Your Body is The Palace of Versailles
Every now and then I end up running into guys with floppy hair and a permanent smile plastered across their face. I call them Golden Retriever guys. They are the straight male equivalent of manic pixie dream girls. They make friends everywhere they go, things always work out for them, and if it does not, they are still more exuberant than me on a good day. This is the type of person you want delivering bad news, which may explain why they usually work in SAAS enterprise sales.
The other day my friend brought his Golden Retriever buddy to dinner. The buddy told me he was in town as emotional support for his friend who recently got a Brazilian Butt Lift done. Thankfully yours truly had recently learned about Brazilian Butt Lifts from enquiring into why something was suddenly amiss about Kim Kardashian. BBL is a type of plastic surgery that involves transferring fat to the glutes. Liposculpture, the doctors call it. Kim had had her BBL removed/undone. "I heard they are not in style anymore," I said with authority. "They are still a thing among porn stars and my friend just signed a big deal with a porn production company," he replied without missing a beat. All of this had transpired within about 9 minutes of meeting him. As we winded down dinner, he announced that his porn star friend had just asked if he wanted to go to a metal show and extended the invite to us. Of course, I wanted to go in service of this newsletter.
The venue was the backyard of a house in suburban Austin. A handful of people were moshing in the backyard and kicking up a dust bowl. Through the haze of lights and dust, I made out four guys in gimp masks on a makeshift stage. Later as I stood in the back watching four gimp masks bobbing their heads to muffled noise, the guy next to me pointed at the kid moshing the hardest and said, "That's Willie Nelson's grandson." This sequence of events should tell you why you should hang out with the Golden Retrievers among us.
Eventually, I met the porn star. I guess what they say about meeting your heroes extends to porn stars too. It seemed like she had undergone several major/minor surgeries besides the Brazillian Butt Lift. How do I know? Probably cause unlike Hollywood stars, porn stars can't afford plastic surgery work that looks seamless. I did have a brief conversation with her, during which she made an allusion to sex every 20 seconds. That's like if I met you and all I could talk to you about was the intricacies of my job. She did however tell me about how she had to use a special pillow for sitting down for two months after the BBL surgery. It was apparently excruciatingly painful. What purpose did the pain serve? I found the answer on her Instagram. All the messy realities of plastic surgeries were airbrushed away on there. It's an arbitrage that lot of us engage in, only that she took it further than most - look good on the internet while sacrificing your quality of life off of it. In fact, I would say she's probably the first actual transhumanist I've met. Someone who used technology to augment their physical body for the purpose of production.
On the drive back home, I was reminded of a little detail from the court of Louis XV that had gotten stuck in my head. The latrines in the Palace of Versailles were so few and poorly placed that people who attended the court usually relieved themselves under the stairwells and behind beautiful furniture. The palace whose legacy lies in its beauty, smelled of human excrement when it was actually in use.
It's true that hygiene was a constant issue in heyday of Versailles. After the royal family was forcibly moved to Paris in 1789, the first thing the governor of the château did was to order a thorough cleaning!