I never thought of myself as a supervillain. It seems a little boastful, you know. Super? Really? It feels like a marketing ploy. Still, if both BuzzFeed and Gawker agree that's what to call you, I guess you are that thing. What is modern braggadocio but retweets and clicks anyhow? I'm also dubious on the former part of this portmanteau. I don't consider myself a villain. Sure, people have risked their lives trying to stop me, but people will make a crusade over just about anything these days. I mean, in college the white kids held a protest because there was an only POC student interest group. Then some other white people started attacking the protesting white people. Who's the villain there, huh? ... Okay, I guess all the white people, but you get my point. Just because people protest you, try to murder you, run a very tasteless smear campaign at every Chick-fil-A in America against you, or even if the nominal superheros of the day make it their business to stop you, it doesn't mean you're a villain.
All that said, I'm creating a giant machine. Some might call it a doomsday device, but those folks are hyperbolic, fear-mongering rubes. The function of this machine is not to destroy, but to dismantle. Specifically society. Now it may seem like I'm being pedantic or semantic, but hear me out. Life sucks, right? That's my basic premise. At least as presently constituted it does. You still with me? Cool. Now why does it suck? Well, lots of reasons: terrible dads, poverty, Tinder, etc. Now what do all those and other shitty things in life have in common? They're not xanax. And that's a problem. And the crux of my very machine. To put it technically would be tedious, so I will settle for a trite metaphor. Use your mind's eye, imagine the air, the substance we breath and live upon, is Troy and xanax is the Greeks. They gotta get in there, but how? My machine is the horse. The Trojan Horse that will permeate our atmosphere with alprazolam. In deference to this metaphor I've built my machine to look like a horse and, ironically, to be piloted by a horse, which was far and away the most difficult aspect of its creation. I'm terrible with design and I hired this engineering student as an intern...he said he knew PhotoShop...it all went to shit pretty fast...we lost alot of good horses...
The long and short of it all is that I built a monumental horse-shaped industrial desk fan that spews xanax. Enough xanax to fill the jet streams of our atmosphere and veil the world. I also have a jumpsuit to go along with it. It's...remarkably comfortable. Anyhow, once the fan is turned on it will not stop. Sort of. Someone has to keep shoveling loads of xanax into the machine. Furthermore, the horse pilot needs to be replaced once every however long horses live. But let's not get too mechanical yet.
As the world is enveloped in a giant sack of xanax dust (a.k.a. Operation Teabag Gaia) society will be reborn. The panic of modern life will give way to floppiness. The world shall know what it is to flop and the virtues of flopping. Think of it - no fear, no anger, no inhibitions! Everyone will describe themselves as "laid back" on their online dating profiles. Animals will be much more chill and you'll be able to pet even the most dangerous ones. Ferrets will suck less! Now I can't calculate what will start happening to society after prolonged exposure. My guess is, though, that whatever happens will be real smooth. I wouldn't be surprised if froyo becomes the global currency. Beyond that, who knows. Of course, everyone will become addicted to xanax fairly quickly. But that's the beauty of my horse ouroboros. Humanity and most life on the planet would die from withdrawal were the machine to stop.
So why am I telling you this? Why reveal my plot? I'm not going to lie, this is really just a Kickstarter pitch. The machine is good to go; I'm set to turn the dial of history to floppy, but I can't afford enough xanax to keep my machine going. That's where you come in. All I'm asking is a paltry 27 million USD to get enough xanax to kick (wink wink nudge nudge) this thing off. Pledges of at least $20 will receive a follow by me on twitter. Pledges of $20 - 100 will get a 2mg bar of xanax inscribed with their name. Pledges of $100 or more can some to my evil lair and take a selfie with the machine! And finally, if you pledge $1000 or more I'll let you jack off the horse pilot. So please, donate today. Thank you.
