The Definitive Guide to Life’s Simple Pleasures by Harry The Partridge

So what’s your pleasure?

Some chaps need fast cars hand built in Europe by men wearing string bikinis. Many need luxury travel. Power. Perhaps fame. A diamond grill in their mouth? [Some people live just to play the ga-a-ame. Sing it Alicia!] Can’t stop throwing those lavish parties in East Egg now. West Egg, keep it bumpin’ (and isn’t it time to put a few more flat screens in your Escalade?) Some chaps need a legacy, a snotty little puke to carry on the family traditions of assfulness and plunder. Don't forget the grimacing, glowering, sunburned, crusty old sea-faring buttholes who require three yards of yacht for every year they’ve had ED. Some need four yards. Some souls eventually take to doing lines of coke off the Gutenberg Bible at the Library of Congress. Those who have it all generally come to worship scarcity over utility and soon make a sport of amassing lifeless trophies (Maltese Falcon or Geronimo’s Skull anyone? Angelina Jolie?) Some steal cash just for the fuck of it: Bernie Madoff, Lou Pearlman, Marc Dreier I’m looking in your direction.

Anything goes as long as there is a conspicuous dearth of even the rudest sense of noblesse oblige among contemporary America’s shabby and lackadaisical upper crust (both fresh and stale). Evil abounds as idle monied hands play their dangerous games and all looking-glasses are self-generated. All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up! The Koch brothers get a hard-on from giving your kids cancer, hear hear! When the world is yours, it’s easy for your appetites to ruin you (although this isn’t always the case. Kim Jong Un looks to be a paragon of temperance, doesn’t he?)

Insular moguls slide down every slippery slope there is like kids at the water park. It becomes child’s play to play Russian roulette with someone else’s head like Phil Specter and actually expect to get away with it, or try to claim diplomatic immunity with a totally straight face after beating a gay sex slave to death like that Saudi Prince (epic FAIL guys). At the bottom of every slide there is madness and misery. But this is of course nothing new. The great tug of war between virtue and vice is a tale as old as time. From the Greek playwrights down through Shakespeare, the fine tradition of dramatizing man’s moral quest continues in our day in the form of television programing like Jersey Shore. There is no need to worry however as long as there are admirable adult role models like Justin Bieber to guide our youth.

Before you lose heart, I, Harry The Partridge, have some great news to share with you this evening. At the considerable risk of being pegged a long-feathered counter-zeitgeist sort of fellow I’ll say it loud: You don’t need to keep your maid in a cage, buy the governor’s mansion, or get bespoke riding boots from John Lobb to find true happiness in life. Many of the greatest pleasures in life are free or nearly so. So without further ado, I bring you The Definitive Guide to Life’s Simple Pleasures.

The pleasures:

•Take the T into Cambridge and punch some random prick wearing an ascot in the face.

•Swill beer and shout “go Sox”.

Ok. I’m embarrassed. That’s it. That’s all I can think of.

Stay tuned then for Harry The Partridge's Guide to Ultimate Luxury. Oh hell, I’m too lazy, go read RL Champ. I’m going to go do a vodka shot in my eye and donkey punch a hooker, then Tweet about it.