L.B. Wilkenson has a lot to share about the life and times of a dildomonger and, for the next few months, we’re gonna let her.

Maybe you’ve already had a lot of jobs.

Maybe you spent a summer making soap for a man who wore a kilt, had angry-red boils on his thighs and liked to talk about how sexy black girls are. You’ve worked in a Ghanaian preschool, where you had to clean up a lot of barf, and as a maid in a budget hotel in Amsterdam, where the barf situation was pretty much the same. You’ve watched TV for a living, handed out fliers for a strip club, worked in publishing, worked in film, worked in libraries, bookstores and restaurants—you’ve gotten to the point where working in an adult toy store is officially NBD.

You’ll meet people who think adult toy stores only cater to men with greasy hair and sweaty palms shuffling around in soiled raincoats with nothing on underneath. Try not to imagine how dull the sex lives of these people must be. It’ll harsh your mellow.

Some people will assume that you have a lot of sex. That’s fine. When you first meet someone and tell them what you do, expect their eyes to go saucer-wide as visions of you engaging in madcap, professionally sanctioned fuck-fests dance through their heads. Suggest in a conspiratorial whisper that sometimes you do end your shift covered in sweat, lube, a stranger’s urine and your own bitter tears. Try not to laugh.

Some people will practically deify you and others will treat you like you’re the biggest degenerate on the planet. “Funny” people will ask you if your mother knows where you work and “concerned” people will tell you to go to college. If, during that speech they happen to use a word incorrectly, correct them. It’ll feel great.

Everyone has sex, so when you’re on the job, you’ll meet all kinds: celebrities (management will make you sign a waiver so you won’t name names), stockbrokers, hipsters, old folks, young folks, gays and straights. Because part of an episode of Sex and the City was filmed in your store, you’ll meet a ton of tourists who would never, under any other circumstance, set foot in an adult toy store. Some of them will ask you where Carrie Bradshaw’s house is. Try not to laugh.

You’ll find that your job affords you an excellent opportunity to observe other people, which is great because you’re simply fascinated by other people. You want to be a novelist one day, so you’re always trying to figure out what makes folks tick.

Carefully watch the woman in her sixties or seventies who always comes in wearing a brown fur coat and her white hair up in a French twist. She’s rapidly sliding into full-blown dementia and you suspect that your store is just one stop in a circuit of mayhem that she traces throughout the city. As she turns on every vibrator on display, worry that she’s not being cared for well enough and that she’s going to get lost one day. After she’s gone, turn off the vibrators she’s left rattling like crazy against the glass display table.

Laugh with your coworkers about the guy who called the cops a couple of weeks ago because your manager wouldn’t let him return an anal douche. Or about the guy who asked to have a sample of lube squeezed in his hand, then left the store with it cupped in his palm.

Hope that you actually help the older women looking to rediscover their sexuality after a hysterectomy. And the women in their late 20s and early 30s who come in and quietly confess that they’ve never had an orgasm.

Have a long talk with a guy who tells you he wants to buy his wife a gift because she gets angry with him every time he wakes her up for sex. Assume that he means a romantic gift and show him the selection of bubble bath and massage oil. He’ll shake his head and say that he’s not a romantic guy. Then he’ll wait a beat and ask, “What exactly is a butt plug for, anyway?”

You’ll explain and he’ll buy the butt plug. Try not to laugh. Or cry.

I had seldom thought about my age until two summers ago, when a schoolgirl at a Vienna backpacker hostel demanded it. To my answer — “27” — she said “Fwüüüü!” which is German for “I am surprised your colostomy bag isn’t leaking.” Then a few weeks ago I was at a train station in Germany, and the Ticketfrau also asked my age to see if I qualified for a “youth” fare — apparently the Botox that Austrian schoolgirl made me get has paid for itself. To my answer, which was (unsurprisingly) “29,” she just kind of shook her head and glared at me, as if I were born in 1976 by devious personal choice, like a gay who hasn’t yet become an ex-gay in the glorious light of Christ (I can make such sophisticated comparisons because of the wisdom I have from being alive for so long).
It was a good thing I kept the entire truth from her, which is that I was 29 by a matter of a few insignificant weeks, soon to switch my Rascal scooter to “turbo” and zoom across that venerable decade border, leaving my twenties behind in a cloud of dust and Ben-Gay. In fact, by the time you have so little going on in your life that you decide to read this page, I will have “celebrated” my 30th birthday, or will perhaps be celebrating it right this second, drunk somewhere and picking up a 19 year old in celebration of our mutual sexual peaks (or so I’ve read). Perhaps you are that 19 year old, and still so psyched your fake ID got you into the Beer Garden that you haven’t yet noticed the aging pervert in your midst.

