The Importance of Being Cool

It had to come to this eventually, didn’t it? You had, in effect, caused yourself to be ostracized from the right group, the “cool kids” here at school, and the only way to remedy it now is a thorough breakdown of all various issues. You see, there are a number of things that we, the “in” crowd do that you do not, and a further number of things we do not that you do. That needs to change.
Let us address one of the most grievous issues first: It’s obvious you’ve been thinking. And not just idly thinking; you’ve been doing some real, solid introspection. Which is just WRONG! What were you thinking? I’ll tell you what you were thinking: something, and that is precisely what you shouldn’t be thinking. You are a person of thought, and of clarity, and that is inexcusable. Your contemplations may lead to legitimate creativity, deepening of character, and, worst of all, a progression and maturation of yourself.

In contrast to your obvious faults, allow me to introduce you to a perfect specimen of cool-ness: Chaz Chazzington. Chaz knows that the key to cool lies in an utter non-progression of personality, a stagnation of interesting features and thought and a reliance on pop-culture for new interests. When faced with the ghastly prospect of having free time to think, he assuages his mind with low-energy mental churnings regarding his social life, like his girlfriend, his other girlfriend, his friends’s girlfriends, and his “Bro-time.” He also makes absolutely certain to assault his eardrums with something so harsh and offensive to taste that it numbs him, utterly clearing his mind. That ensures he won’t be having any of that loathsome maturation today!

This leads us to our next point: Your tastes. You may think, looking over your “favorites” in all the different forms of media that you could be considered to have “good” taste. You would say you like good movies, good music, and good art. You would be correct, and that needs to stop. All forms of media are simply vehicles for ideas, and things considered to be in “good taste” are therefore obviously conveying good ideas intelligently. Which, come on, is obviously bad! Did we not just cover in the previous section the danger of your own, self-generated ideas? And now you want to expose yourself to the ruminations of the world’s great minds? Whatever is wrong with you?! What are you, some sort of insatiable idea-glutton, gorging your already dangerously clever mind with more brilliance? You obviously want to be left out of the “Cool” people forever. Cool people don’t want clever. They want genital-based jokes that insult whoever they have decided they dislike that hour.

Chaz knows this. He GETS it. What, you might ask, does Chaz like to listen to for music? He likes his bass loud, and his bass louder. Yeah, bro, he knows he said bass twice. That’s how loud he likes it. LOUD. There is not a single song on his brand-name music-playback device that does not degrade women or glorify sex/violence/money. The word “love” appears 6 times only in his 3000 songs, and twice it is followed by, “dat booty.” As for movies, he likes them raunchy, or shooty, or exploding. That’s it. Those are literally his only criteria for value in a film. Well, it does get bonus points if the attractive female lead shows her breasts. Chaz likes that. And art? Chaz thinks that he’ll just leave that for the gays, right guys? Hyuck. Hyuck.

There are many more fields in which your cool factor is painfully deficient, but there is one which should deal with most of them handily: your personality. It has come to our attention as a hivemind of popularity that you are being your own person an awful lot. You are making your own decisions based on personally formulated values, and expressing yourself the way you feel you most want to. To this, we have but one thing to say: “How dare you?” We are, frankly, offended by the ostentatiousness of your individuality. What are you doing, being yourself? Why aren’t you busy being us? Are we not worth being? You are pretending to be happy with your own characteristic style of dress, speech, and action. But we can tell that on the inside you are a shriveled husk of a human being, longing with all your withered heart to be cool, like us.

Chaz is like us. Chaz is cool. Chaz understand that the total obliteration of self is key to his happiness. And as Chaz perfectly mirrors our every facet, we are there not only as a collective of popular humanity, but also as that small voice that whispers in the back of his mind as he tries to sleep but still can’t. No Chaz, that isn’t hollow emptiness. Of course that isn’t an aching lack of self-fulfillment throbbing in your chest, Chaz. That’s victory. You’ve won, Chaz. You’ve won it all. You’re cool. And now you’ll always be cool, like us. Cool-ness is eternal, and your success in popularity now, in High School, will surely carry you over, satisfied, through the rest of your life. You are cool.

And that’s all that really matters.

One day I pooped

Three years ago, I shit in a gas station toilet.

To understand the context in which this tale exists, it’s necessary to enlighten you first and foremost as to my excretory tendencies. As my roommate might attest, I relieve myself of my solid-waste burdens more or less two times as frequently as any other person on the planet. That is, my body calls for a mandatory, everything-must-go anal purge on roughly the same timetable as Old Faithful, give or take a few minutes depending on my corn intake. This is normally.

