Congratulations Red Herring!

Today is Wednesday, and today nothing of interest is going to happen to you.

Plenty of interesting things will happen in the world.  People will live full, vibrant lives, rich with activity and potential and opportunity.  All throughout the world, things will change today.

But nothing will change for you.  You're a red herring, and today you're just a thing that we briefly focus on which, upon reflection, will have no significance.  The details of your day, including your breakfast (fair trade coffee and a bagel from the bagel shop near your work), lunch (Subway chicken teriyaki six inch), and dinner (Weight Watchers chicken satay with rice) will all be completely insignificant.  Even though we've mentioned them here, the narrative significance imposed through their position herein will be wholly undercut by their thorough disconnection to anything of value, even the surrounding context of other peoples' lives, which might have some measure of significance in the world.

You'll just keep on living, alone and unknown, and one day you'll die, unloved and unmourned.

                                         

Congratulations Red Herring!

Congratulations Risk Mitigator!

Your life is controlling risk.  Risk of a hostile corporate takeover, risk of personal injury, risk of psychological damage.  The world is resplendent with threats, and your job is to make sure they're as non-threatening as possible, considering the circumstances.  So when your first child was born about four months ago, you immediately began considering means of mitigating risk.

"Well, you won't be leaving our apartment for the first four months of your life," you announced to your newborn daughter.  She stared at you, puzzled, then puffed out her cheeks and commenced wailing terribly for a few hours.  You didn't know how to respond, so you handed her off to your wife, who shoved a tit in her face.  That shut her up good.

Four months into her life, your wife now has to return to work so you, being the forward thinking young dad you are, have now decided to start taking care of your infant on your off days.  Your wife has been uncomfortable about the prospect of you being alone with your daughter.

"You're kind of dumb," she said.  "Call me before you do anything that you think I'd call stupid."

You told her you loved her and that that kind of backchatting sass is why you married her, then hung up and began the process of coating your infant daughter in shock-resistant Safe Tee Foam (trademark).  Once your daughter was all bundled up you took her out into the world and, within minutes, were greeted by screaming nannies and armed police officers who ripped your daughter from the stroller while they held you at gunpoint, all the while ignoring your cries of "she's safe, she's safe, it's fine."

It took them nearly ten minutes to cut her free from her foam using a flick knife, but once she was out it was immediately apparent that she'd suffocated.  You thought about trying to adopt a child from an agency, from some weird place full of brown people like Brazil or Tapas, but when you crunched the numbers it was too risky, so you faked your death instead.

Have fun with your new life in Alaska!

Congratulations Risk Mitigator!

Congratulations Backwards Betty!

You’re Betty, and you do everything backwards. Well, almost everything. This isn’t one of those Benjamin Button situations. You age normally. And you form and end relationships normally, loving people at first and then hating them by the time you’re finished with them.

But you do everything else backwards. Case in point:

Today you’re going to be giving a guy a blowjob while you’re on the bottom of a sixty-nine (which is just non-sense!) and then you’re going to ask him to fuck you in your favorite position: reverse cowgirl. He’ll be super excited.

“I love reverse cowgirl!” he’ll announce to his roommate, who will be videotaping the two of you. He’ll nod in response and then nod at you, as if to say “go for it.”

Then you’ll flip him on his back with your freakish strength, look him deep in the eyes and BOOP, inside you’ll go.

You’ll ride him while he stares up at you, mystified and uncomfortable, for a full minute and a half. Then the combination of your vagina and your eye contact will be too much for him to bear and he’ll come inside you without warning.

“Thanks a lot for that, buddy,” you’ll say without one whit of sarcasm. Then you’ll go to his bathroom and brush your teeth with his toothbrush while peeing and thinking about dropping out of school so that you can attend the University of Phoenix online.

Congratulations Backwards Betty!

Congratulations on Having Your Hypochondria Justified!

We make fun of you. A lot. In our defense, you wash your hands after touching everything, and it makes your hands smell extremely weird. Also, you wear that funny white mask all the time, even during sex (by which we mean watching porn), and no one thinks it’s endearing anymore.

But today you’re going to be totally vindicated when everyone in New York City who has ever touched a subway pole with their bare hands or breathed in any air ever dies. They’re going to die horribly, too. Their skin will melt right off of their bones and their skulls will crack with the stress of their coughing fits so severely that their jaw bones will unhook and tumble to the ground. After that, their organs will liquefy.