Either way, now that I’m back in America (sans deodorant and face powder, which were confiscated rather aggressively at the Düsseldorf airport as part of the liquid ban, despite one being a solid and the other, as you might guess, a powder), and busy following the example of our elected leaders and ignoring the carnage in the Middle East, I have nothing left to distract me from the ceaselessly pouring granules of the sands of time. My birthday has always depressed me, ever since I took my friends mini-golfing when I was 12 and had such a temper-tantrum at my lack of mini-golf skills that I made my dad weep with shame (which he is doing once again, after reading of my desire to pick up 19 year olds). That was topped, only barely so, by 23, the year my then-boyfriend decided to buy himself a new subwoofer for his computer speakers instead of splashing out for an $11 pierogi dinner at Odessa, and I spent the evening sandwiched between his friends, half-participating in an inane conversation about the genius of Steve Vai.

I don’t know what the rest of you do on your birthdays, but my birthday is a day for somber reflection — somber, drunken reflection, and a ruthless taking of my life’s stock. And despite the braying of Austrian schoolgirls and German Ticketfrauen, I don’t so much care about getting older as I care about… well, about Steve Vai, for one thing — that guy was a total fucking genius and I could listen to his 19-minute blues jams for hours! No, I don’t care about my birthday except that I’m supposed to care because it’s my birthday, and I don’t care about being 30 except that everyone seems to think that’s “old” (it’s when people have started telling me I’m only as old as I feel, which is something you only say to oldies), and I know that despite my dad’s mini-golf shame and a decade’s worth of bad relationship choices, I have had a mercifully easy life. To make this point, I would compare myself to some people in the Middle East, but that would involve watching the news, and since they confiscated my deodorant in Düsseldorf I don’t want to raise my arms to turn on the television. And besides, who has time for the news when there are 19 year olds to corrupt? NYU sophomores, o ye with your battered copies of L’Etranger and your “original” emo tortoiseshell glasses, I’m coming for you first. As fast as this Rascal scooter will go. 

Every year in July, America runs out of men. For me, at least. Either I scare them off, divorce them, introduce them to one of my better-looking friends, talk them to death, exhaust them physically and emotionally to the point where they have to move back in with their parents, turn them into hippies or recluses, or accidentally poison them with termites. Well, that last one was actually an episode of House,M.D. but I wouldn’t put it past me.

Thus my only option this time of year is to spend a few months across the ocean, affecting the accent of whatever country I happen to be visiting and pretending to read The Man Without Qualities in the original German. That nobody has actually ever read Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is irrelevant, because I only use it for arm curls, as a stepping stool to reach smaller books, and to pick up broody intellectual men on the train. Which, by virtue of me being a boorish, stumpy American galumphing through a continent of wispy cosmopolitan beauties, never, ever works unless I happen to catch a guy directly off the plane, before he has had a chance to absorb his leggy, cheekboned surroundings and ditch me for Katja/Jana/Elke and her seven sexually adventurous cousins. It helps if the guy has never seen any Europeans on television, or had any European exchange students in high school. Basically unless a guy is home-schooled and suffers from some sort of learning disability that prevents him from understanding supermodels when they say “American passport? I love sex,” I have no chance in Europe, with my fellow travelers or anyone else. This leaves me no choice but to sublimate my rage and frustration into scathing judgment of my fellow man. (Just like Dr. House — sweet, sweet House.)