On the fateful day which I describe to you now, it had been 2 days since I had last deposited my smelly bounty, and dreadful things were brewing. My gut had been aching on-and-off but I hadn’t, despite many efforts, been able to squeeze out the villainous shit-log which was determinedly gummin’ up mah works. But now, we were on our way home from Cedar Point, and about an hour into our drive I realized that 12 hours of consuming nothing but deepfried lard and sugar at the amusement park had finally awakened the horrorterror of fecal wrath which lives in my colon. Violent, stabby pains lanced my abdomen, and I suddenly was made aware that I needed to shit with approximately the same intensity with which an Orca whale floating several hundred meters above the ground must fall. My stomach gurgled in agony, and suddenly I knew what intestines sounded like when they wanted to kill themselves. I needed to make my plight known to the rest of the vehicle.

“Mother,” I announced, “Satan has gathered his armies at Hell’s Gate, and that Gate is my asshole.”

In short order, we stopped, and I waddled gallantly into the dingy Speedway and into the miserable rat hole they called a restroom. There were two urinals and two toilets. In the point .3 seconds it took me to whip into the nearest stall and de-pant, I noticed shoes in the adjacent stall. I felt deep sympathy for them but, as butt cheek met porcelain, within me I knew that it was all over. There was no turning back.

For a moment, I restrained the cruel tides of fate and ass-batter, and I knew then how the men felt in the Enola Gay, knowing that with one, subtle movement, Nagasaki would be no more.

My stomach crowed its dirge of loathsome apocalypse once more. I begged Nagasaki’s forgiveness.

“FOR NARNIA” I bellowed as I pounded the walls of the stall with balled fist. My genitals had long since retracted into my body like a dick-turtle out of pure terror at the coming crap-aclysm. For an instant, the compacted crap at the colonic exit held, too long dried and hardened to budge. But the white hot atomic fury of the incoming B.M quickly overpowered it. At t+ .04 seconds my sphincter was outclassing jet-liners in terms of thrust. My asshole had metamorphosed into a Space-Shuttle powered by Mach 5 shit and shame. The Sun has has solar flares which have ejected less material with less intensity than I propelled blistering diarrhea from myself. The tiles into which the toilet was bolted had cracked, the walls of the stall all shuddered and creaked away from the nuclear asstastrophe. The tank on the toilet exploded because it committed suicide. I knew precisely what the word “shitstorm” truly entails.

At this point in time, the infernal and eternal Eldritch majyyks which have clearly possessed my rectum begin flowing outward from my innards with the shit, a sewageous torrent of evil energies, promulgating bizarre events and upsetting the very balance of nature.  Dogs in the surrounding 4 counties won’t stop barking for two days. The Ohio river flows backwards for ten minutes, a seismograph in Belize registers a 2.4 and somewhere in Albania, a gastroenterologist begins to weep but doesn’t know why.

There is one ultimate, cacophonic explosion of shit which thunders from my now-gaping poop-chute, a concussive blasst which rattles silverware in drawers up to 3 miles away. In this moment, I am the peaceful eye of the hurricane, I am Nirvanic, I am bliss itself. My soul rests, having cleansed itself of the grimdark turd-taint which had infected it. As little dribbles of overflow shit glide down the exterior of the bowl, and the sewage stench of my criminal droppings waft throughout the bathroom, simultaneously I hear two things: My stomach gurgles once, and I realize with terror that it is not over. In fact, the worst has yet to come. And my stall neighbor says, and I quote: WHAT THE FU-

There’s no longer a Speedway there.

LOOK AT NIETSCHE'S FREAKING MOUSTACHE

THUS SPAKE THE ‘STACHE

A pondering on whiskers.

BEHOLD. Or, wait. Okay, here: Scroll to the bottom, BEHOLD for a little while, and then flip back here. I’ll wait. Okay...GO............we good? Cool.

ANYWAY. The staggering mass of philtrumnal follicles by which I am certain you have just been shocked into silence belongs to none other than the philosopher with whom I am reasonably certain you are familiar, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is perhaps most famous for his proclamation that, “God is dead.” Let there be no doubt in your mind that the extravagance of that lip-foliage which so broodingly lurked about Nietzsche’s talk-hole played a not insignificant role in this. You see, men are, by nature, feeble and cowardly. They quail from harsh reality, and appeal to divinity to comfort them. However, Nietzsche needed none of this. So proud and fuzzy a prow did he have perched upon his lip that he no longer felt any need for “comfort.” As the King of Moustaches would probably be unable to have been disproven to have said in the unlikely circumstance that there was such nobility (which there totally should be): “Dogs? Man, forget dogs. Moustaches are where it’s at. They are like these constant companions, Fur-Golems composed of testosterone and rage existing solely to be your best bro forever. It’s awesome.” Yeah. That’s totally something that hypothetical guy might say. imaginary royals of facial fluff aside, once our dear friend Nietzsche had cultivated what was essentially the effing Congo of moustaches, he found he had all the companionship a man could need. Not to mention, so coarse and rugged were the tendrils of masculinity he sprouted like a freaking face-farmer that his glorious mouth-drapes were essentially a multi-tool, eliminating the need for many tools. He could get down to scraping paint, grouting floors, cleaning fish, washing/waxing cars, and even ESPECIALLY stabbing vagrants, all with his transcendentally magnificent  ode-via-appearance to the Gods of Manhood.

