The Real Tom Larkin

From now on I’ll be posting episodes of my podcast on therealtomlarkin.com. Here’s the last episode I did with my podcast partner, Robert Carroll. Rob had to step away from it, so future podcasts will feature me with various guests.

Rowdy says goodbye to the podcast, and the guys discuss Tom having to play Farmville for work, the trend of using the word “they” to refer to an individual, a brothel-themed social game called Hookertown, how our society views sex and violence differently, Burning Man, reselling Mardi Gras hats, the power of free t-shirts, the Game of Thrones food truck, and Rowdy’s contributions to Larkin & Carroll.

Download this episode (right click and save)

The other day a radio show I was listening to ran through a list of outrageous instances of movie censorship on television. Apparently Samuel L. Jackson, while surrounded by venomous snakes on a passenger jet, at one point exclaims that he is tired of “these monkey-fighting snakes” on his “Monday to Friday plane”. Walter Sobchak, the Dude’s best friend in “The Big Lebowski”, shouts at Larry Sanders while destroying what he thinks is Larry’s Corvette “This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps”.

At what point do we draw the line on this?  What level of nonsense do we need to reach before the delicate among us can hear the word “fuck”?  And who decided that making sense takes a back seat to decorum?  Isn’t hearing Samuel L. Jackson scream that he’s tired of “These motherfucking snakes” on his “motherfucking plane” the entire point of that movie in the same way the punchline is the entire point of a joke?  Wasn’t the promise of that line the reason the movie got made in the first place?

Numerous Americans have died in the name of preserving the free exchange of ideas.  That includes swears.  And it should.  Curse words can not lie.  They never leave any doubt, never sit on the fence.  They don’t show up until pretense takes off. 

People who don’t like them can’t stand that.  They hate the idea that there’s a world out there, and in that world there are things like “Shit”.  They hate that reality can’t be changed by substituting words like “shoot” and “freaking” and  ”monkey-fighting”.  And they hate that they’ve lost the battle.  Television doesn’t belong to them.  Entire channels are dedicated to pornography.  Some of these same people watch them.  They hate that, too.  So their solution is to wash the drapes in a burning building.  Tell other people how to talk and pretend it’s for The Children.  Offending these people is one of the highest callings in a free society.  Appeasing them is one of the most disgraceful trespasses.  

Sometimes life demands the word Motherfucker.  Being stuck on a plane full of murderous snakes falls comfortably within that jurisdiction.  If we didn’t need it, we never would have invented it.  Yet as I’m writing this, my computer is underlining the word and pretending it doesn’t know it, that it’s not a word.  Is there any English-speaking person who doesn’t know Motherfucker?  Apparently the imac G5 has never heard it.  Well it has now.  

To all opposed, most of whom will never read this blog, or anything they disagree with, I’m telling you this for your own good:  Fuck You.

My original plan for this entry was to raise the issue of retail receipts becoming too long and the outrage that should be gripping society as a result.  But after seeing video footage from a bachelorette party my friend attended this past weekend, the pot has boiled over.  Receipts will have to wait while I sit in an ivory tower and tell women how to live.  Ladies:

Stop tolerating male strippers to get back at men for liking female strippers.  Every time a woman I know encounters a male stripper it’s the same litany of complaints.  He was disgusting.  He was greasy.  He was grinding all over me.  He was so old he had a small pox vaccine scar on his shoulder.  Women are so hell bent on beating men at their own game they grit their teeth and suffer through this ordeal like it’s some sort of unshakable duty.  Guys don’t feel the need to have wedding showers.  But the girls have gotten it into their heads that if they don’t stake their claim to some bachelor party territory they won’t be sexually liberated and they’ll be consigned to a life of pie baking.  Tell me what’s out of place in this scenario:  We’ll go to a nice brunch, then a spa to get facials, and then a wine tasting.  Then let’s rent a hotel room and bring in a sweaty gay guy to pretend he’s straight and rub his genitalia on us while house music blares out of a cheap cd player!  What fun!  

At the end of the day most men don’t even like strippers.  A lot of them might think they do, but the math doesn’t add up.  Think of a strip club like this:  Imagine a restaurant where you don’t get to eat the food, they just wheel it by on carts and you’re expected to throw money at it based on how much you want to eat it.  For an extra fifty dollars you can take one bite of the food.  One night someone clues you in to the fact that for two hundred dollars you can go to a room in the back and eat the whole meal.  You’re really hungry, so you do it.  Then you get the most epic case of food poisoning you’ve ever had in your life.

Stop dressing like Han Solo.  I stand in awe of what some women think they can pull off these days.  Knee-high leather boots over the pants with a vest on?  Your best friend better be a wookie.  Uggs?  Were those a joke that went over my head?   They’re named after their own ugliness.  They’re also fur-lined.  And women sport them as a fashion statement.  In eighty degree weather.  Get it straight: Gay men don’t have your best interest in mind when they tell you what to wear.  Did you have a Barbie doll when you were a kid?  Did you ever dress her up really weird just because you could?  I don’t think this needs any more clarification.  