Decoding the mating habits of Central Europeans, for example, requires the sort of eye for subtlety and endless hermeneutic patience normally reserved for trying to figure out how the fuck soccer works. As far as I can tell, Czechs, Germans and Austrians walk into bars surrounded by their ostensible “friends,” and then spend all night standing around in silence not looking anyone directly in the eye except when they toast before drinking. Approximately every three hours, the ghost of Khrushchev sneaks in through one of the beer taps and arbitrarily pairs a bunch of people off — they then leave together without a word, move in together, raise children without getting married and cohabit for 50 years without taking part in a single conversation with each other. Eventually the man dies and the little old lady spends the rest of her days following people around and whacking them with umbrellas.

Slightly more understandable are the sexual practices of vacationing American college students, many of whom spent their freshman years drinking nothing but Everclear and thus confuse Europe with Las Vegas. “Nobody here knows me or understands my language,” they seem to think, “so I can do whatever I want on my parents’ nickel with no accountability or consequences.” American sorority girls, for example, find it acceptable to have youth-hostel sex with other Americans within seven minutes of meeting them, and then to pee in the trash cans of those youth-hostel bedrooms while I look on in mingled horror and fascination and my traveling companions stop making fun of me for taking antibacterial gel wherever I go.

It is a good thing there is no room for me in this paradigm, as I am impervious to the matchmaking efforts of Khrushchev’s ghost and enjoy peeing in toilets and getting to know people sober. Besides, it is probably good for me to be alone for a while, give the men of the world a break. Oh, who am I trying to fool? Despite details of the space-time continuum, I am saving myself for Dr. House — and once he sees my nose in this copy of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, he’ll be mine.

Nietzsche once said that he who fights with monsters should take care that he doesn’t turn into a monster himself, and that when you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back. Well, it was either Nietzsche or Ted Nugent. I don’t know, I was pretty drunk that night, and there were a lot of people there at Ann Coulter’s party, doing blow off Suicide Girls’ asses and celebrating the release of Ann’s new book, I Have a Vagina Full of Money. Or maybe it was called God Loves Mean Assholes the Most. Or Beyond Good and Evil and All the Way Back to Super-Evil. I don’t remember what the book was called. From what I’ve heard it’s pretty obscure and probably won’t even sell out its print run of five (especially since most of us got a copy for free, and I used mine as kindling to incinerate the foreign).

Anyway, as I said, we were all pretty fucked up. And thus, I don’t remember most of what Nietzsche/Ted Nugent said (it might have had something to do with pizza toppings — “I am not a sun-dried tomato, I am dynamite!” sounds a little familiar), but for some reason that bit about monsters and the abyss stuck. Unfortunately, it got me thinking — and since everyone else at the party was a Republican (except for Nietzsche, who considers himself a Libertarian, but I think that’s just the VD talking) and thus hates to think, it also got me lonely. And when I get lonely, I start taking stock of situations (again, I can see why my Republican friends don’t like thinking, because it sets off an unfortunate chain of events). And when I take stock of situations, I start seeing unpleasant things when I close my eyes, à la Julia Stiles in the remake of The Omen, who closes her eyes and sees footage of herself doing an astoundingly shitty acting job in a remake of The Omen.

Here is what I’ve been seeing lately on the back of my eyelids: a giant photo of the dead face of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on the front page of the newspaper, à la those sweet decapitated Westerner corpse photos Arab television likes to run sometimes. As if, first of all, offing one Al-Q mastermind and then putting his head on a stick à la Lord of the Flies (metaphorically… I hope) is the international warfare equivalent of Capture the Flag and the game is now over because our corpse photo is the corpsiest of all. And as if it were somehow the righteous thing to do, and that every time a homosexual looks at al-Zarqawi’s waxy dead eyelids he will be compelled to go to the Olive Garden and electric-guitar-pyrotechnic worship hour.