Regards,
The Xan Man
-Sent from an iPhone
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Story of the Wry
It came into the mind of my father that he needed to do a thing. This was subconscious, but we all felt it. Hell you could see it. See it in his eyes, his lifeless, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. You could sense it in his listlessness. You could smell it in his bathroom. Not long before he had begun to engineer a grand personal bathroom for himself. A palatial WC lined with red velvet and filled with the electronic gadgets old men adore. There were multiple TVs and a pull-out Lazy Boy, just in case you wanted to have a cozy night in. Each time he added a new feature, he would take my sister and me on a tour of his magnum opus. This was by necessity, though, since his pride over his crapper was greater than it was in us, his children. Furthermore, he had designed a series of interlocking doors so no one could enter his bathroom without the correct sequence of passwords, keys, and retinal scans. I once joked that the only vulnerability of this shit safe house was the ventilation system. A small and determined person could slip in through the air vents to drop a clandestine deuce. My father starred at me blankly for a moment before bolting for the door. He was going to Home Depot. His butt bunker had to be impregnable.
Of course, my father's bathroom was merely symptomatic of his greater ennui. He took on many pet projects in those days, mostly home improvements that were questionably improvements and certainly not home. More troubling were his mental lapses, moments when he he would forget what he was doing and stand idly in some spot, sometimes for periods as long as golf. He seemed demented, his mind incapable or unwilling to follow through on the very impulses it created. Often we would find him trowel in hand standing in the garage and staring at his peg board, as if each hole contained some Vernian microverse about husbands enduring their wives' Netflix selections. Things were getting worse and we were worried. Our house became filled with half-finished projects started by my father. My sister had significant difficulty reaching her drafting table as dad had partially built a miniature recreation of the Battle of Antietam using Street Sharks action figures to denote troop deployment. Worse yet, these undertakings were eroding the very core of the man I had known for 27 years. Savagely frugal since time immemorial, my father had grown profligate in his search. Thousands were wasted on trifles, which distressed him further. His maxims of productivity and asceticism were corrupted to ceaseless toil and wanton snacking. He got fat and his impeccable bald spot sprouted the single longest stress devil's lock I had ever seen. His face bloated and divided by that single hair made him look like an angler fish that had lost it's Viagra prescription. A once proud Hank Hill was becoming a Bobby.
Luring us out of the house with the promise of a trip to Target, my mother confronted my sister and me. In typical dramatic fashion, she had applied extra mascara for effect. My father needed an intervention and if we didn't help her she was going to "CHANGE THE LOCKS!" (a favorite threat of my mother's). With no hope of talking her down from her self created ledge of histrionics, we agreed. The following day, we gathered in our living room and went about making preparations for the intervention. My sister sealed all the exits. My mother set up snack traps around the house and rehearsed her water works. I pretended to be helping. Sitting awkwardly on a couch together, we waited to spring the trap on my dad. However, he never came. We waited seven hours at the insistence of my mother before breaking apart like a self-loathing Pangaea. My sister ran off with a friend that ambitiously worked two jobs, a hostess at Hooters and a waitress at Tilted Kilt. My mother took one of her famed angry beauty naps and I merely watched TV. Late into the night my father returned. His dark silhouette stood in the door holding a dripping bag. Lightning illuminated the sopping wet sexagenarian. Without a word, he stepped into the house and wiped the moisture from his brow. He took off his bright yellow Spongebob hat, which he had received for free at a runner's convention, and flopped onto the couch next to me, still cradling the bag. "What's in the bag?"
By that point I had not seen or spoken to my father in twelve hours. He nodded at me knowingly and said, "You want to know what I've been doing?" He mashed his lips together in a strange way and tilted his large bulbous nose down at me. The glare from Criminal Minds shone off his bald head and it made him look like a poorly drawn Mr. Natural without the beard. He grabbed the bag and ripped it open. Golf balls. Hundreds of them. Covered in muck. Apparently he had spent the entire day fishing them out of a stream adjacent to a golf course near our house. "I spent all day fishing these puppies out from that stream." His hand dove into the sea of golf balls and swam through it as if it were some kind of precious treasure. "Can you believe these idiots down at the golf course let their perfectly good balls go to waste?!" I blinked at him. "Okay, I'm going to bed. Goodnight, Dad." I pulled myself up from the couch and walked past him and to the vestibule with a pullout that was my bedroom. My dad did not respond. He held a neon yellow ball in his hand and dangled it in front of his eyes. Blowing on the ball to cleanse the muck, he sprinkled mud everywhere.
