-Christ do?” Because if Jesus WASN’T effective, than his polar opposite must certainly have been. And I can tell you what the anti-Christ would do. He would have a good laugh at you for being so desperate and pathetic that you have been driven to take a how-to book, especially THIS how-to book, seriously.
Habit #7: Asking if Hitler and George W. Bush are highly effective people. Only an extremely defective person would even ask. Of course Hitler was highly effective. He was extremely effective at murdering those he deemed highly defective, which was just about everybody. And W. is indubitably highly effective at failing upwards, at snatching victory, in the form of defective elections and massive intelligence failures which lead to massive public relations successes, from the jaws of defeat. Whether he can also snatch his defective domestic policy from the jaws of defeat remains to be seen. And in any case it may not matter to him, as he and his cohorts are positive geniuses at making the highly defective appear highly effective to the electorate.
Habit #8: (OK, I’m aware I only promised 7. But I’m giving you a bonus habit of highly defective people because you’ve been defective enough to read this far.) Coming to the defense of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People when somebody mocks it. Come on, admit it. You got defensive about the book, didn’t you? You started making little speeches in your head about all the good you got from buying it and reading it and believing it and making it transform your little world. Lord have mercy on your soul. I won’t mock you or torture you or put down your how-to savior any longer. I don’t have to. Your existence is its own punishment.
The 7 Habits of Highly Infectious People
Habit #1: Noseboring, especially while using a motel room remote. Next time you check into a Marriott, remember what the previous occupant was doing with his nosepickers before he grabbed the remote and then don some surgical gloves and a mask and spray that baby with Lysol or worse before flicking on the news. As for the stains and pubic hairs and secretions/excretions/suppurations/expectorations/ejaculations on the bedspread, try not to think about them.
Habit #2: Making burritos or falafels or crepes suzettes by hand immediately after NOT washing those hands in the men’s/women’s room of your favorite restaurant. And why was the erstwhile foodworker in the hombres’ or mujeres’ room in the first place? Because he/she is suffering from a witches’ brew of dysentery, hepatitis, mad cow disease, Mongolian tape worms, and the screaming scabies, and passing them most handily from butt to hand to crepes to your mouth. My suggestion: sand blast your teeth and tongue and steam clean your lips, then spray your face with lysol, before and after every delicious bite.
Habit #3: Building housing projects on landfills composed of non-biodegradable diapers. While you’re sitting up watching Leno alone in your new condo, you ever smell something funny? Something that smells like baby made a poopy, or rather ten million babies made 10 million poopies…..back in 1957? Now think about it: If you, with your snotted up schnozz, can still smell it, do you think you can also still be sickened, not to say killed, by it?
Habit #4: Spontaneously laughing while being extremely gorgeous and curvaceous and hothothot while sitting at a bar alone at last call. Think about it. Does such a woman EVER laugh alone? Even if her laugh sounds like the death rattle of a cave bear, any horndogs within earshot will feign to find it infectious and laugh along with her, hoping against hope that their mock mirth will win her to their heretofore desperately solitary beds. But then, when have you ever seen a really greatlooking nubile babe sitting all by herself at a bar at last call? Even if she IS greatlooking, she’s probably not laughing. And even if she IS laughing, she’s probably a serialkiller, a homicidal hooker waiting to lure you into an alley outside the bar where her cohorts, a coven of carnivorous, manhating diesel dykes, will descend upon you and devour your gonads from your living body. But that won’t stop you from finding her laugh infectious. In fact, laugh fever will rage through every cell of your body as soon as you hear her witch’s cackle, and you will laugh as you have never laughed before. You will laugh your head off. You will laugh your guts out. You will laugh still your eyes pop out on your cheeks and your teeth rattle onto the bar. You will laugh yourself out of your shoes and socks and underwear right as you stand there with Guinness in hand. You will laugh yourself buck naked and erect, infected as you are by her infectious laugh. Then she will stop laughing and you will realize that she wasn’t laughing at all. She was just coughing and hawking and gobbing. And you will desperately try to stop laughing. But you will find that the laugh machine, once set into motion, is not so easily stopped. And a variety of snickers and sniggers and chuckles and guffaws will burst from you like emanations of gas from a three week old corpse which has been cooking and swelling under a tropical sun. And you will realize that you have been very uncool and that the lion will sleep alone, once more, tonight. And you will stumble out of the bar alone and forlorn, no longer shaking with infectious laughter, but incubating a virus which has jumped into your nose from that moment when she seemed to be infectiously laughing but was actually infectiously coughing and spitooing. And within a week, this virus will make its way into your cerebrum, drilling it more full of holes than a loufa sponge. And you will end your days in a quarantine ward, a hospice for sufferers of Viral Hebephrenia, and you will laugh yourself sick, you will laugh until you can no longer breathe, you will laugh yourself to death.
