Stockholm Syndrome (n.) – Feelings of trust or affection felt in many cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim toward a captor.

Perhaps you’ve heard about “Social Intelligence.”  Perhaps not.  Perhaps it sounds like a harmless geek concept like “The Singularity.” Or some scam sold by a marketer with a Twitter profile that reads “Web 2.0 Enthusiast! Online Marketing Consultant Specializing in ‘Social Intelligence.’”

Sorry, Percival, you’re qualified, and it appears quite talented. But our gumshoes at Social Intelligence have found this Facebook shot of you standing next to a man smoking a joint at a Furthur show during your sophomore year at Colgate.  This disqualifies you.  Zero tolerance.  I’m sure you understand.

If this product catches on, and it all but assuredly will, one of two things are going to happen. In the first instance, nobody’s ever going to be hirable again.  As in our political systems, corporations using social media background checks will be all but entirely staffed with milquetoast, vanilla robots. Armies of Mitt Romneys, corporate suites of congenital ciphers and bobble-headed Yes Men. All remnant fumes of creativity and innovation left in the stagnant McIndustries of this country will be snuffed out. Asia, probably a BRIC nation, or perhaps even Old Europe – any place adult enough to realize most of us (and usually the most talented of us) are closet libertines – will soak up all the talent.  We’ll be left with corporate hierarchies entirely composed of Men in Grey Flannel Suits.  And untold numbers of closeted freaks who were smart enough to stay off Facebook.

In the second instance, so much dirty laundry is going to be on display that screeners are going to have to set standards so low the only evidence disqualifying a prospective hire will be a Facebook post proclaiming his lifelong allegiance to NAMBLA or the American Nazi Party (“Interests: Crystal Meth (I don’t fuck around, yo),” “Favorite Book: The Satanic Bible“).  It’s entirely possible, if not likely, that when we merge the admissions of our real lives, where we’re honest in a fashion we’d never be at the office, with our career personas, we’ll be faced with having to admit aloud that Every Man is Two People.

Of course, everyone knows life is 50% acting – that we spend untold hours of every week behaving in an artificial way around people we’d never otherwise associate with, to accrue money.  But as much as we admit that to ourselves, as much as we all know it’s a baseline reality, we rarely talk about it.  And we never discuss it at work, for this obvious reason: To so breach that “fourth wall” admits a duplicity at the center of society’s operational mechanisms.*

And allowing the admission one acts through half of his waking hours raises the question, “Why do I put on the facade?” The response necessarily following that is, “I don’t know,” which then leads to this:

“I’m dropping the false front.  I’m going to speak my mind.  I’m going to question the next directive that doesn’t make sense.  I’m going to admit my politics.  I’m going to express myself, even if it’s at odds with my community, or my employer’s ‘brand.’”

Obviously, that result – having that discussion openly – is not the one the corporations swallowing our society want.  And that’s where the evil brilliance of something like Social Intelligence emerges. That type of monitoring service allows corporations, and the governmental authorities who feed them our money, to control not only who gets hired, but through fear cause the population at large to eschew criticisms of all economically and politically powerful structures.  The mere knowledge something like Social Intelligence exists will both cause people to think twice before writing something that doesn’t fit the Accepted Narratives, and keep people who’d question the Accepted Narratives away from the levers of power.  And away from audiences who’d hear them.

What are the Accepted Narratives?  We all know those very well.  That you should spend.  That you should extend yourself… That you should buy all the stuff the corporations sell.  Get yourself in debt to the banks.  Buy the American Dream… the expensive car, the expensive house, the granite kitchen you see on HGTV.  Get addicted to stuff, get larded up with debt you’ll pay the banks from cradle to grave.  Never sit back and think, even for a moment, “Isn’t life’s only real currency freedom?  Time?  Wouldn’t I be happier owing less?  Wouldn’t I be better off aiming to be free, rather than leveraged into a gilded prison?”

Author’s Note: And when you’re done reading that, read a rebuttal to it, “Orwell via Huxley (Counterpoint),” by ConstitutionalDaily’s Editor, BL1Y:

2. People Will Remain Lazy

Just as many of us are too lazy to adequately hide our dirty laundry from potential employers who go snooping on the internet, employers are also people, and will likewise be too lazy to make full use of all
the information out there.

Consider how few law firms bother to ask for an official transcript either when making summer hiring decisions, or when taking on new employees full time. What are the odds that if you made up a fake reference on a job application that anyone would ever notice? Would they even notice if you and your reference have the same phone number?

Some employers will be very thorough, but probably only in the same proportion as the employees who are thorough about keeping their Google footprint squeaky clean, which is to say not that many.  As the amount of information grows, the signal to noise ratio gets worse. Data mining becomes more time consuming and less productive.

The rest is here.

This site hasn’t been updated in a couple months as I’ve been writing over at ConstitutionalDaily.com, under “The Philadelphia Lawyer, Unfiltered.”  This doesn’t mean I won’t write here in the future.  It means I’ll write here and there.  I’ll explain this in more detail, preferably with an interview and introduction of the editor of Con Daily, BL1Y, in the future.

Anyway, this post is an introduction to “Gone, and Hardly Worth Remembering,” a piece covering, as you might have guessed, the death of Osama Bin Laden.  Here’s some of the meat of it:

Bin Laden was the blackened heart of madness, the spawn of religious certainty infused with the shame of a backward failing culture still smarting from the Crusades.  A king of losers who was spectacularly lucky once.  He deserved worse, far worse, than he got.  But in fairness, he did give us something.

.   .   .

The carnage wasn’t the message, nor will be the revenge.  Which is why, sitting here at the laptop, finishing this bit twelve hours after the first report of Bin Laden’s death, seeing the images of his compound and hearing the details as they come, I still can’t find myself excited.  It’s not the vodka headache, or the conference call I have in a half hour, blunting the emotional impact.  It’s a sadness… a profound sense of loss that in Bin Laden, in the horror he brought, there’d been a moment where Things Could Have Changed.

The rest you can read here.

And while you’re considering that, you might enjoy a few other pieces from my ConstitutionalDaily archive (links to complete pieces in titles):

“The Essential Gravity Theorem“:

You cannot keep a cancer victim alive on chemotherapy indefinitely, or float a jetliner without fuel from New York to LA.  A rocket will eventually come back when its propulsion is exhausted, your SUV will stall when you’re down to the last fumes in the tank, and if you don’t put new helium in it, that balloon your child brought back from the amusement park will be on the floor in two days.

No rollercoaster lets you off at the top, no man has ever survived a hanging by flapping his arms really hard, and while “belief in a bright tomorrow” might lift the spirit, so far as I’m aware standing here, no bank will accept it as a mortgage payment.  The only organisms that grow forever are malignant, nothing outruns compound interest, and patching a tire over and over doesn’t change the fact that eventually, you’ll have to buy a new one.  And when you do, the problem will be acute.  Probably a blowout.

Gravity applies.  It will always apply, and there will be no exceptions…

“There’s Hope (For Those Who ‘Get It’)”:

There’s opportunity in carnage for attorneys.  But only for the certain few – the kind of lawyers who “get it.”  The kind who can deliver value, who can see through the process… work a case like businessmen and deliver pragmatic, bottom line results.

