Here’s a cruelest-month, April bouquet to sniff, my little rainbow blossoms: Our global human population is now metastasizing by 200,000 freshly-hatched new inhabitants … per day! Now — the excuses. As in, if you’re 16 or older and still haven’t received at least your first Rona-wilting shot by this point, why?
Since March 29, of the 22 million Texans over 16, virtually anyone can get vaccinated. You’re living in America, remember? Where Joseph Biden is, thankfully, now president, and we have a surplus of vaccines. Plenty to go around. So, kiss the ground you walk on, kids, ’cause the quicker we all get vaccinated, the more President Biden’s promised Fourth of July celebrations just might, indeed, be “back to normal” this year.
As every still-breathing human on earth well knows, in the course of but three months last year coronavirus sprang, tiptoeing through the tulips, from previous nonexistence to one of the world’s leading causes of death — for a while, the leading cause. But the good news is, more than 100 million Americans have now received the vaccine. The bad news? The fringe far-right’s brainwashing tactics remain a stunning success.
I asked my trainer the other day whether he’d been vaccinated yet — my straight trainer, who has a teenage son to support, mind you. Now, my building is still reticent to permit personal trainers back inside our gym; thus, for the sake of my trainer’s own health, his son’s and the full-time revival of his career, Travis needs to get vaccinated. Yet, Travis the 47-year-old trainer doesn’t see it this way.
“Nah,” he drawled, one spring afternoon out on the Katy Trail — as he stood 10 feet away, instructing me into another contorted yoga stretch. “Why do I need to get vaccinated if everybody else is? Really, I don’t think anybody under 25 needs vaccinating, ’cause they don’t get sick even if they do get COVID,” he explained. “And I don’t trust the vaccines anyhow.”
You happy now, Ted Cruz? Some 20K pharmacies across freedom’s great land shall begin administering inoculations soon — not that anyone in their 20s is remotely planning to get one. They’ve got far bigger monsters to conquer — like becoming famous. Oh, but to go viral!
Yes, I have seen the Fifth Horseman of The Apocalypse, and it is called Instagram. Speaking from experience, my own personal relationship with social media handily mirrors that which the CDC has adapted for COVID — stand at least 6 feet distance away from everybody, mask your mouth to avoid spewing spittle and avoid your friends and family at all cost.
Brass tacks, I’m a social media hermit. To me, Instagram is just another of those hazy, interstellar black-hole popularity contests, something to be placed on the “Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish” anthropological shelf and promptly ignored along with its fellow-pickled, musty mutations: Snapchat, ClipChat, Twitter, Facebook, MyFans, MySpace, Friendster, etc., etc.
There is no more loathsome an aspiration than to be famous for fame’s sake; hence, the stratospheric popularity of Instagram, an app that does absolutely nothing except perpetuate narcissism. A friend of mine, in faraway Britain of all places, recently stumbled across my nephew’s Instagram page — my then-missing and feared-homeless (at best) 21-year-old nephew, as clinically psychotic as a Bjork album. Jeffrey Dahmer Jr. is my pet nickname for the astounding tot. The kid’s Instagram pix are a veritable narcissist’s cornucopia of devil-may-care mirth! All that’s missing are heads in the refrigerator. Presumably, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone under the age of 30 anymore who wouldn’t, oh, happily slaughter their own family on live television just to be globally famous for a few minutes.
Celebrity runs the world nowadays. Perhaps it always did. This is where we are in this lovely spring of 2021, folks: Fame forever, at any price, even if it manifests a global grotesquery on the level of another Charles Manson in the making. There’s no such thing as victims anymore. Victimization went out with Sharon Tate.
Indeed, Manson/Tate exemplify the perfect metaphor of what we’ve sunk to 50 years hence: The beautiful and the damned.
Useless factoid of the month: “Minks are the only animals known to be able to catch the coronavirus from humans and pass it back.” That said, let’s toss on a Blackglama stole and get helter-skelter right to it, shall we?
Dear Howard: I am a professional in my 30s trying to date, but I find myself at the same crossroads every time I meet someone. The hot ones are always halfwits; the intelligent ones are always homely. It is consistently dumb versus deep, and I can’t deal with idiots. Should I start thinking about the future of my private life tomorrow as just something requiring compromising all my integrity today? Is to settle a given? I mean, how much longer must I play the field looking for potential marriage perfection? Is the intelligent Prince Charming out there? — Dr. Hopewell
Dear Doctor Well ’Ho: Sweetie, Mensa doesn’t come in manwhore. Himbo doesn’t come with a Harvard alma mater or diploma. As my father used to say, “You might as well marry a woman for her beauty as kill a bird for its song.” My advice, doc? Date only the very smartest, most intelligent men you can find. Big deal if they have a few physical imperfections compared to porn stars. Hell, that’s what plastic surgery is for! One can always repair the exterior. But remember, as the tee shirt says, STOOPID IS FOREVER.
Dear Howard: Is something wrong with me? I’m 17, going on 18 in a few weeks, and I’m the only dude I know still driving a jalopy who busses tables for an after school job. At 18, I’ll be allowed to ascend to a “waiter” and make tips, with dreams of sometimes even getting to go home at zero-in-the-morning jangling a full hundred bucks in my pockets!
By comparison, everyone else my age that I know is rich already. They have fan pages and followers. They receive nice gifts and points from strangers directly deposited into their bank accounts for having to do little more than masturbate in their bedroom on camera, shoving bananas up their butts while their parents are sleeping. They don’t drive hand-me-down Honda Civics. Why do I feel so mortified and awful by not happily helicoptering my hard-on for the world to drool over? — Hologram Hal
Dear Hogwallow: On the subject of stolen youth, Hal, it’s always an eternal line drawn in the sand of temporary penury versus pirated aspirations; after all, the only money-making expertise granted the young is flesh exploitation. Go to college, Hal. Be proud of the fact that the only people getting to see your erection are only those who turn you on. Trust me, that frozen banana the neighbor kid eats out of your ass for tickets to the Superbowl ain’t gonna buy you shit 10 years from now, yet it’s sure still gonna be out there somewhere on film for you to be turned down for a job — should anyone desire such handy ammunition.
In her anthem to hawked innocence, “17 Again,” Annie Lenox trills, “All those fake celebrities/All those vicious queens/All the stupid papers/And the stupid magazines. Sweet dreams are made of anything/That gets you in the scene.”
Just go get vaccinated, bois & girlz. Fuck carnal fame. Fuck instagramming one’s upmanship, posing pointlessly as a supermodel. It’s high springtime, my little minx, and the relief is infectious!
—Howard Lewis Russell
Have a comment or question for Howard? Send it to AskHoward@dallasvoice.com.