Habit #5: Wearing an infectious habit and passing it on to the next nun without first giving it a vigorous washing. This happened a lot in the Middle Ages, before convents had Maytags. With what were the nuns’ habits infected? The usual. Small pox. And big pox. And middlesized pox as well as extremely small pox and extra extra large pox. The extra extra EXTRA large pox was usually passed on to the nuns by a member of the NBA or the NFL or, rarely, by a Sumo wrestler. But it’s extremely sad to think of that other nun, the virgin nun, the unsuspecting nun with not a stain of sin on her soul or body, whose only real sin, if sin it can be called, is to borrow the infectious habit of her sister nun without first having it steamcleaned and irradiated. And next thing you know that pox is getting all UP in the girl, and she’s dancing madly, dancing St. Vitus’s Dance and the hootchygootchy and the Charleston and the mashed potato and the froog and the pony and the makarena and the lambada and the lindy and the samba and the rumba and the mambo and the chachacha and the dirty dog----right there in the convent! Before the horrified eyes of the Mother Superior! Before the sad sad eyes of the polychromatic statue of The Virgin Mary. Before the lecherous eyes of the visiting Monsignor. Before the furtive and uncomprehending eyes of a tiny church mouse, who was just then nibbling at a communion wafer. And by and by this wacked out nun dances till her feet are bloody, dances still she’s a skeleton of her former self, dances until the only light in her eyes is the light of madness. And the clerical powers that be take a look at her, and then estimate how expensive it would be to check her into a sanatorium, and they instead declare her a saint, who is dancing because she is infected with the Holy Spirit. She’s got dance fever! But the nun who lent her her unwashed, infectious, habit knows better. That poor girl’s dancin’ because she’s got all sizes of the pox! Let the wearers of infectious habits beware!
Habit #6: Sharing dirty needles.
Habit #7: French kissing visitors to your tuberculosis sanatorium.
The 7 Habits of Highly Depressing People
Habit #1: Devouring most of the world’s resources while bombing the tar out of 3rd World nations, yet describing oneself as the Arsenal of Democracy rather than the Arsehole of Demogoguery.
Habit #2: Refusing to do even simple things, like limiting gas consumption in SUV’s, to slow global warming.
Habit #3: Looking for any and every excuse to give tax breaks to the upper 1% and to giant corporations even as the economic and social and medical conditions of the average American deteriorates.
Habit #4: Making policy decisions purely for political and electoral reasons rather than for the good of the nation and the world.
Habit #5: Stealing presidential elections and cynically using the judiciary to pursue a narrow agenda that frequently subverts the letter and the intent of the Constitution.
Habit #6: Looking for any excuse to rape the environment, including handing the national parklands over to lumber and oil cronies.
Habit #7: Making a mockery of the highest ideals of the land, including the principles economic and social justice, by using highsounding words like Freedom and Peace and Equality and Compassion to manipulate the public and ram through a narrow political agenda of Avarice, Aggression, Atavism, and Aryan Supremacy.
Bonus Habit #8: Pretending as if a stolen election is a mandate for change.
Double Bonus Habit #9: Exploiting the populace’s fear of international terrorism to advance one’s narrow political agenda.
Triple Bonus Habit #10: Skittering around the country like a scared chipmunk in Air Force One on 9/11, and then, when it’s save to come out, struttin’ and swaggering at Ground Zero like John Wayne himself.
Quadruple Bonus Habit 7 come #11: Being quick to risk the lives of your fellow Americans in combat though you yourself were a chickenhawk who slithered out of combat in Viet Nam.
(You can count the last few as some of the 7 Habits of Extremely Hyocritical People if you prefer.)
The 7 Habits of Highly Reckless People
Habit #1: Skydiving, surfing, and hangliding in hurricanes.
Habit #2: Driving the wrong way on the Santa Monica Freeway.