What’s the difference between the lawyers who “get it” and those who don’t?  The best analogy’s a tired one, but it fits.  Courts are a Matrix.  The procedures, the language, the rules – in business disputes it’s all mere pretext, a alternative arena in which parties can conduct bare knuckle business negotiations in a cumbersome substitute language.  The issues and legal arguments are subterfuge.  All that matters to anyone is a bottom line economic result.  The faster you can cut through all the bullshit of a case – the motions, discovery and posturing about legal arguments – and get to the numbers, the more impressed your client, and a smart judge looking to get a case off his docket, will be.

“Walk Before They Make You Run“:

The only professor one should ever listen to is an adjunct.  A guy who’s done nothing but work in academia is as qualified to teach you practical skills as your guidance counselor was to assist you in making wise career choices.

“The Difference Between Litigators and Trial lawyers”:

Litigators would have you believe they pound opponents into dust in the courtroom.  And if you’re a clueless client, you might buy that line. But those of us in the business – even a first year associate – know it’s all fiction. There’s an essential, unblurrable difference between trial lawyers and litigators that the latter seeks desperately to obscure… They are not of the same species; not even of the same genus.  In terms of crucial, defining characteristics, personalities and skills, these creatures couldn’t be further apart.

“How to Drink at the Office”:

People think the self-important are smart, skeptical sorts who’d spot them engaging in aberrant behavior.  This is wrong – as wrong as one can get.  The self absorbed are the easiest people in the world to bullshit.  You don’t even have to try.  You don’t even really have to lie.  Unless you’re a godamned idiot… Unless you grab them by the collar, throw their cell phone to the floor, rip the papers from their hands and confess your sins in their faces (“I’m shitfaced, Ted!  Right now, pissed fucking drunk… And I’ve missed every deadline in the Whifflerock case! Too busy selling black tar heroin to staff and trading child porn on my firm-issued laptop!”) – they’ll never even know you’re alive.  So when it comes to advice on how to sauce on the clock, I say “Any way you want to.”  Breakfast bloodies, Irish Coffee, bottle of red at lunch… Smoke a joint in the parking garage.  Keep an arsenal of Whip-Its in your briefcase… rip lines off the screen of your Blackberry.

Apologies on the silence, and lack of links to this stuff in the past.  I’m not much for organization, or punctuality, but as you can see, I didn’t stop writing.  I doubt I’ll ever be able to stop writing.

“[I]nflation is very, very low…” – Ben Bernanke, 60 Minutes, December 5, 2010

“America is simply going through a period of deleveraging…” – The Economist, “Class Consciousness Comes to Davos,” January 28, 2011

Half truths at their very best… and that’s being overly generous.  In Bernanke’s case, a lie by omission – the technically correct use of a term suggesting circumstances at odds with practical reality.  As to the Economist, lazy use of an easy descriptive obscuring the ominous character of what’s actually happening.

This is a short piece refuting two false narratives circulating in the press:

(1) Inflation is low; and
(2) America is merely “deleveraging.”

The truth is the average American has been suffering considerable negative effects of inflation.  It has been present through most the downturn, and remains pernicious in all areas but those where it would create a positive impact: housing and wages. And America is not benignly deleveraging by paying down its debts, but in fact shedding the overwhelming majority of them through default.

Both of these observations seem obvious to anyone with any exposure to the actual economy.  But you’ll rarely see either discussed plainly in the news.  Inflation’s only addressed from a macro perspective, and even there, it’s predicted, rather than acknowledged as an immediate reality.  And you’ll never hear a talking head swap “deleveraging,” with its connotations of discipline and saving, for the more accurate term.

Why aren’t these stories honestly discussed?* Many reasons.

As to inflation, first, and most superficially, the official federal figures define the phenomenon in a manner that renders its existence all but impossible.  “Core inflation” – the measure on which financial pundits focus – excludes energy and food prices.  The government claims it omits these products because their prices are too volatile – that their inclusion would lead to unreliable reports.  This might be true, but it seems an awfully convenient pretext.  You don’t need Paul Krugman to tell you, were food and energy factored into the figure, we’d see a whole lot more inflation.

Second, to admit inflation is present, and damaging a large sector of society, would create a groundswell of opposition to Bernanke’s current monetary policy.  There’s consensus among many liberals and conservatives that if we stop feeding cheap money into the financial system, the economy will falter.  If millions of reasonable people (people outside the Tea Parties) started complaining about the Fed’s policies, and how those policies provide huge profits to financial institutions, but little direct benefit to Main Street, the political will for a QE3 or 4 might not be there when we need those measures. (And we will.)

Third, the inflation at issue is not a simply tracked uptick in the price of goods.  It’s more an “inflationary effect” – a tempered but persistent rise in the price of essentials coupled with a decrease, or stagnation, in workers’ income.  Technically, an economist seeking to run with the official narrative can say “Inflation is contained” without lying.  He could call it a “middle class squeeze” to avoid using a term that spooks the markets.  This is, of course, a distinction without a difference.  That squeeze is caused by a rise in the cost of goods and services, which is inflation.  And though the increases appear minor if measured in a vacuum, when accompanied by flat or decreasing wages, their impact is enormous.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, hidden inflation is not interesting to financial reporters.  To explain how it keeps the lower to mid-middle classes in a form of perpetual debt servitude, one has to examine a set of mundane figures – the balance sheet of the average American household.

I’ve done that here, offering what I think is an honest financial picture of the average lower-to-middle middle class home-owning family in the United States.  Two kids, two cars, one income.  The monthly expenses are comprised of the most conservative estimates I could credibly offer.  There are many more I could have included.

Average US income: $46k
Average US family’s federal tax: 15%
Average US family’s state and municipal tax rate: 10%
Average US home price: $168k
Monthly mortgage payment on $168k home (30 yr. fixed, 5% rate): $985.60

The family owes $6,900 in federal income tax.  Applying common available deductions and credits, their after tax income is roughly $43,000. This leaves them $3,583 monthly on which to live.  From that, subtract the following:

Mortgage payment (adjusted to reflect value of interest deduction): $850
Car Insurance (two vehicles): $150
Utilities: $200
Cable/Internet: $100
Cell Phones: $150
Gas: $400
Groceries/Essentials: $1,000
Home insurance: $100
Clothing: $200
Food at work: $200
Water/Sewer/Garbage: $50
Home maintenance: $150
Car Maintenance: $100
Car Payments: $500

Total: ($4,200)

This family is six hundred dollars in the red every month before we even address things like health care costs, child care costs, and student loans.  Any unexpected expense blows their budget out of the water.

Which takes us to the deleveraging narrative.

How will this family make up the deficit?  Debt, of course.  All but assuredly credit cards, the average rates on which are currently between 15-20%.**  If they use a card to cover one year’s worth of their annual $7,200 deficit at that rate, with interest compounded daily, they’ll incur additional monthly minimum payments somewhere in the area of $200.

As the years go by and additional unexpected debts pile up, the family will do what millions of others shedding debts over the past two years have done: default.  On credit cards, on lines of credit… on first and second mortgages.

Think I’m overstating my case?  Of the $610 billion in mortgage and consumer debt removed from household balance sheets between June 2008 and June 2010, $588 billion was shed through default.  All but 3.61% of it.

