Kareem Abdul Jabbar has a blog for Esquire and it's fucking terrible. It's actually called "Life Lessons with Kareem Abdul Jabbar." Nobody stopped it from being called that.
It's exactly like a blog, except it's also Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and he's telling you about how you should live your life and how everything should be different than it is and how he knows these things because he's Kareem Abdul Jabbar. The most recent one is 20 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 30. I hate this blog. I want to tell it and Kareem Abdul Jabbar to go to hell.
I am not interested in his opinion. I can't relate. I'm not 9 feet tall and I can't hit a running hook shot from 8 feet out. Kareem Abdul Jabbar is and can, so he played basketball impressively well for an impressively long amount of time. He also became a Muslim and changed his name and also he encountered prejudices along the way just like any old black guy did. I'll let you know when I tell you the first interesting thing about Kareem Abdul Jabbar. It hasn't happened yet.
Oh, he got to be in a movie with Bruce Lee, and he was great in Airplane!, and he wore big goofy Bono glasses and he won some basketball championships. You know why he got to do all of those interesting things? Because he's 9 feet tall and can hit a running hook shot from 8 feet out. In this country, if you can do those things as well as Kareem Abdul Jabbar can, then you can also decide things like "I think I'd like to be in a movie with Bruce Lee," and then they just COME TRUE. Like "Step One: Call up Bruce Lee and ask if I can be in a movie with him."
Yeah, I want advice from THAT guy. That's going to help me. If he was here, he'd probably say that the key to success is to forge your own path and never listen to the Kareem Abdul Jabbars of the world because they're smug shitheads who don't know you. He might also tell me to calm down, to not be bitter, to not give into jealousy, and then he'd recite a poem by Kufi that would help everything make sense to me for a minute or two before I decided "no wait, fuck you Kareem Abdul Jabbar," and immediately regretted not gouging his eyes out with a spoon. By then it would be too late.
Do 30 year old people actually need sage wisdom from Kareem Abdul Jabbar? How immature are we as a country full of people that even at age 30 we can't get along just fine making up our own minds about what sorts of things we should be doing? Do we actually need Life Lessons with Kareem Fucking Abdul Fucking Jabbar to tell us this shit? Of course not. He's just some guy with a shitty blog and he's got to say something on it. Which, actually, I can one hundred percent dead-on bullseye relate to.
You know what? I'm 33. I can make some good guesses about what I wish I was doing instead of what I am actually doing. I don't have to be smart or tall or good at basketball for this. Let's see if I can pull it off.
Here. Here are the top 20 things you should be doing at age 30:
1. Continuing to not die.
2. Not getting drunk enough to puke and/or then driving a car and/or just in general not being a slovenly drunken idiot.
3. Don't be a fat piece of shit.
4. Try to be nice to people even if they're acting like assholes.
5. Probably, like, make a little more money than you spend, I guess.
6. Figure out about if you could buy a house or something.
7. Get to a point where you can just sit there and get yelled at by your girlfriend without it being too big of a deal for either one of you. Also think about making that girlfriend into your wife because this is what your life is going to be and you're fine with that.
8. Don't do the same things with your time you did when you were 25 just because you're not famous yet and you "have to."
9. Feel free to order a side salad instead of the fries because nobody cares that you're a pussy now.
10. Don't tell people about something you heard on NPR as if that fact alone is interesting or makes you interesting.
11. Only have sex with like one person per month, probably.
12. Try not to overdo it on the ice cream because it'll make you grow tits now.
13. Here's an idea: go on vacations to places where you can't take kids if you don't have kids yet, because they are on the way soon and they are going to ruin your life forever.
14. Or: go ahead and have kids and ruin your life forever, because you suck and your life is stupid and you might as well.
15. Learn to eat a piano.
16. Stop blaming other people for your problems or telling other people about your problems as if they're supposed to care.
17. Don't get bedbugs from shopping at thrift stores or buying your bed at those weird mattress places where they reupholster mattresses somebody left in the alley.
18. Consider wearing shoes that aren't sneakers. And floss.
19. Push "YES" every once in a while when the automated checkout thing at the grocery store asks you if you want to make a donation to dead kids or whatever it is, and that way you get to not feel like a complete shithead all the time while at the same time not doing anything even remotely inconvenient.
20. Do not read Kareem Abdul Jabbar's blog, or probably this blog, or any blog, and don't have a blog, and don't ever use the word "blog," especially as a verb.
@itisbenjo
@itisbenjo
