Thank You For Your Sanctimony

By Nathan Payne | pablosmoglives | 28 Jun 2024


"Judge not, that ye be not judged.  For with what judgment
ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure
ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."
Matthew 7:1-2

 

When I was a practicing idiot in L.A., I used to know some shady people.  I was never a criminal, but some guy I knew offered me a job once.  He wanted me to be the driver.  He said we weren't going to go any farther west than Fairfax, no farther east than Western, and that we'd only be gone for a few hours.  When it was over, he said he'd take me to Guitar Center and buy me anything I wanted.  Anything.

I slept on it.  It occurred to me that even though my plates and registration were expired and in some rich girl's name (the girl who gave me the car, a '93 Taurus, nothing fancy, but a great gift regardless), that the numbers would find themselves on a detective's desk, and it wouldn't take long to find me.  I decided not to do it.  But I thought about it.  

It was tempting.

 

"We're like bugs, we got the sexiest
drugs this side-a town"
Happiness is Mine

 

My friends were drug people, heroin and meth mostly, and I used to stay up for days with them, wasting time in a profligate, enjoyable manner.  They were criminals, but they were also "good people."  The mom was an ex-stripper, the guy was into bank fraud and had an operation where he'd forge money orders and cash them at currency exchanges with his shady friend, and MY friend was a junkie chick I met at a TV show, where we had both been hired as audience members.  Unless the show is popular enough to be able to entice tourists to work as audience members for free, Hollywood pays people to sit in the audience and make exciting noise on cue.  It's an insufferable, low-paying job, but it's easy and non-committal.  It was a good way to make some money for a couple nights in a flophouse and some drugs, without having to commit to a work schedule.

In fact my friend appears in the video for "California Hills," as the junkie chick who welcomes the rabbit home from work at the 1:50 mark, and who is also laying with him on the beach in a cartoonish, California dope-nod toward the end.  She was never my girlfriend, but we were great platonic drug buddies.  I have no idea what happened to her.  Back to Tennessee, I think?  But she was cool.  My sister of the streets.

She was my friend.

She got me into Eminem, who is actually very talented.  We rode the blue line down to Long Beach to meet some rich guy and go down to Laguna Hills or Cappuccino Heights, or wherever it was, to stand amongst the passing Lamborghinis on PCH protesting something unimportant.  She was a pale junky type with a gothic bent, and carried an umbrella to protect herself from the sun.  She wore a hose clamp around her neck like a piece of jewelry.  She was cool.  After the event we rode the train back to my apartment on Virgil & Melrose, which is a LONG RIDE, and hung out in my room listening to Eminem, Calexico, and The Moving Units, nodding out to our Mexican black tar daydream while my straight-edge "alcohol and weed only" roommates would do normal-people things in the main room.  I even got those guys a job at the telemarketing office where I worked.

But it got weird.

One time, after a lost weekend shooting dope at her mom's house in The Valley, I came home to my apartment and the locks had been changed.  My roommate came to the door and told me that he couldn't have a junky for a roommate.  Nevermind that I got him a job, and hooked him up with some dragon-chasing action when he barged into my room high on Corona Light one morning at dawn, asking for a fix.  He was drunk, and wanted to try some dope while his inhibitions were relaxed.  I fixed him a tiny bead.  He smoked it, and since dope is an opiate, his drunken, gregarious aggression faded into black.  He went back into his room and fell asleep.

So I was shocked when I got back to my apartment and had been locked out.  He was there with his smug, self-righteous yuppie vibe, telling me what all I could and couldn't do.  I was pissed, so I attacked him.  Like, y'know.  With fists.  Nothing heavy.

But he had seen it coming, and maced me.  I caught a face full of pepper spray, and folded into my T-shirt and thrift-store polyester dress pants like an origami drug rat.  My face was like a candle, and he lit it with a blowtorch.  It was horrible.  My roommate went inside to call the police.  My junky friend said, "Let's get out of here."  So we did.

