Judging Books by Their Covers

Having resigned myself to failure in my real career, I began selling old books online last week in an attempt to find another way to fund my plastic surgery addiction. I started with necessary operations like breast reduction surgery and weekly earlobe adjustments, but my urge for physical perfection eventually led to slightly more elective procedures, like eyebrow enhancements and antler implants. I’m still not sure if I made the right decision, but now at least I can respond to “nice rack” jokes by goring people to death.

I expected my stockpile of books to fund quite a few surgeries, but it turns out that most of the tomes I own have market values ranging between seventy-five cents and free. I might have made a bit more than zero dollars had I sold the books sooner, but I figured the books’ value would magically go up if I held onto them for half a year after I graduated. By then, the textbooks would be outdated, I reasoned, thereby making them collectors’ items. Shockingly, my cunning capitalist gamble didn’t pay off, most likely because Half.com is patronized by communists.

While the absolute worthlessness of my textbook stockpile is commendable, what’s equally impressive is the collection of literary works I own that are valued at less than free. Half.com wouldn’t let me list about forty books from Lola’s collection of paperback fantasy and historical fiction novels. Intrigued, I decided to read a few of them, but to me “reading” and “making wild assumptions based entirely on cover art” are practically the same thing. Here are the plot summaries that resulted from that process:

The Silver Crown

In an age filled with magic and whimsy but not air conditioning, a swordsman battles four armed midgets for the right to stand in the cool shadow of a low-flying dragon. The fight comes to a sudden and violent end when the swordsman realizes that he has long arms and that his opponents can barely reach his kneecaps. After bravely dispatching four individuals whose ability to defend themselves was severally hampered by chromosomal growth defects, the swordsman heads off to a nearby fair to bang some wenches and complain about the lack of central air in medieval tents. The book is obviously a moral tale intended for children and anyone else who is too short to be of any value to society. The message is that people of small stature can expect swift and meaningless deaths when defying the wishes of those who are considered to be of average height.

The Alexandrian

Cleopatra’s boobs are escaping. Noble Alexander attempts to help her rein them in, but she refuses to accept assistance from any man wearing an iron skirt. Realizing that he has been shunned, Alexander spends the rest of the novel sulking and booting field goals through the uprights on Cleopatra’s head. This is the historical basis for that Peanuts gag where Lucy pulls away the football before Charlie Brown can kick it. It’s also the basis for that Scooby Doo episode where Shaggy kicks Thelma in the face for not putting out. The moral of the story is that prudishness almost always results in blunt force trauma to the head.

Dragon Rigger

In the future, or the past – or perhaps some kind of futuristic past that led to a mildly more confusing present – dragons, spaceships and flying women race. It’s an arrangement that makes sense if you understand how the idea for this book developed. The original manuscript focused on a group of hermits that specialized in making tasty soups. The publisher loved the draft but suggested a few minor changes, like adding dragons, spaceships and flying women and taking out all references to the hermits and their delectable liquid foodstuffs. In the final form of the novel, the big plot twist is that dragon-spaceship-woman races are rigged: The dragon doesn’t try, the spaceship abuses steroids, and the woman is too busy with food preparation and baby making to ever compete successfully. The lesson here is that reading fantasy novels is an activity best left to those who enjoy discussing missed opportunities for dramatic subplots involving soup.

Castle Roogna

A giant spider and a half-naked man offer to help the centaur build his castle. This is a euphemism for a wild spider-on-half-horse-half-man-on-half-naked-man orgy. After helping the centaur build his castle so well that the horse part of him limps for a week, the spider and half-naked man move on to less violated pastures. The centaur then returns to the unenviable task of building a castle to accommodate a creature that dines like a man and craps like a thoroughbred. The name of the castle, Roogna, is an anagram of Noogar, which seems vaguely racist. As a hideous freak of nature and a bigot, the centaur teaches young readers that that tolerance is a vice best reserved for beautiful people who don’t enjoy intra-species sex romps .