Habit #3: Pretending as if America is so powerful it doesn’t have to pay attention to the wants and desires of the other 94% of the human race.
Habit #4: Pulling out of nuclear test ban and environmental treaties while nuclear weapons proliferate and the global environment deteriorates.
Habit #5: Undercutting United Nations efforts to control the exploding birthrate.
Habit #6: Selling tens of billions of weapons to the world’s nations, including to unstable dictatorships ruled by ruthless tyrants, while at the same time doing nothing to control the dissemination of guns among already heavily armed citizens of one’s own nation.
Habit #7: Putting the narrow economic interests of one’s political cronies before the welfare of the nation and the world.
Bonus Habit #8: Always taking the short view, never the long. Acting, in fact, as there will be no longterm future, or at least as if the longterm future doesn’t matter. Not admitting that man is responsible for the welfare of the earth and is his brother’s keeper, rather acting as if mankind and earth are merely targets to be exploited. Seeing Mother Earth not as home, but as a target-rich environment.
7 Habits of Highly Unsuccessful People
Habit #1: Some smoke.
Habit #2: Some don’t.
Habit #3 : Some are in the habit of snoring.
Habit #4: Some are in the habit of waking up in the morning and blowing their noses in the sink….and not washing the gobs away, but rather leaving them for their housemates to behold when they go to the sink to brush their teeth or wash their faces.
Habit #5: Some are in the habit of serialkilling. They start out with small neighborhood animals, then work up to larger neighborhood animals, such as Labradors and mailmen. Now there are some that say that successful serialkilling is a kind of success, and that Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacey belong in the subgroup of very SUCCESSFUL people. But I’m of the other school of thought, namely, that serialkilling, while a challenging career, is not socially beneficial enough to merit the adjective successful, even if done very well.
Habit #6: Some roll through stop signs.
Habit #7: Some run up excessive balances on credit cards with high interest rates and don’t make their monthly minimum payments on time and get penalized for late payments. Some are running fastforward yet falling back as they desperately struggle and strain to service their credit cards.
Bonus Habit #8: Some make u-turns in business districts and at lighted intersections.
Bonus Habit #9: Some have difficulty parallel parking.
Bonus Habit #10: Some subject their children or stepchildren to physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse. Some act out, victimizing the vulnerable while failing to confront the traumatic abuse they themselves once suffered. Some are cruel and malicious not because they themselves were damaged, but because they are possessed by demons.
Bonus Habit #11: Some take the name of the Lord in vain. Some pepper their conversations with profanity, even in mixed company.
Bonus Habit #12: Some are in the habit of getting swelled heads at the least little bit of success. They can’t handle it. Soon as they get on a roll, they careen out of control.
Bonus Habit #13: Some don’t get out of bed in morning most mornings and show a marked aversion to labor of the hand or the head.
Bonus Habit #14: Some are bad planners and fail to keep their desktops straight.
Bonus Habit #15: Some are in the habit of getting crushed by the least little thing, such as life.
Bonus Habit #16: Some declare moral and intellectual bankruptcy and are forced to auction off their reputations, their ethics, their personalities, their idle thoughts, and even their most cherished memories. Others in arrears have their cultural heritages, ancestry, and religious beliefs confiscated by the IRS or foreclosed by banks and other large lending institutions.
Bonus Habit #17: Some, such as Malcolm X and MLK and Anwar Sadat and RFK and Abe Lincoln and John Lennon, become great spirits who are murdered or martyred by mean or mad spirits. There are some that see this martyrdom as the crowning successes of their careers. But I am of the other school and see getting murdered as a form of Unsuccess, as in: He tried to continue living and was highly unsuccessful, thanks to the assassin’s or assassins’ bullet or bullets.
7 Habits of Highly Lowly People
Habit #1: Getting killed when tornadoes roll through their trailer camps.
Habit #2: Keeping a low profile.
Habit #3: Standing in unemployment lines when they’re lucky enough to qualify for unemployment.
Habit #4: Standing in soup kitchen lines when they’re not, or even sometimes when they do qualify and are receiving unemployment compensation and decide to cadge some free soup as well.
Habit #5: Kowtowing. Inclining their heads from the neck and their bodies from the waist.
Habit #6: Keeping large vicious dogs in small grassless fenced-in yards filled with dog turds.