Because, see, when our side publishes a big corpse face, it is a legitimate, non-brutal act of freedom’s ultimate triumph, and Jesus himself is looking up from his video iPod with glowing pride. It is especially not a gesture semantically identical and thus arguably equivalently monstrous as anything their side would do to us — because, ok, calm down, I realize that al-Zarqawi was a bad, bad man, and that all the nice journalists and venture capitalists his buddies murdered were not. And I realize that most of Ted Nugent’s poetry blows and his moustache is ridiculous (or is that Nietzsche?), but he has a point. If you spend too much time with the monsters, what is to stop you from trying on a sweet pair of monster-sized stiletto heels (like the ones Ann Coulter wore on the cover of Time to accentuate her awesome man-feet) and deciding they look hot on you? And if you spend too much time staring at the waxy-lidded, lifeless abyss, how can you be sure that you’re outside it looking in, and not the other way around? What is happening to us? Ann Coulter, Ted Nugent, Nietzsche, anyone? See? Thinking is the worst.

I’ve always thought picking on an easy target was in poor taste, and this is because as a child I was dumpy, uncoordinated, prone to crying fits, and had a predilection for knickerbockers and hole-ridden sweatpants (sometimes worn in concert). I would come home from school crying and my mother would feed me a bunch of well-intentioned communitarian 60s bullshit like, “Next time J.J. picks on you, you ask her why she doesn’t have anything better to do.” Why don’t parents remember that one of the cardinal rules of childhood and adolescence is that no kid has anything better to do than pick on another kid, ever? And the easier the target, the better.

Meathead children with disproportionate amounts of power and buried kernels of low self-esteem do not enjoy a challenge. And, contrary to what my mother always said, some kids never grow out of this phase — they grow up to be Republicans. They grow up to be i-bankers on the Upper East Side who play Quarters well into their thirties and brag about not owning a book. They grow up to be CEOs of the energy conglomerates. They grow up to be President. So the question arises: in that one time every decade when they hit a run of bad luck (and face it, we are too stupid or powerless to have had any marked effect on the Bush administration’s spectacular implosion or the Lay/Skilling convictions, so bad luck it is), what can we, the limp-wristed, feelings-sharing, Pansycrat wusses, do now that the tables are turning? Do we bathe in the healing aroma-therapeutic mineral salts of Schadenfreude?

We are above such poor taste. And so I have an idea. Listen, I think we should help them. They’re always going on about the Bible, and I’m pretty sure that book has fellow-man-helping stuff in it, so let’s take a page out of it! Literally! And make that page into a paper airplane, and sail it off the Brooklyn Bridge and go, “Ooh, you down-and-out conservatives, look how pretty! There’s First Corinthians, fluttering above the boats! Now buck up, you’ve got Karl Rove cooking up something evil even as we speak. And do we have a Karl Rove? We do not.” And when they realize the paper airplane isn’t going to buy them a yacht and they go back to blubbering about their dust-gathering Hummers they can’t afford to fill up, we can give them some pointers on how to un-alienate their base. The current sovereign bodies in all our branches of government have been so busy inciting anti-fer’ner rioting with all this immigration reform that they haven’t had time to cover up the bad press from the Enron conviction or the gas prices or the war our great-great-great-grandchildren will probably have to fight in (if they can ride their bicycles all the way across the ocean). There are only so many pretty white girls that can get kidnapped by ethnic minorities, after all. And gay people are still having sex all over this great country of ours, but when nobody can afford to drive to their thrice-weekly megachurch pyrotechnic X-treme Worship, they have a hard time whipping up enough righteous indignation to power the great Republican Codified Bigotry Machine (which I envision as kind of a cross between the Goodyear Blimp and a spider).

Oh, now, look what I did. I didn’t help anyone; I just kicked some grown-up meatheads when they were down and didn’t even offer to buy them a hooker. It was really fun at the time, but it was the hollow, shameful kind of fun that comes from eating a tub of Red Vines or punching the homeless. It just makes you feel dirty in the end (especially the hand you just used to punch the homeless). Dirty, debased and constantly vulnerable — much like Ken Lay will be in prison. (Whoops.)

For someone who openly loathes children, I am the world’s best mother. To drunk people. Because I am often the least-drunk person in any given room. It is not my fault that I bloat easily (and thus drink slowly), and I would like to stop being punished for it. Isn’t the bloating punishment enough? Being responsible blows. But see, someone always has to do it. Because it is a proven scientific fact, proven by scientists in important-looking coats, that in any given group of people up to no good, one person must be the buzz-harshing, fun-killing, horsing-around-opposed, anal-retentive mom-type douche bag and everyone else will just be, like, hanging out doing acid off of herpes-covered dildos and why can’t you just chill, Schuman? Jeez.

