Guilty Pleasure

Guilty pleasures? Yeah, I’ve got some. Who doesn’t? They’re nice to have, a little secret, something outside the normal bounds of what you dig. It’s a little decadent, and also I think that in this increasingly connected world it’s important to have something you hold back just for you.

Mine? I’ve got two. That Miley Cyrus song Wrecking Ball, and texting unsolicited dick pics to strangers.

I listen to Wrecking Ball a lot in the car. It’s not the kind of thing I normally listen to, doesn’t really blend with the rest of my music library. If someone were to hear me listening to Wrecking Ball I’d probably blush and pretend I was listening to it ironically. But I do love it. That, and harassing strangers with unwanted pictures of my penis.

Have you heard Wrecking Ball? You probably have. But have you really listened to it? It’s undeniably catchy, but more than that it’s actually sort of moving. Scratch that, it’s completely moving. Miley belts every line of that song like her life is on the line, like she’s playing not so much for the back of the theater as she is trying to get the attention of the people sitting in the diner across the street. There are lots of songs by Miley’s contemporaries that play with similar sentiment and themes, but Wrecking Ball sounds like something crafted by someone who has actually been chewed up by love and relationships and all that messy shit instead of just filtering their experiences through whatever they picked up watching Sleepless in Seattle or The Notebook. It’s like the difference between sending stranger a picture of your dick or a picture of your butt…a butt pic is like, okay, that’s gross. But a dick pic, you get one of those sent to your phone by a stranger? Your whole world gets turned upside down.

I guess the only downside is that sometimes a guilty pleasure comes with side effects that can be a drag. Like, sometimes when I’m listening to Wrecking Ball I’ll get all paranoid someone is going to catch me at it. When I listen to it in the car, I’ll take back roads wherever I’m going so I won’t end up at a stoplight beside someone I know. Or once in a while I’ll send a dick pic to a random number and then worry that the phone number belongs to a man. I’ll worry so much that sometimes I’ll call the number to see if a man or a woman answers. One time I called the number and it was a Pizza Hut, and that was a bummer because Pizza Hut doesn’t receive texts, obviously, which meant I wasted a picture.

If I feel so strongly about these guilty pleasures, why don’t I share them with people? Some folks say that it’s silly to have a guilty pleasure, that you should like what you like and own that. Setting aside the whole legal aspect of sharing my love of sending unsolicited dick pics, I think keeping that and Wrecking Ball to myself is a big part of the allure. I can be an adult man with a job and responsibilities, a contributor to society, someone with otherwise fine taste in music; if you knew me you’d have a sense of who I was locked into your mind. But regardless of your idea of me, I’ll never quite fit the mold you imagine, because when I get home at night I blast Wrecking Ball and snap pics of my junk from different angles to see which are the most effective—ideally, you want a pic that the receiver won’t quite recognize for what it is immediately, you want them to have to really study it before it suddenly becomes clear. Kind of like Wrecking Ball, actually! You think it’s just going to be this teeny bopper thing and then suddenly you’re nodding along with tears in your eyes!