Written by Lars Hancock

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This Sunday, I was behind a brand new car that had a “99%” sticker on it, and it really got me thinking about how much Americans like to whine. And that, frankly, pisses me off.

Because if you look at a global worldview, Americans ARE the 1%. The poorest 5% of all Americans have a more prosperous life than the richest 5% of people in India, the second largest country in the world. The poorest 5% of Americans live better than 80% of Chinese people do. Overall, over 60% of Americans are in the top 10% of worldwide income. And yet we still find reasons to complain?

Look, I’m not saying inner city Detroit is the lap of luxury like the old Euclid Avenue Millionaire’s Row, but to some people in the world, well, it kind of is. Our country provides all of its citizens housing, food, and income regardless of the effort you put into it. Poor families have electricity, television, heat, running clean water, and indoor plumbing. Compared to a world where 16% of people can’t even get a measly bowl of rice a day, and there should be little to complain about.

But we do, and oh do we. We occupy cities demanding more, because the plenty we have been given isn’t enough for us. We can’t appreciate what we have, always looking hatefully on the more rich, coveting their precious goods and lifestyle. We make ourselves miserable wanting what we can’t have, instead of loving that we have so much.

On a related note, Forbes recently published a steaming pile of shit that awarded Atlanta the title of “Most Miserable Sports City”. They claim that true misery is more from “heartbreak” than in long term ineptitude, or analogously, people that get a bad steak at Ruth’s Chris are more miserable than starving peasants. “I ordered it medium rare, but it was more medium, and my Chateau Lafite wasn’t decanted!” Poor baby, here, let me give you a few grains of my fly-infested rice to help you feel better.

As any long suffering Cleveland sports fan knows, true misery is knowing your team isn’t going to contend year in and year out. True misery is showing up to all the games, season after season, expecting the team to find some new and creative way to blow the game, like throwing a helmet prematurely or having one teammate bang another’s mom in the hotel before the game. True misery is the absence of hope, the systematic absence of hope where even if a flower like Cliff Lee or CC Sabathia does manage to bloom in your field of thorns, it will soon be plucked by another to live on their mantle, next to their trophies.

Oh, you “1 percenters”, don't get the misimpression that I'm on your side on this. You have a moral obligation to limit your excess and give back to the community the prosperity you create. You have a moral obligation to stop hoarding your wealth and decide enough was enough, because those dollars you drain from the system to line your personal pockets are causing catastrophic economic consequences for this nation. What we have created in this country is an unsustainable standard of living via government assistance, and this tax on the system is growing out of control because people keep falling off the bottom end of the system. Your greed manifested in cutting jobs and wages for your own personal gain, and your inability to create real jobs and thus real prosperity, instead of merely exploiting people as expendable resources, is creating a severe income gap and inequality. This gap is worsening and will eventually create the collapse of the entire economic system is not corrected.

Now the government has absolutely no right, no foundation, and no obligation to keep this in check. It is not their job. It is your job Mr. One Percenter. You need to decide enough is enough. You need to decide that your vacuous trophy wife does not need to look like a Barbie doll, which I'm sure you'd rather be playing with anyway, so hundreds of thousands of dollars in plastic surgery is unnecessary. Please stop, she’s scaring the children. Cut the fat, live simply, don’t lust for excess. Preserve the system and provide for the many with the authority and responsibility with which you’ve been blessed.

As a warning, look at what happened to Major League Baseball. The Yankees and Red Sox of the world have destroyed the system to the point where nobody is interested in watching the game anymore. Viewership is declining, and young people are no longer interested in the sport. Hapless franchises such as Kansas City and Pittsburgh can't even pretend to field a competitive team, and will never field a competitive team again based off of the current economic system. Why should their fans give a shit about this game? The answer: they don't. They stopped caring and their money stopped flowing into the system, and baseball is dying across America. When only 3 or 4 markets have any sort of chance, only 3 or 4 markets care about the “American pastime”. The “haves” need to make a fair where every team can compete, because if they don't, their unfairly large share of the pie is going to be a much smaller number, as the pie itself will be and is slowly and gradually disappearing.

