Ethnically ambiguous karaoke prostitutes, Miami, and The Pillars of Wisdom by GLO
Hooked on phonics and addicted to knowledge
What’s a book and what’s a review supposed to accomplish?
Is a book supposed to be confessional? A manual? An anthology, a collection of recipes, or maybe a suite of charts decoding the vibes of the cosmos? Twelve Rules for Life or Twelve Years a Slave? Perhaps you prefer a survey of nonviolent interrogation techniques developed by domestic intelligence agencies or a tell-all in which a man recounts an early experience with recreational drugs and a German überhund.
And, if I’m going to review one, why should anyone read mine?
In previous eras these questions would have mattered but we are now entering a period of new romanticism, amateur revisionism, high charlatanism and low moral character. A time in which the two prevailing strategies for winning entail silencing your enemies and outdazzling their audiences.
Make no mistake. Pretending I’m personally qualified to frame or gauge a book is like listening to an econ blogger explain fertility to you. (S)he may be right, but purely through the process of abject bigoted looks-based discrimination, you could probably obtain higher quality answers more reliably by prompting a search engine that breathes through a cloud rather than a meatbot which breathes through its mouth. Nothing makes people less horny than economics which is why it is impossible to tell gay economists from straight ones. Functionally there is no difference.
And because I cannot silence my enemies, I advocate outdazzling their audiences. All of which is to say that if you found any of this windup unnecessary, obfuscatory, or long-winded, I’ll reward you with a true but somewhat embarrassing confession which should illuminate whether or not to dedicate a few hours of your life to reading The Pillars of Wisdom by GLO. And perhaps I can improve upon the form that is the book review. After all, Substack is the sport of gentlemen and I am nothing if not a gentleman.
Realizing you’re not where you think you are
When I was 16 or 17 years-old my friend and I were stoned and he was dropping me off at home. He was pretty big and played on the football team (I have no clue what position) and he begged to come inside to get something to eat. My parents were squares and would absolutely murder me if they caught us but he basically steamrolled me, not through being a jock but by rendering himself into a naggy yenta, an archetype for which I have still developed very little ground game. So I relented because I find it generally undignified to grovel, especially if you are supposed to be an elite meat wall, and also because I was defenseless.
As could be predicted, we came inside and each door and every floorboard creaked at maximum volume like forlorn sirens announcing their distress to wine-drunk sailors across a rocky sea. Nevertheless, we made it into the kitchen undetected, assembled way too many burritos, microwaved them until the cheese was molten enough to burn every last bit of skin off our tongues and then followed it up with big bowls of chocolate ice cream from Publix that had little chocolate-covered graham cracker balls running throughout. Now kids like to shoot up their schools and cut their tits off but in the 90’s, we blazed while listening to Cash Money and ate ice cream like sophisticates. Occasionally a girl would traumatize your penis with orthodontics that cost real dotcom dollars her dad would eventually lose in the market and you’d think about it for months.
In the kitchen, we sat eating and watching late-night 90’s trash on the little TV my mom had stashed on a rolling cart in there but at some point our family dog, Molly, a chunky boxer, began cleaning herself in her little beanbag chair. At first she was discrete but she got more and more aggressive until eventually her collar started rattling. My friend and I stared for what felt like an eternity (probably 20 minutes IRL) and only realized how much time had passed after we simultaneously looked up from her and made eye contact. Suddenly realizing we were in a time and place with another human around to witness us watch the dog in our own personal David Attenborough trance was embarrassing in the way it is always embarrassing to have your most unedited self looked at. There was nothing else to do. We lost all control of our emotions and began hyperventilating, laughing, realizing we had become completely entranced by the rhythm of my dog licking her snatch. That none of us woke my parents was an absolute miracle I still think about twenty-something years in the future.
The uncle you never had
If the anecdote above doesn’t expressly tell you this, I’ve never been able to get through Joseph Campbell but in my limited understanding that I’m just making up right now, there’s usually a guy you meet after you’re out of your parents’ home who is able to put some of the finishing touches on you by imparting knowledge that can’t really come from your father who is responsible for imparting the majority of official and nominal knowledge rather than some of the more esoteric and pragmatic tips that make life significantly better. If you’re Justin Bieber, it’s P. Diddy. But if you’re Luke Skywalker, it’s Obi-Wan. And if you’re one of the endless number of contemporary young men noticing that the world is outwardly hostile to you in both easy- and hard- to-understand ways, GLO is your guy. The Pillars of Wisdom can hip you to some of the many ways in which you are getting fucked and the ways in which you can unfuck your situation. And if you’re concerned about false paths to unfucking your situation, GLO has you covered there too.
