Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder

First of all, accept that something is wrong with you. It’s a good start. Something has always been wrong with me, too. We’re in a club of sorts, the lunatic fringe who are proud to band together. There’s a joyous road to ruin out there, and if you let me be your garbage guru, I’ll teach you how to succeed in insanity and take control of your low self-esteem. Personality disorders are a terrible thing to waste.

Librarians are always smart, a little nuts, and know how to party.

When you’re feeling despondent just put on more country music. There are thousands of slit-your-wrist hillbilly songs that will make you laugh at your self-indulgence and ultimately cheer you up.

As soon as you stop listening to new music, your life is over. You are a fart.

When the worst thing that can happen to you does, I try to be a friend.

As a child in kindergarten I always used to come home from school and tell my mother about the twisted little boy in my class who’d only draw with black crayons and never talked to the other kids. I yakked about this unnamed friend so much that my mother eventually mentioned him to my teacher, who looked confused and then blurted, “But that’s your son!” I was creating characters early for myself and you should let your kids do the same. Having multiple personalities when you’re young is mandatory for a happy childhood.

But suppose you’re still failing, struggling unsuccessfully to find your voice? You should ask yourself, am I the only person in the world who thinks what I’m doing is important? If yes, well, you’re in trouble. You need two people to think your work is good—yourself and somebody else (not your mother). Once you have a following, no matter how limited, your career can be born, and if you make enough noise, those doors will begin to open, and then, and only then, can you soar to lunatic superiority.

And no, the hit records of your generation are not better than today’s. As soon as you stop listening to new music, your life is over. You are a fart.

We’d have valet parking, too, but the attendants would be disguised as hostile schizophrenic street people who would squeegee-attack your windshield right as you pull up. Those in the know would have figured out by now that all our valets were ex-cons,

I hated the Beatles when they first came out because they were so goddamn cheery. I didn’t listen to popular music from 1964 until 1976, when I first heard the Sex Pistols. Finally a new antihippie sound that could piss off every musical legend that came first.