Clearly, the average American household is not repairing its finances. It is walking away from many of its obligations, and if we’re honest with one another, we should describe the process using a term that admits as much. And if we feel the need to observe a level of candor this nation rarely allows, we should admit that an increase in the cost of essentials – created in large part by our own monetary policy – is accelerating this cycle.

Call it a “middle class squeeze,” or “the effects of commodities bubble.” Call it whatever you like. “Inflation” is the operative noun. Call it “deleveraging,” “belt tightening,” or an “increase in the savings rate.” “Defaulting” is the accurate verb.

If you had exposure to some of the people holding themselves out as financial advisers and mortgage brokers between 2000 and 2007, or have read any of the thirty of so subsections in the average consumer lending agreement, you know – bullshit’s a lot of the reason we’re in this mess. More bullshit is not the cure.

We all know what’s actually happening.  Call it what it is.

_________________________

* The broader meta reason is, of course, audience expansion.  The overwhelming majority of people prefer to be reinforced, and react negatively, or with fear, to anything challenging their assumptions, hopes and biases.  At this juncture, twenty months after the official recession ended, most Americans want to hear that this downturn is like all others, and is abating like all others… that real growth is just over the horizon.

**Or payday loans, at loanshark rates.

There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others. – William Faulkner

“Oh, this one is a highland malt, and highland malts are traditionally smoky.  Perfectly compliments a light Dominican.”

“The nose is peaty, but the finish is all sweet pear, with just a subtle hint of lemon-to-almost grapefruit spiciness.”

“The Islay malt finishes strong, with flavors of oxidized wine, a bit of pepper and a touch of sherry.”

You’ve heard this kind of talk before.  Enough to give any decent man an icepick-between-the-eyes headache.  You’re having a drink, a scotch, and as you’re generally prone to, you’re planning to have about four.  (All right, six.)  And there they are – perhaps your friends, perhaps not.  Perhaps just a group at the edge of the bar, not even old enough to have been drinking legally for a decade, going on and on and on like some horrible Cigar Aficionado article come to life, swirling the liquid on their tongues, pontificating like tweed jacket academics talking Hegel…  all on the chemistry of scotch.

But not just any scotch.  No, that would never do.  It must be certain breed of scotch. The glorious, exalted Single Malt.

I’ve not come to piss on the parade. I like a single malt as much as the next guy.  Liked every one I’ve tried so far, and no doubt I’ll enjoy all the rest.  But let’s admit what we know, what we all plainly see – the recent obsession with single malts is a fad.  A fad at the peak of its wave.  The subject’s been examined, critiqued and dissected in recent years more than Dom DeLillo… a liquid poured more for discussion than imbibed for its honest purpose: To deliver a tasty, solid drunk.

So I say fuck the single malts.  Let’s talk about what drinkers who drink to drink as much they do for taste drink when they’re drinking scotch… what everyone knows tastes as good as, and in many cases better, than most of the blessed single malts: The Johnnie Walker Blends.

Yes.  The Johnnie Walker Blends.  Why?  Because like it or not, above your Macallans, Laphroaigs and Glenfiddiches, your Obans, Glenlivets, and Balvenies, the JW Blends still tower.  And not because of sheer ubiquity.  Because the blends simply taste better.

“Philistine!”

Really?  What’s better than a perfectly smooth malt?  How about a whole bunch of them mixed together in a recipe enhancing the strongest points of each?

Or maybe I can put it this way… Who would you rather fuck – any one supermodel, or a hybrid incorporating the finest features of them all?  (No shit you’d be fine with either.  But let’s not fight the hypothetical.)  If you could have any one of the centerfolds and lingerie models you’ve masturbated to since eighth grade, or the best of all of them in one package, which would it be?

Exactly.

The only trouble with the Johnnie Walker blends is, having rarely been assessed like single malts, they’re deeply misunderstood.  Some people judge them by price.  Some people judge them by color, like Weezer records (“Blue is undoubtedly the best, then the Green Album… and Red is, of course, at the bottom.”)  Neither approach is correct.  And in the interest of clearing that up – in the interest of giving the Drinking Scotch Crowd a grading of the blends similar to those the Talking About Scotch Contingent have given the single malts – here you have it: A Proper Rating of the Johnnie Walker Blends.

Last to first (as their shelf lives tend to run in my liquor cabinet).

Johnnie Walker Red

It’s cheap, it’s sweet, and it tastes a little like Black unfinished, lacking the necessary charcoal tempering.  And still it’s terribly underrated.  This ought to be the standard “Wedding Scotch,” what you’d drink if you were drinking it free.  For a reason that escapes me still, at every wedding you’ll instead find Dewars.  This is a solid, serviceable spirit, but it’s no Johnnie Walker Red.  Or worse you might find J&B, which is fine for powering model aircraft and removing nail polish, but is generally unfit for oral consumption.  (If Cutty Sark is the default scotch, leave the event.  You’re going to wake up the following morning next to a bridesmaid with “white power” tattoos… and a whole bunch of interesting red sores near her privates.)

If your daughter’s getting married, do us all a favor and throw a little extra at the bar bill for Johnnie Red.  It’s miles better than any of its competitors, and only a few dollars more.

Three stars. A homely stepsister, yes, but in no way deserving the level of insult heaped upon her.

Johnnie Walker Gold

There are people who will tell you this scotch should be chilled and served as dessert.  This directive should be avoided, as resolutely as those making it should be crisply slapped in the lips.  Two reasons for this.  First, all scotch is dessert scotch.  Cocktails are dessert.  In fact, the only dessert I enjoy.  (When cheesecake or crème brule acquire psychoactive properties, I’ll eat them.)  Second, the only liquor that tastes better frozen is vodka, or cheap bourbon.  Sticking an eighty dollar bottle of scotch, however overrated, in the freezer, is commuting to work in a Ferrari.

Now, on to the heresy of ranking Gold number four. I’d love to say there was a complex reason for this, but the simple truth is, it doesn’t taste as good as Green, Blue or Black.  It’s sweet, but not sweet enough, like it was supposed to be more a liqueur than a scotch, and never quite got there. I used to like the Gold more than many of the others, but in hindsight, I think that accrued more from the fact that I was young and would just as easily have enjoyed paint thinner.  It also might have derived from the fact that I received Gold as a present a few times.  Free scotch often seems to have magically acquired an ideal mixture of the finest quality malts.

Three and a half stars. The “Mousy Librarian” sister of the family.  All the talent’s there.  Just needs a makeover to put everything in the right place… the right set of fuck-me heels, and a skirt that shows off the ass.

Johnnie Walker Green

My research on this subject has been intense as of late.  And this I can say with authority: Green tastes best on a utterly naked palate.  There, the stuff is fantastic.  Nice burn up front, strong and disparate flavors mixing well, and at a solid 86 proof, it doesn’t try to hide the alcohol.  If anything, it celebrates its enhanced ethanol content, which is not only kind of refreshing, but can also save you steep legal fees.

No, that’s not a misprint.  Scotch can be a lethal, sneaky drunk.  Two and you’re working the room.  Three and you’re feeling no pain.  Four and, well, fuck it… Call the wife.  You’ll be home late.  Five and you’re simply brilliant – every charming and witty element of your personality accentuated, yet still lucid as a Mormon.

