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Pop Culture
Jan 29, 2009, 06:58AM

How to Sell Your Soul to Corporate America

Some graduates are taking this whole "entering society" thing a little lighter than others.

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Photo by Andrew Feinberg

I recently witnessed my father purchase a BMW convertible from a sexy little automobile barista for a cool $55 grand. Before this transaction he touched the gray out of his hair and picked up a mistress. A clichéd mid-life crisis. Mom hit menopause about three weeks ago, and his job is about to go half way to nowhere. I don't really blame him. It seems sort of walking Id, but in the right way.

But his crisis sheds light on my own. I recently accepted a sweetish position at a prestigious consulting firm, where I tell a bunch of government employees what to do despite lacking the slightest bit of experience. I gained this distinction because of a degree from a well-to-do university that US News and World today digs as "a serene, tree-lined 140-acre campus next to the eclectic north end" of a morally bankrupt city of sin. AIDS-ridden and shit. Seriously.

I am told that I am lucky. I’ve got dental and a job with benefits and a very decent salary, so good for me. But I don't see the endgame. Qui bono, right?

Let me let you in to what it took to get me into this twentysomething, reality check that closely resembles receiving a swift testicle kick. I had to get my love to dump me. That proved fairly easy. I just had to loosely lose my respect for her and her path. Think less and less of her. Question her commitment to me. Ask her to hit the gym. Venture into the liberal sodomy sex stuff when I got bored with the standard, missionary, lights-off sex.

I gave up my idealistic venture of writing and romantic dreams of novelistic grandeur; difference-making through the words; fame, fortune; selling my pair of man bits for a depressing wardrobe of one navy, one black, one gray, and a couple of stylish pin-striped suits. This tenuous trade-off unquestionably led to a SUV, new IBM laptop computer, and an inescapable series of PowerPoint training sessions.

I delved head-deep into a cocaine routine that seems quite controllable and yuppie. A steady chewing tobacco regiment that spares my lungs and allows me to keep up with yoga and sends my pancreas spinning, aching from a possible uncontrollable cellular growth. But I can run five miles, get new ass, and maintain a slightly higher-than-average sex appeal. The salary doesn't hurt that either. It amazes me how much women love dental insurance.

I gave up listening to new music and reading Hemingway for an iTunes playlist of Pearl Jam's "Nothingman" and the entire Nevermind album. Ray Charles and Warren Zevon make appearances. So do the Counting Crows, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Jason Mraz—weird.  

I fantasize about banging my roommate's girlfriend. They don't fuck or have the sex. They make love and wash each other's dishes after dinners, but she has great tits. Magically perfect, but I've never seen them.

I wonder if the topless car will save my father. I wonder if the Skoal will save me. I won't get back together with that girl that I loved, and that's okay for now, but the fact that the emotional mercy lay never came to fruition still bothers me.

This seems to be a violent reaction to the uncontrollable force that defines change. I think a hollow feeling lives in my father's gut. A knowledge that the finite number of days he has to drive fast and fuck dirty are fewer than they are many. Just as The Man traded my number of drunken evenings and delusions of invincibility for conference calls and the growing reality of responsibility, I reach back and try to hold on to what I know, even though it doesn't even feel good or right.

This is what I've learned thus far:

1. I won't steal your girlfriend from you, but I will clean up your mess when she cries on my arm, so don't get mad about it.

2. When I clean that shit up, do me a favor make sure that she shaves. I hate the pubis when I head to the Southland.

3. But I guess the larger question bears asking: Why, if I see this inevitable demise for all of us in our early 20s, can't you? Leaving me to clean up your problems, and you mad as hell?

I'm a little under-the-weather and challenge Oprah to commission me for the Book Club. I'd rock that shit.

Discussion
  • I almost don't know what to say, this author sounds like such a dick. Now I'm going to brush my teeth to get the rotten dick taste out of my mouth.

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  • I guess with all that dental insurance, the writer believes it would be a shame for a stray pubic hair to get stuck between his perfect teeth. My advice to the author: Start saving up now for that mid-life Beemer and the mistress whose vagina must look like that of a four-year-old. I’d say you’ll be following in your father’s footsteps before you’re forty-five.

