How To Be Garbage

[Author’s Note: This article is about how to be actual garbage, as in waste and refuse, not how to be the band “Garbage”.]

Here’s a hypothetical and hard-to-believe scenario. You’re talking to someone about how much you like my comics. Just go with it, alright? The person you’re talking to suddenly pipes up with, “Oh yeah, I know that guy. Have for years. He’s a real piece of shit. Let me tell you all about that pussy.”

Congratulations! You’ve had an encounter with garbage.

It’s not difficult. Garbage is everywhere. It stinks, and we all have to deal with it sooner or later.

Anyone who’s ever achieved anything of merit has enemies. That’s the way humanity works now. Leftist politics eradicated the “friendly rivalry”; now we have teeming hordes of human garbage, who can create nothing, know they can create nothing, and are too old, dumb, or stubborn to change. So, they contaminate and destroy. They stink up innocent lives. They pretend to be your confidant so that they can gather information to use against you, behind your back.

I’ve dealt with garbage my entire life. It’s nothing more than bitter, envious people who labor in a rut of zilch. If you create, and are successful, they will go out of their way to tell the universe you’re a zero too. The more you succeed, the lower they stoop. It’s the Way of the Cuckolded. Garbage is the cuckold of happiness; happiness will forever leave them for someone who doesn’t act like a walking cancer diagnosis.

Every time someone has been garbage to me, their own life was a howling crevasse of disappointment and futility. I rarely engage or confront garbage because garbage is garbage. It’s a person tossed in the dumpster by life. There are doctors and government agencies that deal with refuse. I avoid it because it’s toxic. Do you understand what I’m saying here?

It’s perfectly fine not to like something, or someone. For fuck’s sake, I am speaking to you from a website totally based around that statement. Hating something doesn’t make you garbage, I do it all the time. But I am justified in my hatred. I have arguments and evidence to back it up, and I don’t make it personal. Garbage gets personal. If you back up your dislike of someone with little tales of your own superiority, because you think you know something “compromising”, you’re garbage. That’s not even gossip, it’s you talking shit about another person to inflate yourself amongst your peers. You’re trying to make everyone stink as loudly as you do. Garbage.

Here’s some helpful tips on how to be utter fucking garbage:

1. Did you see someone whom you envy at a low point in their lives? Bring them up in conversation and describe the incident in the most biased, unflattering terms.
2. Did someone welcome you into a creative endeavor on spec, and you didn’t get enough of the limelight? Cause an unpleasant incident and walk, then tell everyone that the project was stupid and doomed to fail from the start.
3. Did someone you know surpass you in your chosen field? Take drugs and harass them on social media, with your sole “friend” (garbage).
4. Do you not understand an artist’s work, even though you know people who do? Launch an on-line crusade against them, welcoming the presence of other bored, frustrated, reeking garbage who don’t even care about the target. They just want to be garbage.

This is why creators like myself don’t welcome Internet comments and feedback into our lives. Forums are meaningless; a cartoonist you never knew existed could have a thriving forum community, because it’s only tangentially connected to their work. It’s just users who want to meet exclusively somewhere and not be bothered. That’s literally it. I’ve seen a thousand popular forums come and go. No one cares; not even the people who post there. They go somewhere else. Usually 4chan, where theoretically, anything goes. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Fifteen years ago, I was producing animated shorts for my site, via Newgrounds. I used to get angry about negative feedback, because of the slavish amount of work I was doing on the cartoons. I couldn’t focus on the enormous amount of positive comments I got. I never realized that the downvoters most likely never even watched my animation. They just wanted to show off by putting something down. Something that had won awards. They just wanted to poke a wasp’s nest.

Twenty years ago, I was a stage actor in Savannah. I did not read reviews. Sometimes reviews aren’t good. That’s theater. The Savannah Morning News dubbed me Best Actor, twice. I focused on that, instead of the people who didn’t think I could act.

Of course I can act. I act like I don’t want to kill a billion people every waking day. I act like I’m happy, about as well as Jerry Lewis ever did. I act like the loss of my father hasn’t been killing me for seven years. I act like people’s general attitudes don’t make me want to drown in my own vomit. I act like a human being.

Okay… maybe I’m not that good an actor. But you know what helps? I have total recall.

When I was in sixth grade, a bunch of kids ratted to Mrs. Marino that I was crowding them off the lunch table with all my stuff, and they had no room to eat. I showed Mrs. Marino the entirety of my belongings; a pen and a notebook, in which I was writing a custom “Choose Your Own Adventure”. She asked the other kids how I could possibly take up a whole table, and then began to read them a passage from my book, with proper schoolteacher intonation and accent.

They were fucking jealous. So they fucked with me. Story of my life. 

Do you want to be garbage? Then base your daily life around tearing down the accomplishments of others. Especially if they were your friends. Especially if you refuse to do better, or at least compete. Never earn anything. People with brains will abandon you, but you’ll never be alone.

You’ll always have other garbage to keep you company.