The Discerning Kern

The strangest things happen in the world of blogging. For some odd reason, it appears that despite the fact that I don't seem to have a very big readership, I have apparently struck a chord with the youth audience, one of whom seems to have mistaken me for Ann Landers or Dear Abby. I decided not to edit the letter here, so that you can get a real sense of the sheer avalanche of the surreal that careened into my inbox the other day. My advice will follow the letter, published here in its entirity.

Disclaimer: The following and its contents may be a little risque for some readers. Please consider yourself warned.

Dear Kern,

Normally I wouldn't attempt to ask anyone about my curiosities. My 'rents are bunk types who don't listen to a young man's concerns in this world. They just want me to get good grades, go to church camp and win the big games. The football team is the closest thing I have to a brotherhood since I have four sisters (I'm the middle sibbling). John Jackson and Connor Mathews are my main nizzles but I can't count on them to keep secrets like the one's I need to disclose to you. So, that's why I'm writing you, Mr. Kern.

To give you a little background to my story. Let me begin without telling you too much that I go to one of the top high schools in the country. We have won 3 out of the last 4 state championships in football. I consider myself to be a very active personality in my school and take great pride in being a member of the class government. My GPA is tops. Last year I won the king of hearts award at our valentine's dance. This year is not mine, I can feel it. Not because I'm not up to the task of delivering a killer pep assembly speach, but because you can't be the king two years in a row. That's chill though. Right now it's looking like Tucker Luckingbill is gonna win by a landslide since Ethan Schmelling is his only competition, and I hear Tuck is gonna get out an Argentinian acoustic guitar and do this sort of Adam Sandler impersenation. It's so hilarious, bro! Everyone totally loves that shit!

So, you're thinking, 'hmm...this guy sounds like he doesn't have too many problems, eh?' Well, now I want to cut to the chase and tell you what's got me worried. Okay, I'm gonna be upfront here...I got a girlfriend. I can't tell you her name, but she's smoking hot and I can tell we were really meant for each other. It's like, you just don't grow up in the same side of town for nothing. when i used to practice my golf swing in the back yard, i used to hit the balls into her window just to say hi. those were the good old days. since we're all grown up now, we're getting pretty serious. we're so in love that even when one of us is gra-zounded, we sneak out and meet each other at the 50 yard line of Tiger stadium and make out until the paper boys are making their rounds. serious bro, it's tight man. somtimes i just turn on my iPod and listen to Jack Johnson and turn off.

so, let me get to the point here. my dilema is over this coming May for Prom. this year i want to do it all out. last year we had the hotel and all the nizzles in the house. the hotel thing is alright. it's tight. it's not sick and off the hook, but it's okay. however, this year i want it to be more about me and the girlfriend. it's all about us now.

you're thinking, awww...i know what he's up to. he wants some skins. well check it there bro. i'm on the mother. we're in love, true dat. and yes, we've done each other the favor of taking the v-cards away from each other. so check this out. after school and I saw this piece of shit mid 90's pickup with a topper in the lot with two guys in it. i thought, hey these guys don't look like tigers. they looked too old. i could tell because they rolled their own cigarettes. and tobacco is an instant saturday school at our school. the driver looked at me and sorta gave me the nod...I was like two cars down so I just walked over to them. their music was blasting some old shit i've never heard before. the guy's voice in the song sounded like chef from south park. he turned down his tunes and greeted me. his friend was sorta quiet and didn't do much talking. he had some small video camera and i figured they were recording me or something. these guys who i normally would think were creeps made me an offer that's got me thinking twice about our after hours plans. so,this guy,he called himself Sal and asked me if i wanted to make say, $1000 in less than 2 hours. he told me that all i had to do was bring my girlfriend with me from the party at the hotel,into their huge topper on top of that black truck of theirs and drive around for a while and make some what he called 'art' ....

now, i'm not dumn, cause i've seen some of those websites that my boyz and i watch the movies like mikesapartment or captain stabbin or bangbros. we've seen stuff like that. my family would kill me for that and send me to hell and back. but i've seen it and i think i could pull it off....if you check out collegefuckfest.com there are dudes out there that look my age doing hot chicks all over the place while doing beer stands and slammin energy drinks. i mean, a grand is a lot of money and i could really buy my girlfriend something great with it or we could go on vacation to the cancún or something sick like that. so, all we have to do is do it in the back of their truck for a while and stuff.....