Net net, everyone needs to stop their bitching, work hard, and play fair, so we can all thrive together in a vibrant and healthy system.

Anyway, off to the questions.

Most people love taking about themselves, but there are certain things that are just boring and downright awful to listen to.  First thing to come to mind for me is hearing another person's poker or golf story.  In your most humble opinion what is the worst thing to listen to somebody else talk about? -The guy who always has the better story.

Sure golf and poker stories are annoying but there is no more annoying thing than listening to somebody prattle on about their precious children. People act is it nobody has had children before them. Each wonderful precious moment of their brats’ wonderful precious little lives is a new event that has NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, and gets shared as such. If I have to listen one more time to what is genius little Timmy is, I'm going to throw up on you, and then hit you in the face with a shovel. He’s not that special, and I don’t care anyway.

Besides, most of your stores about your children to make me want to call DPS. Yeah it was cute that a little Maggie called the wild coyote she was playing with in the backyard a puppy dog. The real story here is your negligence. She was in the backyard playing with a fucking coyote! Oh and I know your kids - you don't have to tell me stories about them. I know little Suzie speaks with a lisp and says things that sound like something she totally didn’t mean to say, and can’t comprehend the sexual innuendo in the misstatement. But she's 12, she should speak clearly, and she should also be out of diapers too. Your stories are painful, your kids are idiots, you’re a terrible parent. Just shut up before I need to go to the car and make a trunk liquor slushie to get through the day.

I'm planning on doing a ridiculous vacation next year. Call it a 30th birthday present for myself. I'm single and have a lust for adventure. If it were you, 3 weeks going everywhere across Europe or 3 weeks in Japan? –RickNashEquilibrium

I think this question really hinges on the pros and cons of Japan, and making the decision based off of those. On the positive side, you'll be much taller than all the population. Everybody will stare at you, especially the women, and as such your chances of scoring are incredibly high. And that is good. Japanese food is phenomenal as well. Fresh seafood, fresher and more delicious than you could possibly imagine, will be available to you everyday. And it will be prepared in unusual ways, which will be a great experience. Plus they have some great booze over there – sake, beer, whiskey - Japanese booze is awesome and they are not afraid to pour it liberally, meaning you can’t help but have a great time.

The downside is communication. First of all, you have no chance reading any signage. And if you get in a pickle, your internet translator will provide you characters you can't possibly pronounce or understand. When you need to say “help me I'm being held captive and man raped in the basement of the house next door,” your iPhone will only display kanji that look like, well, nothing you can comprehend. This could have obvious detrimental consequences. And a simple subway ride to town could leave you wondering why nobody is there, and why your testicles are glowing green and swollen, because you happen to get on the express to Fukushima, being completely unable to interpret the signage. Oops.

Europe on the other hand is the whole lot safer. Unless you dress and act like a Eurotrash douchebag, you're not getting laid. The food, you’ve had it all before. Sure it'll be better over there, but still you know what you will get, and you've experienced it before. You could probably navigate your way on pidgeon versions of the native language like a teenager figuring out a bra in the back seat of mom’s station wagon in the MetroParks. Overall, you can get around and have fun, but it wouldn’t be as different.

So how adventurous do you want to be? Personally, I’m 30 and single, I’m going Japan, green glowing balls be damned.

Some board members (Irish ones at that) denounce the merits of corned beef on St. Patrick's Day. You have any thoughts on that or methods to prepare this wonderful dish? Next week could be too late so let's do this now – peeker643

Traditions are traditions. You keep traditions simultaneously to keep life predictable and to keep it interesting. Once a year you pretend to be Irish, and racistly stereotype the Irish people as drunks that love to drink and eat corned beef. This is one of the forms of racism, inherent in all of us, that we are allowed by society to keep alive. Until the PC police take this away from us, there is no reason to deny ourselves this pleasure of denigrating a culture thusly. So absolutely, you must eat corned beef on St. Paddy's day.