Take, for instance, GLO’s take on an archetype he calls the Goofy Shmoofy. Like Neoliberalism and The End of History, the Goofy-Shmoofy is a proper noun with many antecedents and deadnames as he exists across all space and time but GLO’s coinage is the correct and appropriate one for our time because he is able to properly contextualize the Goofy Shmoofy within the Goofy Shmoofy Cycle. To quote the author directly:
(T)he Goofy Shmoofy is preparing for a life-changing opportunity. He will conquer previous bad habits and will dedicate most of his time to honing his skills. The longer this phase lasts, the more he is able to differentiate himself from his past self. This phase doesn’t usually last more than a few months because it’s easy to reach a level of competency that sets one apart from the average man. If you are looking for high-value men in your organization, you will come across Goofies in this phase. You will likely let them in because their Goofy nature will not be apparent.
The Goofy, like a butterfly, has a life-cycle across which he metamorphozes both before your very eyes and imperceptibly. Failure to identify him or understand his changing nature can entrap you in his life cycle, hijacking your time and resources.
However, Pillars presents a robust study in how to make it in life, replete with résumé tips, fitness and supplement information, sex magick, and yes, political commentary. Despite defining concepts like the Goofy Shmoofy Cycle, Pillars isn’t confined to high level academics and taxonomies quick to fly over normies’ heads. In the chapter titled “The Legend of the Sheriff,” GLO documents a young woman who would fellate undergrads two by two in the bathroom but often waylay her suitors’ climax by putting them in the position to reassure her about various insecurities she held mid knob-slobbing. While GLO is able to make larger points about human psychology and sexual dynamics, the reason I remember “The Legend of the Sheriff” is because he tells it in a salacious and enjoyable way that illustrates the distance between legends told and the reality that undergirds them.
The larger point I’m trying to make is that when all serious politics are considered contraband, it’s important to hide them in comedy and smut so that all intellectual attempts to grapple with them must lower themselves to do so and then look unserious by contrast. This is what Kamala Harris tried but failed to do with Charli XCX. The problem is there are only so many ethnically ambiguous karaoke prostitutes you can have promoting the political aspirations of ethnically ambiguous karaoke prostitutes before you feel the need to pick up a purple wizard book about women sucking guys off in the bathroom. This is what Hegel called dialectics.
Party in the city where the heat is on
I hate to be inappropriate and think it would be uncouth of me to speak for GLO, but if you’re still reading, this is the book for you. The magic takes place in your mind but, like the story above, in which I possess less self-awareness than my dearly departed but nevertheless hygienic boxer, Molly, I read the book in a certain place and a certain time and it was last month while vacationing in Miami, a proper counterpoint to GLO’s Latin American locale, the Yucatan coordinates from which he puts pen to paper.
I read the book in a sunny, subtropical, equatorial part of America that is like an overpriced knock-off version of the locales GLO advocates moving to. The predominant modes of academics would tell you this is irrelevant or “outside” the text but the text is totalitarian in its worldview. To reject where you were and what you were doing reading it is to preclude yourself from the text itself. The book is about economics, making it in this world, sexual dynamics, and the human spirit above all else. In all seriousness, it contains some heavy material but it shows you something in how it’s argued. To cover it too much, is to ruin the process. But as GLO says in the introduction, “A decade of experience writing for young men has demonstrated that inflammatory, sexualized speech is the most reliable delivery mechanism to reach the masturbation-addled man.” Now you understand why I had to tell you the story about my dog. We have serious stuff to talk about and we cannot be getting distracted by the Tone Police.
In theory, I didn’t have to write this, but
One jacked Slav cannot help but notice another jacked Slav cavorting with Latinas in the wild. Plus, regular reviews bore me. As two enthusiasts of lifting, crypto, and Spanish yoga pussy, each of us is morally bound to shill the other person’s specious business endeavor, be it a multi-level marketing scheme or a purple wizard book filled with nothing but life skills and big dick energy. Not because we are nepotistic but because we are duty-bound to dazzling the world. We are the collision of cold-winter IQ and paranoid schizo-enchantment that is the only reliable guide through the gray clown show of life that currently dominates the contemporary global empire.
I’ll close out by saying that I don’t condone Ted Kaczynski but from a historical perspective, he showed normies how cool hoodies and aviator glasses and becoming pen pals with the feds is. He mailed life-changing materials to strangers and for $39.99 that’s what GLO will do for you.
You can buy it here.
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