When Your Money Fails

Unlike the other books on this list, this one is mine, not Lola’s. It also can’t be considered a fantasy or historical fiction novel, so I created a hybrid genre for it that I like to call fantastic historical fact. I acquired this insightful piece of fundamentalist Christian journalism from a reputable garage sale years ago, and I’ve seldom regretted the eighteen cents I invested in it. According to the cover, the book exposes the efforts of world governments to summon the anti-Christ through clever uses of the number “666.” As the picture on the front of the book indicates, the primary agent of this apocalyptic conspiracy will be zombie George Washington. The undead president has a barcode on his head, suggesting that there will be so many zombie Washingtons that a scanner-based inventory system will be necessary to keep track of them all. The central point of the book is that you won’t have to choose a side in the final showdown between faith and patriotism if you just let zombie George Washington devour your soul.

Since so much information can be revealed simply by glancing at a book’s cover, reading has indubitably become obsolete. There’s no need to negotiate with the striking writers in California since the stuff that goes between the two covers of a book is now completely unnecessary. If pictures were added to the front of screenplays, that problem would take care of itself as well. In this way, with a little imagination and too much free time, it’s possible to undo in a few short hours the language advances mankind strove for thousands of years to achieve.

Day One of Ruining My New Computer

I bought a new computer yesterday and unplugged my old desktop for the final time. The transition was mildly traumatic. It was kind of like bringing home a new puppy and then beating to death the old dog with a rusty shovel. I admit that the old dog sometimes threw up in my shoes and mauled my children. I can’t deny that it ran into the coffee table every day for two and a half years after we rearranged the living room. I even grudgingly accept the fact that it never fetched the paper, saved my family from a fire, or stopped barking at that footstool I bought last March. The old dog may have ruined my footwear, thinned out my offspring and protected my family from the hidden malevolence of otherwise unassuming pieces of furniture, but that doesn’t mean it was a bad pet; it was just a pet that loaded Windows too slowly and therefore had to die.

Unpowered and alone, my old computer considers its future. At this point, its options are pretty much limited to “trash heap” and “flaming trash heap.” It might have made a good second-hand computer for someone if it didn’t have all those rusty shovel wounds on its sides.

With the untimely end of the old computer, my life will be very different. I won’t be able to brush my teeth, shave, shower and drive most of the way to work before my computer finishes starting up. If I haven’t written an article in nine weeks, I won’t be able to use the excuse that opening a new Microsoft Word document would require the assistance of a tech support guy in India, a shaman, and the blood of thirteen goats. And when I need to cry in front of a police officer to get out of a speeding ticket or to convince him not to arrest me for the pile of dead midgets that somehow ended up in my trunk, I’ll no longer be able to force out the tears simply by thinking of that little gray box full of wires that I bought for $12.50 from an emotionally unbalanced hermaphrodite smuggling diseased cattle into Quebec. I wised up this time and spent nearly twice that amount on my new computer. I also skipped the hermaphrodite by buying directly from the diseased cattle, which I still consider to be a more reputable hardware manufacturer than E-Machines.

I like to keep computer towers under my desk so I can kick them over whenever I experience any emotion other than absolute happiness. The fact that my old computer lasted for five years under those conditions is a testament to the sturdiness of its design and the girliness of my kicks.

In a way, I didn’t really murder my old desktop. I just treated it like I would any of my elderly relatives: I took it off life support and shoved it in the closet. It was five years old, after all, which is like 35 in people years. People and things that get that old should be burned as firewood to warm those of us who are still young and spry. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to keep my old computer relatively unincinerated for next few days. Like an enemy combatant, the device must be kept functional just long enough to allow all of its useful information to be extracted through routine file transfers and possibly some waterboarding.

As my electronic workhorse for half of a decade, my old computer’s hard drive is full of files worth saving, like old term papers, family photos, and a pornography collection so massive that its mere existence has caused no fewer than two popes to have strokes. If I don’t purge and then destroy the old computer, I fear the aging electronic abacus will one day use all this information against me, most likely by making a special guest appearance on the daytime talk show circuit. Oprah’s guests that day will include my old hard drive, the Vatican guard and some very perplexed representatives of Frito-Lay, whose products are featured prominently in all of my videos. It’s not easy living with a corn chip fetish.

Lola doesn’t let me keep corn chips in the house for obvious reasons. Generic Doritos, however, have never been accused of arousing anybody, which is exactly why our pantry is full of them.

All future blog updates will be written on my new, super-fast computer, which is actually a refurbished unit that will be just as slow as my old computer as soon as I transfer over the mandatory fifty gigs of corn chip porn. By buying a middle-of-the-line, previously-owned computer, I thought I was being quite reasonable, but Lola was less than pleased that I exceeded my $26 electronics budget for the year. If I need anything else in 2008 that has wires and needs to be plugged into the wall, I’ll just have to make it from wood, twine, and the smoldering plastic remains of my old computer.