Pretty gruesome, right? It was predicted by our youngest future-engineer, Sean, who is eight years young today.

You’ll be spared, thanks to your habit of constantly wearing gloves and the fact that you haven’t slept with anyone in like a decade. You’ll inherit a city filled with really wet, gross skeletons and a handful of other germaphobes, most of whom are Chinese, which is ironic because your racism against Chinese people was largely founded on them being, in your mind, “dirty.”

Live and learn, we guess! Try not to kill yourself in the post-apocalyptic wasteland that used to be the Big Apple.

Congratulations on Having Your Hypochondria Justified!

Congratulations Magazine Editor!

You edit a magazine. It’s a job, we looked it up. Apparently it entails sitting in one spot and going over text that someone else wrote so that you can be sure that there aren’t any mistakes in it. If there are you just mark it up and ask that person to correct their mistake.

Normally it’s pretty dull, but today’s going to be a red letter day. Today you’re going to discover, while editing an article about a local spelling bee that an autistic boy won, that spelling has, at least twice in the article, been spelled as “spelking.”

“Well that’s not right,” you’ll mutter under your breath before marking the error and sending it back to the author for correction.

You won’t get the article back until tomorrow, when you discover that one of the errors was intentional and, in context, makes sense. But tonight the glass of white wine you drink before bed will taste good, better than it has ever tasted before.

Congratulations Magazine Editor!

Congratulations on Discovering How Much You Love Being Poked With Thousands of Needles!

You’ve been poked and prodded in an almost inconceivable number of ways, stretching back to your first sexual experience way back in high school. And after half a decade of banging your way through a veritable lacrosse team of partners you finally found the one for you: a young man with a big heart and a dick to match that you decided to settle down into common law marriage with one drizzly evening two years ago.

But lately sex hasn’t been doing it for you the way it used to: something about the absence of filthy, dirty anonymous sex is making you feel like you’re kind of a failure in life and you don’t like it. Your common-law husband recommended that the two of you start swinging or engaging in poly-play, but both those things sound growth, so you talked to your mom about it and she had a way, way better idea: sexual acupuncture.

Here’s how it’s going to happen: you’re going to go to an acupuncturist tomorrow. You’re going to sit down and ask her if it’s okay to have your common law husband fuck you while you get pins rammed into your skin. She’ll nod, but with a few caveats.

“You need to sign a waiver, and I can’t do any points on your face. I’d also strongly recommend that you use a condom.”

“Why?”

She’ll shrug. “The barrier method is pretty effective at stopping pregnancy, and I’d rather you not end up pregnant. I think you’d both be terrible parents.”

You’ll nod in agreement and sign the waiver. Then the next day you’ll show up, condom in hand, with your man and lay down on the table. As the pins enter your back and your ass you’ll feel more relaxed than you ever have before.

“Good?” the acupuncturist will ask intermittently. You’ll moan in response. After around ten minutes of that she’ll leave the room and your husband will enter you without a condom on. He’ll fuck you so hard that your muscles will start to clench around a few of the more delicately placed pins, causing your relaxation to shift to pain, a spectrum of sensation that feeds back into itself, delivering ceaseless agony to you in rotation with profound relaxation.

When he finally comes inside you, though, your entire body will suddenly stop feeling any tension, any anxiety. Instead you’ll have the strangest and most purifying orgasm in your entire life. Your body will all but shut down, breathing slowing, eyes batting idly, world coming into focus for the first time, maybe the only real time in your entire life.

You’ll also be pregnant.

Surprise!

Congratulations on Discovering How Much You Love Being Poked With Thousands of Needles!

Congratulations on Not Catching Fire!

Being drunk on the trampoline isn’t necessary the worst thing in the world. It’s kind of expected, actually. People get wasted on trampolines and bounce. They’re more injury prone, sure, but they’re usually quite relaxed and have a good time doing their thing on the old trampomoline.

But not you. You’re kind of a dick whenever you get something. And when you get wasted the dickishness gets that much worse. So today, when you down a bottle of schnapps alone and decide to get on your son’s trampoline and bounce and bounce and bounce while throwing small, hard objects at the children around you, it’s not going to be cool. Definitely not as cool as you think it is, at least.

And when you finally topple off the trampoline and crack your skull against the tile surrounding your pool, there’s a reason no one is going to run to dial 9-1-1. You’re going to deserve that wheelchair you’ll be getting, prick.