so, this is where i need your advice...is this just totally nuts and the wrong thing to do? i mean, it feels wrong, but that's a lot of cash, man. it would be slammin. i want to keep this a secret so that's why i am enlisting your help, because i know you know your stuff, man. oh yeah, and i saw on these sites that all these guys shave their genitals...should i do that as well? it seems to look better when it's cleaned up, you know? do you have a preference on razors or waxing methods that you could help a brother out with?

yours truly,

J.J. Peters

First of all, I'd like to say that it's good to see that James Frey is not just sitting around feeling sorry for himself, and instead is pretending to be a suburban teenage boy whose most complex problem happens to be whether or not he should make amateur porn in the back of a truck. At least I hope to God it's James Frey, because if this were a real 18 year old, even the jaded Crotchety Bastard is taken aback. Crying out loud, where the hell do I start?

First off, J.J.(if that is your real name), I implore you to never use the word "nizzle" in a sentence again. No, seriously. Fucking stop it. I'm not sure exactly why it is you think that enlisting a cranky old son of a bitch like me is going to help you, but you asked for it...

Big tip of the day, son. If you have a secret that you can't even share with your best friends, the most cogent decision would most likely be to keep it to yourself, or go see a counselor. The thing not to do, of course, is send it to a blogger. If you haven't already noticed, we're generally whores. Honestly. We'll publish anything that comes across our fucking desks. I mean have you seen Pink Is The New Blog, for crying out loud? It's just some guy who thinks it's cute to put up pics snapped by the paparazzi and with stamps of snarky words and phrases. People eat it up with a knife and fork, and sop up the excess vapidity with a biscuit! It's exactly this kind of low impact drivel that helps keep Britney and Early Man Federline's gilded trailer lifestyle afloat.

Sorry, where were we? Ah yes. You were telling me about your stellar GPA. Color me skeptical, but while you may be magically adroit at almost all of your subjects, somehow I don't quite understand how it is that you've managed to get good marks in English. The grammatical inadequacies of your letter would give even the most frigid of English teachers the orgasmic thrill of whipping out their red pen and marking the hell out of your paper with orgiastic abandon. I'm sure you're great at delivering "speaches", but you probably can't write one out worth a "dam". In regard to these speeches(a word which I use with a great deal of trepidation), I certainly hope that your friend's oratory brilliance at the pep rally consists of a little more than cheap mimicry of a celebrity who has made his mark on society by playing a one of a long string of half brain dead nincompoops and making up asinine songs while strumming along on a guitar and sounding like giggling lobotomy patient on a field trip. Then again, they always say one should play to their audience, and if you and your friends are any indication, then Mr. Luckingbill has probably chosen an absolutely appropriate performance for his target demographic. I'm sure he will have a long and fruitful reign as the King of Hearts. For the sake of the school, however, I hope the peasants revolt and behead him. Figuratively, of course.

Yes, Mr. Peters, it sounds like you have the world by the balls. Good for you, with your "smokin' hot" girlfriend, and your "Jack Johnson". Ha. It won't always be all make out sessions and sunrises while listening to questionable musical choices on your iPod. No, no, no...you'll go to your college and she'll go to her college. Probably somewhere warm and chock full of half dressed co-eds. Oh sure, you're in love. For now. Just wait until that first Thanksgiving break, suffering through the awkward guilt as you'll both have had some sort of late night cram session in "Drunken Grab Ass 101" and realize that deep down you secretly want to see other people. Naked. You'll talk less and less until the two of you reach the very point at which you cannot stretch the absurd charade any further, and it's done. This will happen at Christmas Break. You will most likely spend the rest of the next four years wandering in an aimless and reckless manner, attempting to drunkenly stick your penis into anything female and remotely drunk, with varying degrees of success. After that's over, you will eventually become a bloated version of your current self and you will settle down in a two story suburban crackerbox that resembles the non-descript houses from Edward Scissorhands where you and a wife who puts up with your shit more than you deserve will have two or three of your children, at least one of which will be you all over again. Congratulations. Have fun with that.

