Neil Strauss

As you all know, I only email you when I have something to say,
whether it’s about the topics in the game, emergency, writing, life
advice, or culture in general.

But today is an exception: Because someone else has something to
say. Every now and then, I get a letter in my inbox that I feel
compelled to share.

And, for readers of The Game, I feel I must share this. (On a side
note, thanks for the comments on the Stephen Colbert story in
Rolling Stone. Cool that so many of you saw it. Note that the
online version is NOT the same version that was in the magazine:
it’s just the outtakes.)

Anyway, as you may recall, we started a Book Club on this list a while
back.  It’s temporarily been on hiatus while I created book three
for the paperback reissue of Rules of the Game. And idle hands, it
seems, are the devil’s playthings.

So our fearless book club moderator, Josh Mills, decided to review
the Dr. Seuss children’s book One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
as if it were a seduction manual.

And, on reading his analysis, he just may be onto something, even
if his analysis is a little crude at times. (So do not read if
you’re sensitive to men being…men.)

This is what the book looks like if you’re not a Dr. Seuss fan
(which you should be because he’s a genius and one of his books
was in the top ten most influential list I sent you all a while
back):

http://neilstrauss.com/seuss.jpg

Anyway, read and enjoy.

———————————————————————————-
The following is intended to be nothing more than humorous
gibberish. Should anyone want to take offense, keep in mind that
its fucking Dr. Seuss.  And I’m really bored today.

Operating under the assumption that fish are women. . .

“One fish two fish red fish blue fish
black fish blue fish old fish new fish.
Some are red and some are blue.
Some are old and some are new.”

There is considerable physical variety out there. While you may
have preferences, i.e. red fish, it will be more beneficial for you
to practice your social skills on all varieties of fish. When you
have perfected your skill set, there will still be plenty of red
fish. And the experiences you have with blue fish, old fish, and
new fish will teach you about yourself and your preferences as
well. Perhaps, when you were younger, you had an experience with a
red fish. Being young, i.e., not smart yet, you may have decided
that the joy you received from that experience was due to the
redness of the fish. But blue fish can have a bangin’ hot ass too.

“Some are sad and some are glad.
And some are very, very bad.”

It can be difficult, particularly in the beginning, to get a clear
reading on other people’s private, more authentic personas as
opposed to their public personas. You need to be able to meet a
girl and figure out what the odds are that she will stab you.
Calibration is your friend.

“Why are they sad and glad and bad?
I dont know. Go ask your dad.”

If I can interject myself into this interpretation for a moment, it
has not been uncommon, in the past, for my Facebook status to read
simply, “BBC.” People who know me understand that this stands for
Bitches Be Crazy. While it sounds derogatory, it’s not really
intended that way, but as a sort of funny, exasperated
acknowledgment of the frequently vastly different emotional lives
women lead as opposed to men, as well as a shorthand way of letting
people know that I’m having some sort of chick drama. So what the
story is saying is that perhaps an older male or a more experienced
PUA can give you advice. You are probably overthinking it. Go
sleep with 10 more women.

“Some are thin and some are fat.
The fat one has a yellow hat.”

Women are natural peacockers. They get trained in accessorizing
early on. The fat fish, knowing she needs to draw attention away
from her less attractive feature, wears a yellow hat. This also
gives you an excuse to say, “Hey nice hat,” and thereby ride that
fat fish to your heart’s content or until your friends find out.
(Hey, Dr Seuss set up the fat joke here. What? You expected me to
just let that one go by out of political correctness? And for the
record, mopeds are fun as hell too.)

“From there to here,
from here to there,
funny things everywhere.”

Humorous things will happen to you on your quest to become a PUA.
Remember the story when Neil ended up on a fire escape with no
pants?  Now just imagine the dumbass things YOU are going to do
once you get in the field. . .

“Here are some who like to run.
They run for fun in the hot, hot sun”

If you don’t hit the gym every now and then, but manage to find a
fish in good shape, she will wear your sorry ass out and leave
you semi-conscious and gasping in a pool of sweat and tears to go
find someone who can keep up with her. Lift a weight every now and
then, slackass.

