Yet Another Hanging Curveball

Dear Ms. Bad Advice,

Where’s the meaning in it all?

Existentially challenged,

Fuzzy Dunlop

Baltimore, MD

If it was up your a** you’d know where it was!

Dearest EC,

Congratulations!  You have the distinction of being the first angst-ridden cartoon character to have turned to this blog for advice.

It’s probably no coincidence that the very same day our crack team of personal advisers here at GBA is  joined by a … rapping corpse, your woe-laden missive comes to us over the Inter-Tubez.  When it rains, it pours — especially when it’s raining human fecal matter and you picked that day to leave the house without an umbrella.

But I digress … .

It’s hard not to be glib and answer with something along the lines of, “The ‘meaning’ of it all is in the dictionary, silly!”  Or, “It’s all about the Benjamins.”  Or, “Meaning, shmeaning.  Go find yourself a good woman/man/shemale and settle down already.”  You see where I’m going with this, I’m sure.  With a name like ‘Fuzzy’ you’ve probably spent the entirety of your existence being taken somewhat less than seriously — if not altogether regarded as a complete waste of genetic (never mind spiritual) material.

Ms. Bad Advice knows your pain.  Ms. Bad Advice has sought the elusive answers to the impenetrable questions.  Ms. Bad Advice has walked the long, lonely road without destination, without purpose.  Ms. Bad Advice is here for you.  She is here to gently suggest to you, “Grow a pair, nimrod.”

As John Stuart Mill (yet another in a long line of Victorian Era British “greatest good” mongers) is rumored to have said to Søren Kierkegaard (wildly masochistic Danish Christ fetishist) upon a chance meeting of the two outside the Vatican: “Put a bloody cork in it with all this ‘faith’ and ‘meaning’ nonsense already, you effete Saxon!”

Indeed.

It is a cold, hard, unforgiving world where compassion and searching will either get you buggered or a spot on Oprah’s “Reading List”.  There is no happy medium, and the VAST majority of those stuck with the ‘compassion and searching’ hang-up can’t stop getting buggered long enough to write something down, get it published, and then somehow draw the fat/thin/fat African American lady oligarch’s attention.  There’s only one Eckhart Tolle in this world — and thank [g]OD™ for that infinitely small favor.  Don’t even get me started on that Deepak Chopra pipsqueak or the small army of “The Secret”-peddling baboons.

These are not people who have found “meaning” and are just desperate to clue you in on it all, bringing solace and ease to your fragile heart.  They are hucksters looking to sell you something AND bugger you.  Repeatedly.

Because that, my poor, lost little lamb, trumps ‘meaning’ any damned day of the week.  And by “that” I mean: Money, Sex, Continued Attention and Adoration.  You think Jesus died on the cross for your sins?  The man/Son of Man has been making bank for more than 2,000 years.  He took Judaism and made it a genuinely marketable commodity (i.e., a billion and half adherents worldwide beats a measly few hundred million sons and daughters of Moses in my book any day).  Even if you don’t believe in him, don’t give a rat’s a** for his teachings, aren’t aligned with any of the thousands of denominations based in the Christian doctrine, or are any flavor of Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jew, or a damned Zoroastrian — you STILL have to deal with the guy’s inescapable presence in every day life.  Jesus is the original (and still champion) when it comes to ‘brand marketing’, my friend.

Too bad he just couldn’t figure out how to take it all with him when he was resurrected body and soul into heaven.  (I know, I know … seven seals, four horsemen, three sixes, raptures, wars, plague, all-around nastiness just around the corner when he comes back to cash the check he wrote two millennia ago.)

So, EC, “the meaning” is where you left it: In the irrational decision to hold on to a name like ‘Fuzzy Dunlop’.  Get thee to an attorney forthwith and begin proceedings on legally changing that handle of yours.  Try something like, “Stone Coxon” or “Flint Tuvguyavich” or even “Popeye T. Sailorman”.  Just don’t go with “Carrot-Top”; unlike ‘Eckhart Tolle’, one ‘Carrot-Top’ in the world is one too many.

And should someone even hint to you that he or she has ‘found the meaning’ in it all, beat the crap out of that person and take it from him or her.

Then feel free to bugger away.

What a wonderful world that would be.

Toodles,

Ms. Bad Advice