'Cause the everyday stuff's just for losers. ( 1,011 words, posted September 20, 1996; not to be read before September 20, 1999) 1 Clearly I had to devote some serious time now to thinking about how fucked-up I was. And when I wasn't doing that, I had to devote even more serious time to getting out there and being that fucked-up person, so I'd even have something to think about. 2 Finally I gave it all up and put out a call to higher powers from outer space or other universes or other dimensions or, even, other times. All I asked for was some sign or symbol or marker to indicate their interest in even considering saving this destroyed remnant of yet-untested, prototype, human vestige. "But don't all call out at once," I warned. I figured, you know, they could send one or more of the standard, universal, spiritual signs -- like a catastrophic 7.9 earthquake or the simultaneous suicides of 5 or 6 world leaders in each others' arms with their clothes off. Or, like the sudden, unexpected, unexplainable explosion of world historical landmarks or any simple accidental nuclear catastrophe -- or any fucking thing at all! -- just to let me know some force somewhere was on the job -- at least sometimes. 3 Eventually, though, I wised up and stopped waiting and took the last tiny drop of motivation I had left and forced myself to eke out the classic-progressive, urban-country, Love-hate song: "Here Comes That Human Thing (Again)," which somehow, despite thoroughly sucking, went immediately to number 1 with a bullet on all charts, for all times, across all genres and all peoples. But even this didn't seem to move one single molecule of serotonin or dopamine in the direction of getting me on top of my own human thing (again). So why had I even fucking bothered? 4 Then I came out with the runaway best-seller Assholes Anonymous, which espoused my basic belief that if people just stopped trying to hide what major assholes they were, and simply let it all out, the world would be a much happier place. This was followed, almost immediately, by my book The One Minute Asshole, which was written for people who didn't think they were assholes by nature, but wanted to be (maybe because they'd read Assholes Anonymous and found the rewards appealing). A few months later I came out with Winning Through Being An Asshole, which, as the title indicates, showed how to dominate situations by simply getting in touch with your own inner asshole. Then I wrote Sex and the Single Asshole, which showed how people looking for sex were always attracted to the biggest assholes, so if you already were one, you didn't really have to do anything except "be yourself." And, if you weren't one, you were in big trouble, but could easily remedy this by reading all my other books.

5 hen I did a quick series of age-related books like The Adolescent Asshole, The Adult Asshole, and The Infant Asshole, but for some reason, these didn't sell and I dropped my plans to add The Aging Asshole, The Middle-Age Asshole, and The Senile Asshole. By this time, my publisher had convinced me a radical change was necessary to keep the market niche alive, so I moved into fiction with The Asshole Who Came In From the Cold and Asshole on a Hot Tin Roof, in quick succession, and both were immensely successful. I followed with All the President's Assholes, which did OK, but not as well as the first 2. That's when I started thinking about getting away from books and maybe doing the series in other media like movies, songs and refugee camps. So I produced the film: "Asshole on the Installment Plan" -- but couldn't get a distributor. And I recorded the pop single, "Like an Asshole" -- but couldn't get airplay. And, when I started the refugee camp, "Assholes of the World United," I got absolutely NO recognition for it from either the Philip Morris Relief Unit or the Honda Cross. 6 I was forced to take a job on a street that was just the remnants of everybody's failure to give reality a vote of confidence, at a time when it really needed one. I was paid to not come to work and to send in a video excuse instead, or if I did come in, to just sit around with my co-workers and fuck everything up.

7 he walls of the home office were covered with large political posters that showed a normal-appearing man and a normal-appearing woman, walking down a normal city street, looking angry. The caption across the top in big boldface letters read: The Enemy of The People Is The People Blackboards were positioned throughout the building, wherever 2 corridors intersected, so men and women in tight dresses and spiked hair could stop at a moment's notice to work out complex Boolean equations that had just occurred to them in between dances. These people were mostly the stunt doubles hired by city management to try to flesh out the character of the town, or to, at least, try to water down any resistance to its lack of character. In order to become stunt doubles, they'd had to undergo the same evolution of form and consciousness that regular humans did, but an immortal soul had not been attached at birth. And so, though they could follow the general operational protocol for humans, something intangible and unnameable was missing -- like the loss of already inaudible frequencies above half the sampling rate, in a digitally generated sound. Links "I'd started with nothing, and now I was losing even that -- though all the meters and graphs and digital readouts said I wasn't. "Even my heads-up display was quiet where, normally, it would've blipped on some short-range, short-term, corrective, instructional video, had any one of my key parameters started to slip outside acceptable bounds."