- If you’re a college freshman, be wary of your orientation group leaders. I used to be one in college, and I can tell you from experience that our only goal is to sleep with you. Sure, we might give you a tour of the campus or offer a shoulder to cry on if you’re homesick, but please be aware that we’re doing all these things while maintaining a full erection.

- If a teacher tries to sleep with you, go for it. It’s fun, and even though people your age tend to be horrendously awful in bed, you’ll probably still get an “A” just for being young and attractive. Also, as an impressionable young student, there’s no way you can get in trouble for this. The teacher you seduce may be thrown in prison and raped by serial killers, but you will not get in trouble.

- High schoolers: Being underage is a lot like being in prison. If you can find a contact to supply you with liquor and smokes, everyone will want to be your friend and no one will make you their bitch.

- College kids: This situation is the opposite for you. Knowing someone who can buy liquor is actually a huge hassle, because people will never leave you alone. It’s much better to just mooch off others.

- There has never been a time in life when a girl couldn’t get what she wants ten times faster by pretending she’s a huge slut. You don’t have to be a huge slut, you just have to pretend to be one. This trick will continue to work until you die of old age.

- Drugs are really bad for you. If you ever encounter a drug, you should immediately mail it to my home address so I can properly dispose of it. This includes your parents’ prescription drugs.

- If you’re awkward and not very cool, you should buy a hip pair of sunglasses to hide your face. Hipsters have been using this trick for years, and it works extremely well. I was not aware of this trick until recently, and now I feel like I’ve wasted my life. Everyone looks cooler in sunglasses, especially ugly douchepies like us.

- Sitting on the blacktop of a 7-11 parking lot at 11:30am, eating Ho-Hos and a Slurpee for lunch with friends may very well be one of the best moments of your life. It sounds sad, but it’s really not. Most high schoolers are very eager to move on to the more exciting parts of life, but there is rarely anything more awesome than a day that includes Ho-Hos, a Slurpee, and zero responsibilities. You’ll try to emulate this moment later in life, but by then these foods will give you diarrhea and you’ll get fired after spending the rest of the day at home.

- If you get a part-time job at the Perkins restaurant in Superior, keep in mind that not showing up to work for three days and then lying and telling them you had to drive to Minneapolis because your doctor said you might have cancer will cause them to fire you. I know from experience.

- On the other hand, if you get a job as a telemarketer, they will not fire you for any reason. You can skip work for three weeks without notice and they’ll let you show up the next day like nothing happened. I’m not sure why’d you want to come back though, since getting paid $8 per hour to have people repeatedly encourage you to commit suicide isn’t really worth any amount of payment.

- The computer lab is a bad place to look at porn. Even if you hide the browser behind Microsoft Word and just peek at it for a few seconds at a time, everyone will notice. This is why if I have kids, I’ll buy them a laptop before they go to college.

- The only true rules are have fun and don’t drop out, and they’re pretty simple ones to follow. People who drop out usually end up sleeping with me, and that’s way worse punishment than a few hours of studying each week.

- I’m not sure about you, but when it started to get dark and all those unruly teenagers were hanging around asking people to light their cigarettes, I got a little jumpy.

- If a teenager with a piercing or a general rugged attitude towards life ever asks you for a light, you should immediately cover your butthole and call the police. There were no incidents this year, but most years there are hundreds of incidents of unwanted sodomy at the festival.

- Warning! Reverend Raven is not actually a reverend. I asked him to administer last rites to a duck I accidentally ran over with my car, and he refused. I also suspect that the Chainsmokin’ Altar Boys he performs with are not actually religious. One of them offered my sister a “Dog in the Bathtub”. After looking up the term online, she’s very glad she declined.

- Double warning! If you misread the schedule and showed up to The Insomniacs thinking it was the characters from the 1990s cartoon show The Animaniacs, you were probably very disappointed. I know I was.

- Charging handicapped people $5 to park is not a sin. Those bastards have been freeloading on our society’s parking generosity for years.

- As far as I know, there has never been a streaker at Bluesfest. This is because it’s usually 40 degrees near the lake in August.

