cali damage

Ever wondered why why models say “People don’t understand. It’s HARD to be a model.”???

Or why actors say, “People don’t understand. . . it’s HARD to be an actor.”?
They’re not wrong  . . .it IS hard to  spend 90% of your income on your monthly facial surgery and give the remaining 10% to L. Ron Hubbard.  And, it IS hard to weigh 80 pounds and stand still for 8 hours while people take 8,000 pictures of you.  But, the fact is, Models could show up, eat 4 burritos, and snap a mere 3 pictures, and be home in time for church, and we’d be just as happy.  it IS hard. . . but here’s the thing: All the ‘hard’ stuff   is EXTRA.  It comes FROM OUT-COMPETING THE OTHER PEOPLE WHO WANT TO DO THOSE SAME THINGS.

That’s my rule: the more people want to do X (and the fewer jobs doing X), the more that  competition-skills  eclipse actual X-skills.   Every second that people put into out-maneuvering their peers for jobs, is a second they are NOT actually practicing their craft. 

skills are  REAL  to the extent that they are non-transferable.  They relate to thing X and only thing X.  for instance,  shooting a basketball or doing calculus or  knowing how to do a heart transplant are real skills.   Competition is a transferable skill, consisting of  a mix of opportunism, shamelessness, backstabbing,  undetectable deceit, egomania, schmoozing, meticulous friend-collecting-and-rolodexing, and  manipulation. . . . if you can outcompete your peers at selling insurance, you’re probably going to be able to sell shoes and comic books.  If you can  shmooze Hollywood executives, you can shmooze art collectors and influential academics.  schmoozing is like some kind of viral meta-skill that just endlessly proliferates accross jobs like the aids.

This is why actors today can’t act.  Their ‘skill set’ consists 90% of  knowing how to work the Hollywood system, and only 10% is left to learn how to pretend to be a wise-cracking alien.  Politicians, having the most powerful, sought-after jobs on the planet, are even more skewed:  they spend 99% of their time working the system, and only 1% actually passing laws.  That’s why any reformers don’t get elected: not that there is a conspiracy, just people who care more than 5% about serving the people simply aren’t spending the 99% that is necessary to learn competition skills essential to getting elected.

The corollary to this rule:  the more competition there is for a few jobs X, the more jobs open up for MIDDLEMEN whose jobs are totally not necessary to actually getting thing X done!  The middlemen function as GATE-KEEPERS, who devise new and more complicated hoops for contenders to jump through to prove themselves.  Ok, you can’t just wave your boobs around to support your team.  Now you have to make a pyramid and smile and yell about balls a lot. You can’t just rap anymore: you have to ‘brand’ yourself and sell sneakers, cologne and  large pants.  And you certainly can’t learn about tax laws,  social injustice, and the history of democracy – you have to learn about polls, spin doctors, tv makeup and backroom dealings. 

An additional irony: the audience actually gives not a fuck about all that stuff.  They’d be HAPPIER with random fine broads in the audience hopping onto the football field and shaking around, HAPPIER with politicians who knew the problems of the average person and actually, like, read the laws they were passing, HAPPIER with actors who had more emotion about their role than their burger-king tie-in merchandise. And, back in the real world, people would be happier avoiding office politics and actually doing their jobs. 

In conclusion:  the middlemen plus the emphasis on competition-skills combine to detract from the doing-the-actual-fucking-thing skills. Also they combine to distort and pervert the original goals of the actual thing. . . all these extra hoops are erected, connections eclipse talent, and the audience in time will care more about the horse-race aspects of the competition than the thing itself!  Whether it’s pop music (American idol etc.) or politics (forget bush’s position on the issues. . . do you think his swift boat vet strategy will backfire?) or work (who cares if the report is done on time ? who is going to get credit for it?).

I used to believe there was no God.  However, recently I had a vision.  It came to me in the shower, after a significant amount of Smirnoff.  But a vision nonetheless: if the catholics can drink wine, I can drink vodka. At least my libation doesn’t turn to blood in my fucking duodenum. But I digress.

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 I  believe that there IS a God.  He loves you, forgives you, and all that.  But he can’t contact or save you or influence you, any more than you can influence or contact him.  He can only watch you, your ups and downs, your lies and your virtues, wanting to touch you, but failing.  His ONLY contact with the human soul comes when a person dies.  As the human’s soul slips out of the body, God slips into the body.  But the body is dead so God can’t do anything. In every graveyard there are hundreds or thousands of lonely bits of God.  And this goes on, forever.  You can spend your whole life praying to Him, but you only encounter Him the second you die, and in a millisecond later, before you can even see his face, your soul is floating up in the sky, to disperse forever, like so much secondhand smoke.  No heaven.  No hell.  Just a God that loves us and is forever denied, over and over.  Trapped in our rotting husks.  Still just as cut off from humanity as he was in Heaven. 

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So, what should I call this religion of mine?  No fair saying ‘shultzzzisfuckedupism’. . .   I am trying to have a very mature theological and epistemological discussion here.