Wardrobe Dysfunction

I’m not the snazziest dresser in the world. I’m ranked second or third in most fashion polls, although one magazine made the cruel accusation that I’m only the fourth best dressed man in human history. I cried for two days after I found out about that one. My sense of style might be surpassed by a select few, but my outfits still radiate enough sex appeal to cause cancer. When I feel like blending in with all the ugly people around me and not killing my coworkers, I wear a trash bag and wooden clogs around the office. On those days when I need lethal levels of fashion to do my job, however, here’s what I wear.

For those of you who are a bit nervous about following in my footsteps, I’ve included a helpful description of how each piece of clothing fulfills both requirements of the business casual dress code:

Long-Sleeve Button-Down Shirt

You are what you wear. If I put all three of these shirts on at once, I could be a stealthy lesbian who works for UPS.

Business: Any man who has the patience to fasten more than six consecutive buttons must be a true professional. I can usually make it through three or four buttons before I give up and close the rest of the shirt using duct tape.

Casual: The top button is supposed to stay unfastened, which leaves your chest exposed to female co-workers and passing wild animals. Nothing screams “laid back” like getting mauled to death on Bring Your Angry Lemur to Work Day. One could argue that such a day is pointless since lemurs lack the intelligence to ever succeed in the workplace, but that logic didn’t stop the founders of Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

White T-Shirt

I try to always wear one piece of clothing that I can wave to make a swift and safe surrender should the Canadians ever invade.

Business: This extra layer of clothing helps keep the sun’s harmful rays out and my dangerously manly chest hair in. I’m not sure what will happen if sunlight ever touches my painfully white torso, but I’m fairly confident the resulting glare would cause passing airplanes to crash.

Casual: It turns out this particular garment burns much slower than anything else I wear. That comes in handy when I need to get out of meetings by lighting myself on fire.

Belt

While clever, the reversible quality of this brown and black belt is pointless since dark matches everything.

Business: My pants could stay up on their own, but I wear a belt anyway as an extra layer of protection against surprise depantsing. I prefer my workplace depantsings to be scheduled well in advance.

Casual: Its two-colored nature allows me to switch identities quickly. Boss: “Chuck, why haven’t you finished that project?” Me: “Chuck is wearing a brown belt. This belt is clearly black.” Then a regularly scheduled depantsing creates a diversion so I can slowly slink away.

Khaki Pants

The United Nations debated for sixteen days before finally settling on khaki as the official pants material of the white-collar world. Close runners-up were denim and platemail.

Business: Too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, these pants were designed to kill any chance the average man has of producing healthy sperm. Modern offices want their workers to be productive, not reproductive.

Casual: There is a bit of creative freedom when it comes to bland, brownish pants. I prefer to wear pairs that are a few inches too short to allow for some ventilation and to provide easier access to the secret beef jerky pieces I tie against my lower leg.

Brown Dress Shoes

These shoes are scuffed and torn from my intense daily regimen, which consists mainly of sitting and occasionally walking short distances to find new places to sit.

Business: On those occasions when I venture off the sidewalk, the bottoms of these shoes have enough crevasses to hold mud for days. This leaves a trail of slowly drying dirt chunks that proves helpful when I need to navigate the cubicle maze that is my office.

Casual: The shoes are a little too big, so I use them to house my auxiliary beef jerky supply. I don’t even like beef jerky that much, but it’s useful when I need to barter my way out of the career-ending situations that tend to emerge quite frequently when you have dried meat hidden in two or more places on your person.

Short White Running Socks

By leaving my ankle scandalously exposed, I bestow upon that joint super-human flexibility and exponentially enhanced sex appeal.

Business: The glaring whiteness of the socks and their total lack of color coordination with anything else I wear draw attention away from my numerous facial deformities. My wife still hasn’t noticed that I wear an eye patch.

Casual: Some of my socks have holes the size of doorknobs, but I don’t need to replace them since the beef jerky keeps my feet dry and extra salty.