As for a recipe, why bother? You’ll make it once a year, and the time and effort to make proper corned beef isn’t worth it. Corky and Lenny’s makes it every day, you’re not going to do better, so go to the experts. Why waste your time in the kitchen when you can be in a bar drinking Guinness, and trying to get some lassie to polish your shillelagh?

Why is it my girlfriend freely believes in UFO's, ghosts, ancient alien contact, witchcraft, and the possibility of BigFoot, yet finds it impossible to accept I am loyal and am not "spanking" anyone on the side? -pod's uncle

Your uncle has a lot of questions, doesn't he?

Here’s the thing about middle class white people: our lives are boring. We get up, we go to work, or take care of the kids, do basically the same fucking thing every day, and then try to drink enough at night to get us to the next day. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Your girlfriend asks herself “is this all there is to life”? The TV promises mystery, lust, intrigue, conspiracies, and an general lack of suckitude to life, a promise unfulfilled by this thing called “reality”. So in an effort to remain sane, she invents fun things in her brain. Bigfoot is real. The Browns have a competent front office. You’re giving the high hard one to someone on the side. Tristan Thompson wasn’t a completely awful pick. Fantasies that are completely unsupported by anything in reality and that make her life happy and interesting to believe.

Trust me, for her to think you’re putting the bone in someone else’s Dawg Pound, it is a compliment. It means she cares if you do or don’t, and gives you credit for being exciting enough to actually have a mistress. This is healthy for your relationship. Don't nurture it, but appreciate it.

What happened to alternative rock? Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Rage.....even the Toadies, Porno For Pyros, Macy's Playground type.......why did everything turn into either a) scream-o or b) indie rock? God the 90's was an awesome time for music.

OT, why is Nutella so freaking delicious, and why do Hipsters have to claim something so good as their own?

OTT, Is there anything more detrimental to modern music festivals than hipsters? -Gradysmanldy

Music sucks today because you are getting old.

Old people always bitch about how everything kids do today is complete and total trash. This is largely due to the fact that everything kids do today is complete and total trasht. Society is on a precipitous and clear decline, led by the increasingly spoiled and pretentious youth of each subsequent generation. Good music is about pain, and as society softens, real pain gets more obscured, and ennui takes over. Blues is the soul of music, and without actual blues, music has no soul. As a result you get autotuned douchebags singing about their penis. Please, shut up about your faux problems. They are boring and make for terrible music. And you’ve been handed everything in life, so you didn’t see fit to learn an instrument, which is why there is no artistry to the tripe you ejaculate out for public consumption.

This brings us to the hipster. Hipsters are vile humans. They dress like the nerds of old, so as to create a countercultural statement on society. The beautiful irony of this is that by copying the hipster look of others, you are in fact embracing the real culture of today’s youth instead of adopting a true counterculture. If you need any further proof what feebleminded followers hipsters are, LeBron James is a hipster.

Hipsters attempt to create an ennui about themselves that is just short of emo, but that still fabricates issues so they can feel pain and therefore emote on this manufactured pain. They embrace things that they think aren’t mainstream, but which are safe, easy, and comfortable. This is why they love Nutella. It is delicious, and just offbeat enough that they think they are cool by eating it. They claim it as their own because they think they are so awesome that nothing they do predates their conversion to hipsterdom – Hipster Über Alles. Music, food, and culture itself didn’t exist before they graced it with their wisdom. Arrogant little fucks that they are.

This is also why they kill a music festival like a nun kills an erection. You just want to go and listen to the music, but there are the hipsters casting derision on you because you can’t possibly appreciate their music that they invented. They talk down to you with an arrogance and faux elitism that is nauseating. Just shut up and enjoy the music – is that so hard? To a hipster, yes, yes that is.

Please email questions to lars.hancock@yahoo.com, tweet them to me @ReasonsImADrunk, or DM them to me in the forae to LarsHancock.