Until you get in the car, halfway down the block, and concentration on witty repartee now fading, the booze comes fore from the shadows. “Remember me, old boy?  I’m the liquor behind all that malt flavor.  I’m still here, and I’m not going anywhere…”

Shit. I’m plastered. Indeed you are.

Demon scotch.  And now it’s too late for a do-over.  You’re at a stoplight and a police cruiser’s pulling up to the left and it’s starting… The Fidgets.  Fiddling with the radio.  Tapping the steering wheel to appear nonchalant where you think you might be looking nervous, yet rigid as a statue from the neck up – eschewing any movement of the head that might lead to sudden eye contact.  Fuck, fuck fuck… Your heart races.  Hands go clammy and pictures erupt in the brain.  Pulled over on the side of the road, tripping as you walk the straight line, stuttering through the alphabet in reverse.  Adrenaline floods the synapses…  Am I in the proper lane?  Is this where I’m supposed to be? Or is it the other one? Can I shift over? If I go straight am I violating the arrows on the road? …Where is that fucking arrow? Am I on top of it?

And who the fuck put Duran Duran “Decade” in the stereo? 

“Moving on the floor now babe you’re a bird of paradise…  Cherry ice cream smile I suppose it’s very nice–”

Green light.  Your move.

Kill me.

I’m not guaranteeing JW Green will keep you from this.  But it might hit you hard enough early to keep the important concerns in the mind, concerns like this recollection: You didn’t take the train in this morning. Vehicle operation will be required.

Four stars. The high maintenance career woman of the clan.  Costs a bit more to date than she ought to, but delivers decently in the sack.  (Or at least gets you drunk enough first that you don’t care either way.) 

Johnnie Walker Black

There are those who’d argue the more a product sells, the greater the proof of its excellence.  As one can deduce from the success of everything from Lady Gaga to Olive Garden to Bud Light Lime, the Spiderman franchise and every Real Housewives of ________ series to date, this is clearly untrue.  Often, the more popular a thing is, the greater the proof of its dullness, its lack of exceptional character… the more likely it is to placate the preferences of a broad demographic whose taste resides exclusively in their mouths.

Johnnie Walker Black is the exception.  It’s everywhere, in every airport, corner tavern, dance club, bowling alley, restaurant and golf course bar in the world.  Probably one of the top one hundred recognizable labels on the planet – the “Marlboro Red Pack” or “Budweiser” of scotches.  Except for this: Its quality is every bit as high as its level of brand exposure.  Some may have more unique flavor, but there is no smoother scotch.  Neat, rocks, or with water – hell, slugged straight out of the bottle – Black never strikes the tongue wrong.  Never offends the palate, never overpowers the nose.  The blend is utterly flawless, sweetness balanced by charcoal, none of the flavors competing.  The problem with Black, if there’s any, is it tastes too damned good.  You find yourself quaffing the stuff as you would a great beer or wine.

Except it’s not a beer or a wine.  It’s seven to ten times their proof, and pushing forty dollars a bottle.  This can be a pricey habit, and probably not the healthiest.  Which leads me to my final point, the greatest compliment anyone can give a whisky: Avoiding its regular purchase.  I like Black so much I can’t have it around all the time.  If it’s there, it’s too much temptation… It’s going to go – ahead of everything else, including the most exotic single malts in the cabinet.

Five Stars. The Audrey Hepburn of the family.  Not overt in any way, but you know it’s all amazing under that little black dress.

Johnnie Walker Blue

Is it $200 good?  No.  But few, if any, whiskies are.  And anyway, that’s not Blue’s real price.  The sticker bears no relation to the cost of ingredients, or any process in the drink’s production dramatically different than those used in the distilling of the other blends.  It’s a $125 bottle of scotch sold at a premium that makes it a favorite Christmas and retirement present, and one of those things certain types of men order in front of one another to look and feel important.

And yet, however artificial the price, Blue is undoubtedly the finest of the blends.

The most accurate description of Blue’s flavor is a mix of the best elements in Gold, Black and Green mixed together, multiplied one and a half times in intensity, weighting the liquid to a point where it’s more malt than water… to the point where the whisky has an almost syrupy consistency.  If Red sticks to a glass like tap water, Blue’s more akin to molasses.  It has legs longer than the meatiest merlot, denser than the chewiest imperial stout.  The stuff runs down the side of a snifter like Grand Marnier.  And it goes down the throat even better.  If there’s an aftertaste to this spirit, it’s past the reach of human senses.  Blue disappears on the tongue.  It delivers the flavor and exits, making room for the next swig.  And in that, it’s a lot like Black.  You’ll want another, and another, and many more after that.  Thankfully, the price will keep you from this.  If you’ve got a bottle of Blue, you can afford to have a bottle of Black standing by to take over after you and the friends each have four or five drams.  As good as any scotch tastes, if you’re drinking it quick – and that you will do with Blue – the sixth is just a mouthful of numbness.

Five Stars. This is the Brazilian exchange student who came to board with the family for a semester and wound up staying.  Everybody wants to fuck her.  If you get the chance, keep the lights on… take a detailed mental picture.  It’s that good.

If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.  – Dorothy Parker

Why are you reading this site (or any site similar to it)?  Why do you like subversive humor?  Read contrarian books?  Why do you rent movies with themes mocking consensus? Enjoy poking fun at the hierarchies around you?  Laugh at comedians who question religion, pundits who question government, satirists who point out the mindlessness of consumer and corporate culture?  Why do you post on a bulletin board, blog or website under a pseudonym making fun of most of the things you’re required to do under your actual name to make a living?

That’s rhetorical, of course.  We all know why we do it.  Because we need to.

Our lives are spent navigating through a world of white lies – unable to say what we really think unless we’re wealthy or crazy enough to not give a damn.  We know we can’t give an honest opinion about certain things.  Can’t risk offending people because, well, Who knows when we might need them?

A conversation on Darwin might pop up during a work function, and we might be compelled out of a sense of intellectual honesty to make fun of Creationism, or Intelligent Design.  But we won’t.  We’ll fear, no matter how much a person believing in these things ought to be subjected to at least mild ridicule for such preposterous positions, that someone adhering to these notions is in our midst, and he might be a rung or two above us.  He might be able to kill our Christmas bonus… stall our corporate ascension.

We might be working in a suite in some big white building in the middle of an office park a hundred miles from anything interesting, listening to a manager tout our company’s new business plan… cheerleading how it’s going to drive new sales, and how the future couldn’t be brighter, all the while knowing everything he says is a lie.  That the company is in fact up for auction.  That we read so on a finance blog, checked the rumor with some reputable sources, and yes, it was true.  That the plan being discussed is nothing more than an attempt to gin up revenues for a quarter to enhance the company’s sale price.  But we wouldn’t dare say that at the meeting.  We’d fear being immediately fired for cause.  We’d be unable to collect unemployment, badmouthed to all prospective future employers.  And so we shut our mouths.

Two examples is enough.  You understand the sort of self-censorship I’m discussing.  It’s everywhere, in every corner of life, allowing outright lies, nonsense, and worst forms of illogic, to stand.  Historically, up until recently, there wasn’t much anyone could do about this. The options were: (a) Stifle any view the people you depend on for money might find antisocial or offensive, pretend to adopt theirs and muddle through a frustrated but comfortable life; or, (b) Become a Lenny Bruce or Thomas Paine.  And if you fail in the latter, be forever ostracized from your potential business connections.  Be a pariah.

