All I really need to know I learned from music videos.
All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned from music videos. Wisdom was not at the top of graduate school mountain, but there in a hot tub placed in the back of a slow rolling Mercedes Benz limousine or in sterile white room with moving walls or in a metal-caged dome filled with fire-wielding gangsters set in some post-apocalyptic version of Los Angeles.
These are the things I learned:
Share everything, especially drugs. This will bring you many friends/partners. If they don’t, who cares? More for you.
Play fair. If you are having a party on your boat, invite other boats.
More boats will see the party and come over. They will want to know who is having the party. You will be famous.
Patience is a virtue. If you are in love with a cartoon, wait. She will turn into a real person soon enough.
Put things back where you found them. Unless it is a condom.
Let other people clean up your mess. It creates jobs. And let’s everybody know that you had “mothafuckin’ partay”.
Take things that aren’t yours. Life without conflict isn’t worth living. When conflict does come, run to a beach. There shouldn’t be anyone there except a single beautiful stranger that wants to have sex.
Never say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Unless you are standing in the rain underneath their window.
Don’t eat food. Food takes up too much time. You will need that time to wear sunglasses and point at people.
Flush. Everything. Flush letters down the toilet so you forget painful memories. Flush vomit down the toilet when you are insecure about your weight. Flush drugs down the toilet when you didn’t share enough and the cops are outside. Flush. Everything.
Warm cookies and milk don’t really mean much in the real world. You will want anti-anxiety medicine. Stay close with your smart friends. Some of them will be doctors.
Live a balanced life – learn some and kill some and fuck and cry and envy and leave and die and come back and celebrate and high-five everyday some.
Take a nap every now and then on a waterbed. You will dream about the boat party.
When you go out into the world, walk wherever you want to, cars will stop and strangers will think you are unique and interesting just because you can dance. Pay no attention to law enforcement or gravity.
Be aware of time. Life is short and produced by somebody else who is a lot smarter than you are. Remember the little urine sample in the Styrofoam cup: every now and then you will need a new job.
Goldfish and dreams and teenagers in convertibles and even the beautiful stranger on the beach – they all die. So do we.
And then remember that video with that blonde prostitute and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – VOGUE.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. Social climbing and promiscuous sex and basic sanitation. Killer whales and bungee jumping and zombies and leather jackets.
Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or extra-marital affair or your addiction and it holds true and clear and just down right fucking hot. Think about what a better world if would be if we all – the whole world – every good looking person – had a grape blunt and a ménage trios at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon and then passed out on a polar bear skin rug. Or if all governments had a basic policy to celebrate someone’s birthday party by pouring buckets of money on strippers in a mansion while a strobe light went off.
And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to act like a dumb, uneducated hooker.
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