Habit #7: Failing smog tests.
Bonus #8: Not qualifying for medical or dental or pension benefits.
Bonus #9: Getting kicked out of this country and sent back to scary impoverished 3rd World nations roamed by death squads.
Bonus #10: Getting beheaded and otherwise mistreated by potentates.
Bonus #11: Having to dig their own graves before being shot into them.
Bonus #12: Not standing up for their rights.
Bonus #13: Having difficulty with the subjunctive and conditional tenses.
Bonus #14: Lacking grace or fluency in French, even if they are French.
Bonus #15: Drinking from fingerbowls and being unsure of which fork to use for which course at state dinners.
Bonus #16: Never getting off their knees.
Bonus #17: Never pinpointing the political bias of network newsreaders. Pretending or assuming that they have none. But mostly never even thinking about it and simply believing.
7 Habits of Highly Obnoxious People
Habit #1: Some gob with gusto into gutters.
Habit #2: Others lob juicy loogies into public drinking fountains.
Habit #3: Some nose pick obliviously while waiting for lights to change at busy intersections.
Habit #4: Some chose to eat what they pick.
Habit #5: Some try to control dinner conversations by talking more loudly and frequently than anyone else and by not really listening to anyone but themselves.
Habit #6: Some take off their shoes and bang their heels on lecturns at the United Nations and promise to bury their adversaries.
Habit #7: Some interrupt.
Bonus Habit #8: Some pick their teeth while you’re trying to unpack your heart to them.
7 Habits of Highly Lovable People
Habit #1: Being pitiful and embattled yet cheerfully keep on keeping on.
Habit #2: Spending their last dime to buy you extravagant birthday gifts, even as they also spend your last dime and plunge you irretrievably into debt.
Habit #3: Some are good with large animals, such as Labradors, dugongs, and leopard seals.
Habit #4: Pretending so well to understand you that you never realize they don’t.
Habit #5: Losing their edges and becoming sweet and dithering.
Habit #6: Being maddeningly and indiscriminately encouraging.
Habit #7: Displaying breathtaking patience and dignity and stoicism and compassion and even good cheer at moments of intolerable suffering, including those of their own death throes. Their deaths become an inspiration to those of us who survive them.
Bonus Habit #8: Being beautiful to look at and listen to and touch. And when they touch you, their touch is like a benediction.
Bonus Habit #9: Some come running.
Bonus Habit #10: Getting you in touch with your own best self and make you feel larger than life and seem larger than life themselves and if and when they pass away the world feels poorer and darker for their passing, though richer for their ever having been here at all.
Bonus Habit #11: Having tender looks in their eye.
Bonus Habit #12: Having soft warm hands and odd, blocked shaped feet covered with warts but smelling of cloves.
Bonus Habit #13: Never looking the same way twice.
Bonus Habit #14: Always leaving you stronger.
Bonus Habit #15: Offering you dazzling insights.
Bonus Habit #16: Gently, softly, playing their guitars during blackouts.
Bonus Habit #17: Having an antic quality which makes you laugh just to see them move. They make the whole heavy world seem somehow lighter.
Bonus Habit #18: Not being hung up on their own beauty, but give it freely, expecting nothing in return.
Bonus Habit #19: Making a house a home.
Bonus Habit #20: Always being there for you, even when they’re not.
Bonus Habit #21: Remembering what matters, and at least pretending to forget what doesn’t.
7 Habits of Highly Duplicitous People
Habit #1: Forgetting all the things you did for them as soon as they decide they want somebody or something new.
Habit #2: Being brilliant and entertaining mimics. Perpetual impostors, they are never really themselves because the real-est self they are IS an impostor.
Habit #3: Cultivating an initial charm which wears thin in moments of great stress and import.
Habit #4: Rarely, or never, taking responsibility for the consequences of their acts.
Habit #5: Seeing others as mere extensions of their own emotional needs. They never realize that other people have existences of their own.
Habit #6: Thinking, when they have betrayed a trust, that they have outsmarted the victim.
Habit #7: Always being on the run, even when they’re standing still.
7 Habits of Highly Ineffectual Boyfriends
Habit #1: Paying off girlfriends' maxed out credit cards---over and over and over--- without demanding that the girlfriends becoming financially responsible.
