It’s been awhile since I’ve posted about my forthcoming book, Well-Behaved Monsters, so this seems like a good time to do so. To clue in newsletter newcomers, but also to remind you existing loyal readers that it’s set for official release just six days from now, on April 9, though you can get your pre-release copy (and price) by ordering a copy now.
Anyway if curious about the subject matter, my tome concerns a group of single guys, out on the nightlife scene in varying combinations, who hit upon some – to put it mildly – highly unusual and controversial pickup strategies. But also the larger points here, one being that men and women think drastically different about these matters (itself a controversial opinion, in many circles, despite reams of scientific evidence), which is why these stunts are working in the first place. Yet that this entire dating game charade is ultimately giving everyone involved a much darker opinion of human nature.
This short and actually much lighter scene, tonally, than many others, occurs somewhat early in the book:
Upon entering Sticks, it becomes immediately apparent that Lily is having one of her nights, too. Increasingly common pretty much every time she comes back from Chicago to visit, which makes me wonder why she bothers in the first place. Millie shouts out our names and waves from a corner booth, where she, Aaron, and some other gigantic whale of a guy I don’t recognize are seated around a pitcher of beer. We slide in to join them, and get the refill train rolling down the tracks as well, when a waitress flitters past. This is a pleasant surprise as I’d debated calling Aaron, figured he would already have plans, and didn’t bother. As for the other guy, he is quickly introduced to me as Millie and Lily’s cousin Michael, who is living in the basement now.
Meanwhile, Lily doesn’t say hello or for that matter even stop by our table for the longest time. Her pretext is that she’s bumping into so many familiar faces that she must make her rounds, and therefore doesn’t have time for us. And to some extent I’m sure this is true. However she mostly looks to me like someone who is making a concerted effort to establish that she has way more important things to do than associate with our pathetic table. This attitude has always been there, implied and sometimes even stated outright, that she is better than the rest of us. She has a college degree and is paying an astronomical amount for that Windy City apartment. But word on the streets has it that her employee is going out of business, and she has nothing else lined up, though the smugness remains.
It’s a complicated legacy, to be sure. I wouldn’t exactly call her a career highlight – nor, in all fairness, would she say that about me. Which I am well aware of and totally okay with. However this unfiltered assessment of the situation has led to my indifferent attitude, which I do believe has fueled her interest, at least on occasion, once it enters those aforementioned funhouse chambers of the female mind. My flippancy stems from knowing that she was way more interested in banging Joe when he was single than she ever has been in hooking up with me, on those few scattered occasions across the years. I know this and will call her on it.
If we are broaching this topic, then it means we are in a highly combative, verbal sparring mode, or should we say she attempts a highly combative approach as I mostly laugh in her face. It also means we are likely to wind up screwing later. She denies this, possibly because acknowledgment would require openly admitting that the guy she’s chosen to shack up with for the night is some leftover dregs, acquired in the absence of anything more substantial. Also, regarding people who take themselves way too seriously, I have a tendency to find them ridiculous – and she certainly fits this bill.
All of which leads to a phenomenon that Aaron and I are frequently discussing here of late: that what women want is not what they are attracted to. She wants someone who treats her well and takes her seriously and is quite the distinguished individual himself. However, if she ever had such a mate, she would be bored into an even greater alcoholic oblivion. Instead, what she is attracted to is a guy who is none of these things, because the challenge is the real allure, her attempts to force this irregular knot shaped peg into a nice neat round hole.
“I feel like every chick I know is, like, thirty-five, and single, and totally miserable,” Aaron is telling me now, “they’re all whining to me, where are all the guys? There’s no guys left! And I’m like, are you fucking kidding me? You had all kinds of guys coming around a few years ago, and you blew them all off.”
“Right,” I concur, “it was soooooooo hilarious, you know, when they were twenty-three and had their pick of the litter, and were dumping guys left and right for no reason whatsoever. Because they didn’t like his shoes or something. Now we’re supposed to feel sorry for them?”
“Exactly. Where are all the guys? Are you for real? You had a good guy. You had all kinds of good guys. Fuck that. I’m not coming anywhere near that shit.”
“I hear ya. I don’t have the least bit of sympathy for them.”
“Neither do I.”
“To be honest, I actually think it’s somewhat hysterical… and really what you might call just desserts,” I tell him.
“Exactly! See and some of them, I mean, they had, like, three guys going at once that they threw out for no reason. I’m like, are you for real? You don’t want a good guy. What you really want is a guy with money, why don’t you just admit it. And then they’re like, yeah but I dated this guy that had a lot of money, but he was an asshole. And I’m like, well, there you go. You can’t have it all.”
