Manhandling for Spare Change
And other sloppy metaphors for virtue.
A nice man once offered me fifty bucks to suck my unmentionables. I was flattered, of course. I hadn’t ever put a price on my penis before then. I hadn’t even considered it an object one could valuate. He showed me different. Also, apologies for referring to my parts as unmentionable just prior to totally mentioning them. It's going to happen a few times due to the subject matter and as a most serious thinker, I must pursue this thread wherever it hangs. A little to the left if I'm being honest.
I did decline. Courteously. Not because he low-balled me. Fifty bucks is a lot of money just to ejaculate as a teenager. But it was too abrupt a solicitation. A boy, which I was at the time, needs a little romance before placing himself inside another person. Dinner, movie, a new dirt bike, flowers, the ego-fluffing pretense of interest inherent in dating. These rituals exist for a reason. They have a value of their own.
So, while I appreciated his enthusiasm, trying to cut straight through every obstacle like a Whordian Knot, I still said no. With that kind of problem-solving know-how at his fingertips and nearly thirty years later, I wonder where he is now. The way I see it, he’s either in prison or Congress. It could go either way.
This happened while begging for change in 1997 or so outside a bar called Dempsey’s Brass Rail in Spokane, Washington. It closed down in 2011. It may seem odd, but those doors shutting forever had nothing to do with preying on underage kids. This is probably because we, the aforementioned underage kids, were preying on their clientele more than they ever managed to do us.
You see, drunk gay dudes like dudes. Not only that, but gay dudes tend to average higher salaries than the normies do. Add overflowing mojitos to the mix and those homosexuals were damned generous. Gorgeous, too! Though, not my type, to be honest. Every time they laughed, their Adam’s apples escaped chokers cleverly deployed to mask their male-pattern badness. I don’t like Adam’s apples. They ruin a neckline, and they almost always come with a penis.
Their drag shows always brought in the wealthy. These guys were mad entertaining. One of them had been a professional skateboarder at one point and he borrowed my deck to manage several tricks in six-inch heels right on the sidewalk. I felt like I should have paid him. But of course, I didn’t. He paid me. We never gave them anything.
We jacked into this institutionalized sex-oddity. We dangled our tight, young bodies and smiling, cherubim faces in front of Dempsey’s like the wares hanging in the back of a butcher’s shop. Our meat was on sale, but not on sale, as we shook our cups intoning a phrase both ancient and immortal, “Spare some change?”
We preyed on their man-lust in an ancient version of the most prude OnlyFans one can imagine. And they gave and gave, our plastic cups always overfloweth Saturday nights at Dempsey's Brass Rail. Again, while we gave nothing.
Why am I telling this story? My wife wants to know. If you know, please let me know, so I can let her know. Because I do not know.
Just like I don't know why I write things here. I have other options. It's fun, sometimes. I do it when it isn't fun, too. But I haven't met an embarrassment of successes from writing. By some metrics, anyway. By others, I'm a most wealthy man.
Mohammed and Seneca both claim wealth is measured by the wants a person does not have, not the riches they've acquired. Old Mo said Allah has no wants, which is pretty easy to pull off when you're bloody Allah.1 Still, Seneca said the same, and he was only the richest man in the world. Not a god.2 He did once called in his debts from abroad and crashed what passed for the British economy, however.
But before these two richies, poor people said the same thing. More importantly, they demonstrated it over decades.
Diogenes the Cynic begged for spare change from statues. Maybe hot ones. Who knows? He did this for a reason rather than simple insanity, though. The old cynics in Greece used to be somewhat obsessed with an idea Nasim Taleb dubbed, antifragility. It's the idea some things, when faced with stress, become stronger. The most basic example is working out, but it extends to all kinds of estates. A person can have an antifragile mind, as well.3
Not Taleb, of course. Years after publishing and maybe writing his Incerto series, he settled into a life of opulent, Platonic professoring from a palace. In this former-monastery, he screams at clouds and whoever he decides is an idiot on Twitter about needing to lockdown the world so his calcified mind can feel safe from COVID-19.