It is also well known that it was Nietzsche who popularized the term, “Übermensch,” or “Superman.” A lesser writer might churn out a tired line about how Nietzsche’s moustache helped make him a “Man of Steel” or some such thing, but I am too cautious by half to fall for that. I know that would, in fact, be an insult, degrading the magnificence of the Master Philosophers Visage-Shrubbery by likening its coarseness to mere steel. Because it is actual documented historical FACT# that the first steel wool was made when Nietzsche nuzzled up against an I-Beam. Nietzsche often spoke of mankind evolving into a new, higher form with his Übermensches, but the sense in which he spoke referred to our collective mental, philosophical and cultural state. But make no mistake, he had already more than accomplished the evolutionary ascension to a higher form in a wholly physical way through the follicular protuberance his face rebelliously extruded, as though daring the world, “What. Make me.” This type of growth is more than just a shirking of grooming trends, this is an advance in the arts of Moustachery on a very fundamental level, this is less like facial hair and more like the horns of a Mountain Goat, a fierce and ostentatious declaration of the possessor’s superiority. Clearly our Dread-Lord of Face-Fuzz represents the pinnacle of human development, and the beginning of a new, greater species, Homo ‘Stachiens. I envision a glowing future where an entire society of brooding, nihilistic mustachioed super-geniuses tromp heavy-footed about, occasionally entering into fierce tussles wherein the loser has his (or her, I’m no sexist) beautiful, lush, but ultimately inferior crop of dense curly hairs ripped painfully from their face, whereupon they are shunned forever. It would be a utopia. And, certainly Nietzsche’s spawn would thrive massively in just such a culture, given how absolutely absurdly virile a man would have to be to extrude through his pores so luscious a mouth-carpet, and how powerful his genes must thereby be.

I mean, just LOOK at this mighty specimen of manhood. Walruses would shuffle home, sobbing and feeling like wusses after being confronted with whiskers so adamantly and furiously stupendous. There is a kind of thinly-veiled, rage of insanity lurking somewhere under the endless topiary maze of Nietzsche’s copious brows and prodigious ‘stache. There is an intensity to it, but also a crucial lack which makes it all the more terrifying: There is no remorse to be found in those eyes. This is a man gifted with one of the world’s most extraordinary intellects and driven by brutal, feral passions. Nietzsche states famously in “Beyond Good and Evil,” that “...when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” I am tempted to say that this is precisely what has occurred to the man himself, thereby obliterating his soul to result in his terrifying gaze, but then I realize: That cannot be true. Not with this man. And then I notice that this phrase is in the second person. Nietzsche was clearly explaining what happens only to others when they try the abyss-gazing thing. Given the indomitability of the rabid wolverine he kept dangling just below his nostrils, it seems all too apparent that Nietzsche gazed into the abyss, it nervously gazed back, Nietzsche challenged it to a staring contest, it feebly declined, and then Nietzsche called it a pansy and beat the ever-loving crud out of it. There is just something undeniably awe-inspiring about a man who clearly went out, punched a Grizzly Bear in the face until it was almost dead, then ripped a piece of bear off and straight stapled that stuff to his mouth.

Think what you may of Nietzsche’s philosophies, but one thing cannot be denied: His moustache was incredible, in the way that seeing a dinosaur sipping tea with a Stormtrooper is incredible. To impress this point upon you one further time, I leave you with what I assure is a totally real, well documented anecdote#: Once a group of scientists showed a picture of Nietzsche to a group of Blue Whales, well known for the dense forests of hair-like keratin they keep in their mouths with which to filter feed, called a “baleen,” or, more scientifically, a “rockin’ Sea-’Stache.” According to reports, the whales stared at the picture for approximately 30 seconds, at which point one nudged its nearest companion, hesitated for a moment or two, and then said:

“BBBBBOAOAOAOAOAOAAAWAWAAAOAOAOAOAOWOAOWAOW.”

Which translates roughly to:

“I dunno, kinda seems like overkill, doesn’t it?”

THE ‘STACHE, THE LEGEND