Congratulations on Ruining Your Son’s Birthday Party!

Congratulations on Talking Her Into a Mistake!

You’re not the most charismatic person in the world. In fact, you could be the least charismatic person in the world. You’re tall and thing, but you’ve got mean features, a terrible laugh and you literally cannot listen to someone to save your own life. It’s a bad mix for relationships, which rarely last over a week, but it’s an amazing mix for convincing young women to embarrass you sexually, which is exactly what’s going to happen today.

Today you’re going to walk right into AA, throw your five year chip at the group leader and shout “FUCK YOU!” at the top of your lungs. The entire group will watch you as you ascend to the podium, since that’s actually sort of a normal speech intro in AA. Then you’ll look back out at them from the podium, staring deep into their eyes, wondering who you could convince to come out with you and ruin their life again.

You’ll zero in on one woman, tragically worn with dark circles under her eyes and full, colorless lips. She’ll still be beautiful, but it will be clear that the road of the world has worn her down. You’ll lock eyes with her, point out in the crowd and speak.

“This is all bullshit,” you’ll say, gesturing with your finger to indicate that bullshit is located pretty much everywhere in the room, especially within the crowd. “You,” you’ll say, pointing at the young woman, “should come out with me and make some mistakes tonight. Like people do.”

The young woman will look at you up and down. She’ll bite her lip for a second, then shrug.

“Alright. But not tonight. Tomorrow. I got a thing tonight,” she’ll say, winking at you.

You’ll shrug. “Alright.”

Then you’ll turn to the crowd and wave to them. “Thanks for trying guys.”

On the way out you’ll whisper into the group leader’s ear to give your number to that girl, and he’ll nod back at you. After all, you two used to be good buddies back in the day, before he got all lame. He’ll come through for you. He always does.

Congratulations on Talking Her Into a Mistake!

Congratulations on Remembering Your Special Condoms!

Most of the time you’re lucky if you even recall to bag it. That’s why you’re riddled with herpes. All kinds, even the Complex kind. Normally people in your position would take heed of their crisis and slow down or, at the very least, invest in a combination of treatment and preventative measures. But not you. You just keep getting fucked up on Wild Turkey and sticking it in crazy bitches, mostly because TV tells you to.

But you still care about “her comfort,” whatever the shit that means, so every once in a while you buy some really classy condoms. Condoms that cost a little bit extra.

Aww yeah. Now we’ve got your attention.

So tonight you’re going to meet this chick at a bar who has a ponytail or whatever. We’re not entirely sure what’s up, because you’re going to be blackout drunk and Steve, the predictor who pulled the short straw and ended up watching your life of all god forsaken shitshows, is only able to see things through the eyes of the person he’s channeling. So he’s only going to remember what you remember.

He’s going to remember the splinter you get from the girl’s doorway, which will catch in your hand and bury itself in your finger too deep to get out. It’ll be a short shock of pain, one you’ll forget until the next day. He’ll remember the way you taste, like Old Crow and breath mints. From your mouth he’ll realize your desire for this young woman, blowing gales against your subconscious.

He’ll remember you finally convincing her to come to bed, her insistence that you wear a condom. You’ll act surprised about it, like you look like someone people fuck more than once, but after she insists you’ll remember your fire and ice shit, those condoms that make your dick hot and/or cold and ostensibly do something to the genitals of the women you’re fucking which, you understand, are supposed to be capable of feeling things as well. And once the condom is out of your wallet and swabbed around your dick she’ll cautiously lower herself on to you and have cautious, tenuous sex with you.

The whole time it’ll feel like she might break away. She’ll muffle her shrieks occasionally, mumbling into her own arm as she rides you. Occasionally you’ll reach up to touch her body, but she’ll bat your arms away. As she works herself on you you’ll slowly come to realize how insignificant you are in the world. Under her tender ministrations you’ll approach orgasm and, for the first time, avoid it. You won’t want to shame yourself in front of her.

But she’ll outlast you, despite the numbing powder the condom you’re using is filled with. You’ll twitch as you finally come, writhing underneath her, and she’ll smile for the first time since she started fucking you.

She’ll withdraw from you after that, standing at the side of the bed until you awkwardly stand and then pointing for you to leave her bedroom. She’ll give you some sheets and a throw pillow the pullout couch that you’ll find yourself on, staring up at the ceiling. As sleep beckons you’ll wonder what she’s thinking right now. You’ll wonder if she’s masturbating herself to fulfillment or sleeping contently. You won’t really have any context, since you’ll usually be insensate before this part of the night. It’ll be strange for you, laying there alone, wondering what just happened. It’ll feel a little bad.