“Oh me! Oh my!
Oh me! Oh my!”

Be sure to inject emotion into your speaking voice. Pretend you
care about their cat’s personality.

“What a lot of funny things go by.”

Use situational comments to start a conversation: Did you see those
two girls fighting outside the club? It was crazy! And then blah
blah blah take your shirt off. (Note: blah blah blah represents
more steps and time than is necessarily apparent.)

“Some have two feet and some have four.
Some have six feet and some have more.”

This refers to the end of your bed. As your skill set progresses
upward, you will go from being alone under the covers to having a
woman with you to having threesomes and more.

“Where do they come from?
I can’t say.
But I bet they have come a long, long way.”

For an AFC, a hot woman is like your second grade teacher. It is
difficult to imagine them leading lives, particularly normal lives
wherein they do things like eat or sneeze or watch something boring
on TV because there’s nothing else on. So, in the AFC mind, a hot
woman is always just that, a hot woman, who he imagines living
somewhere magical and exotic, often in a landscape involving a
disproportionate number of large, fluffy beds. But what the story
is saying is that these women are bored, traveling miles and miles
in search of some sort of adventure to help them escape from their
drab reality. That adventure could be you.

“We see them come.
We see them go.”

Again, the fish/hot women are being viewed from the AFC viewpoint.
They are observed, not interacted with. They are “studied,” which
bears absolutely no relation to stalking at all. (Footnote: It’s
perfectly normal to know that a woman goes to bed an hour earlier
on Tuesday than she does on Wednesday. What? I just happen to be
in that neighborhood a lot.) Anyway, the point is, they move fast,
so make sure you always use the three second rule, or the
opportunity will pass you by.

“Some are fast.
And some are slow.”

This is the next thing you must do after using the three-second
rule: calibrate. Some fish/women will be easier to sleep with
because their goal that night is to have sex. Others are more
relationship-oriented and will require a greater time investment.
And some are in between, and will have higher ASD, which will
require more time to get past. She just wants some validation. So
maybe spend some time cleaning up the pile of sand before she lays
her eggs in it. It’ll make her feel good and it’ll make you feel
good.

“Some are high.
And some are low.”

This is a guideline on whether to neg or not. Some fish have high
self-esteem and are more emotionally stable and have shiny scales
and whatnot, and you may have to tease and disqualify yourself in
order to be considered a potential suitor. Other fish tend towards
lower self esteem and more emotional fragility. So you must be
careful here. The lower self esteem fish often masquerade as higher
self esteem fish–until you throw in one neg too many because you
had that extra shot of whiskey and all of a sudden you’re the guy
who made the girl cry at the party.  Good luck getting invited
back. Also, her friends hate you now too.

“Not one of them is like another.
Don’t ask us why.”

Predicting the behavior of women in no way implies understanding of
said behavior. We know that if they do X, then Y is a behavior that
has had Z result for some percentage of people when it happened to
them. But everyone is different, and no two approaches are the
same, so that’s what keeps the game exciting.

“Go ask your mother.”

This is a final warning to manage your expectations. Just because
you now know what you’re doing with women in no way guarantees
that you will not be hurt. In fact, it makes it much more likely
because you’re now actually out interacting with women instead of
waiting for your next sexual experience to finish downloading.
When you do get hurt, it’s okay, because your mom still loves you.
She will still hug you. Perhaps she will also have advice. (Just
don’t tell her the part about how the argument with the girl
started during a conversation about anal sex and how, really, it’s
perfectly natural and if she really cared about you, it shouldn’t
be that big of a deal. And anyway, this other girl I used to
date. . .)
In my final analysis of “One Fish, Two Fish” by Dr. Seuss, while
the manual does have some useful advice for the hapless AFC, it is
unfortunately not presented in an organized enough fashion to be
terribly useful. It’s kind of all over the place. And now, for
some reason, I want to go to the aquarium and touch myself. . .

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