- If you’re incredibly racist and agist like me, rest assured that 99.9 percent of modern blues fans are aging white people who finally got tired of listening to the same four Eric Clapton songs that have made up their musical tastes over the last 30 years. Also rest assured that, much like modern motorcycle riders, any blues fan who is below the age of 40 usually works as a dentist during the week. That’s what makes this festival so safe.

- Bayfront Blues Festival is a family event. Many of the performers play there specifically because they enjoy performing for families. Granted, it’s music, so the vast majority of the musicians play just so they can have sex with large breasted women, but the Bluesfest staff have assured me that all complimentary groupie BJs were confined to the Great Lakes Aquarium gift shop.

- I tried to get into the gift shop by claiming I was a cymbals player for Big Walter Smith and The Groove Merchants, but it didn’t work.

- Bluesfest is really a fun and family friendly event. The only true sin is their website, where all valuable information is provided in obnoxious PDF files.

- Postscript: For those who say these bullet point columns are lazy, let me point out that in order to finish this column, I had to Google search “What else smells like marijuana”, “What do reverends do”, and “Funny sounding sexual positions”, and I also had to download a visitors map of the Great Lakes Aquarium to find an amusing section of the floor plan in which to situate the groupie BJs.

However, sometimes I’ll wake up Monday morning and have no column at all. In this rare case, I’ll use a variety of methods to come up with ideas. First, I’ll read through the Duluth News-Tribune’s website in hope of finding something lame to make fun of. While you’d think it would be fairly easy to find lame things in that newspaper, it’s actually quite difficult. Their website is only 10 percent actual news, and 90 percent weather predictions, classified ads, and unscientific online polls about Brett Favre, so it’s slim pickings.

When that fails, I’ll go to Twitter and look at the trending topics to see how many current trends I despise. The rate is usually 100 percent. For instance, today’s trending topics include Justin Bieber, the iPhone, and Snooki from “Jersey Shore”. I’ll think about what those things have in common, and then write a column about it. So in this case, I’d write a column about things I’d like to set on fire just to see them burn.

I think Bieber and the iPhone would melt in seconds, while Snooki’s thicker, blob-like mass would take significantly longer, allowing her to continue drunkenly trying to fellate a telephone pole for several minutes before dying.

If Twitter fails – and let’s be honest; pretty much all that website does is fail – then I’ll sometimes write about an adventure from my real life. Of course, most of my “adventures” involve drinking too much, vomiting on something important and then trying to flee the scene, but I think having a standard theme like that helps make those columns more enjoyable. Like an old episode of Scooby-Doo, people know exactly what’s going to happen each time, but they tune in anyway because it’s still really enjoyable to watch.

If you think about it, there’s really no excuse for each of us to not have at least one weekly column topic. If you don’t have one thing that happens in your life each week that’s worth sharing, you should probably just jump off a bridge. Not to kill yourself, but to break your leg so you’ll have something interesting to write about. If I was a publisher and someone started a conversation with, “So I jumped off a bridge yesterday,” that person would have my attention. The same is true for the phrases, “It’s in my car trunk right now, and it’s barely breathing,” and “I thought it was funny at the time, but my brother never walked again.”

There are literally hundreds of ways to think up column topics. Before Ann Landers died and was replaced by a supercomputer with impeccable manners and grammar, I used to sometimes read her columns and use the ridiculous problems of her readers as fuel for a farce. Last year I wrote a column titled, “My eyes are up here, ladies“, which was just a satirical version of a Salon.com article some lady wrote about how she had come to accept her saggy breasts.

One time I literally took my resume, replaced all the bullshit descriptions of my experience with truthful ones of my actual experience, and published that as a column. People laughed really hard. I died a little inside, but it was worth it for a laugh. Another column I wrote in 2003 titled “Look at my mustache!“, was crafted by searching Google Images for photos of guys with weird mustaches, and writing what I think such men would say.

Apparently, they would say sexually inappropriate things. Go figure.

I’m not sure what next week’s column will be about, but it’s not anything you couldn’t think up yourself, reader. Perhaps you should write it first and steal my columnist position from me. Seriously, please do. They don’t pay me.