Stop seething at me for this blog.  You did this to yourselves.  In your haste to destroy the patriarchal mores of society you scrapped the old model of Do-What-The-Men-Tell-You-To for the new model of Do-What-The-Cast-Of-Sex-And-The-City-Tells-You-To.  Barbie for Carrie Bradshaw.  Don’t look at me.  Speaking on behalf of heterosexual men everywhere I can assure you of a long-standing policy that any unsupervised Barbie that falls into our hands will be melted with the most spectacular method readily available.  We’ve been destroying Barbie for years, but we never said to replace her with a different blonde in more expensive shoes.  

My plan for the moment is to update once a week, but today I decided to include this bonus blog.  Since we’re still in spring break season, and thus still in bad decision season, here are ten Japanese tattoos that can be inked onto people who think they’re haikus.  The perfect fate for the kind of people who impulsively tattoo Asian characters on themselves.

“If this guy doesn’t drive a lifted jeep wrangler, I don’t know who does.”:

この人が持ち上げられたジープのラングラーを運転しなければ、私はかだれが知らない

“I can’t believe I’m getting away with writing this on this person’s body”:

私は私がこの人のボディでこれを書くことをうまく免れていることを信じることができない

“This man smells like Jagermeister and axe body spray.”:

この人はハンターのマスターおよび斧ボディスプレーのように臭いがする

“At least this isn’t a poem about peace or some bullshit like that.”:

少なくともこれはそれのような平和またはでたらめについての詩ではない。

“I wish you could see how scandalously this dude’s girlfriend is dressed right now.  It’s amazing.”:

私は中傷的にこの男のガールフレンドがいかに今服を着るか見ることができることを望む。  それはすばらしい。

“Roundeye”:

円形の目

“This guy looks nothing like Vanilla Ice and you’re a racist for thinking that.”:

この人はバニラ氷のような何も見ないし、それを考えるための人種差別主義者である

“No, you’re not a racist, this guy actually does look kind of like Vanilla Ice.”:

いいえ、バニラ氷のように人種差別主義者、この人実際に見えるちょっとではない

“Here’s one way to spend half a paycheck.”:

ここに一方通行がペイチェック半分の使うためにある

“Looking at this man for ten seconds is the equivalent of spending a year in New Jersey.”:

10秒の間この人を見ることはニュージャージーの年を過ごすことの等量である

It seems drugs will stop at nothing to win the war the United States declared on them, and now they’ve managed to enlist the media.  Editorials are showing up everywhere questioning the sensibility of the war on drugs or calling for its outright demise, a trend I will now continue with this blog.

Of course drugs should be legal.  Think about your uncle who smokes pot.  He’s probably completely harmless, and he’s probably no different from anyone else, just with a way higher threshold for the Doobie Brothers.  But he’s not the problem, right?  We need those laws to protect the habitual users, the junkies, the ones who can’t resist getting high, who will ruin their own lives if we don’t step in.  We’ve got the laws.  How many junkies are they stopping I wonder?  Crystal meth can put holes in your face and occasionally lead to your house exploding.  If face holes aren’t a red light, what are?  Skull holes?  I doubt jail’s intimidating to someone weighing these options.

But that’s not the end of it.  The United States shouldn’t just legalize drugs.  The United States should sell drugs.  It has been for years anyway, only without making money.  The entire structure of the drug war’s P.R. strategy hawked drugs as well as any ad campaign.

People want drugs.  If people didn’t want them we wouldn’t need drug laws.  The slogan “Just say No” implicitly states that there are drugs to be had.  Say you’re leaving work and someone asks if you’re going to the office party for Mitch’s birthday.  You say you’re not going, and the person says “Good for you.  Just say no to cake”.   The only response to that is “Wait, what kind of cake?”, because cake is awesome.  Now imagine if the cake could be injected into your bloodstream and felt inside your brain.  Broaching the subject of it in any form becomes a sales pitch.  That’s what “Just say No” is.

The alcohol industry has avoided the concept of drunkenness for so long they’ve actually started to believe that people drink booze to experience things like “crispness”, and not to get blitzed and avoid experiencing things like “life”.  So-called anti-drug ads constantly address the concept of getting high, meaning that anti-drug ads do a better job of selling drugs than beer ads do of selling beer.  

Most of the drug war’s misguided commercials present an accurate picture of what the product does, followed by an astoundingly unlikely outcome, like a kid accidently shooting his friend in the face.  I want statistics on this.  How often does anyone smoke pot then mistakenly discharge a firearm into someone’s head from six feet away?   I googled “shooting your friend in the face while high” but all it brought up was a you-tube video of the ad in which that happens and some photography articles.  It would be like a beer ad featuring a bunch of people playing beach volleyball but then one of them gets hit by a meteor.  Is anyone going to pour the bottle out on the ground after seeing that?

