Morals.

I think that morals, scandal and hypocrisy go together like bacon, lettuce and tomato.

Watching a show late last night/early this morning I couldn't help but notice the constant commercial interruption for 'Girls gone wild!' videos and 'Extenze' ad nauseum.

What's the connection here? Are there horny old toads who can't get it up by watching eighteen year old chickies showing their boobies? Are they thinking, "If only I bought some pills to give be that big boner, I could beat the meat while watching that video of girls who are way too young for me, but I can DREAM, can't I??"

But I DO remember when I used to hang out at the bar, sitting with this seventy year old dude, "Gus", and his one purpose in life was to screw the youngest crack-whore that he could lay his grubby mitts on. I thought that he was disgusting and yet fascinating. I'd bike over to his house occasionally, for exercise and to shoot the shit with him and his wife and a couple of times he practically accused me of ratting on him about the sex thing to his wife "June".

It seemed to me that June was really lonely, sitting in her kitchen playing solitaire, day in and day out, while Gus was hitting the bar, day in and day out, doing his 'thing'.

It never occurred to me to rat him out to June, she seemed happy enough with the situation. Gus used to hire a couple of bar-bums that I knew to house-paint etc. for him, sometimes for beer, and hunting them down or helping them do 'a job' was Gus's excuse for being 'out' a lot.

Eventually things went 'south' and Gus was busted for drinking and driving then June sold their houses out from under him and SHE 'went south' too! I'm not sure if it was co-incidence or not but at about that time, those two bar-bums turned into crack-heads and one of them was found dead in his house. This happened to be the house where Gus took crack-whores to too. Now that I think of it, Gus used to take crack-whores to the other guy's apartment too.

The whole thing was very sordid and they kept that part of their lives separate from me but it kind of leaked out, as these things usually do, over a couple of draft and an 'amazing tale' here and there.

The strangest thing, to me, was that everyone seemed to have a similar story as to how 'into it' they were. I'm sure that, when they were talking to me, they imagined that they had the wool pulled right over my eyes but it might be that they had the wool pulled over their OWN eyes. Each person talking to me, whether bragging or complaining, wasn't 'like THEM'! They knew all the stories and were happy to relate them to me with the 'caveat', "... but I'm not like them, I'm not the scum of the Earth!"

I remember being told by this German guy that it was like I was from another planet and I took that to mean that he supposed I didn't know what was going on around me. This from a guy who couldn't get through the day without smoking pot like Cheech and Chong.

I guess to them it DID seem like I was from another planet because I wasn't 'into' the pot or the crack or the crack-whores, "What the fuck was I doing there?"

The point that I think I'm making is that we're all hypocrites, we're all deceitful little animals scurrying in circles, deceiving ourselves that 'we're not as bad as 'them'', we're not as bad as those 'hardcore' self-deceiving hypocrites, rats etc. who are 'in the know' precisely because 'we are'.

If you're an exception, you're not to be trusted, you're 'bucking' the societal mores, you're the immoral one.