Congratulations on Remembering Your Special Condoms!

Congratulations on Escaping Your Responsibilities as a Father!

Many people avoid their responsibilities as a father through cowardice or cunning. You are going to go into the history books as the only person to have ever been removed from your duties of fatherhood by court order, following your complete inability to assist your children with anything.

“Is it true you once mixed baby food with motor oil in an attempt to make your child a cyborg?” the judge will ask. You’ll shrug.

“And that you don’t know how to make soup?” she’ll inquire.

“The defendant would like to plead the fifth,” your lawyer will interject after you open your mouth to respond, cutting off your no doubt cutting rebuke that soup is surprisingly tough to make.

“I’ll simply read off the rest of the evidence, then,” the prosecuting attorney will declare.

It’ll be a laundry list of ineptitudes. He’ll recount the time you once sent a chauffer to a professional soccer game to acquire your daughter, how you once hired a high priced prostitute to teach your son about proper condom use and STIs. He’ll read segments of testimony from all three of your children about the time you once tried to get your dog to clean up glass by licking it off the floor, and how you proceeded to beat it with a newspaper when it refused to do so. These are simply the ones we can recount here. We’re not even going to get into that one night with the not-so-high priced prostitute you wanted to use to teach your children proper diving mechanics.

The jury will deliberate for fifteen minutes before they emerge with the sentence.

“We find that the defendant will no longer be allowed within one-thousand feet of his children and that, should he attempt to do so, he will be confined in a federal penitentiary for no less than one year. We also find that he will have to pay sufficient child support, totaling at least fifty percent of his total income, to his children and the plantiff, in this case his wife.”

Normally such a harsh sentence would elicit gasps from the crowd. But you’re such a shitty dad that no one’s going to be shocked by it in the least. In fact they’ll be a little bit surprised that you weren’t just sent to prison right then and there for being such a shitty dad. But they’ll let you go, the bailiff shaking his head as he pushes you out the door into the cold spring air.

As you trudge down the courthouse steps the decision will ring in your ears. You’ll walk across the street, counting your steps, until you reach a bright red sports car. A young woman will be sitting in it. She’ll be dull, but beautiful, her eyes glassy, her face expressionless.

“How’d it go?” she’ll ask. You’ll shrug and she’ll nod, and the two of you will head back to the apartment you own, furnished entirely with funds you receive for managing the investments of Lehman Brothers.

Congratulations on Escaping Your Responsibilities as a Father!

Congratulations on Misinterpreting the Term Friends With Benefits!

Today you’re going to walk into a doctor’s office with the healthcare card of the girl you’ve been fucking for the last four months who isn’t too serious about you.

“Sir, we can’t accept someone else’s healthcare card as proof of a policy,” the sassy black receptionist who works in every doctor’s office ever (you know the one!) will tell you.

“But she said we were friends with benefits,” you’ll loudly declare, hoping that someone gets the pun. The secretary will be unimpressed.

“Get the fuck out of here, kid. We’ve got real patients.” She’ll point to the door and you’ll shuffle out, hanging your head.

When you get outside the cold will bite right through your clothing, and your polio will leave your legs a creaking ruin. You’ll clutch your tattered blanket around your shoulders and hope that your lady friend brings some polio medicine when she comes back for her card and a little somethin’ somethin’. Temping is a hard life, a life without health benefits. You want to hold on until the employer mandate forces temp agencies to insure their constituents with reasonable healthcare policies, but that day is being constantly delayed and your polio is getting so, so much more worse.

Congratulations on Misinterpreting the Term Friends With Benefits!

Congratulations Russian Jew!

You’re a Russian Jew. That means most of what you have going for you is a cultural history of being able to survive regardless of the circumstances surrounding you. You’re not funny. You’re not good with money. You’re not great at war. Hell, you’re even kind of bad at circumsizing people in accordance with the creed of your own culture.

It’s a tough life, but it’s the one you were born to, and all that survival instinct has kept you alive and in decent food shelter throughout your stay in New York. Plus your cultural disposition has surrounded you with awkwardly sexually aggressive, deprived and attractive women who look at their mothers and feel their all too rapidly approaching middle age stealing upon them. It’s a life of shame, self-hate and copious, mediocre sex.

