The Oracle of Bad Advice

People come to me with their problems. André needs guidance on girls. Ana needs someone to talk her down when the butterflies turn into something worse. Kathi needs help pre-grieving the boyfriend she hasn’t ended things with yet. I’m the guy. I always have a line ready—some half-philosophy that sounds just wise enough to get everyone through another forty-eight hours.

Naturally people start to wonder where it all comes from. Innate wisdom? Years of carefully observed suffering? No. It comes from Assi-Toni.

Assi-Toni—"Trashy Tony," more or less—was a YouTube fixture in the mid-2000s, the kind of man who’d plant himself in front of a webcam and deliver relationship philosophy so bluntly wrong it looped back around to something that felt, in the right light, like truth. His standing quote, which I’ve been carrying around like a cursed fortune cookie: No matter what you do as a man, no matter how you do it, it’s wrong—and that’s why more and more women in our generation are disappointed, because they’re fucked-up cunts.

I mean. He’s not entirely off.