John Mayer’s music is basically garbage, but we have to admit we sincerely enjoy him as a personality. We admire how revealing he is in interviews, on Twitter, and in bathing suits and how he’s always seemingly trying to figure things out and grapple with the Big Questions. And he’s so self-aware! Like even of the fact that his personality is more compelling than his music: “All this weird shit about me? All this strangeness? I wouldn’t have a music career without it,” he tells Rolling Stone this month. And why shouldn’t we listen to him get introspective about his psychological struggles? Like Ken Kesey and those other folks who dropped tons of acid in the sixties, John Mayer has been through something profound and weird and warped and extreme— being famous in the aughts — and while it has clearly screwed him up, we suspect we can all learn something from his experience.
Thus, we present to you the Tao of John Mayer, as extricated from his interview in Rolling Stone:
On the Importance of Emptying the Mind
“I mean, I have masturbated myself out of serious problems in my life. It has a true market value, like gold bullion. First of all, I don’t jerk off because I’m horny. No, I do it because I want to take a brain bath. It’s like a hot whirlpool for my brain, in a brain space that is 100 percent agreeable with itself.” Presumably, sex with Jessica Simpson does the same thing.
On the Interconnectedness of All Things
“I met a girl one time in Vegas. Her name was Dimples, and the ‘s’ in Dimples was a dollar sign. I have this weird feeling, a pride thing, for the people I’ve had relationships with. I still feel like I’m with them, in the sense that if I f—ed Dimples, what does that say about someone like Jen? I feel like it’s all connected. How could I ever cosmically relate these two people? What would I be saying to Jen, who I think is f—ing fantastic, if I said to her, ‘I don’t dislike you. In fact, I like you extremely well. But I have to back out of this because it doesn’t arc over the horizon. This is not where I see myself for the rest of my life, this is not my ideal destiny,’ and then I see myself f—ing Dimples? What does that say for my case?”
On What One Should Look For in Another Person
In a word, energy: “I don’t care about anything other than energy. That’s why people think, ‘Is he bi? Is he that?’ I’ve never slept with a man. But I get it. I’ve seen pictures of men on the Internet that are sexier than pictures of most women.” In another word: vaginas. “Isn’t it also about a beautiful vagina? Aren’t we talking about a matrix of a couple of different things here? Like, you need to have them be able to go toe-to-toe with you intellectually. But don’t they also have to have a vagina you could pitch a tent on and just camp out on for, like, a weekend? Doesn’t that have to be there, too? The Joshua Tree of vaginas?”
John Mayer’s Dirty Mind & Lonely Heart: New Issue of Rolling Stone [RS via Us]