You usually just tell people that you’re Russian and skip the Jewish part during introductions. After all, why should they care that your mom guilted you into doing some new and deeply regrettable thing during every Thanksgiving in your life, or that you engaged in a bachannal feast of Chinese food every Christmas day? All they need to know is that you seem sad all the time and keep to yourself.

All this will change tomorrow when you find out that Regina Spektor is a Russian Jew. Overnight you’ll go from being a quiet, assuming dude to being the loudest prick in your office.

“DID YOU KNOW SHE’S PLAYED IN ISRAEL?” you’ll shout at whoever is nearby. People will start going out of their way to avoid contact with you.

“SHE’S SO TALENTED AND ATTRACTIVE!” you’ll tell them homeless man on the subway who, in a moment of lucidity, will ask you to please leave him alone.

When you get home you’ll just scream at the walls of your apartment about how great she is at the top of your lungs. You’ll scream until a knock comes at your front door.

Regina Spektor will be standing there in all her splendor. You’ll think that she’s there to thank you for singing her praises and maybe have some awkward, guilty sex with you. But as it turns out, no, she’s not.

She’ll just punch you in the face, knocking you flat out on the floor, where you’ll lay and massage your lip, wondering if you’re swallowing too much blood.

“Please stop talking about me,” she’ll sigh at you before turning around and leaving you there alone in your home, hopefully to grow a personality.

Congratulations Russian Jew!

Congratulations on Finishing All the Liquor In Your House!

Your wife will tell you couldn’t. Shouldn’t. Won’t. She’ll be right, at least on the first two counts.

But stay at home dads need to party sometimes too, and after your kid’s asleep you like to pretend that you can still “throw down” with the best of them. So tonight after you’ve washed your hands of baby feces and vomit you’ll sit down at your four person kitchen table slash office desk, put away the laptop you’ve been tapping out your “novel” on and break out all the whiskey in your house.

Since your wife’s in AA it’ll just be a bunch of bottles in the back of your cabinet that you forgot to throw away when she first started, all mixed into one Nalgene. Your wife will finger her coin as she watches you pour them in one by one, mixing ouzo with bourbon with vodka.

“This is a terrible idea,” she’ll say.

“You think that about all drinking!” you’ll shout back at her, shutting her up and beginning a fissure in your relationship that will eventually destroy your marriage and force your child into a broken home that never needed to be. Then you’ll examine the mixture you’ve made and down it in one massive gulp.

Your throat will flex with the pressure of the liquid sliding down it, your gullet will burn. There will be other homoerotic metaphors here but we’ll leave those to your imagination. Suffice to say it’s going to suck. But you’ll get the entire thing down in your tummy and plop the bottle down on the kitchen table.

You’ll turn to your wife, give her an “I told you so” look, and then let out a long, satisfied burp. That burp will then turn into a choking cough, which will turn into an explosive fit of projectile vomiting,

“Holy shit,” your wife will say, laughing to herself while she finds some old rags under the counter. When the entire process ends you’ll be face down on your kitchen floor, moaning, while she drops some rags on you.

“I’m going upstairs to masturbate,” she’ll tell you. “Clean yourself up before you come to bed.”

She’ll leave you there gasping, whimpering, and wishing you’d chosen to just go down on your wife instead of making terrible decisions with alcohol.

Congratulations on Finishing All the Liquor In Your House!

Congratulations Cokeface!

When you wake up in the morning sometimes you feel kinda down. Sometimes you don’t want to face the miserable dross that is our daily existence as human beings living in a modern world. Sometimes you just wanna quit, so you get yourself a little pick me up and carry on, thinking about how great your morning treat was.

Examples of acceptable morning treats include cups of coffee or tea, cigarettes, glimpses of rainbows, jerking off when you first wake up, taking a nip of Seagrams to make the commute bearable and tossing your partner’s salad. Examples of unacceptable pick me ups consist of cocaine, or cocaine analogous activities.

So today when you wake up, do us all a favor and don’t do a huge hit of coke. It doesn’t make you as cool as you think it does, it doesn’t make your wife love you more or your kids not hate your sellout, shitbird ass. It doesn’t even make you happy for that long. See a therapist, get some meds for your dick and just stop doing cocaine in the morning. Then we’ll all happily cheer you with cries of “Congratulations Cokeface!”