I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds

You don't become famous so you can fuck the maid. You become rich so you can fuck the maid. If maid-fucking is what you're after, you just need a moderate middle-class income and the schedule flexibility to be home on a weekday afternoon when the service turns up. You become famous so you don't have to fuck the maid.

Chris Rock once famously said men are only as faithful as their options. This is partly true. There are complicated laws of spacetime involved, less to do with wormholes and causality loops than with the basic fourth-dimensional reality that time moves forward. Ancient cultures used to conceive of time as cyclical, but this is because ancient cultures are stupid. I give them credit for making the empirical observation of the repetition of seasons and the structure of the year, but it's not like they didn't notice grandma drying up and dying when she hit one too many spring cycles on that particular roulette wheel. Plus they tended to build giant fuck-off-sized pyramidy things way out of scale with the rest of the neighborhood. I don't trust any civilization that doesn't grasp the basic fundamentals of real estate. They always go broke eventually.

We modern types realize time rolls inexorably forward, like a bowling ball thrown by a four-year-old, crawling along the wax-slicked lane of no return,* edging toward one or another gutter or toward some sort of limp collision with the obstacle pins at the end, the outcome of which is irrelevant. There is no way in which a resolution will not be had.  And when it is, nobody will give a shit what your score was.

The point is, we don't have all the time in the world, no matter how either rich or famous we are. So the rich and famous men must consider their options. Option 1 we'll call the John Mayer, where you can leverage your status for some really high-class poon, but given the visibility, you're going to have to play it very carefully into a series of time-consuming relationship-type enterprises in order to crack each individual sexual code. If you're out there slinging it around, TMZ is going to jump out of a dumpster with a camera and suddenly, Jennifer Aniston stops returning your calls. All that work, wasted.

Option 2 I think of as the Tiger Woods, meaning you can have as much random, self-destructive sex you like, so long as it's with anonymous and discardable partners you can credibly describe as opportunistic money-seeking liars should one get loose and start talking to the dumpster press. The problem there, obviously, is in numbers. At a certain point you reach a critical mass where total containment is no longer possible as you have too many free radicals bouncing around. Once one leaks, you have meltdown, which looks an awful lot like your wife beating in your SUV windshield with a golf club.

You can do Option 1 or Option 2, but there really isn't time for both. I don't want to say the approaches are mutually exclusive, but they certainly aren't complementary.**

So I don't think we're going to hear that Arnold Schwarzenegger was up to his narrow hips in Cameron Diaz or Linda Fiorentino or other women who were hot in the '90s. But I would say that seeing the manner in which he chose to sow his Alpine rye, there's almost no way this is the last we hear of freakishly strong, gap-toothed fatherless children running around the state in humble financial circumstances. Once you go Tiger Woods, you go the whole golf metaphor, baby. Don't act like you don't know exactly what I mean.



----------------------


*unless you count the automatic ball return machine, which I don't. Because what am I, a Hindu?

**as with every rule, there are exceptions. In this one, it is, predictably, Madonna; because she's the center of the sport-fucking Venn diagram. She's all categories.