Suckage Part 1

I read a couple of months ago that 11% of women and 5% of men are on antidepressants in this country.  Eleven percent of women!  That means that, when you walk into a bar, you have a one-in-ten chance of bringing home someone who is depressed even before the whole hump & dump thing.

According to the article, most of these people are not actually ill with depression.  They do not have clinical depression, which is the only thing antidepressants have been approved to treat.  That is a good thing because clinical depression is supposed to feel something like being the pope’s hard-on.  Forever.

No, the vast majority of people who take antidepressants take them because they are depressed the way that everybody gets depressed sometimes.  You know, like because Natalie Portman will probably never star in even one porno movie or because statutory rape laws have killed the passion you once had for a career in teaching high school.  Without really using my imagination, I have a hard time seeing any upside to bringing somebody who is already depressed home with you from a club or a bar.

So why the fuck is everyone so gaddamn depressed?  I have given this a lot of thought and the best answer I can come up with is suckage.  Life is just full of suckage.

There are many sources of suckage.  Work is all about suckage.  Families have closets full of suckage.  Suckage is all around us.  But I think the biggest suckage indicators are the movies.  See, art is jam-packed with suckage.  Art=suckage.  Nowhere is this clearer than the difference between real life and the movies.

Women like romantic comedies.  You know, those formulaic social commentaries that feature perfectly dressed women with fabulous hair who would be models of stability were it not for their fucked up relationships with men so statuesque and beautiful that they must be CG.  These movies go perfect with a chilled chardonnay and a big ol’ box of chocolate-covered strawberries.  And a box of Kleenex.  And a few shots of insulin.

Men have their own dick flicks.  I don’t mean porn.  We will call porno “skin flicks.” I mean movies where things get blown up and a lot of people get injured and killed.  Those are dick flicks.  Also high on the dick flick list are recent movies like Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, dude-buddy unromantic comedies so crammed with dick jokes that they make vaginas seem about as fashionable and sexy as bicycle helmets.

None of these types of films has anything in common with reality.  So, whether you like your movies with a tall glass of estrogen or testosterone, real life is comparatively jam-packed with suckage.  Women want romance and relationships free of turbulence and misunderstanding.  Men want to kill things, to fuck, and to talk about their dicks when they are not killing or fucking.  If life were perfect, every time I told a dick joke or blew my wad hundreds of people would be injured or die.  That must be what heaven is like.

I read this article the other day about how a couple of scientists in Hawaii think some other scientists are going to destroy the universe.  So, they are suing and have started a crappy website.

If this were a movie, the dudes out to destroy the universe would either have found a way to profit from the destruction of the universe or they would be completely mad.  I can’t think of many ways to make a lot of money destroying the universe all at once, even on eBay.  But if the dudes who want to destroy the universe are completely crazy mad scientists bent on annihilation of everything, what good would a lawsuit and a crappy website do?

This, my friends, is the difference between movies and the suckage that is real life.  Instead of sending some crack team of submachine-brandishing muscleheads out after these dudes who are about to destroy the universe, we file some papers with some goddamn court.  No superspies.  No superheroes.  No army of robots with retractable tentacles wielding heat-seeking buttplugs.

A few months ago on a Saturday night, I went out pussy hunting with one of my good friends.  We’ll call him Ralph.  Ralph is frequently my wingman on these excursions, but neither of us played a great game this night so we left with only phone numbers.  So, we’re walking down Second Avenue at about 3am and we are both a little drunk and I turn to Ralph and say, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” You know, like in Fight Club, one of my favorite movies of all time.  So, Ralph turns to me and says, “Really?” He is smiling.  I can tell he is all into this.  He is already clenching his fists open and closed.

And I’m already starting to have second thoughts.  Ralph is taller than I am.  He weighs more than I do.  He wants to maim people as much as any other dude.  If you can’t fuck and you don’t have a handy dick joke or a detonator, punching someone’s lights out is as good as anything.  But I am brave.  I say, “Sure.” He says, “Okay.”

So I stand there, waiting for him to punch me.  I think I probably looked very deer-in-the-headlights while waiting to be punched.  Ralph doesn’t care.  He reels back like he is pitching for the majors and swings at me.  But my eyes are open, so I see it coming and move out of the way.  Ralph is one step ahead of me, though, and comes at me with his left fist.  He nails me under my right eye and kind of smooshes my nose.  He hits me so hard that I fall backwards on my ass.

So now, I am sitting in my expensive game clothes on a sidewalk on Second Avenue at 3am on a Saturday in a puddle that is probably some homeless dude’s piss.  Ralph is laughing as he asks, “You okay?” Then he says, “You’re bleeding.”

My nose is bleeding and I have a gash under my right eye.  I feel like crying.  But I don’t cry.  I wipe away the shock and blood with my sleeve and get up and say something to Ralph like, “I’m fine, you fucking thug.” I am pissed and Ralph gets worried that I am really mad at him and whines something like, “You told me to hit you as hard as I could.” I pinch my nose back to stop the bleeding and say, “I know.  Now you’re supposed to tell me to do you.” And Ralph says, “Are you fucking nuts?”

Just then, our dysfunctional relationship is 1% dick flick and 99% romantic comedy.  I don’t feel liberated or manly or transformed.  I am bleeding, for Christ’s sake!  I feel beaten and disappointed, and Ralph feels guilty and sorry.

We shared a silent cab to our respective stoogepens.  My nose eventually stopped bleeding but my eye puffed up.  When I went to work on Monday, somebody asked me what happened and, being the wizard of deception I am, I told him it was a paper cut.  Then people called me “Paper Cut” at work for two months.

That’s what I’m talking about.  That is suckage.  The antidepressants we take dull our senses just enough so that we can’t see the vast divide between what our lives ought to be and what a pathetic pussy-assed world we actually live in.

And that’s just mainstream movies versus our lives.  The difference between real sex and porno is even more stark and depressing, but I will take that up some other time.  That won’t be pretty either so, if you need to refill that prescription, you should do it today.  You have been warned.