I’ll tell you why I can’t just chill — because if I’m not responsible, you’re all going to die!!! And now that summer’s coming, and some people think it’s acceptable to spend all day mainlining margaritas and just WAITING for someone to have an unfortunate accident so that I can explain the head-shaped dent in my wall to the paramedics, I’m here to tell you that everyone had better shape the fuck up and get responsible immediately because the Schuman Mom Train is derailing herself, permanently!!! Pass the crystal meth.

Apparently God hates me so much for not procreating (and also not chiseling the Ten Commandments on courthouses in my spare time) that he has made me de facto Most Responsible Person in the Room for all eternity, and I am sick of it. I quit. I am officially no longer everyone’s hysterical Jewish mother just because I can judge my own level of intoxication (with the possible exception of this magazine’s Literary Upstart in 2005, and if you know what I’m talking about, you’re probably too drunk right now to tease me effectively so you should just mind your own beeswax — and make sure to take an Advil before you go to bed and hydrate or you’ll feel terrible in the morning).

This is not to say that I never do anything stupid. I do massive amounts of stupid things, all day long. My stupid thing/not stupid thing ratio of things done on any given day is generally 3:1. The difference is that I remember everything I do. Even if I’ve been drinking (case in point: Literary Upstart Aught-Five). I remember every unfortunate proclamation of undying love I make, every ill-advised grope, every rejection-fueled putting-on of moves, every regrettable drunk-dialed word. (If only I could apply such skills to my scholarship, I’d be Hannah Arendt). No matter how much I try and how many times I listen to Appetite for Destruction, I can never become intoxicated enough to blank out, and the result is that all potential future degenerate behavior is informed with the memory of past degenerate behavior, and suddenly everyone else is hopped up on PCP making sawdust snow-angels at the paper mill they broke into and I’m home watching House, drinking juice spritzers and just waiting to bail someone out of jail.

This leaves me with two choices. Either I get married immediately, and start hanging out with a bunch of teetotaling Christian fundamentalists and spend all my free time admiring goatees and X-treme Snowboarding Against Gays, or I spend the remaining three months of my twenties turning into Keith Richards. And that, my friends, is not even a real choice. So the next time someone smokes too much weed in my apartment and plunges noggin-first into my door like some sort of gangly weed-addled tree, that someone will be me. Bring on the Everclear and heroin! Fuck yeah! Whooo! Have I ever told you you’re hot? Yaargh!! (B-t-dubs, in case I don’t regain consciousness, I tattooed my stomach with a list of my food and medication allergies, my mom’s home and work phone number, a MapQuest printout of the five nearest hospitals, and TiVo instructions for House.) Now let’s make out before I puke!

It used to be my job to show up at the Union Square multiplex at 9am, buy tickets to four movies, and not watch any of them. I got paid to evaluate something called The 2wenty, a preview thingy you may know from your recent trip to see the gymnastics movie Stick It on opening day. (I myself am boycotting this film on the grounds that every major studio in the country turned down my wrenching cinematic gymnastics memoir, I’ll Never Get Boobs, in which I am played by Charlize Theron, who bravely stumpified her legs for the role. And no, I can’t do the splits anymore.)  

In case you spend all of your cinema time at Film Forum trying to get laid and you aren’t familiar with it, The 2wenty consists of “2wenty m1nut3s” of the most simpering, idiotic and insidious MerchanTainment (or, if you prefer, InfoTizing) the world has ever created, and to make sure of this, its creators exhumed and reanimated Theodor Adorno, and showed him The 2wenty until he re-killed himself. The 2wenty’s genius lies in its complete eschewal of “actual content” in favor of large advertisements disguised as features, themselves punctuated by smaller “regular” commercials designed to fool you into thinking the other parts aren’t a commercial. This is a technique cribbed from the last great American art form, the infomercial, in which the “program” involves Cindy Crawford flying to Paris and having a big cry with her dermatologist and the “commercials” involve “commercials” for Cindy Crawford’s beauty products, and then the “program” comes back on as if the commercial that came in the middle of it was for something else and thus acts to legitimize it as something “other” than a commercial. Adorno’s reanimated corpse gave a fascinating lecture about infomercials before it re-died — plus it got a great deal on an air purification system, an Ab Lounge, some Space Bags, Turbo Jam and five Magic Bullets.