When I awoke the next morning, my father was gone and so was the bag. My mother paced nervously around the kitchen, chugging decaf coffee mixed with metamucil and valium. "It's another woman. I just know it." "It's not one. It's hundreds." I said. My mother spit up her coffee like an owl regurgitating a pellet. "I KNEW something was up when your father told me about that all female focus group!" "No, not women. Golf balls." "You can't fuck or focus group a golf ball! Don't even try to cover up for your father!" I went and laid down face first on the couch as my mother accosted me with threats and theories. Thankfully, my sister arrived then, still drunk from her all night bender. She was the new kid in school, the school of maternal ire. I listened as they had their tête-à-tête, my mother throwing insult and my sister retorting with vomit. The puke seemed to be the glue of her defense, hardened by an imbrication of implausible excuses. Things were escalating quickly, when my father showed up again laden with a sack of golf balls. My mother rushed at him. "What is this?! A bunch of presents from your whores?!" She slapped his arm and the bag fell to ground, expelling its contents onto the floor much like my sister's vomit. Dad immediately dropped to his knees, scrambling to collect the balls. "My darlings!" He gathered them with such care, as if he were a male seahorse and they his children, sucking them into his grasp for protection. "Anal beads!?" My mother collapsed on the couch weeping, simultaneously splattering her brains on the jagged rocks of her own delusion. My sister puked sonorously. I got up from the couch, went out the door, into my dad's car, and drove off.
It would be a full 30 or so hours before I returned. I passed the time smoking weed in the car and wandering around the suburban streets of Orlando. It is quite surreal, especially in the summer. The heat is savage and the sun is so bright. The only humans that exist hurtle by you in their cars afraid lest they get stuck in the vegetation, which grows seemingly by the minute, threatening to swallow up suburbia. Around sunset I ventured back. On the way I saw a strange silhouette stooping in the stream. Like some mythological fool consigned to his eternal fate after challenging a god, he hunched over the waters and sifted through the muck with his hands. Every now and then he would rise up holding a small sphere in his fingers to examine it against the backdrop of the red sun. Upon arriving home, I noticed a note on the fridge. "Dear Children, I am leaving you to be with my lover Armand. I can no longer endure living in a loveless marriage. There is leftover pasta in the fridge. XOXO, Mom." I ate that pasta and it was sub par at best.
Of course, my father's bathroom was merely symptomatic of his greater ennui. He took on many pet projects in those days, mostly home improvements that were questionably improvements and certainly not home. More troubling were his mental lapses, moments when he he would forget what he was doing and stand idly in some spot, sometimes for periods as long as golf. He seemed demented, his mind incapable or unwilling to follow through on the very impulses it created. Often we would find him trowel in hand standing in the garage and staring at his peg board, as if each hole contained some Vernian microverse about husbands enduring their wives' Netflix selections. Things were getting worse and we were worried. Our house became filled with half-finished projects started by my father. My sister had significant difficulty reaching her drafting table as dad had partially built a miniature recreation of the Battle of Antietam using Street Sharks action figures to denote troop deployment. Worse yet, these undertakings were eroding the very core of the man I had known for 27 years. Savagely frugal since time immemorial, my father had grown profligate in his search. Thousands were wasted on trifles, which distressed him further. His maxims of productivity and asceticism were corrupted to ceaseless toil and wanton snacking. He got fat and his impeccable bald spot sprouted the single longest stress devil's lock I had ever seen. His face bloated and divided by that single hair made him look like an angler fish that had lost it's Viagra prescription. A once proud Hank Hill was becoming a Bobby.
