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THE VICE GUIDE TO EVERYTHINGA definitive guide to the rest of your life
What the fuck is the matter with people these days? They're walking around, wearing sandals, not paying for shit and talking about their dreams. Don't they know the rules? It's time we write a definitive guide to everything in the world, a list of DOs & DON'Ts that people can reference seriously and systematically for the rest of their lives.
CONVERSATION We're sitting in a bar last night and some middle-class penis in a plaid shirt and pleated pants comes up to us and says, "Hey guys, I'm Don. Got a minute?" Then he tells us that he just got back with a girl he had originally lost because he "took her for granted." When we angrily asked why we should give a shit, he was shocked. He didn't understand what our problem was and pointed out that he was being "sweet." "I'm usually an asshole," he added. We told him that assholes are a lot more interesting than self-indulgent "me me me" shitheads like him, but all he could say was things like "I'm just reaching out. I'm not known for reaching out." The more we gave him shit for talking about himself, the more he defended himself by talking about himself. What are we, therapists? Don't people know the basic laws of conversation?
If you want to start out a conversation by talking about yourself, it better involve the rest of us pretty damn fast or we're going to tune out. You're "usually an asshole" but now you're being "sweet"? OK, ask us what we are and which is a better type of person to be. Let's have a debate about it. We would argue that even George W. Bush is nice if you meet him face to face, and then you could try to defend niceness by talking about this cruel planet we live on or something. Eventually, we would all come to a conclusion about how assholes are actually nicer than nice people because at least they care enough to be sincere and whatever, whatever. The important thing is, once we got off the topic of you and made it more general, we would have an overall conclusion from which everyone could glean something. A conversation is supposed to go: anecdote about you, then anecdote about me, then anecdote about him, then we all get together and come up with a general conclusion that unites all our anecdotes into one big summation about human nature. 2. DON'T ASK A QUESTION JUST SO SHE WILL ASK YOU THE SAME THING When a guy wants to talk about himself, he'll do this thing where he asks the girl a question he secretly wants to be asked. For example, if he wants to tell her how cute he was when he was an angry young man, he'll ask, "What did it say on the back of your leather jacket when you were punk?" Then, while she sits there saying, "Well, I didn't really have a leather jacket with stuff on it when I was into punk. I would just wear a black sweatshirt," etc. But he's not even listening because he's too busy thinking, "Yeah, yeah, whatever, when is she going to stop talking so I can tell her how mine said ‘If you're not angry you're part of the problem'?" 3. DON'T TALK ABOUT YOUR DREAMS Nobody cares about your dreams, you asshole. "It wasn't really my dad. It was, like, a composite of my dad and Owen Wilson, and we were going on this road trip but there were bees everywhere…" Can you go fill up a syringe of care juice so I can shoot it in my veins, please? How am I supposed to stay awake to hear a made-up story that you didn't even consciously make up and you don't even really remember? Maybe if one of us was in the fucking thing, we could while away the time psychoanalyzing the meaning of the dream and what it meant about our relationship, but shit, talking about your dreams is worse than talking about yourself. You weren't even really there, for fuck's sake. 4. DON'T TALK ABOUT YOUR JOB "What do you do?" is the lamest and most boring question there is. Asking people about their jobs means they are defined by what they do, and it's not 1950, so fuck off. The worst part is when people actually answer it and start getting into the nuances of their job and how they totally nailed that proposal and how everyone knows it but Gordon. Dude, I don't care if your job is battling Argonauts. We don't want to hear it. The only people who have jobs exciting enough to talk about are sick of talking about their exciting jobs so, by definition, job talk has got to go. If that means knowing someone for days without knowing what they do, so be it. What's wrong with that? Are you so shallow you need to know everyone's job before you can like them? 5. DON'T ASK WHAT "ETHNIC BACKGROUND" (WHAT A GAY TERM) PEOPLE ARE Basically, it's the same as the above DON'T. Why do you have to know what fucking "ethnic background" a girl is before you talk to her? Is she fresh off the boat? No, she's not, she's from Detroit, and so what your question is really asking is "Why do your eyes look weird?" 