Crossposted at DailyKos
Hey, George, Dick, Don… You got enough stuff yet? Think a few more bombs and a few more thousand dead children and a stranglehold on a desert full of oil is gonna keep you from dying? Not going to happen, pal. I can’t believe you all managed to get so old and never learned a goddamned thing about what life is really all about…
I’ve spent enough time in AA meetings in Hollywood, watching the richest of the rich and the most famous of the famous crawl in on their hands and knees in agony and emptiness and terror… to know that NONE of that shit means a DAMN if you don’t have self-respect and love in your life.
Having finally found self-respect and love in my life, it occurred to me yesterday, just what is it about the people on the VH1 “Envy Us” showcases that I envy? Okay — I didn’t get the rich and I didn’t get the famous — but I have everything that anyone truly wants, if they sit down and think about it long enough.
See that rich guy at the bar, scoping out chicks? He’s got all the stuff, man. He might even be a big movie star or a hot shot broker or a tycoon. And maybe he hasn’t figured it out yet, but after he’s fucked as many women as it takes to realize he’s missing the love and the self-respect, he’s going to drive home in his fabulous car (or in the back of his own limousine), look around his fabulous home, paid for with his fabulous bank account, the account made fat with his earnings from his fabulous, glamourous career — and he’s going to wonder why the fuck he isn’t happy.
Sure, you could interpret this as my brilliant rationalization for choosing to be content with what I have, or for lacking the “ambition” to “achieve” and to “acquire.” But it doesn’t feel that way to me. I had lots of chances to marry wealth, even if I didn’t have what it took to get it on my own. I passed. Sometimes, when the bills got behind and the car broke down and I, like a moron, turned on “E” and watched the beautiful people, I felt like an asshole for waiting for love. Maybe I should have married Whatsisface, even though I didn’t love him and I always got the feeling he liked the IDEA of being with me more than he actually liked ME.
Well, while it may have taken me a while to realize it, I have everything a human being could possibly need. It’d be nice to have more stuff, I guess. I could dig driving a Bentley up the driveway to my Malibu mansion, I guess. But not if it meant giving up what I have now. I have love. I have a spouse who loves me and a child we both adore who thinks we hung the moon.
Wouldn’t trade it for anything.
