From The Inner Swine Volume 13, Issue 2, June 2007

I knew a kid in high school who had as a personal philosophy of life something he called MEMO: Minimum Effort, Maximum Output. I doubt this was original to him; few kids in Jesuit schools have original ideas. Originality is beaten out of us like sin. What this philosophy boils down to is to put the least amount of work into anything while simultaneously exploiting the situation to its fullest. I don’t know what that kid’s up to these days—probably dead, like just about everyone else I went to school with, most of whom perished in hellish flames while demons cavorted around them, just as the priests predicted they would.

Me, my time is coming. And I have absolutely no doubt that no matter how long it takes for said time to come, when it does there will be several priests from my school days present, no matter how many decades they themselves may be dead by then. As a matter of fact, I may spend the rest of my life trying desperately to adopt enough orphans and endow enough schools for the blind to avoid eternal damnation, just so I won’t have to hear Father Browning tell me that I was evil, and that was why he had to fail me in Religion class back in 1987. And then he’d tear off my pants with some sort of trick magician’s move and paddle my ass for the lord.

Not that anything like that happened in my Jesuit high school. Mostly, there was emotional abuse. And some light attempted cult brainwashing.

Anyway, over the years I’ve adopted MEMO and adjusted it for my own personality, mainly by lopping off the last two letters, leaving me with a simple guide for the rest of my life: Minimum effort. It’s short and easy to remember, and it really is the easiest way to the simple life, because it immediately lops off entire categories of action and effort. If you’re seeking a simple and uncomplicated existence, after all, you can’t necessarily put much effort into things, because effort spawns complexity—you have to seek out resources, marshal those resources, organize things, and then put the work in—any one of those stages can produce unwanted complexity in your life. The devil, after all, is in the details.

As an example, let us examine the disastrous nature of my haircuts.

(more…)

This is an essay from the Winter 2010 Issue of my zine, The Inner Swine, for no particular reason.

From the Columbia Record & Tape Club to Amazon MP3s: My Musical Consumption History

PIGS, my first brush with what I’ll term Pop Music Snobbery Humiliation came in grade school. I was never a particularly hip cat, peeps; when I was very young I was wiry and quick and dreamed of athletic prowess, but something went wrong with me genetically as I got older and by the time I was ten or eleven years old or so I was a pudgy glasses-wearing nerd, and I drifted myopically through my days without too many worries. Generally, I was a happy kid living in my own little world. I had a few friends and I did well in school, and had few complaints.

There were, of course, a few bullies. There always are. I didn’t have a terrible time of it, but there were a few incidents. I don’t lay awake at night tortured by my experiences or anything, but there was one kid who was in my grade who occasionally liked to torment me, but usually there were juicier targets for him and I sort of coasted by in the usually rhythms of being almost-cool to being almost-outcast depending on the prevailing winds of grammar school. By the time I graduated to High School I was almost nostalgic for my grammar school, so obviously I didn’t have a Carrie-esque experience, but that one kid still irritates me in my memories to this day. It’s not like he beat me up or ever did anything particularly terrible, it was just that he sensed I was kind of not paying attention to the things that made you cool and liked to knock me around with my own lameness once in a while.

One of these moments was when everyone was suddenly discovering pop music and choosing their sides; I can remember one girl had a birthday party in class (we used to do that—every kid got a birthday in class; after three o’clock or something we’d move the desks out of the way, they’d bring in cake and soda, and we’d spend the last hour or two of the day having fun) and brought in some records to play. I’d never heard any of it, obscure things like “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John or “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats—you know, minor hits I couldn’t be expected to be familiar with.

The kid who picked on me sometimes positioned himself as a heavy metal guy, naturally, and declared that Van Halen and Led Zeppelin were the greatest bands in the universe. I’d never heard of either. How is this possible in the early 1980s? You have to have a powerfully foggy brain, like mine. You have no idea how easily I can ignore things. No idea. Anyway, one day he demanded to know what my favorite band was. It was one of those grammar-school moments when you sensed that history had paused to make note of your response, and it would follow you—probably on your permanent record—forever. I didn’t actually have a favorite band, and I didn’t own any albums of my own (my parents had few rock and roll records aside from The Beatles, who I loved, but even I knew better than to name a band that had broken up 15 years prior), so I simply picked a band from the air and said Led Zeppelin, hoping this was sufficiently cool. My nemesis, no fool, demanded to know what my favorite album by Zeppelin was, and I couldn’t answer, and my humiliation was complete.

I vowed to never be so uncool again.

(more…)