You would think the massive subsidies the movie theaters earn forcing aggressive marketing on an already-captive audience would help lower the price of your ticket, but this is America, where we pay for the privilege of advertising for rich companies (if you don’t believe me, check out the logos all over the person sitting across from you on the subway, and think for a second that even NASCAR drivers have the sense to get other people to pay them to be human billboards).

The goal of The 2wenty is to offer such high-budget, flawlessly produced fake content that viewers feel lucky to see rad commercials (sort of like megachurches with attached mega-Christian-chain-bookstores, where congregants feel blessed to shell out non-discount prices for Jesus Wants You To Finance That Hummer… and, of course, to obliterate completely the line between MerchanTainment and alleged actual “entertainment,” so that the “real picture” you paid advertisers to make is actually a two-hour “preview” for Coke-flavored Coors.  
Of course, there is a way to avoid all of this, which is to download Stick It illegally from the internet until movie studios go out of business, and spend your $10 at the Angelika, where you also might score some action. The problem with this is that according to some advertisements during The 2wenty, every time you illegally download Stick It a puppy gets decapitated, and plus, all the snooty movies they play at indie theaters aren’t in English (or, worse, have ugly people in them). So all that’s left to do is stop watching movies altogether, stay home, and stick with the pure art of infomercials — because look, the TempurPedic mattress can withstand the MerchanTainment Apocalypse, and you’ll learn how you can get your own risk free, right after this commercial breaks for a commercial — for MerchanTainment Apocalypse, coming soon to a theater near you.

I really hope all these new anti-immigration laws pass, because nothing will make this country safer than ripping a bunch of parents away from their children — children who, like me, were smart and hard-working enough to be born here all by themselves. However, the new laws — which, in case you are exercising your God-given American right to ignore the news, would make illegal immigration a felony — are only a good start. If it were up to me, in order to get citizenship you’d have to prove seven generations of pure American blood (and Injuns don’t count!), showing that you are patriotic and hard-working enough to go back in time and encourage your ancestors to come over on the Mayflower. If God had wanted Americans to speak Spanish, He would have had it discovered by Mexicans.

At the very least, we should revamp that pussy Citizenship Test “legal” immigrants have to take in order to pretend to join our ranks while they donate all their stolen-from-pure-blood “paychecks” to Al-Qaida and other organizations in Iraq. Instead of a bunch of liberal bellyaching about the Boston Tea Party (you know who drinks tea? Fer’ners), today’s Test should find real Americans according to real American criteria. And it shouldn’t be limited to fer’ners trying to take our jobs and our women, everyone should have to take it — and if you flunk, you should get separated from your family and deported to some socialist republic, like Oregon. As my great-grandfather would say in his thick Russian-Yiddish accent: “I vant fern-chiks out da country!” If I were in charge, the immigration test would look like this:

1. What was America’s best war and why?
a) WWI: You didn’t hear those badasses in the trenches whine about more body armor.
b) The War on Terror: It will literally never end; how can you beat that? It’s semantically impossible!
c) WWII: Without Hitler, how could we compare lesser world dictators to Hitler?
d) The Cold War: Without it, there’d be no NASA.