She drove us to McDonald's, where we ordered several million dollars worth of icewater, which I poured on my face until the burning needles in my eyes turned into small rubber mallets, and the music in my face had transformed from a heavy metal onslaught into a slower, pulsing, convalescent groove.  She drove me to my favorite hellhole, the St. Moritz Hotel on Sunset Blvd., and asked if I was going to be okay.  I said that I would be.  She said she'd be in touch.  She had my back.  She saved my ass.  She drove away.

I slept.

An arrangement was made in which I was able to go back to retrieve my belongings from the apartment without any legal difficulties.  I had a brand-new mattress somehow, and I couldn't take it with me.  But there was no way I was leaving it for him.  So I dragged it down to Virgil, propped it up on a chain-link fence, and gutted it like a hunter disembowels a deer, right there on the sidewalk.  I took my knife and slashed away until all the fluffy innards had been reduced to landfill.  It was a waste.  But it had to be done.

I was free.

Whether the guy in this video is legit or not is beside the point.  I think he's interesting, and if we'd been in a room in which there was an active tweek-pipe, I would have been inclined to engage him in a drug-related friendship.  He's interesting.  What he says about being a pimp is what I say about being a songwriter and musician.  If it's not in your heart, don't even begin.  Don't do it to GAIN something; do it because it's who you are.  He's right about that.  But that's not why I'm posting it.  The reason I'm posting it is the comments.  The sanctimony in the comments is beyond belief.  It really bothers me.

Who do people think they are?

I never hung out with any pimps to my knowledge, and have never solicited a prostitute for anything, but I've met some relatively-honorable people on the street, and find that they're more honest when they're feeding you a line, than many "good people" are when they're "telling you the truth."  Or whatever good people call it when they're lying to you.  Always for your own benefit, whatever it is.  And always "smiling."  So freakishly, unnaturally POSITIVE.  It's caustic.  As I wrote in my lo-fi mustardpiece "Zen AF:"

 

"[there is] more honesty
in a lie
told from a sad heart
than in a truth
told from a heart that shows no sadness"
Zen AF

 

"Zen AF" starts at the 3:11 mark in this video.  It's obsolete, but it has some amusing moments, lines that sparkle like bubbles in a puddle of soda on the freeway.  It doesn't come from a righteous place, but the stupidity contained in the poem is heartfelt, and therefore real.  The word "Zen" has no meaning for me.  I was never into anything "Zen," and still don't know what the word actually means.  In fact there are some embarrassingly-meaningless passages scattered throughout the poem.  It is what it is.  Listen at yr own risk.

But the purpose of this article is to inspire people to deal effectively with sanctimonious virtue-peddlers in comment sections, which are like the streetcorners of the internet, populated with zombies, hustlers, and prostitutes.  Not counting the Dark Web, whatever that is.  But don't waste your time engaging the priests of haughty degeneracy in a comment section.  Especially the ones that blame prostitution on Capitalism.  Those people will receive the beat-down they are asking for, in time.  While I'm not above telling them that they're cursing themselves, even if such a sentiment is wasted, more often than not I leave a comment that no one can deny.  There's no way to argue with it, and because it fits within the confines of politeness, it even sounds affirming.  Until you realize what it actually says.

I always tell them, "Thank you for your sanctimony."  It's biting, like a shot of pepper spray to the face, but it sounds nice.  It's like forcing them to make out with a rattlesnake.  How are they going to respond?  

Who cares.  Just tell them, "Thank you for your sanctimony."  That's how you shut down smug, self-righteous bullies on a comment board.  They're not better than anybody.  Pimps and dumb junky poets included.  Just make sure you never, ever return to the comment, to see what anybody says in response.  It's always a mistake.

Thanks for listening.

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Nathan Payne
Nathan Payne

I am a songwriter and bandleader who travels the world in search of the golden ticket. http://www.pablosmoglives.com


pablosmoglives
pablosmoglives

Replacing my blog at http://pablosmoglives.wordpress.com

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