Habit #2: Allowing themselves to get sucked into neurotic lovers' verbal labyrinths. Calling said bloodsucking labyrinths "therapeutic dialogues."
Habit #3: Carrying on a prosperous accounting business in Los Angeles while one's wife works, and secretly dates, as a showgirl in Vegas. Her secret dating is only secret from her accountant hubby. In fact, she's in the escort section of the Vegas yellow pages if anyone besides her spouse should care to find her.....and they do.
Habit #4: Playing Mr. Mom on the homefront, raising the toddlers, while wifey pursues a career as a pornstar.
Habit #5: Not asking wives where they've been when they get home at 4 AM…..with jism dripping down their thighs.
Habit #6: Remaining hungup on broads who have resoundingly and humiliatingly dumped them. Carrying torches for the old which blind them to the new.
Habit #7: Going round and round the wheel of suffering with women who will never change.
Bonus Habit #8: Loving madwomen for their madness. Being deeply touched by blackbirds with broken wings.
Bonus Habit #9: Helping estranged wives and lovers buy mattresses upon which they will fuck their new lovers.
Bonus Habit #10: Not asking what the used condoms are doing in the backseat of her car.
Bonus Habit #11: Waxing romantic and sentimental over women with adding machines for hearts.
Bonus Habit #12: Finding human trainwrecks sexy.
7 Habits of Highly Ineffectual Parents
Habit #1: Never having children in the first place.
Habit #2: Letting demon children call the shots and rule the roost.
Habit #3: Letting children dis them and others and not calling those children to account.
Habit #4: Never fostering their children's intellectual development themselves yet always blaming teachers, never themselves, for their children's academic failings.
Habit #5: Having more and more and more children in hopes of making a fresh start with each new one while writing off the old ones…..and rationalizing that quantity trumps quality.
Habit #6: Not standing up for a child who has been bullied inside or outside the home.
Habit #7: Not giving every child unconditional love 24/7/52.
Bonus Habit #8: Not drawing a line in the sand.
Bonus Habit #9: Seeing a child as an extension of one's own unsatisfied emotional needs rather than as an autonomous being.
Bonus Habit #10: Foisting their children and their children's problems off on more responsible and functional adults----and never admitting that's what they're doing.
The 7 Habits of Highly Defective Teachers
Habit #1: Constantly trying to keep their students, especially their brightest students, on the defensive because they know, in their hearts, they're dumber than their students.
Habit #2: Using their brilliant intellects, if they have them, to rip their helpless students.
Habit #3: Trying to work out their frustrations and failures at the expense of their students.
Habit #4: Caring more about grades than about how much their students learn.
Habit #5: Talking over, under, around, or through their students' heads.
Habit #6: Getting lost in the trappings of academia and losing sight of the spirit of the subjects they're supposed to be teaching.
Habit #7: Lecturing with bad shaves, open flies, magic circles, chalk dust stains, and same old lame old jokes.
Bonus Habit #8: Cultivating savagely suffocating halitosis.
Bonus Habit #9: Infecting their students with their own sense of defeat and hopelessness and cynicism.
Bonus Habit #10: Never trying to learn from or surprise oneself with the act of teaching. Always teaching the same old thing from the same old notes & texts & printouts.
Bonus Habit #11: Seeing themselves as standup comics and using students as a captive audience in order to test new material or to retest fantastically stale material. Blaming the students, not the material, for lack of laughs. Playing a laugh track and installing an applause sign to cue students for the proper response.
Bonus Habit #12: Envying and resenting and hating and tormenting students for having youth, sex lives, and futures.
The 7 Habits of Highly Defective Academic Administrators
Habit #1: Junkets, junkets, junkets.
Habit #2: Caring more about their office decor than about their faculty and students.
Habit #3: Doctoring their resumes and having regular nightmares that they'll be found out for the semi-literate snake doctors they are.
Habit #4: Behaving like game show hosts.
Habit #5: Sowing dissension among colleagues, faculty, students, and alumni in order to consolidate personal power.
Habit #6: StromThurmondizing: Trying to hide symptoms of early Alzheimer's by hiding from colleagues, faculty, and students. Then forgetting to hide and forgetting one has something to hide….and not realizing that one is being found out. Or realizing it and then forgetting it and remembering only a vague feeling of unease. And finally remembering nothing at all. Yet still clinging to the seat of power.