2. What is the best ride at Disneyland?
a) The Matterhorn: It’s kind of gay, just like the actual Swiss.
b) Big Thunder Mountain Railroad: Proves why trains belong in theme parks, not cities.
c) Hall of Presidents: But really, they should remove Bill Clinton.
d) The I Hate Communists and Race-Mixing Ride

3. Why must the word “militia” be interpreted as liberally as possible, while the phrase “created equal” must not?
a) “militia” sounds foreign so it’s probably made up
b) all of the above
c) reading is for assholes!
d) if you even regard this question seriously, you fail

4. What is the most important attribute of a red-blooded American?
a) Red Lobster nearby
b) nine cars
c) “work ethic”
d) mediocre intellect and a sense of entitlement

5. Who is America’s biggest enemy?
a) Susan Sarandon
b) condoms
c) That bitch at Scores who keeps promising a blow job in the champagne room and then just dances around like some understudy from that Producers thingy.

Ha!! Unbeknownst to you, you just took this test! And you failed, because anyone who lives in the sin-soaked Island of New York obviously doesn’t deserve to be in America — just look at your stupid Statue of Liberty and its goddamned “huddled masses” plaque that brought all these fer’ners here in the first place! It’s just like my Bumpa said when he got off the boat, nine years old with only the worn-out shoes on his feet (which he wore out running from pogroms): actually I don’t know what he used to say because he didn’t speak English then. But you know what I mean. I’m sure it was something about rounding up fer’ners.

It has recently come to my attention that I need shitloads of money. Not just because I would like some $500 jeans (made from pieces of real pirate, and now available all the way up to waist size 27, for fatties!), or because I have suddenly and for reasons beyond all comprehension decided that FUCKING LEGGINGS are at all acceptable to wear anywhere outside a Jazzercise class that itself takes place only in a Jay McInerney novel. 

Yes, it’s true that I can’t afford to be ostracized because of my salt-of-the-earth insistence on wearing normal pants, but that’s just because I’m already ostracized because of my disturbing antisocial behavior. These days, the closest I get to regular human contact is mentally reenacting every stupid argument I’ve ever had (and even against imaginary people, I come off sounding like a moron). 

But see, money will make my antisocial behavior “quirky” and “eccentric” instead of “totally barmy,” and everyone will think I am cool. If I have enough money, my “hobby” of locking myself in my room to watch Law & Order and eat carrot cake will become even more essential than leggings, and Ian Schraeger will open a bunch of exclusive clubs where all you do is pay $500 to go sit in a room alone with a TV, and then they bring you carrot cake and you have a choice between regular Law & Order and all the Law & Order spin-offs, and then maybe an old episode of Knight Rider now and then because hey, talking car. That sentence you just read would be “edgy” and not “crazy” if I had so much money that I could throw an open-bar party at Doc Holliday’s in honor of its release.

The problem is that I don’t have any money, and I also don’t have any skills that could bring me any money — OR SO I THOUGHT, until recently, when I realized that I am actually little more than a normal-pants-clad goldmine with an extraordinarily loud voice. And that voice and these normal pants are about to change the world. 

Have you ever noticed that all those sweet megachurches with their charismatic Pastor Scotts and their pyrotechnics and their CEO Worship Hours all have one thing in common? Yes, that’s right, Christianity. But the problem with Christianity is that you can’t be Jewish. Do you see where I’m going here? I hope you do. I don’t see any reason why I can’t start a Jewish charismatic movement, based on superfluous and selective readings of the sacred texts (which I retranslate to be rad, obviously), eschewing Hebrew for Tongues — because let’s face it, they kind of sound the same anyway. We even have our own shitty, watered-down rock music — it’s called Maroon 5. Sure, it might take some cajoling to convince your bubbe that indoor fireworks aren’t verkockte, but once she checks out the valet-parking services at my One True Light of the Rockin’ Torah Nondenominational Syne-GAWESOME, she’ll change her mind. Pretty soon, they’ll start serving matzoh ball soup at Chili’s for the after-service rush at the strip mall.

And then, thank G-d, I’ll be loaded, what with the government grants and the outrageous tithes I will force from my congregants for all that Jewish missionary work — after all, we’ve got about 5,000 years of proselytizing to catch up on, now that I’ve arbitrarily decided it’s allowed due to the lack of reading the Torah directly responsible for my charismatic religious leadership. And I’ll finally have money — money to protect me from the judging masses, who judge me not just for my “eccentric personality,” but for the way I’ll look teaching Pentateuch Jazzercise in my sweet new $400 leggings.