Then along came the Internet, and people started typing exactly what they were thinking.

.      .      .

BrownBuffalo: “The company’s earnings seem too high.”

CaptAmerica: “They’re juiced.  It’s a fucking lie.”

BrownBuffalo: “How do you know?”

CaptAmerica: “I read this chat board full of traders and investors.  They’ve been warning of bullshit numbers for weeks.  A restatement will follow.”

(And it did.)

.      .      .

FlyersFan29: “Of course I support gay marriage.  If people want to commit, it makes no sense not to let them.”

TheWalrus: “What do people say when you say that?”

FlyersFan29: “Are you nuts?  I work with a bunch of fucking holy rollers.  I’d never say that out loud.”

.      .      .

MonkeyMan: “I’ve never voted Democrat in my life.”

PigPen: “You work with trial lawyers!”

MonkeyMan: “They don’t know what I do in the booth.”

.      .      .

Again, you get the picture.  Suddenly, the floodgates were opened.  On anonymous boards and blogs all over the Internet, people were writing all the things we think but dare never speak aloud, relieving themselves with admissions of all the dirty, kinky shit we do in private and never admit.  And sarcastically, disparagingly questioning the official myths.

Advertisers and spin-masters were thrown back on their heels.  The demographic studies were instantly obsolete. Audience and entertainer were blurred.  People couldn’t be as easily manipulated.  And if they couldn’t be relied on to follow– and worse, if they started to question… those people Couldn’t Be Predicted.  And if people couldn’t be predicted, who would know how to allocate advertising dollars?  How would politicians, corporations and every other entity dependent on public support know how to organize and pitch to their vassals?  How could they mine maximum dollars from the suggestible, and segregate those easy marks from the voices questioning the messages they’d been using to herd the masses so successfully in the mainstream media?

You could almost hear the siren call, in every boardroom of every Monster, Inc. and political consulting firm in the country: We need new demographics!  We need data!  We need a way to get these inscrutable “new media” followers into categories where we can feed them what we know they’ll like… Where we can control, or at least massage, the conversation.

Then along came social media.  Eureka!  We’ll let them herd themselves.

They have, and continue to do so, and few, if any, have noticed they’re being corralled.  They went on MySpace, then Facebook, and used their names, connecting themselves to endless tentacles of co-workers, neighbors and lost acquaintances.  At the cynical suggestion of a “New Media Consultant” who said it would garner them business, they started blogs hyping their “Personal Brand” and professional skills.  They opened Facebook pages and sites with banners discussing their career accolades, and the services they provided, linking to nuggets of industry information offered to show they were diligent, smart and determined go-getters.  And all of it, of course, was positive.  Even if they didn’t believe the articles they linked, or the thrust of the stories they wrote, they understood the essential truths of marketing:

The average person only gravitates to things that are upbeat– narratives that reinforce him.  He wants to believe in things… wants to join.  Invite him.  Make it as sunny and sanitized as possible.  This throws the widest net.

I’m not suggesting social media isn’t capable of skepticism, enlightenment or subversion, and noble subversion at that.  The Iranian Green Revolution’s use of Twitter to galvanize world sentiment against a corrupt, weak, and soon-to-be-overthrown regime proves this in spades.  What I am suggesting is that noble use of social media is an aberration.  That the general use of it, the broadest use of it by far, is aimed at replication of the types of insipid, self-censored conversations we already have far too many of in our everyday lives.  That and links to mountains of Dale Carnegie marketing drivel.

Which is a giant goddamn shame.

The more social media connections we make in platforms where we’re compelled to guard against offending others, the more bland, derivative blog posts we author futiley pitching our professional services, the less we can be honest with one another.  A man keeping a dozen or so online friends, all of whom he knows well and can trust, or a man writing on a bulletin board under a pseudonym, is free to say what he likes.  He can poke fun at the government, religion, and prevailing values.  He can suggest brighter alternative policies… all with minimal fear of being ostracized from business connections which would view his positions as a sign of unpredictability – view him as a risk they should avoid.

A man with five hundred Facebook friends – half of whom he dreams are future business connections – has no option but to geld the comments he places on his wall.  He has to stop and think before he writes, and however much it pains him to pull back from speaking his mind, he has to avoid any comment, or any “blue material,” that might upset some of his followers.  And if he makes any sharp criticism, it must be offered in a self-deprecating sense, with an allowance that it’s “just his opinion”… a gag-inducing disclaimer that of course he respects the views of differing others, however much he actually does not.  He has to remain “friendly” – on some level, be a salesman.  Just like he does in real life.

This is an abhorrent surrender.

The value of the Internet, the true revolutionary capacity of the thing, is its ability to allow us to be open with one another in a way we could never in real life interaction.  Yes, it’s true the world runs on white lies (and some of a much darker shade).  And it’s true that a lot of people aren’t wired to be open with one another, or to deal with a technology that consistently debunks the narratives politicians and corporations offer to keep us in line.  Many people do, in fact, need to be led.

But not as many as we think, and not to the degree we think.  To give away the power of the “Wild West” Internet in favor of social media platforms where everybody is compelled to play nice and avoid airing his real opinion is trading the open sky for a cubicle.  If you’re not able to say what you really think – to feed that essential human need to express yourself – what the hell is the point of Internet dialogue?  You already have the actual world in which you’re forced to bite your lip.  Why willingly resubmit to that indignity online?

Are we so desperate to connect that we’d trade the freedom to air our actual thoughts for the opportunity to aggregate hundreds of virtual McFriends?  So cynical and careerist we can’t see the Internet as anything more than an advertising forum?

Of course you’ve heard it said, “Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the Average American.”  In the same way, I think the social media revolution and the billions of mostly censored, polite interchanges and streams of self-promotional dreck trailing in its wake leads to an even more disturbing axiom: “No one ever lost money underestimating the loneliness, neediness and crassness of the Average American.” People are so desperate to connect, or shuck for a cheap (and more often than not illusory) buck they’ll gladly be herded into platforms providing less choice, and robbing them of the most sought after thing a man can ever hold – the privilege of saying whatever he damn well pleases.

It’s argued a lot these days that given economic conditions, we’re going to need to reconnect with our local communities.  That people will need to rediscover the concepts of bartering and cooperation to survive and prosper. If that’s the case, and I think it will be for many, maybe it’s worthwhile for us to get off our asses, get off that Facebook conversation about nothing, and re-engage those around us.  Be polite in those instances, bite our tongues as necessary, and leave the Internet uncensored.

Leave the Internet a portal where you, me, and the millions of other people who need it, can observe unbridled candor with one another. Leave it to eviscerate myths, to allow people to be what they really, actually are.  To allow the preacher’s wife to quietly advocate for abortion rights when her husband’s asleep. To allow the corporate insider with a conscience to spill dirty emails on ACME, Inc.’s latest fraud.  To let a young associate expose how his law firm is secretly laying off partners and screwing them on severance.  To let the world condemn a vile show trial like Khodorkovsky’s where the Russian Press cannot.