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  • wow. the self-loathing in this article is impressive. you know, it doesn't take a lot of work to be poor, drunk, and fucking random girls -- really, just make an honest effort at it. I'm sure you'll get back there.

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  • Well done. For the author's sake I hope he's embellishing a little bit. Life can't be all THAT bad. If I were you I'd go back to the girl that you loved - presumably she loved you too.

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  • Didn't they already make a straight-to-video sequel to American Psycho? This shit be played out

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  • I can't believe how much of a self-loathing douche bag you sound like... asking your girl friend to hit the gym, wanting to cheat on your room mate's girl, complaining about getting a new 'SUV'! I bet you drive a fuckin soccer mom beamer and hookah while playing seasons of madden after work. Go back to your decks and best practices, homo... Sorry got kinda heated... anyway, solid article. Haven't laughed that hard in a while. Keep up the good work and I look forward to your next piece. P.S. Your room mates tits... amazing.

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  • I dunno why, but I was reminded of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQMz0b-c54A

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  • Maybe this is someone's idea of satire, if so, you need to work on your writing skills. If it's real, well, good luck with that "controllable" cocaine habit and the rest of your life that you appear to be throwing away.

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  • too much writing right now is just people trying to position their own personalities in some kind of interesting niche.

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  • Let's not drag Ray Charles into this.

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  • I think people are being a little overly harsh on the author. On the one hand, I admire some of the writing; on the other hand, the persona he's created here is so unlikable that I would never be able to read anything longer from him. But that's the first person narrative for you. It doesn't seem like the author wants us to like him. How could he? He's drawn himself as a pre-homicidal Patrick Bateman. Maybe this all was just an exercise in voice--an attempt to get readers to respond.

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  • I should clarify: I'm not denouncing the first person. I'm simply denouncing the self-sucking persona this author has created.

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  • It's not so much that he's unlikeable, which I'd be fine with, but that it's utterly unoriginal

  • I didn't care for this article either. But how much writing today, especially first person stories, IS original?

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  • Why Skoal? You should buy that pre-packaged Swedish shit snuss, much more elegant and a great way to one-up your glamorous colleagues at the consulting firm.

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  • If you're going for the nicotine rush, why not just smoke cigarettes?

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  • Christian, super-cool edgy dudes don't have time to smoke, they're too busy banging models and pulling down six figures but secretly being wounded and unhappy.

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  • Cigarette smoke mixed with the light from a neon sign outside the window in my cheap downtown office. I could barely see the dame seated at my desk, but she was definitely a looker- brunette, but maybe that was a wig. She was laying all sorts of angles on me, using her lips and legs like a goon might use brass knuckles and a baseball bat. I had eight slugs on me, two .38 shells and maybe six fingers of whiskey. The whiskey helped me not get too worked up by her dame-tricks. She thought her man, some kind of uptown broker or money type, was having a little something on the side but there was something unsaid to her story. All I really know is that I get paid to tell my clients what they want to here. I ain't a priest; I'm a private dick named Tracer Bullet and I got bills to pay. Bills like Bill the landlord, or Bill the loan shark that took care of my last gambling outing and was getting a little impatient judging by the goon he sent to do a number on my car windshield.........

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  • Beautiful Calvin & Hobbes reference.

  • I was thinking more Dick Tracy or The Girls From Apartment 3-G.

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  • Ahhh. http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/1961/ch_trace_91.html

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  • I love corporations. Corporations own my soul. http://www.thesixtyone.com/#/paintingtasters/song/Corporations/39612/ They're in control.

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  • I'd be more okay with the author being a dick if the article were at least well-written. It's probably for the best that he's found himself in corporate America. I'd highly suggest a read of "Revolutionary Road."

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  • You're right on the money, hgfst. Trouble is, he'd probably cry if he read "Revolutionary Road" or saw the movie.

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  • Fu*ck y*0u. You are so pathetic bragging about all the money you have. Get over it little b1tch.

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