Habit #7: Skinnydipping at midnight in the school pool with Betty Coed.
Bonus Habit #8: Playing doormat to the football and/or basketball coach.
Bonus Habit #9: Playing pinochle nightly, till 4 AM, with the custodial staff at the heating plant.
Bonus Habit #10: Joining the local Aryan Brotherhood Chapter in burning library books in the campus quadrangle at a pep rally for the upcoming homecoming game.
The 7 Habits of Highly Hobbity Hobbits
Hobbit Habit #1: They have the habit of reappearing in blockbuster movie sequels around Xmas, sequels I definitely don’t want to see, though I’m getting an awfully hard sell from whomever’s marketing them.
Hobbit Habit #2: They have cute names like Smegma, Barf, Carbuncle, and Suppurating Pustule and are, I believe, short round and hairy yet tonsured like Jason Alexander and Wally Shawn.
Hobbit Habit #3: They live underground, like rabbits and the homeless guys in the train tunnel under Park Avenue, but they’re far less interesting than either of the aforementioned. OK, OK, maybe they DON’T live underground. Maybe they live in cute little round thatched huts shaped like their cute little round thatched heads. I don’t really know for sure and I don’t want to know.
Hobbit Habit #4: People that are at least as creepy as Trekkies seem to adore Hobbits and like to dress up as Hobbits and maybe even want to be Hobbits and may already be on their way to becoming Hobbits. These people may also be, in their away-time from Middle Earth, Trekkies. Perhaps they regularly commute between Outerspace and Middle Earth. OK, fine. Just so long as they stay out of my neighborhood.
Hobbit Habit #5: Once upon a time Hobbits lived in tiresome books written by J.R. Tolkein. These books were read and enjoyed by creepy college classmates of mine who seemed to have once had good minds that were destroyed forever by attacks of terminal Anglophilia and rodentia-philia and Midlotho-philia. They wore Birkenstocks and lederhosen and said they enjoyed living in the universe that Mr. Tolkein created for them. I wondered why they couldn’t remain in that universe forever.
Hobbit Habit #6: Now that we are firmly in the Post-literate Age, when even reading cheesey fantasy novels is too much of a challenge for the masses, Hobbits appear primarily in films and are in the habit of being played by young English public schoolboys who used to be nobodies but who now must be somebodies because they appear constantly on American talkshows flogging their goddamn sequels. These unprepossessing boys, who vaguely resemble the equally uninteresting child stars of the Harry Potter series, say they were all down in New Zealand together, shooting an apparently infinite number of sequels which promise to haunt American theaters and TV’s forever. And they all bonded beautifully down there, with the sheep, and the sheep flies, and the kiwis. But they won’t keep their bonding to themselves. They’re determined to share it with me, and with you, forever.
Hobbit Habit #7: Hobbits are now one of the prime motors and money trees of a giant media conglomerate. I forget which and it doesn’t really matter which one it is. But that conglomerate is going to shake that money tree until every Hobbity dollar has fallen from it if that shaking takes a thousand years. And even if the shaking doesn’t take a thousand years, you can be sure it will feel like a thousand years.
7 Habits of Highly High People
Habit #1: Heroin. When she hugs you, you don’t want her to ever let you go.
Habit #2: Laudanum. They don’t make it like they used to and they don’t take it like they used to.
Habit #3: Cocaine. Running all round your brain.
Habit #4: Crack Cocaine. Jimmy crack coke, and I don’t care.
Habit #5: Crystal Meth. Live a lifetime in a breath.
Habit #6: Caffeine. Seems tame. But doesn’t leave you the same. Hurry. Scurry. Don’t expect me to stick around to pick up the pieces.
Habit #7: Jesus. Jesus will get you high. But how high did Jesus get? High as the cross on Calvary Hill.
Bonus Habit #8: Speedballin’. Great balls o’ fire!
Bonus Habit #9: Alcohol. Our old friend. Which we embrace with misgivings.
Bonus Habit #10: Maryjane. Only LOOKS plain. She’ll take you where you want to go if you let her and maybe even if you don’t.
Bonus Habit #11: LSD. You might just see God. But you gotta drop from 10,000 feet without a parachute. When you see yourself falling, you either sink, or swim. What’s that you see through the clouds? Is that Him? Or sudden impact? Or both?
posted by mobydoug at 3:05 PM
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