Leave it the kind of place where a college kid and some code can turn the music industry on its ear.  Where one crazy Australian with a website can check the power of a hundred governments… Where millions can exchange all kinds of ideas, however unpopular or contrarian they might be, without any fear of reprisal.

Few of these ideas will be born, and even fewer will find large audiences, if we’re all engaged in small talk, or pitching our wares, on sites where our bosses, co-workers, and judgmental neighbors might be lurking.

If all we do online is have predictable conversations about predictable things in predictable platforms funded by data mining corporations intent on massaging our views to keep us predictable, well, we’ll be predictable.  We’ll be boring.  As boring as most of the comments on your Facebook wall.  We’ll have taken the one truly revolutionary technology to emerge in our lifetimes and handed it to those who already control 99% of all the other transactions and interactions around us.  We’ll have once more proved insurmountable a sad, fundamental flaw holding back human evolution… That given the choice, we’ll trade the privilege of expressing ourselves for the comfort of running with the herd.

Author’s Note: I just read an article reporting this October’s LSAT had the second highest number of test-takers in history.  This piece seemed apropos.

There exist millions of subtypes and blends, but generally, we have two broad categories of intelligence in this world: Organizational and Creative.  Organizational is the type held by the average successful corporate executive – the ability to view a situation involving dozens of moving pieces, focus on what you need to do and execute.  Sometimes it’s big picture thinking, sometimes not.  Often, the brilliance in organizational thinking is applying Occam’s Razor – keeping things limited, targeted… ignoring the buzz of distracting peripheral matters and attacking the finite issues standing between you and a profit.

Creative Intelligence is a different animal.  It’s ungrounded, necessarily distracted by the stimulus around it, which it uses as a form of fuel – an endless stream of objects, situations and concepts for it to consider and incorporate into its thinking.  This isn’t to suggest it’s of less value than Organizational Intelligence.  Quite the contrary.  Creative Intelligence can be channeled toward many certain goals and business purposes, often with stunning results.  Hence, our reverence for the “revolutionary thinkers” behind every radical progression in government, markets and art.

We need both to prosper, of course.  No idea, nothing to execute, and without execution, an idea’s just mental masturbation.*  The problem is our country only rewards Organizational Intelligence.  America’s economy is almost exclusively administrative – entire corporate parks filled with hands devoted to “compliance,” “claim processing” and  “regulatory oversight.”  The only sectors creating anything new are medicine and finance.  One we can’t afford, the other mints fleeting paper gains – cannibalistic profiteers merging businesses, cutting overhead, refinancing debt and sucking the last remaining margins out of obsolete assets.

Here and there, creative outliers reap staggering rewards.  But the Mark Zuckerbergs, J.K. Rowlings and Jay Zs of the world are few and far between (and the further they progress, the more middlemen commoditize their ideas, making their work more managerial). Where the profits of being Organizationally Intelligent are spread widely among millions of professionals, the profits derived from true Creative Intelligence couldn’t be more unevenly distributed.  Graphed out, they’d mirror the EKG of a man being shocked back from cardiac arrest – wild, off the chart peaks for the successful one percent, flat-line failure for the rest.

Where does this lead?  To millions of creative minds trapped in corporate and bureaucratic ant farms.  People who live to conceive new ideas, solutions and forms of self expression, but know the chances of making enough money doing so are far too thin to warrant the leap.**

It’s a tough slog subjugating the mind to rote execution, enough to drive a creative person mad.  If you’re a regular reader of this website, there’s a good chance it’s driving you mad right now.  You see your own, intimate annoyances in what you just read.  And you might be thinking you’re defective – that you should feel a sense of satisfaction in the mere formulation or completion of directives. You’re wrong.  You’re fine, healthy, and not even remotely close to alone.  Half the people around you are struggling with that exact inner conflict, stuck where they don’t belong – idea men in a cut-and-paste country, exchanging ticky-tack emails filled with ticky-tack tasks.***

This is where you ask me for a solution.  Sorry, I’m just the writer.  And really, that’s subjective.  Only you can fix your career.  Only you can find a way to profit from your creativity.  But I can sympathize. I can describe what it was like for me, and what it might like for you.  How I wound up in a rut, spinning wheels in law firms in Philly. Part of what led me there, and what I realized living through the exercise. Here’s an outtake from Happy Hour doing that.  Perhaps as you think about the subject, the solution will pop into your head.

_________________________

The greatest lie you’ll hear in law school is that litigation is one of the most creative fields in the professional world. To cite a single example of the many disproving that ludicrous proposition, let’s look at legal writing.  It’s the diametrical opposite of creative. What you’d like to write, the flourishes of wit you’d like to add, the personality of your prose, is stripped away in favor of minimalist effective text. Take out, say, any Twain book, or no– better yet, buy a copy of National Review. Read anything in National Review, one the most creatively written publications in the land.**** Now, compare that to the brief you filed with the Eastern District Court yesterday. You know, the one arguing the choice of law provision in your client’s partnership agreement.  How creative is that?  “Conniving.” “Clever.” “Well proofread.” Probably. But creative? No more than Al Gore would be characterized as charismatic.  Some clerk’s sleep-reading it right now, scanning just enough of the thing to convince his judge he actually absorbed it in detail.

Billable hour legal work does not and never will favor the creative.  It favors robots, automatons, and pathologically determined ones at that. The kids who took notes even when the professor told you the lecture wouldn’t be on the exam. The kids who sat Hitler Youth upright in their seats, processing every syllable from the professor’s mouth. The kids who followed orders – from their kindergarten teacher to their scoutmasters to their obsessive helicopter parents – without question.

I was never that kid. I’ve always worked in spurts. The concept of spending eight hours actually grinding out legal analysis, or worse, reviewing case documents, simply doesn’t exist in my world. The human mind, or at least mine, is not built to endure that tedium. Go ahead, give me the box of documents to review; I’m only going to find one way or another to pawn that off on some staff member. It’s not that I consider myself above the work. I simply have no choice. Physically, I am unable to do it. After the fifth or sixth piece of anonymous, out-of-context paper, my eyes glaze over and I’m sleeping.

So like the hundreds of thousands of lawyers who also find the drudge work of litigation insufferable, the only solution I knew was to force my mind to operate like a turbo engine.  When I needed to do something – when I’d pushed a task off to the last possible second, the eve of the deadline – I could compress time… fire the cooling jets, run to 6000 rpm on a head full of espresso and knock off an eight hour project in four.

If you’re practicing law and you don’t already have that skill, you probably never will. You learn it young or you don’t learn it at all. I picked it up after I was thrown out of fourth grade for “conduct” issues. My parents shipped me off to another school where a psychiatrist stamped me “gifted” (my first experience with medical malpractice) and threw me into an accelerated program with a pack of very directed little business litigators in the making.

The class was a disaster. The school had selected the students by grades and natural ability, so it had an odd combination of overachievers of average intelligence and off-the-chart super smart kids who knew more than the teacher. And then a few people like me, who’d no real business being there. The future litigators were constantly gunning, hands in the air, cross-examining the teacher to learn what questions would be on the next exam. The truly brilliant kids were firing spitballs or doodling. I spent most of my time wondering how the hell I’d wound up in the room.

