Being a Glorified Ape is No Excuse for Living Live One

The reason that the Bush/Gore election was decided on a difference of a handful of hanging chads was that, and we’ve forgotten this, at the time no one could tell the two apart. Well, there was Gore’s photo-shopped knob thanks to the good people at Rolling Stone, but as far as positions went, they were nearly identical. Gore wanted to continue the Clinton years, which were the Reagan years dressed in fuzzier verbs, and Bush wanted to revert to the Gipper’s all-American, monosyllabic phrasing.

This year we are looking at two or three completely different visions of America by 2020. True, there is a perverse faith that congress will ring the air out of any radical change in one direction or the other, but still the uncertainty looms like a fog around the simple fact that this current recovery, consisting of more gristle than fat, is coming to an end.

So what is a gentleman to do in these unsettled times? Since most of your budgeted single malt scotch money is now being poured into your outsized mortgage, or possibly your ex-wife’s outsized mortgage, you’ll be limited to a bottle of House of Stuart or some other brand with a kilted chieftain on the label. Plaid scotches are always a sign that pesky quality has been cloven twain by the claymore of economy. Fist thing to do is get your head right: look homeward, fine patriot, and remember that bad bourbon is generally less appalling than bad scotch.

Next, go scrounging around in the wedding china and retrieve those Waterford old-fashioned glasses you haven’t seen since your first anniversary. If the wife hasn’t already left you, you’ll get brownie points for being a romantic at heart. Then drag out the holiday finest silverware, china and crystal: even for instant grits. The point is to deny the sting of this temporary poverty by living like a pasha without incurring any further capital outlay on your already stressed finances.

If the wife has already left you, then she’s got the wedding swag and there is nothing you can do about it. Go have a single drink (remember the budget) at the swankest hotel in town and try to make off with the glass. Repeat once. Don’t worry about the china and cutlery: you won’t make it out alive. Your best bet is to use your two pilfered glasses to cozy up to some divorcée, show her what a dashing rake you are, and eat off her finest. Either way, a plastic cup and the cash-strapped populism you embraced as an undergrad will not do.

However you acquire the glass, use it to pour yourself a drink. Although it will look suave sitting in the glass as it comes — don’t do this. You aren’t in college anymore so you’ll want to cut the rotgut with soda or something.

If all this foolishness hasn’t alleviated the humiliating albatross of your reduced circumstances, then proceed to the de luxe plan. Go to the record store and look in the 99¢ bin, here you’ll see all sorts of foreign names, get Vivaldi or Brahms. You’ll probably know who Beethoven is, but avoid him. Ludwig von Beethoven comes on strong and finishes weak, and the point of this exercise is to have nothing remind you of your IRA. Wagner is also famous but much too angry for our purposes.

Now wander around the house, sipping bourbon and branch, Vivaldi tumbling through the background like an enormous furnished elevator with boldly confused children in it — your children. As owner of the house, or at least the legal target of the upside-down mortgage, you can and should forbid whatever two-cats-fighting-in-a-sack style music your pre-teens have dragged into the house.

Finally, learn bridge or mahjong or one of those old-fashioned aristocrat games. New fashioned aristocrats can’t play mahjong any more than you can — but neither you nor your friends know any aristocrats, old or new, so the reality, here at least, is irrelevant.

You might think all this putting on airs is not for you, but remember it was all those nuevo-riche buying houses they couldn’t afford that pissed in the economy’s whiskey in the first place. It’s no good looking like one of them.

The other advantage of feigning an aristocratic mien is that contrary to keeping up with the middle-class Jones, it is acceptable, even preferred among the eccentric old money class to wear frayed shirts, pants and tweed coats. If you don’t have an old tweed coat, you have only yourself to blame — I can’t think of everything.