This second excerpt occurs slightly later, but concerns many of these same topics. Our main character, Sid Mason, is contemplating how and why chicks don’t seem the least bit bothered by his friend Robby Newall’s outrageous and often violent behavior, are interested in dating him anyway…yet typically don’t stick around too long:
It probably has more to do with his behavior, either that they disappear of their own volition, or he’s too inconsistent to keep them around. Which opens an interesting philosophical debate, one that I return to often, wondering which is more immature: Robby’s behavior, or women who are attracted to such behavior?
It brings to mind that whole era where a bunch of atrocious rap/metal bands were ruling the airwaves. Looking backwards at archival footage of that time will reveal that random guys around town did quite well mimicking that aesthetic, the dopey mannerisms and backwards hatted attire and ignorant mindsets involved, as far as attracting females. Not to mention cranking this garbage as well.
This phenomenon was a stomach turning one on multiple different levels. Somewhat in defense of these lunkheads, they were morons to begin with, and probably not much could be done about that – whether they legitimately thought that trend was cool, or were adopting it as a calculated move (then again, regarding this latter point, is that really so different than, say, dressing up as an OK Corral gunslinger, or a middle-aged Parrothead? A disconcerting thought, to be sure. But I can’t even fathom how miserably I would have to bomb out with these stunts to consider aping Fred Durst. That would have to represent the very last card in the deck.) Also, I mean, it was working for them. So that’s another faint tally mark on their wall.
And maybe this is too harsh on the girls, but I feel they came off even worse by being impressed by this nonsense. They had a choice. It would fill you with revulsion, to where you were looking at these chicks and thinking or possibly even on occasion saying, “really? This is what you find attractive?” So once again, these dynamics would find one pondering which side was worse, and I know where my bets ultimately landed.
The standard, almost universally held “wisdom” is that girls mature faster than boys. Which for the record I believe is completely fucking preposterous. You take a guy like Robby here and yeah he’s somewhat of an outrageous character, personality-wise. I get it. Let’s examine some more pertinent facts, though. He also lives on his own – with roommates, but whatever – holds down a full-time job and pays his bills on time, or at least as on time as any of us are. Meanwhile let’s contrast this against a huge percentage of the girls I know in a similar age bracket. They’re still living at home, at the age of say twenty-three. Mom and dad bought them a car, mom and dad are paying for the car insurance. Sometimes these girls are holding down a part-time half assed job, sometimes not. Sometimes vaguely tinkering with a single college class, sometimes not. However, Robby is definitely very immature in their estimation. Like for example the way he insists upon getting together every single Friday night to play video games with his friends, without fail, no matter what – that’s the epitome of immaturity. She and all her twenty-three year old girlfriends who still live at home are in agreement on this point.
This topic has burned me up to the extent that I mentioned this not so long ago, in a conversation with my dad. He and I are not especially close, therefore it’s something we’ve never tangentially drifted near discussing before. However, he is an engineering professor at a small but popular regional college, and I thought he might have some particularly useful and apt insight on the matter. I presented my question to him in as neutral, non-witness-leading form as possible and waited for his response: does he think the girls in his classes are more mature than the boys?
“No. Huh uh. Absolutely not,” he says, further refuting this suggestion with a violent head shake.
“Thank you for saying that,” I tell him, add, “I just feel like every girl I meet is living in a fantasy world. It’s like, they don’t have to take anything seriously, because some really rich and really handsome guy is going to show up any day now and sweep them off their feet.”
“Oh yeah. Totally,” he says. “Now, if you had asked me five or ten years ago, I might have said something different. But these days? No. There’s no way. The boys are much more level-headed and sensible.”
But from these females, you will never hear any suggestion otherwise, that they are not much more mature, wiser, stronger, resilient, than us guys have ever thought about being. Anything that has gone sideways in their lives, meanwhile, is plainly the fault of some dude, or more likely “the system” that has been orchestrated by a bunch of dudes, all acting together in a concerted plot. But that’s just not what we’re seeing. It’s simply more of this elaborately constructed spin control, almost like a slight variation on that Usual Suspects quote about the devil: most things in this world seem arranged to benefit the female, yet they’ve got the entire universe in their corner anyway, painting them as the eternal victims. Problem is, having everyone kiss your ass all the time hasn’t done much for building character.
Well as mentioned before, I do expect a few horrified unsubscribes every week, once they crack open the latest edition of this ‘lil newsletter. For those of you who continue to stick around, though, this material is maybe right up your alley.
And so I have some preorder options down below for you. The paperback will look just like the one depicted above, and of course there’s an ebook option for your Kindle as well. The general public will have to wait until April 9. I’m also featuring the standard crass marketing ploy, to drum up early sales, in that there’s a “countdown deal” in place for both of these options below – discounted now, but scheduled to go up a dollar at a time afterwards.
So get your copy today! It would mean so much to me! Thanks to preorders I’m already at #1517 in the “dark humorous comedy” category on Amazon! Yowza!
And bless you as always for reading.