To complete this amazing ensemble, feel free to wear a pink sombrero or bloody hockey mask depending on which is more appropriate for your particular office. Don’t feel bad if you have difficulty pulling together this outfit at first. After all, I spend seconds a day picking out what to wear, although sometimes it’s even less than that if my wife does it for me. Considering the high value of my time and my incredibly short attention span, committing such a large portion of my day to fashion is a bold but ultimately worthwhile investment. That’s why I’m one of the few people to have my beauty listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

License to Grill

I’ve never been diagnosed with a terminal disease, but I imagine that news is a lot less devastating than learning you’re no longer allowed to grill on the deck of your second-story apartment. My lease has a clause that lets my landlord change the rules at any time, a provision I considered as meaningless as my wife’s warnings not to use the dishwasher to clean wine glasses, the good knives, or the cat. But on the first day of the year, the apartment’s management staff delivered the new policy along with the promise that I could appeal anything I found to be unfair by curling up and dying in any of the complex’s conveniently located Dumpsters.

I’m not a master chef, but I do enjoy holding raw meat over a fire just long enough to mildly diminish my chances of contracting Brucellosis. When I lived on my own, the grill allowed me to rise above my regular diet of microwaved hotdogs in favor of hotdogs I grilled, put in the fridge and then later reheated in the microwave. The taste difference was minimal, but the black singe marks on those vaguely meat-like wieners always made me feel a little bit less pathetic than I really was. A grill is both cheaper and warmer than a therapist.

Under the new rules, I could technically let a known terrorist stay in my apartment as long as I didn’t keep him here for more than seven days. Anyone who grills on the second floor, however, can expect a swift trip to Guantanamo Bay.

The main reason I’m so mad about the policy change is that I picked this apartment specifically because it allowed grills on the second floor. Through my exploitation of this lack of statutory respect for fire safety, I learned to prepare more challenging foods, like slightly plumper hot dogs. After I got married, I grilled even more often to pretend that I was contributing to the household, an illusion that would often shut up my wife for minutes at a time. I eventually came to realize that the grill aptly symbolized my marriage, both of which are poorly constructed and filled with flammable gas. The latter marked my only meaningful contribution to the relationship.

Since the apartment complex’s ban on grilling could cause irreversible harm to my diet and my marriage, my only choice is to look for loopholes in the new rules. The text of the ban says that apartment residents on the second floor cannot grill “on the deck.” The work-around for that particular phrase is fairly obvious:

This picture is just blurry enough to be inconclusive. Most think it shows an indoor grill, but others argue that it depicts a fridge or possibly a mountain lion.

I was so pleased with my idea that I considered patenting it, but I soon found out that someone already invented an indoor grill. It’s called a stove. If the landlord really thought through his grill ban, he’d realize that the safest place for me to prepare my food is on the deck, where the number of walls I could potentially ignite is reduced by one. I don’t use the oven much, but my attempts to make toast have resulted in no fewer than two toaster fires in my lifetime. Really, allowing me to be indoors at all is an immense fire hazard, regardless of whether I’m preparing chicken on an indoor grill of running cold tap water over an already moist sponge.

Even though indoor grilling is not specifically forbidden under the new rules of my lease, I might lose my security deposit when I cut the necessary eight-foot-wide ventilation hole in my ceiling. If I can’t grill inside, my next option is to keep the grill hidden on the deck and use it only in quick, secretive bursts. There’s an outdoor closet attached to the deck where I could hide the grill in between meals, but the propane-fueled wonder will break apart if I move it too much. My former roommate and I spent upwards of three hours putting the thing together, a process that required us to bend, twist and sometimes molest an unnerving number of parts. The fact that the grill still stands calls into serious question the law of gravity and several other basic tenets of modern physics.

I need a way to hide the grill from prying eyes without frequently moving it, a challenge that generated the following clever solution:

Before: A grill.

After: No grill.

If you’re wondering where the grill went, you’re not alone. There’s no way anyone on the apartment’s staff will be able to find my precious food preparation aid when its camouflage is activated. I am concerned, however, that birds unaware of the grill’s invisible presence might fly into the contraption, thereby disabling its state-of-the-art cloaking mechanism. That’s why I came up with one more way to preserve my constitutionally-protected right to grill.

Upon rereading the new rules, I discovered that you can’t grill on the second story, but you can have children. The policy says nothing about grilling things on or in your children. That’s how I came up with this solution:

He has his mother’s confused, satanic eyes and his father’s sexy grill-shaped head.

