Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

"I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again"

"The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive, and there is a myriad of ways to deduce that answer."

"..whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationships they perceive to be a normal part of living."

"Self-deprecating cleverness has become a virtue."
"Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less."

"If you define your personality as creative, it only means you understand what is perceived to be creative by the world at large, so you're really just following a rote creative template. That's the opposite of being creative. Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time."

"Within the reality of one specific fiction, how do other fictions exist?"

"I'd sit around with a revolving door of acquaintances in someone's shithole apartment. We'd load up on Busch until it was time to go to the local uncool sports bar (Jonesy's) at 8:00, which was where you went before hitting the hipster bar (Whitey's) at around 10:20. Not unlike the summer of 1992, there was no real activity: We'd just sit around and listen to the dying days of grunge, fondly reminiscing about things that had happened in the very recent past."

"If given the choice between hearing a great band and seeing a cool band, I'll take the latter every single time; this is why the Eagles suck."

"It makes me think about all the perfectly scribed love letters and drunken e-mails I have written over the past twelve years, and about all the various women who received them. I think about how I told them they changed the way I thought about the universe, and that they made every other woman on earth unattractive, and that I would love them unconditionally even if we were never together. I hate that those letters still exist. But I don't hate them because what I said was false; I hate them because what I said was completely true. My convictions could not have been stronger when I wrote those words, and--for whatever reason--they still faded into nothingness. Three times I have been certain that I could never love anyone else, and I was wrong every time. Those old love letters remind me of my emotional failure and my accidental lies.."

"I profoundly prefer to be turned on by any woman who looks vaguely fucked-up; that's much more intellectually satisfying."

"..how smart are you while you're having sex? What part of sex is 'intellectual'? Certainly none of the good parts."

"It was like watching somebody commit suicide with a belt and a folding chair."

"Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music."

"Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened."

"QUESTION #9-- 'Is Adam Sandler funny?'
No."

"A cool image needs to be semielitsts, but it can't be wholly elitist: What you display should be extremely hard to find, yet could have been theoretically found by absolutely anyone six months ago (had they possessed the foresight)."

"Like most uncreative intellectual men, almost all of my previous relationships had been based on my ability to make incredibly moving mix cassettes.."

"Important things are inevitably cliche."

"Star Wars has become one of the most overrated films of all time, inasmuch as it's pretty fucking terrible when you actually try to watch it."

"A psychologist once told me that--over the span of her entire career--she had never known a man who didn't have some kind of creepy, unresolved issue with his father. She told me that's just an inherent part of being male."

"..science fiction tends to be philosophy for stupid people."

"Taoists constantly tell me to embrace the present, but I only live in the past and the future; my existence is solely devoted to (a) thinking about what will happen next and (b) thinking back to what's happened before. The present seems useless, because it has no extension beyond my sense."

"..coolness and condescension are pretty much the same thing."

"Beyond your closest friends, you can probably describe everyone you know with one sentence."

"You must overtly love whatever music seems the most detached from your own personal experience. Apparently this means you're a genius."

"Relatively speaking, having sex is so easy. People do it all the time. It's so pedestrian; fantasies about making love are rarely necessary and usually contrived. However, dying is always original."

"Sometimes I find myself wishing that the world would end in my lifetime, since that would be oddly flattering; we'd all be part of humanity's apex."

"I'm angling for purgatory, and I'm angling hard."