In reality, I wasn’t gifted, and I sure as hell wasn’t an overachiever. The entrance test to the program was a total farce. Not unlike the SAT or LSAT, it was largely dependent on subjective questions an upper middle class kid would have a much easier time answering than would a child of limited advantages. They asked me about Darwin and whether I understood the tenets of Communism. Being an inquisitive kid, I’d opened a few books on my parents’ bookshelves, one in particular called The People’s Almanac. The Almanac contained blurbs on every important political movement and historical figure in history. I not only knew Darwin, I gave a layman’s dissertation on the Theory of Evolution, chucking in a reference to Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, a book in part about Evolution that had also been on the shelf.***** On the Communism thing, I knew Karl was not Groucho’s brother. That he was a dissident, and had gotten a bunch of Russians in a lather… something to do with wealth disparity.  The teachers listened to my spiel, and they all agreed I Was Smart.  Told me I’d do great things, and changed my folks’ concern into pride.  He’s not a bad kid.  He wasn’t being challenged enough.

Orientation was unique, to say the least.  They assembled the class in a circle and everybody gave a brief sketch of themselves.  First one out the chute was a round, pert little girl – perfectly pleasant and you just knew she was going to say she had a kitten and her favorite food was sugar cookies with smiley faces on them and then it came out…

“I’m Carol, and I have one kidney.”

That set the tone for the rest.  It wasn’t over-sharing, just bad sharing.

“…And if you don’t feed guinea pigs they eat their babies.”

“People pick on me because of my big head, but I’m growing into it.  I’m not hydrocephalic.”

“I throw Chinese stars.”

Hydrocephalic? By the time we got to the kid who only identified himself as “Thomas,” and flashed a maniacal grin and a thumbs-up as his personal descriptive, I had a feeling this wouldn’t last. Look on the bright side. You’re going to be a rock star in the dodgeball games.

I barely made it a year.

It was there, however, that I learned the technically bad, but mentally liberating work habits that persist to this day.  While I ran a run and gun offense, cramming the night before an exam, the diligent students were looking over their fifteenth outline of their notes. They’d memorized the subject matter weeks ago. I’d get a B or B+ and forget everything an hour after the test. They’d get an A, and they can still recite all the signatories on the Declaration of Independence.  The freaky smart kids who doodled through class would get the A+.

But in trying to keep up, in reaching to survive at the next level while still doing as little as possible of the disciplined work in which I’d no interest, I discovered my one and only advantage. I had an ability to speak, to write, and in the midst of some extemporaneous thought pull what sounded like an amazing insight out of my ass. In my better moments, when I was on, I could throw the long bomb the merely diligent didn’t have in their arsenals. I could, when the planets aligned properly, bang out that “gold star” paper or presentation that made the teacher stand up and say “What–? You?”

I realized early this was the only skill that would allow me to compete. And I leaned on it for the rest of my educational career. By senior year in high school, every one of my electives was a paper or presentation-graded course. This got me into a highly respected university, and things didn’t change when I arrived there. Why fuck with a good thing? I eschewed all courses with exams, taking only those graded on papers and presentations.  This, of course, allowed me to:

• Triple the depth of an already double-parked social calendar; and
  
• Graduate with an inflated GPA (although from a cost of labor perspective, it was the greatest bargain in history, one for which my business management professors should have given me an award).

It also left me utterly unqualified for any lucrative career.  Hence, law school.

Why not?  It’ll be cool.  I’ll get to go into Court and make all kinds of interesting arguments.  Get paid to the use the creative side of my brain.

Indeed.  How could it be anything else?

____________________
*Yes, of course, they overlap.  Some people have both.  But rarely in equal measure.  And as someone who learned to manage a business he knew nothing about while simultaneously writing his first book, this I can say with certainty: The more you focus on commercial concerns, the less interesting your thoughts.

**There is no doubt, America 2010 – a Leviathan of red tape complexities, obsessed with nothing but short term margins – is leaving its creative minds, its innovators, to wither and die on the vine… pissing away the country’s greatest advantage.

***Many of which are responses to pointless correspondence created by scared middle managers desperate to look productive… the agonal gasps of activity in our fading Whiffle economy.

****Some say the fact most artists tend to be bleeding hearts proves a natural connection between liberal politics and creativity.  Perhaps, but I’d say it also explains a lot of the terrible music, movies and books in the marketplace.

*****I opened that one thinking it’d contain pictures of nude women.

May you live in interesting times. - Chinese Curse

It was midnight, or maybe ten… Eighty on the open road when the Ipod cued up the tune.  “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away… It’s just a shot away…”

I’d learned long ago never to skip through that song, never to turn to something else.  Some music’s Important.  Shoots straight into the cerebral cortex, demanding your immediate, complete attention.

Keith allegedly wrote the song in minutes, killing time in some friend’s flat.  Just popped out of his head onto paper.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps he’d been writing it for decades, the lyrics collecting in his head over a childhood in desperate post-war England, then years in the convulsions of the Sixties, in the teeth of mass upheaval.  Let it Bleed came out in 1969, but with its ominous, apocalyptic themes, the record’s muse was clearly ’68.  And however old you might be, wherever you might be from, we’ve all studied 1968.  Vietnam slipped from bad into ruin, psychopaths shot Kennedy and King… Even Andy Warhol took a bullet.  The whole world had gone to shit, and the only question people were asking was where it went from there.  Another shoe to fall?  The start of a new revolution, or an even further collapse?  All that energy and anger, it had to go up or down.  Everything’s always going somewhere.  That’s the narrative, right?

Some have argued a man needs a maid, a point with which I’d never quibble.  And just as I subscribe to that notion, a man also needs a decent car.  Not an expensive one.  Not some gaudy Escalade or Range Rover, Porsche or Benz SL.  Just a good set of wheels.  Heavy, awful on gas, with full time four wheel drive, leather, sunroof and, of course, most important – more significant than any other option – a stereo that can shatter your eardrums without the slightest hint of distortion.  Even at the highest decibels.

In these frantic days of high tech annoyance, of Blackberries, Bluetooth and smartphones, of texting, Twitter, Facebook and the maddening inescapable conclusion We Can Never Be Truly Alone, a car is man’s last stand.  His final hope of private dignity – that he controls his destination and could, if he liked, Disappear.  Or just an easy micro-vacation, a place to hide, Dogfishead in the coffee holder, open highway and the sole form of interruption not some mindless text from a boss, but a sharp cross wind through the windows… a shock of cold night air blasting down from the vacant mountains left and right.  A moment of not being pulled, cajoled, directed or pestered… the fantasy he’s going nowhere.

At least that’s what it used to be.  Now it seems that’s our reality – where we’re at.

I want to write how for the last three years there’s been a change in the air outside.  A sense we’re but a spark from an explosion, in a respite, standing on the beach as the surf peels back before a tsunami that could either lift or crush us. That the country sits astride the thinnest of fences, one nudge from resurgence or implosion.

But that’s not the feeling anymore.  The talk radio nuts, pundits and politicians are but a monstrous hurricane of bullshit.  Fictions, lies, narratives… in service to the mass delusion we’re headed for some radical change.