The new rules don’t have a provision for paternity testing, and my son’s inhumanly blockish skull and suspect dental arrangement cause him to look a disturbing amount like me. Furthermore, there’s no provision in the lease to kick out children who are ill, so I don’t see how they can complain if my son occasionally has a fever of 450 degrees. As far as I’m concerned, cracking open his head to warm my hamburgers isn’t grilling; it’s good parenting.

Now that I have a solid plan, I’ve decided to take the risk of moving the appliance to the outdoor closet, where it can safely wait out the winter. A grand battle with the leasing office looms in the warmer months ahead. Until then, sleep well son.

The grill lies dormant, peacefully dreaming of its next chance to burn down the entire apartment complex.

Holy War

Two rival churches are battling for my soul, a fight that I consider equally flattering and baffling. Like that fat girl with herpes who can’t find a prom date, my soul is considered to be damaged goods by most major deities. A lifetime of shunning good works and publicly mocking charities has left my immortal self black and shriveled, like a metaphysical raisin or one of those weird-looking turds I fire out of my rectal canon after eating at McDonalds. Recently, a local Christian church and a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses began assaulting my apartment complex with a tasty mix of packaged foods and self-righteous condescension in an all-out effort to convert local heathens like me. I’ve decided to chronicle their holy war to let the competing sides know just how much progress they’ve made.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses struck first by leaving propaganda in the one place I’m truly susceptible to spiritual enlightenment: the apartment’s communal laundry room. When my pile of dirty clothes reaches critical mass, I silently wish someone will push their religious beliefs on me while I dump my sweat-stained shirts and semen-soaked formal dinner napkins in the washing machine downstairs. That’s where I found two issues of The Watchtower, a hip religious magazine that entices young readers to convert with fun questions like “Do you view the future with hope or apprehension?” and “Why does God permit wickedness?”

There’s got to be more effective religious imagery available than open French doors and an Indian chick stealing a white baby.

The first question wasn’t very effective at convincing me to convert since I view the future with a mix of lust and slight bowel discomfort. I really should stop eating at McDonalds. As for the second query, I attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through college. That’s how I know God lets bad things happen to good people because he’s a jerk, although it’s possible that I zoned out on a few of the relevant lectures. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ publication doesn’t have much better luck on the inside. One caption states, “Heart-to-heart talk about matters of faith does not happen by accident.” Actually, accidents happen all the time in my religion thanks to the Catholic Church’s stance on birth control. Just ask the majority of my siblings.

Not to be outdone, the local Christian church struck back by hanging a bag on my doorknob. At first I was a bit perplexed since the bag wasn’t engulfed in flame and filled with animal waste – the typical Catholic way of dealing with followers of religions slightly different from our own. I guess non-denominational Christians rely on focus groups instead of arson and biological warfare when welcoming non-believers to the neighborhood.

Good things come in small packages with attached fundamentalist agendas. 

I’m still impressed by how perfectly the Christian church tailored the bag’s contents to me and other unclean dwellers of this particular apartment complex. The first thing I noticed about the bag was its color. The paper sack was bright orange because everyone knows heathens have poor eyesight. Had they put a blue bag on my doorknob, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it for weeks. Salvation can’t be put on hold just because I’m mostly blind after years of masturbating and shooting heroin directly into my eyeballs.

I became even more impressed by the brightly-colored conversion bag when I explored its contents. Based on where I live, this Christian church correctly assumed that in addition to being damned to hell, I’m also poor and hungry. That’s why they gave me the perfect gift: a jar of peanut butter and a box of Pop Tarts. If there’s one thing the unwashed underclass loves more than frequenting prostitutes and worshiping Satan, it’s eating peanut butter and Pop Tart sandwiches. To satisfy my own curiosity I ate one of those religiously-motivated delicacies. My initial reaction was that it actually tasted pretty good. My secondary reaction was throwing up for half an hour.

At least they didn’t take the biblical route and fill the bag with bread and dead fish. 

In case I missed the bag’s message, the Christian church included a helpful note that listed the church’s location and the times and dates of its services. Their point was clear: They’d given me enough calories to survive another few days of my empty existence, and now I owed them big. I don’t have much desire to go to a meeting of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I might actually show up to one of the Christian church’s meetings. I’ll just make sure to eat a peanut butter and Pop Tart sandwich shortly before I show up.