This Is the Way the Year Ends
And now, the national hangover.
Mother nature, as usual, appears not to be without a sardonic sense of humor. I can think of no other explanation as to why New York City at the moment looks as if it's sitting at the bottom of a sinkful of dirty dishwater. A short while ago, I left my apartment and walked through a chilly mist to the local grocery store -- my aim being to pick up a few rations to get my wife and I through a holiday weekend which our illustrious Idiot In Charge has seen fit to extend by a day, due to the entirely timely death of Gerald Ford. In spite of the fact that my neighborhood is a good twenty blocks from Times Square -- Ground Zero of the atomic blast of revelry that welcomed in the New Year -- the streets are nonetheless littered with the remains of last night's celebration. If you've ever thrown a party in your home, you're no doubt aware of what it feels like to wake up in the morning -- after all the giddy anticipation, followed by the gloriously bacchanalian blackout -- to find that your living room looks as if it's been redocrated by Hezbollah. Now take that living room and multiply it by 23.7 square miles and expand the guest list to eight-million; that should give you a good idea of what Manhattan looks like this morning.
Unlike so many of my island-mates, I actually didn't do the big party thing last night -- my wife and I instead choosing to ring in the New Year by relaxing on our couch with a bottle of Piper-Heidsieck, some take-out Bar-B-Q from a great little place up the street, and a freshly-purchased DVD copy of The Descent (which is just balls-out excellent by the way). As Jayne had to be at work at the pre-dawn hour of six this morning, we turned in at around 10pm and were fast asleep when 2006 slipped with great fanfare into 2007. We awoke just a little after midnight to kiss softly and wish each other a Happy New Year, then began to drift back into the kind of sleep necessary to ensure that Jayne wouldn't be an irritable wreck when the sun finally rose.
Unfortunately, we never quite made it there.
The pair of early twenty-something guys who live a couple of doors down from us -- roommates and recent additions to our building -- were determined not to let 2007 begin so quietly. They packed both their spatially-challenged apartment and, inevitably, the hallway leading up to our front door with drunken partygoers, none of whom seemed to comprehend that the person he or she was talking to was, in fact, standing two feet away. The resulting cacophony sounded like the Jackass guys were taping a stunt involving a herd of angry cattle, a hand-grenade, and a half-pipe right outside our door. Of course this went on for hours, or at least until I finally decided that these inconsiderate pricks needed to understand that they weren't living in the Teek-house anymore.
"Hey, my wife has to work in the morning -- take the fucking party somewhere else," I said, after throwing the door open to reveal a scowl on my face that I have to imagine would've struck fear into the heart of Damien Thorn.
The girls immediately apologized, while the guys -- popped collars, khaki pants, dickhead haircuts and all -- basically reacted with expected bravado.
"Yeah, well -- I have to work too," one of them snorted.
I quickly decided to overlook the fact that this response made no goddamned sense whatsoever, and just concentrate on the problem at hand.
"Kid, you don't wanna fucking start with me. Just take it inside," I returned, slamming the door as a final exclamation.
Within a few minutes, there was a somewhat feeble knock at my door and I opened it to find Sean Astin facing me -- or at least it looked like Sean Astin; and not so much the Sean Astin who played the loyal and loveable Hobbit, Samwise Gamgee, as the Sean Astin who played the sniveling and pathetic CTU bureaucrat on 24, Lynn McGill -- the one who always looked like a little boy trying to play grown-up, until he ultimately died in a puddle of his own vomit.
"Dude, I'm so sorry man," he stammered, his little puppy-dog eyes looking lost and baleful. "I'm the homeowner here. I'll take care of this."
Once again, I chose to overlook the fact that he, like the rest of us, is merely renting.
"Just shut them the hell up," I said, exchanging a nod and closing the door on him as he compliantly backed away.
As I turned to go back to bed -- resisting the temptation to look through the peep-hole to check and see if he was, in fact, stumbling off on oversized, hairy Hobbit feet -- one word popped into my head:
Douchebag.
And that got me thinking.
What's In a Name?
There's a decent little movie from the late '80s called From the Hip which features one of those scenes that's so cleverly-conceived that it's stuck in my mind for years. Hot-shot, wise-ass defense lawyer "Stormy" Weathers, played by Judd Nelson -- who at the time was still basking in the ultra-cool afterglow of his role as John Bender -- files a motion to debate whether or not the word "asshole" can be used in court to describe a plaintiff. His insistence is that the exact meaning of the word is so specific that there are no suitable substitutes; there simply is nothing that equates to calling someone an asshole. This claim is of course completely accurate; "asshole" has no worthy synonyms.
I've come to believe that the same holds true for the word "douchebag."
The ability to recognize a douchebag is a little like the ability to recognize pornography: you can't quite describe it blow by blow, but you damn sure know it when you see it. You don't really know how you know -- you just know. The second I threw open my front door and stood face-to-face with a phalanx of popped-collars filled with cheap liquor, Swingersesque/hip-hop-infused faux-cool, frat-bred swagger, Wall Street-corner office aspirations, and enough perceived entitlement to fill twenty Hummers, I knew that I was witnessing douchebaggery in its purest form. Still, for some reason, I spent a good portion of this morning -- in between allowing the unbridled insanity of David Caruso to wash over me as A&E broadcasted non-stop episodes of CSI: Miami -- trying to figure out just what makes someone a douchebag.
The Urban Dictionary has several descriptions of the word -- the best of which, I believe, is this:
An individual who has an over-inflated sense of self worth, compounded by a low level of intellegence... with no sense as to how moronic he truly is.
An adherence to this particular definition would explain why frat-boys are, by and large, complete douchebags -- as are white guys who talk like black guys (with special recognition going to those who excessively quote Chappelle's Show), and anyone who drinks Red Bull and vodka, ever.
The next question of course becomes, "Can a woman be a douchebag?"
My answer would be yes.
In addition to the fact that, simply as a point of reference, the term in reality describes a device which is used for cleaning a presumably dirty vagina, it would seem impossible to be able to apply the Urban Dictionary definition to, say, Kevin Federline without also being able to make it equally suit his female counterpart in worthlessness, Paris Hilton -- who is herself in desperate need of the use for which the douchebag was originally intended.
So, knowing what we know -- that the word "douchebag" has a highly specific connotation, and that it can easily apply to both men and women -- only one conclusion is possible:
2006 was most certainly the "Year of the Douchebag."
Never in my lifetime have more unrestrained douchebags risen to such a state of pre-eminence in our popular culture. They've achieved levels of distinction heretofore unseen in recent human history -- from the "taste-makers" in the world of film and television, to the previously inculpable realm of literature, all the way to the highest corridors of power in our nation's capital, douchebags were everywhere last year. They had a say in what you saw, heard -- even how you felt and what you were and weren't allowed to do on occasion. They made the headlines and the gossip pages -- they made music; they made laws.
I usually abhor the ubiquitous beginning/end-of-year attempts to categorize everything into a series of lists, but then again I also abhor melodramatic overacting, yet I continue to willingly surrender my brain to hour-upon-hour of pulverizing at the hands of Almighty Caruso as the CSI: Miami marathon rolls on.
My point is this:
Next, the Top Ten Douchebags of 2006
Be glad it's all over.
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