6. DON'T TALK ABOUT YOUR KIDS There was this question in "The Ethicist" once where the lady goes, "My daughter is so smart and beautiful I almost feel that it's unethical to introduce her to other people. I'm worried it's going to give them impossible expectations for their own children. Is it ethical to let them meet my daughter?" Dear parents of the world, YOUR KIDS ARE FUCKING BORING! Why did you bring them to this dinner party anyway? You knew they were going to take over every conversation by waddling too close to the stairs and forcing everyone to get up from their chairs and go, "Oooh, careful, Moses." (What kind of name is Moses, anyway? Do you want him to get wedgied?) Look, it's simple: Your family is your own personal business. Your mom is the world's greatest mom, true, but so is mine. What are we going to do, get into a debate about it? It's private. Now, if you insist on bringing up a topic like what a selfish bastard your brother is, we can do that but, as with any "me" topic, we have to spread it around. For example, we could break it down like this: Your brother's selfish and you're not. Your father's selfish and your mother isn't. Looks like you got the mom genes and he got the dad genes. Maybe personality traits can be passed down like any other physical feature. All right, let's compare others at the table and see which sibling got which parent's gene. Hey, we're seeing a pattern here. It seems that…what? Oh wait, shit, where's Moses? "Oh cute, he's playing with the doggie, awwww," and just like that, there goes the only bearable conversation of the whole night. The only thing I want to talk about now is abortion. 7. DON'T TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER If someone starts talking about the weather for more than, say, a minute, you have to interrupt them and say, "I'm sorry, I don't do weather." Other topics that are not allowed anymore are 9/11, "hipsters" (no more even using that word), punk episodes of TV shows (punk CHiPs, punk Quincy, etc.), and Vice magazine. 8. DON'T TALK ABOUT YOUR PETS Bad news, lonely person: He's not saying, "What are you doing sitting in Mommy's chair?" He's saying, "Food, territory, sex, fuck, food, food, territory, food." It's a fucking animal. And why are you correcting me when I call it a "she" when it's actually a "he"? Oh sorry, did I hurt your dog's feelings? Is he going to have a complex now and start thinking he's a fag? There's nothing masculine or feminine about something that eats its own shit, lady. It's a glorified bug concerned with one thing: the food source. Animals are stupid, all right? That's why we eat them. So stop talking like your nutrient-worshipping personality slave has any kind of relevance outside your sad existence. Nobody cares. 9. DON'T TALK ABOUT ASTROLOGY What? You actually believe in that horseshit? Have you ever tested it out? Tell someone you're a sign that you aren't and see if they go, "Hmm, that's strange. You seem a lot more like a Scorpio" or whatever you really are. Astrology is a stupid person's desperate attempt to impose order on a world they feel is totally beyond their control. It is a science for people too lazy and uneducated to understand real science. If someone says, "What sign are you?" you should hear "Get the fuck out of here. I'm crazy." Oh, and that thing where you go "I'm sorry, but I'm psychic" is for babies. You are not psychic. You are a person who remembers strange things more than you remember boring things. That's called "selective memory" or "trying to appear special." 10. DON'T SAY "REMEMBER WHEN?" When you reunite with an old friend it's verboten to sit there going, "Remember when I accidentally shot you with a BB gun?" or "Remember when your dog barfed in my hair?" Those are OK stories and everything, but you're saying that those old times were way better than the time you're having right now and that means that there's no real reason you two should be meeting again. Either have new times or let the past stay as it was and never meet again. You know the worst kind of violation of this rule? When some guy brings his girlfriend to the reunion and the two guys sit there talking about how crazy they were while the girl is forced to endure this puffed-up version of her boyfriend's past. Ewww, the old friend will even pull out an old nickname and say to her, "We used to call this guy ‘The Wolf,' because he could get out of any situation. There'd be, like, 10 guys ready to kick our ass, and he'd have, you know, two dates that were all pissed with each other, and then, before you knew it, The Wolf would have everyone over to his place for a party. It was awesome." There, that's not so hard, is it? There's still plenty of good shit you can talk about. Is your relationship going badly? Let's hear about it. Did your girlfriend come home early and find you with a whore? By all means, let's have it. Did you fuck a girl in the ass and get so much poo on your dick it looked like an elf shoe when you pulled it out? Yes, dude, let the beans spill. Gossiping is also a great thing. As long as the story actually happened, you can embellish all you want. You can even cut out the middleman and replace the hero of the story with you. Go nuts. Hey, let's talk shit about people. If some really evil things fall in the woods and the person you're talking about never hears what you said, it never made a sound. As Winston Churchill taught us: "What people say about me behind my back is none of my business." Actually, you know what? Fuck this. You need to know a lot more shit. You need to know the DOs & DON'Ts of everything. CONTINUED: THE VICE GUIDE TO EVERYTHING | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |Next> COMMENTS
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