Luring us out of the house with the promise of a trip to Target, my mother confronted my sister and me. In typical dramatic fashion, she had applied extra mascara for effect. My father needed an intervention and if we didn't help her she was going to "CHANGE THE LOCKS!" (a favorite threat of my mother's). With no hope of talking her down from her self created ledge of histrionics, we agreed. The following day, we gathered in our living room and went about making preparations for the intervention. My sister sealed all the exits. My mother set up snack traps around the house and rehearsed her water works. I pretended to be helping. Sitting awkwardly on a couch together, we waited to spring the trap on my dad. However, he never came. We waited seven hours at the insistence of my mother before breaking apart like a self-loathing Pangaea. My sister ran off with a friend that ambitiously worked two jobs, a hostess at Hooters and a waitress at Tilted Kilt. My mother took one of her famed angry beauty naps and I merely watched TV. Late into the night my father returned. His dark silhouette stood in the door holding a dripping bag. Lightning illuminated the sopping wet sexagenarian. Without a word, he stepped into the house and wiped the moisture from his brow. He took off his bright yellow Spongebob hat, which he had received for free at a runner's convention, and flopped onto the couch next to me, still cradling the bag. "What's in the bag?"
By that point I had not seen or spoken to my father in twelve hours. He nodded at me knowingly and said, "You want to know what I've been doing?" He mashed his lips together in a strange way and tilted his large bulbous nose down at me. The glare from Criminal Minds shone off his bald head and it made him look like a poorly drawn Mr. Natural without the beard. He grabbed the bag and ripped it open. Golf balls. Hundreds of them. Covered in muck. Apparently he had spent the entire day fishing them out of a stream adjacent to a golf course near our house. "I spent all day fishing these puppies out from that stream." His hand dove into the sea of golf balls and swam through it as if it were some kind of precious treasure. "Can you believe these idiots down at the golf course let their perfectly good balls go to waste?!" I blinked at him. "Okay, I'm going to bed. Goodnight, Dad." I pulled myself up from the couch and walked past him and to the vestibule with a pullout that was my bedroom. My dad did not respond. He held a neon yellow ball in his hand and dangled it in front of his eyes. Blowing on the ball to cleanse the muck, he sprinkled mud everywhere.
When I awoke the next morning, my father was gone and so was the bag. My mother paced nervously around the kitchen, chugging decaf coffee mixed with metamucil and valium. "It's another woman. I just know it." "It's not one. It's hundreds." I said. My mother spit up her coffee like an owl regurgitating a pellet. "I KNEW something was up when your father told me about that all female focus group!" "No, not women. Golf balls." "You can't fuck or focus group a golf ball! Don't even try to cover up for your father!" I went and laid down face first on the couch as my mother accosted me with threats and theories. Thankfully, my sister arrived then, still drunk from her all night bender. She was the new kid in school, the school of maternal ire. I listened as they had their tête-à-tête, my mother throwing insult and my sister retorting with vomit. The puke seemed to be the glue of her defense, hardened by an imbrication of implausible excuses. Things were escalating quickly, when my father showed up again laden with a sack of golf balls. My mother rushed at him. "What is this?! A bunch of presents from your whores?!" She slapped his arm and the bag fell to ground, expelling its contents onto the floor much like my sister's vomit. Dad immediately dropped to his knees, scrambling to collect the balls. "My darlings!" He gathered them with such care, as if he were a male seahorse and they his children, sucking them into his grasp for protection. "Anal beads!?" My mother collapsed on the couch weeping, simultaneously splattering her brains on the jagged rocks of her own delusion. My sister puked sonorously. I got up from the couch, went out the door, into my dad's car, and drove off.
It would be a full 30 or so hours before I returned. I passed the time smoking weed in the car and wandering around the suburban streets of Orlando. It is quite surreal, especially in the summer. The heat is savage and the sun is so bright. The only humans that exist hurtle by you in their cars afraid lest they get stuck in the vegetation, which grows seemingly by the minute, threatening to swallow up suburbia. Around sunset I ventured back. On the way I saw a strange silhouette stooping in the stream. Like some mythological fool consigned to his eternal fate after challenging a god, he hunched over the waters and sifted through the muck with his hands. Every now and then he would rise up holding a small sphere in his fingers to examine it against the backdrop of the red sun. Upon arriving home, I noticed a note on the fridge. "Dear Children, I am leaving you to be with my lover Armand. I can no longer endure living in a loveless marriage. There is leftover pasta in the fridge. XOXO, Mom." I ate that pasta and it was sub par at best.
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