There Is No Them.

Patton Oswalt is a genius. I’m not gonna give you a bit of this — go and read it, all of it, and come back to me.

He’s right. I realize it more the older I get. There is no Them. There is only Us. The most vile fucking redneck Religious Right crusader asshole is just me with a different set of parents and a different collection of DVDs. The crackhead on the corner is also me, although admittedly me if I were somehow dumb enough to get hooked on crack, which I’m not. (Maybe his DVD collection didn’t include New Jack City. Thank you, Mario van Peebles, for giving me Chris Rock sucking on the glass dick to scare my white ass into never touching the rock.)

I get frustrated with a lot of Us, a lot of the time. Some of us, I really think, need to get kicked off the face of the fucking planet. (Like Joseph Kony. And the guy who invented Comic Sans.) But most of us, I think, are doing what we can to survive. We may not all be doing our best — hell, most of us probably don’t know what our best is, or that we’re even capable of it — but we’re doing what we can. You can’t really hate us for that.

Except emo kids. Fuck them. Fuck them all.

So thanks for the best advice I ever got as a teenager, Patton, even if I didn’t hear it until I was thirty.