Those old cynic philosophers, on the other hand, actually meant what they said. Have another example.
Crates the Cynic would insult prostitutes as he'd astutely noted no one delivers a stinging zinger like a lady with her mouth full for a living. He did this to stay sharp. The cynics, and their disciples the stoics, would hug frosty statues in winter and roll in hot sand during summer. They all spent time in gyms. They exercised their bodies and minds.4
These guys knew antifragility and felt it was a good thing, though they didn't call it that. They called it virtue and it was the highest goal one could attain. They knew they would suffer in the pursuit of virtue. So, they chose how they would suffer. Through pain and sweat and humiliation, they improved themselves, gained control over their impulses, and maybe once in a while offered some laughs.
Adversity made them stronger. It led to virtue and the journey is the thing. But if you're not laughing on the way, is it even a journey?
I subject myself to snobby judgment for the same reason. I also talk trash for fun. Not often, just now and then. When the mood is right, I've taken my pill, and I find a proper digital hooker. It never fails to produce new followers, subscribers, all the lifeblood of this social media ecosystem we participate in. I try not to worry too much about those things. But I do notice them.
The last time I did this, I targeted a man with strong opinions regarding whose hanging ham-sticks should be getting sucked in society. His screeds, inherently solicitous, looked as desperate a plea for fellatio as I'd ever seen from a clown. He reminded me of those drag queens. The only thing missing was him offering fifty bucks to do the deed himself. Apparently, this is popular, as he has many followers and such. But I already knew that. Dempsey's Brass Rail, remember.
I asked him whose meat-trumpets we should be blowing, considering he presented himself an expert on the matter. When I made fun of his answer, as he should have expected given the subject in his hand, he shared me. I suppose so his minions could appreciate my unique stupidity. I get it. I've enjoyed it a long time by now. But over the course of him absolutely owning me, my subscriber count jumped twenty percent. I doubt his moved at all. Most of them read me, too. Hi guys! You rule.
This chode-chugging clown gave me something while I gave him nothing. It was an asymmetric exchange, and I laughed the entire time as I knew exactly what I was doing and what was happening. My mark made an outstandingly generous drag queen and lacked the awareness to even understand how caked his makeup had become. I bet he can't even do a kick flip.
This is all to say I write and crack bad jokes for fun and exercise. I publish and post into the abyss, begging for likes and shares from impassive statues for the most part, to accustom myself to rejection and ridicule, and to stay sharp. As sharp as I can, anyway. Even spoons can make a shank, after all. And the mind stays sharp from poking skanks.5
But I have to go now. The wife wants to know why there was yet another flaming bag of shit left on our porch. I'm sure I have no idea why that happened, honey. And why do you want to know? You should have less wants. Are you familiar with Seneca? Have you heard of GOD? Why are you hitting me? I swear it doesn't have anything to do with dicks this time.
Sic vivitur.
If you enjoyed taking advantage of social media influencer-prostitutes, maybe you’ll enjoy this Scofflaw’s Tale, too.
“Kind words and forgiving of faults are better than Sadaqah (charity) followed by injury. And Allah is Rich (Free of all wants) and He is Most-Forbearing.” Quran, 2:263
“Riches have shut off many a man from the attainment of wisdom; poverty is unburdened and free from care.” Seneca, On Philosophy and Riches
“Now the crux of complex systems, those with interacting parts, is that they convey information to these component parts through stressors, or thanks to these stressors: your body gets information about the environment not through your logical apparatus, your intelligence and ability to reason, compute, and calculate, but through stress, via hormones or other messengers we haven’t discovered yet.” Nasim Taleb, Antifragile
There are too many passages in Diogenes Laertius' Eminent Lives of the Philosophers to choose one. Just go read the chonk about the Cynics if you need one.
Book of Lamb, 8:21
I was approached once by a funny little man offering fellatio. There was no talk of money changing hands though, I suppose he felt he would be doing me a kindness. He didn't look the type who would have much cash on him anyway. He mentioned working in a bacon factory if I recall. I made my excuses and left, but he helped himself to a grope as I made my escape, the cheeky rascal.