Why It Was Inevitable I Would Write About My Looks a Lot
One of my central themes if you haven’t already noticed is that good looking and rich people are an embattled minority.
What I like about this subject is aesthetically it’s a great provocation. How could being good looking and rich and white—because all my characters are white, perhaps supremely white—be a good thing these days when the Republican party is hypocritically obsessed with the working class, and the left is in love with anyone who’s not white hypocritically? If it was ever a good thing?
My characters not only acknowledge their privileges but glory in it and rub it in the faces of anyone who doesn’t have what they have. My characters are unchristian vain and mad at anyone who tells them their vices are vices. It is my critique of society at large that is way too focused on humbling the privileged to the detriment ironically of the whole.
Because I really think that what America suffers from is too much democracy and too much capitalism. We lack a rigid class structure to restrain the envious of the lower strata. In Britain though in the days of the empire they had liberty if not outright democracy and capitalism combined with a rigid class structure to keep people away from each other’s throats. In America’s glory days we had a class structure too with the Kennedy’s on top or the Obamas as much as I hate Obama, also Kennedy—then there was the rest of us admiring them and striving to emulate them.
We don’t have that anymore to keep us in line. This is the problem of our times. Absurd and offensive though it may seem. That’s the problem. This shouldn’t be offensive.
So I made my looks and self-evident entitlement my break-out theme. Who said it was a bad thing? Any of it? I demand you to ask yourself. If you look great why should you not take it as God’s gift to you and everyone else? Why should society say it’s bad and demand you to be modest because they don’t look as good? Why is it bad to be advantaged, and why can’t other people look up to your advantages and admire them with the respect the advantaged deserve and to which they’re entitled by nature by birth? These are central questions for me.
I also take perverse delight in being a great artist who has the opposite problem of a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky who regretted how ugly physically they were. And Vincent Van Gogh and countless others. Most artists are driven to produce art because they were ugly men and heartbroken. It’s a cliche. I am the other way around. I’m driven to write from being beautiful and a heartbreaker. And not being too proud of it either. If you can’t see my remorse in all of my work, then you’re not reading closely enough.
However while I am remorseful that’s also just another tactic to make readers mad. Who can be good looking, boast of it and then lament it! Perhaps I’m poking fun too at how attached to everyone’s looks we all are biologically.
And—I can’t say it enough—I’m also having my revenge in so many ways, revenge for all the creepy gay men, overly affectionate moms and girls touching my arm and draping their hands on my shoulder, and embarrassing me, staring rudely at me and making sex jokes and otherwise making me uncomfortable when I never asked for this attention, because I have my whole life hated attention. In the supermarket I was so depressed and uncomfortable with the attention I was getting I was telling people honestly how I wished I didn’t have to have it all at once. Like why did I have to be so tall and have such good hair? If you ever thought I was that vain, understand how much vainer a man is who doesn’t talk about their looks. Or downplays them. That’s true base vanity to me.
As girls had contempt for me as a kid and people still have contempt for me for not womanizing and just going all over the place, as much as they would hate me if I did womanize, as much as we wish someone didn’t make us jealous, we also darkly disdain someone who doesn’t make us jealous and avail himself or herself of one’s gifts and abilities.
It’s a catch-22 I find myself in constantly. Jay you need to loosen up and be happy and have some fun. Jay—Jay please stop you’re having too much fun. Please stop. Stop!
My beauty was always the elephant in the room and it made me the butt of so many jokes. So the other reason I do it is to get it out in the open to preempt people and also neutralize all the attention people give me. Perhaps.
If I didn’t write about my looks it feels like I would be empowering the people who hold them against me. So I’m putting them in the world’s face. You can’t hold them against me if I own them. You can’t take advantage of how it makes you feel and bully me if I blast away at you for the emotional unrest it causes you first.
I didn’t ask to look or talk or think the way I do. I was born this way. And I don’t deserve to be abused for it. So if my art is about saving the advantaged in all events from self-oblivion the promiscuous and the wealthy and the powerful at the hands of a resentful mass society, then that’s because I affirm that fortune is good. Luck is good. And anyone in their right mind takes advantage of their advantages heedless of public opinion in reckless perhaps callous and unempathetic and narcissistic disregard of it. And does not apologize and does not humble himself or herself for any reason.
Even the fortune 1% are a minority as legitimate as any other. But they are in a sense the most important minority because it’s to achieve and strive and live and have fun and make money and be beautiful and make love that’s the reason we get out of bed everyday. Without raw sensation we would all be suicidal nihilists. I’ve been there so I would know. It’s not for moral reasons we live, it’s sensation. As David Hume one of my favorite philosophers said that “all reason is just the instrument of the passions.” And Nietzsche admired the Greeks because they were “superficial out of profundity.”
It is my intention no less than to dramatize these radical ideas which shouldn’t be radical because they’re fucking commonsense.
We are not “good” and we are not “evil.” We are evolving animals like any other animal. Eating having sex and shitting and sleeping. People forget this sometimes. And with how much we like to kill each other we’re not even very evolved animals either. The last thing we are is rational. If we were rational we might live more cooperatively like Beavers. This is why Karl Marx was wrong. People are not decent or rational enough for communism. It’s why Adam Smith was right capitalism is good and fair because markets are natural. Human nature is primitive. This is why Hobbes is right too that you need law and order just to stop people from cutting everyone’s throats. And as Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky argued you need religion to save yourself from yourself and your existential dread.
Just imagine if Hitler weren’t a psycho and stuck with painting instead. Imagine if Lenin and Stalin became Christians.
If we celebrated ourselves and others and all humanity and the beauty of the world in art and culture and politics, then the world wouldn’t be such a terrible place. We would also be a lot happier and more fulfilled. It’s common sense.