The government wants to control drugs.  Keeping the public from getting high wouldn’t be hard.  Sell lousy drugs.  But sell them cheap.  Make them in China.  People don’t want quality.  They want quantity.  “Fast and Furious” took in 71 million dollars last weekend.  Go to Trader Joe’s and watch the stoners.  They’re buying three dollar wine, aren’t they?  Sell them some three dollar dope.  Put a five pound bucket of imitation cocaine on the shelf at Costco.  Referring to “good shit” will suddenly be like talking about a wine’s nose: Lame.  

In Kindergarten my teacher asked the students to pick one person they would take with them if marooned on a desert island.  Most of them opted for their parents.  I said Robinson Crusoe.  “He’d know just what to do” was my reasoning.  It remains the proudest and possibly the most lucid moment of my life and a decision I stand by to this day.  In the past 25 years my parents have made no headway whatsoever in a real case against Mr. Crusoe, and I’ll eat my shirt if a single one of the other kids’ parents could even tie a sheep-shank.  Had the scenario played out in real life, my classmates would all be sun-bleached skeletons by now and R.C. and I would probably be operating an island touring outfit with a side business exporting tropical fruit.  It’s laughable.  

Unfortunately for me, island savvy turned out to have virtually no overlap with western-style academics, and I spent first grade spinning my wheels waiting for a lean-to building class that never came.  I’m pretty sure Mrs. Ward told my mom that I was basically retarded.  On a related note, she told my friend Mike’s mom that he was “high risk” and may have to attend a special school better equipped to address his massive intellectual shortcomings.  It seemed alarmist at the time, but the teacher had the last laugh 12 years later when Mike could barely keep his canoe straight long enough to be the valedictorian of our class.  Stay golden, Mrs. Ward.  Thanks for your input.

Over the next decade I proceeded to dazzle teacher after teacher with my ability to consume time without leaving even a trace of evidence that I had done any work at all, almost like a sentient black hole.  My family was very proud.  Of my brother, who is now enrolled in a Ph. D program.

My college experience at Boston University was average, save for a sizable spike in leaving parties in the absence of women, an M.O. that reached its pinnacle when my roommate pointed out one night that a Store-24 hot pocket didn’t necessarily require microwaving as long as it was thawed.  I eventually graduated.

After college I took my $130,000 B.S. in Film and Television into the great frontier of the restaurant industry and waited tables in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts for a year and a half.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mrs. Ward.  I met some really nice girls, and after dealing with me, they went on to meet some really nice guys.  One relationship in particular was very special to me, but it wasn’t meant to be.  We suffered from the typical back-and-forth that plagues many couples, I suppose.  She’d flirt with one of the other guys we worked with, I’d get jealous.  I’d act a little clingy, she’d move to New York City and start dating a woman.  That kind of stuff.

I relocated to Los Angeles in September of 2004 in time to miss the celebration when the Red Sox won their first world series in 86 years.  But I’d made it to L.A., and in just a couple short years I managed to land a job that probably couldn’t be performed by a developmentally disabled person.  I still occupy that position today.  And last night I ate an entire bag of chips by myself in one sitting.  Welcome to my blog.  Thanks for coming.

Special thanks and the lion’s share of the credit for this website go to my cousin Evan, who’s responsible for the idea to create the site and the phenomenal execution of it.  I couldn’t be happier with the design of it.  His talent is what made it possible.  That being said, please don’t blame him for my behavior; he has no control over it.

Thanks must go to my Aunt Ellen and Uncle Mike, who have supported me in every way you can support another person, including the purchase of this domain name.  Their support only increased after I moved to the west coast, where they also live.  This fall, after I came down with pneumonia, they brought me to their home, nursed me back to health, and admonished me for not coming to them for help sooner.  I’m writing this in a beautiful leather-bound journal that was a gift from them.  Believe me when I say I know where I’d be without them.  And it wouldn’t be a nice place.

I’d also like to thank my cousin Mark, who gave me unfettered access to his XBox 360 while I camped out on the couch next to his bedroom and monopolized the T.V. during my recuperation from pneumonia, which allowed me to meet with Evan and create this blog.  He also gave me a ride to the supermarket one night, where we bought and ate a bunch of gummi candy.  These provisions may seem small compared to those of Evan, Mike, and Ellen, but since those three are adults with incomes and property of their own and Mark is only 17 and still in high school, his contribution represents a much larger percentage of the resources at his disposal.  So taken in proportion, Mark’s sacrifice is just as impressive as theirs.  Not to mention, driving to the store to buy candy because there wasn’t much to do made me feel more like a teenager again than I have in a dozen years.  You can’t hang a price on that.  Thanks, Mark.