Moving along, you used the word "nizzles". Again. My personal recommendation for curbing this particular habit would be for someone to release a colony of red ants onto your sphincter everytime you say that word. With any luck, you'll be cured of bad slang in no time. So you know what I'm thinking, eh? I can assure you, my lad, you haven't any idea what is going through my head as I plod through your ill prepared correspondence.

This is one of my favorite quotes from your letter thus far: "and yes, we've done each other the favor of taking each others v-cards away from each other."

Aww, who said romance is dead? It takes a very special poetic touch to liken the losing of one's innocence to the monumental occassion of getting the last hole punched on your Krispy Kreme card so that you can get a free small coffee with your twelve pack of donuts. You, young sir, seem to be to romance what herpes is to souvenirs. And "skins"? Seriously, did you just wander in from a Bell Biv Devoe video? Bloody hopeless, this one...

Moving along from your sweet nothings, you appear to have run into some questionable company in the form of two skeezy malcontents hanging out in a school parking lot. Let me repeat this: THEY ARE HANGING OUT IN A HIGH SCHOOL PARKING LOT. This doesn't sound like very savory behavior to me. Although from the sound of it, they may have been listening to Isaac Hayes. I imagine they can't be too terrible, but come on! Are you trying to tell me that two guys that you don't know want you to star in amateur porn with your nubile high school girlfriend, and you are seriously considering the offer? I don't know your girlfriend, but something is telling me that even if she's a complete wild woman, and by and large, I don't think most WASP-y suburban girls are, she is most likely not going to go for the idea of doing the bow chicka bow bow in the bed of these guys' truck with a video camera on. With this in mind, did it not occur to you that your logic for wanting to do it is flawed? Technically speaking, since you're only doing half the work, wouldn't you both get $500 for the performance? Besides, weren't you saying that you wanted to do it so you could do something nice for her?

Hey crazy idea time! Try this on for size: You could not treat her like a whore! How's that for a nice gift? And it's free! I know you are attempting to compare your situation to that of other amateur pornsites, but truth be told, these people generally have a either a serious lack of scruples or are really, really hard up for money. To be honest, it sounds to me like there is more than small part of you that wants to be in a verite skin flick. Frankly, it scares me a little that you sound this excited over the prospect of being one of the nameless jerkasses who end up floating among the nude flotsam and jetsam of our fine internet. You say you think this experience would be "slammin". I heartily disagree.

You see, J.J., when it comes to internet porn, everyone loses. The people in the videos end up feeling a great deal of regret, the guys making money hand over fist end up in a higher tax bracket because they're making so much bank it's ridiculous, and people without social skills who haven't had dates in many years feel terrible for watching it. Listen to me, kid. Leave all that internet porn stuff to us trained professionals. I meant, the trained professionals. The trained professionals...

To address the final part of your letter, there are some areas I don't feel comfortable giving advice. Incidentally, your crotch is one of those areas. If you want hair care tips, ask Vidal Sassoon or Jose Eber. Do what you like. It's your junk. Go nuts.

So, J.J., to sum things up, you are probably: a) a very bored Ashton Kutcher, b) some kind of closet pervert, or c) a Goddamned idiot.

HOWEVER...if you want my boring, earnest advice, I say treat your girlfriend like a lady. You've got many years of acting like a jerkass and screwing everything up ahead of you, so there's no need to get a head start on things. First love is a tenuous and special thing, and you only get one shot at it. Despite the fact you sound like a bit of a wanker, there seems to be some insane reason which I cannot discern at the moment that makes me feel as though I would genuinely hate to see you sully that experience due to the lure of a fistful of dollars and some smutty pseudo-Spielberg poking his Super 8 into your unmentionables. I never went to either of my proms, and I am sure they would have sucked anyway, but you seem to really revel in these kinds of ridiculous spectacles. You should enjoy it with someone who you deem special and seem to care about. Be a gentleman. And please, for the love of God, don't fuck it up.

Good luck on your future endeavors.

Sincerely,

The Discerning Kern

If you have a question, a comment, want some potentially disasterous advice, or are just plain masochistic, Ask The Discerning Kern by e-mailing him at thediscerningkern@gmail.com.