There will be no progressive revolution.  There will be no new Ronald Reagan.  No policy cure for unemployment, and no transformative technology to save us.  No riots from those left behind, no civil unrest in the streets as the desperate get squeezed into pulp.  The tea party anger will abate and those forgotten, well… they’re going to disappear, slip off the edge of the Grid.  We’ll fragment, but at glacial speed, an endless series of soft landings engineered in the interests of those of us with something to lose.  As it rolls along and we get tired of hearing about it, the process will become all but invisible.

Sure, this is hypothesis, some might say conjecture.  But we all see the same clear facts, and I’m hardly out on a ledge saying ’11 will look like ’09 and ’10, and that ’12, ’13 and ’14 will pretty much look the same.

There’ll be you, me, what we do, and this necessary malignancy of delevering.  I’ll follow the usual schedule.  Two or three times a week, out there on the road in the night, slicing the dead air and every once in a while, the Ipod’ll hit that same song – the one I’ve been hearing every other day since junior high.  “War, children… It’s just a shot away… It’s just a shot away.”

And yet it never comes.  Well, at least not domestically.

There will be no other shoe to fall.  It’s myth and nothing more.  Nor will there be a resurgence.  No sustained up or down, only the illusion of both as we lurch on in fits and stops with an occasional bailout here and there when Important People become frightened.  Welcome to the Flat Age, the Vacuum.  Take a breath, sit back and pour yourself a triple.  Nothing’s going anywhere.

I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day… I could feel them wondering why I wasn’t dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. – Charles Bukowski, Women.

Of the myriad lies, myths and abject imbecilities accepted as fact by a depressingly large majority of primates in these glorious United States, none offends logic as much as the spoonfed-and-swallowed notion all intoxicants are equivalent, or even approximately so.

Acid’s as identical to speed as single malt scotch is to Budweiser.  Marijuana’s a gateway to cocaine as the Beatles would lead one to Slayer.  The baseline of all this thinking, the “Just Say No” mantra of the ’80s, was a vile marketing trope, a reduction cynically aimed at the lowest of common denominators… a zero-tolerance slogan blurring endless families, genera and species of intoxicant.

Yet it stuck for the unaware (and those who didn’t want to know different).  And this I find a dangerous lie.  Vodka’s not a buzz like rum, mushrooms nothing like blow.  Heineken and Woodford Reserve are in no way interchangeable drunks.

To a pro, an aficionado, the nuance in the differing effects – what one substance does and one does not – is the defining character of a buzz.  And one needs to know these distinctions to pick his poisons wisely, avoid what offends his constitution.

In the spirit of drawing some of these boundaries, here’s an outtake from an early draft of Happy Hour Hour is for Amateurs explaining why I never get drunk on beer.  Why beer is a substance to enjoy, but never a substitute for liquor.

_____________________

I should have known better than to drink beer. Sure, I enjoy the substance – perhaps more than any other.  But at core, in an organic sense, at the deepest cellular level, I am a Hard Liquor Drinker.

This leaves one with limited options at the usual office function.

The robots in human relations know liquor’s risky to serve.  People open up on scotch, have sex in the bathroom on martinis… These things cost businesses money – settlements, firings and such.  And worse than any of that, liquor-drunks speak their mind, tell their co-workers and bosses What They Think.  This can destroy “morale,” undermine the broadly observed fiction everybody likes their job, gives a damn about the firm, and wouldn’t have quit before they started if they’d never needed the money.

To prevent this honest discourse, they no longer served any spirits at official office happy hours. Where once there’d been Chivas and Stoli, there was Amstel and chardonnay, the favored social lubricants of People Who Stop at Two:

Hi Rachel.  Great choice on the white, huh? Compliments the goat cheese and arugula sandwiches. Let’s talk about a local gallery you’ve been to recently. Throw some obscure artists’ names at me and I’ll volley back with a comment about some Czech author the Times says we should all be reading. We’ll then segue into a discussion about your recent appellate argument. I’ll say ‘fascinating’ a few times, chug the last of this carbonated piss and excuse myself to get another…  I figure six equal one double Wild Turkey.

…Maybe eight.

And if you’re a hard alcohol drinker, you know – you cannot play with beer.  It’s a vicious, sneaky fluid.

I’ve navigated a three thousand pound truck through a blizzard on a half bottle of Ciroc, delivered a best man speech on God-only-knows how many glasses of Johnny Walker Black and hit a three irons out of heavy rough on enough Basil Hayden’s to power a lawnmower. A smart editor would tell me to write that I didn’t intentionally do such things, particularly the drunk driving bit.  That would, of course, be a lie. Slamming three foot powder drifts along a snow covered back road on a headful of vodka/Red Bull stingers is an experience every decent American should know. And it’s sacrilege to give a best man speech with a blood alcohol level below 2.0. As to golf, after a lifetime around courses… after having shot in the 80s and shot in the 100s, having used overlap and interlock grips, blades and offset heads… after having futilely taken lessons and tried a dozen different swings, this much I know of the sport: It only approaches tolerable, and can only be played correctly, on the precipice of Utterly Plastered.*

And why would I ever think different?  In many, possibly most, regards, I’m much more effective after drinks. Not “better” in some craving, dependent sense.  Just a little bit smoother and more graceful than otherwise might be the case. A buzz clears the overburdened mind, wipes away the surface detritus cluttering this Modern Life… Blots out a dozen or so of the ceaseless, disconnected observations, impressions and questions racing through my head at any moment.  Yes, caffeine and stress rev the brain, but it’s ethanol that channels the horsepower. At least in a creative sense.

But beer… Well, beer is Different.  Beer is my kryptonite – the drink that makes me a fool.  And I’m not alone in this.  In fact, I’d say it’s quite to the contrary, that everyone’s an idiot on suds.  There’s a reason the classic beer drunk is drawn as a slobbering oaf, more than considerable truth in the stereotyping of these creatures as morbidly obese monks and slurring red faced Germans in obscenely-tight lederhosen. Beer is a sloppy, numbing drunk – a blunt force volume intoxicant drowning the brain and organs. You’re stupid, sluggish and gaseous, with not a thimble’s worth of thought in your skull.

Where whisky goads an Id to action, beer leaves you dim and rudderless, your grey matter treading foam and hops. Beer’s why college students swan-dive from balconies into hotel swimming pools… why your high school girlfriend vomited in the closet one door down from the bathroom… why your buddy-who-just-got-divorced shit his pants and passed out in a lawn chair at that Memorial Day pool party.  Beer’s the voice in your head, right as you’re about to come, saying “Just a couple more thrusts… I can pull out of her in time.”

This was what caused all the worry.  Whisky can kill you, that’s true.  But it’ll rarely be the source of embarrassment, a fount of public shame and disgrace.  Beer’s the polar opposite.  None above a nine year old girl could imbibe enough to die from the its effect.  But it will kill everything else.  Career and respect of peers… assumptions you had native intelligence slightly above a Bonobo’s – these are all undone with beer.

And here I was on my fifth.  Or was that seven?

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* Some would go one step further – say you need liquor to play golf well, and the best in the game are closet drunks.  That the muscle relaxation of booze is required to zen a golf swing.  That Tiger is a gin rag with eyes, as are Mickelson, Westwood and Els, and that those in the clubhouse know.  They understand.  One need only look at John Daly, at his death dive from the money list and tour, to see the folly in going on the wagon.