1. You have a dalliance with a girl named Lauren immediately after you break up with your long-term girlfriend named Lauren, and it makes you feel guilty. But when the girl after her is named Lauren, well, Laura, but never mind, you are joyfully exasperated. Those Laurens with their honeyed lips and white thighs! “I can pick a Lauren in any crowd,” you boast.
2. You are one of those California boys who moved to New York, and people are right to despise you. You will concede on that one.
3. In college, you toyed with considering yourself a language poet, mainly because once you hypnotized yourself by saying the word “square” until it lost all meaning. What joy it is to force sounds through your tongue-y mouth! Your “face butthole” as you like to call it.
4. You figure out sometime in your first year of bartending after college that you will probably not be a good poet, or even a poet at all, and you think it is because you actually like both your parents. Your mom in particular is just the best.
5. You live in a loft with four other young men who are just as strange and destitute as you are, and together you have built a bong out of a five-gallon Sparklett’s jug. It was an incredible group effort. The teamwork! It was almost enough to make you believe in utopia. You were the one who thought of removing the wheels from a broken office chair and affixing them to the bottom.
6. You consider yourself a radical pacifist, but you also think Taylor Swift should go die.
7. You worry you are getting bougie because you like the fancy cocktails and food at your work. But who wouldn’t like jalapeños muddled in their drink? Those tricky bourgeoisie bastards! Argh! You shake your fist at them!
8. When you were a kid, you had pet rats.
9. Contrary to desiring to die young, you long to get old. What an excellent old man you would be! Trying to picture yourself as a family man, a middle aged man, is much harder. If only you could leap straight from boyhood to dotage!
10. In the mornings, you make yourself gruel, which is just what you call the watery oatmeal you are able to prepare. But you do enjoy offering your lady guests “gruel” in the morning. You love it both when they accept and when they are repelled. Those Laurens! They can do no wrong!
11. Fundamentally, you believe the world is a very funny place even though it is so full of suffering. You are as concerned about the suffering as anyone else, and you yearn to make the world a better place quite earnestly, but you still think it is fucking funny when someone falls down. Sweet humans! Silly apes! What have you done with all of your dominion?