Face Facts: You Need Help

After spending some time in a mega-bookstore I came away with a few observations. Self help books fuel most of what is going on in publishing these days. I was going to call this entry something like VODKA MARTINI AND A JOINT FOR THE SOUL but the whole Chicken Soup thing is so beyond parody that it can't possibly be funny.

The Chicken Soup books are a publishing juggernaut. You really have to see it to believe it. There is a CS for teens, for Latinos, and every conceivable demographic. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a CS for suicide bombers or one for death row inmates.

When was the last time that our society got excited about a work of literature? Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities was a huge bestseller and one of the finest novels in American letters. That was fifteen years ago. I could probably think of something else but it is more fun to imagine that we are just a bunch of dumb monkeys--at least for the purposes of this essay.

Men and women are reading different books. They both read self-help books but with completely different strategies. Men and women flock to books that offer fairly childish solutions written by hucksters and snake oil salesmen. But men are generally seeking monetary advice and women want answers to romance and the keys to a fulfilling existence.

I’d like to try my hand at writing a self-help book, one more couldn’t hurt. I’d rather write one for women than for men for one reason: Having money isn’t the most boring thing in the world but talking about it is.

If I do write this book I won’t concern myself one bit as to the efficacy of the advice I give; no one else seems to care. Most of the advice I find in these books is totally useless and some is downright dangerous. If any of the fad diets work why do women’s magazine print a new one every single issue? My diet: drink a diet shake for breakfast, another for lunch, and then eat a sensible bucket of fried chicken for dinner. Does it work? How the fuck should I know? I’m not fat so maybe it does work.

Men are from Mars and women are from somewhere else. It would be more accurate to say that men are in one aisle and women are in another and maybe that’s why they don’t have a lot to talk about. How can men and women communicate if men are obsessed with children’s games and women…I don’t know what women are doing. Women need to dump Oprah and Martha and we guys will all chip in to have Terry Bradshaw put out of his misery. I’ve seen Martha’s show and from the looks of her she’s some sort of crystal meth freak. I saw her making a pillow case out of an old shirt. She just runs around and makes things that any sober person would just buy at the store. Why would she do that unless she was on meth?

If you want to self help then educate yourself. There are lots of ways to do that but we all should agree on a short canon so that men and women can have a conversation. Here is my very short list:

Literature: Shakespeare
Visual Art: The Simpsons
Music: Mozart Bach Beethoven
History: Greece, Rome, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, WWII

Everything else is under electives.