Sorry Hank

I too am an admirer and friendly with Hank Moody. Unfortunately, Hank charges money for his friends to visit and in this economy, well, that seems a bit indulgent. He gave us all a free weekend a few weeks ago, but I was busy. My admiration is also rooted in a fantastical alter ego that occupies and haunts my imagination. My admiration is based on similar desires: to be raunchy, to fuck all kinds of women, and say shit like (HANK): “It could we worse, instead of finding out your husband was gay, you could have found out he was a scientologist.” (WOMAN): “I am a scientologist Hank.” (HANK): “Or a nazi, or al qaeda.” Conditioned as we are as upper middle class folks, we are sold a bill of goods that your late teens, early twenties is the time to be bold and brave, to meet all kinds of people, to have good and bad and awkward and a lot of sex, to experiment (for some it might be drugs, or ideas, or a bowl of jello – or all of the above), to travel the world, to be free before the crushing confines of capitalism weigh us down for the next forty years. For a variety of internal and external reasons I missed a lot of this time and as such I often waste far too much time thinking back and asking what if. So when I met Hank several years ago, I was initially awed, inspired by Hank. As Thesaurus noted, he was also a writer (the only thing I have ever really wanted “to be”). I had a man crush. But as Thesaurus slept on his first conversation with Hank, he examined quite eloquently the many reasons Hank and I wandered away from each other. There is only so much self destruction one can watch without re-examining their crush. And of course your view of women is problematic on so many levels (plus you have this amazing wife / ex-wife who kept giving you chances and you kept fucking up, to me almost unforgivable or at least incomprehensible). And I get that there might be a some kind of nobility in how up front you are with your conquests and your cock, and you live “with what is in front of you” but that is too easy (and you have a daughter, help me understand). But Hank’s skepticism still resonates and stays with me and I hope continues to guide me through this fucked up world. So indeed, raise a toast with some regularity and “meet everything with a raised eye brow.”