Regardless, this is the time of year when this newspaper forces me to give students tips to help them achieve their best in life. Since I’m a 31-year-old temp who has to buy his own health insurance and hasn’t contributed to a 401k in nearly six years, I’m obviously quite the expert on maxing out one’s potential. But I’m currently the only writer for this publication who isn’t mentally ill or living off state disability payments, so I guess I’m a “winner” by their standards.

So here are my helpful tips. Be sure to come back in future weeks when I give tips on other things I know absolutely nothing about, like menopause, country western line dancing, and waking up before 3pm.

 
- 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.

Determined to succeed, I hid in a dumpster behind a mattress store, emerging twice a day to attempt to urinate without being shot. I was successful roughly half the time. Around 4am each morning, after all the gangbangers had drank themselves to sleep, I would surface again to fist-fight raccoons, defeating them and hungrily devouring their corpses. The meat had the texture of a baseball mitt, and made me viciously ill.

My parents finally came to pick me up, two days later than they had promised. I was covered in vomit, excrement, and raccoon bites. Three bullets were lodged in my left leg, which had turned a dark shade of green. When I complained about my condition, my father said, “You’re seven years old. You should be covered in vomit, excrement, and raccoon scars. That’s what kids do.”

Even though I was filthy and a raccoon had permanently removed a chunk of my ear, I felt proud. I had earned my parents’ love forever. Or so I thought. The next month, my parents told me we were going for ice cream, and then they drove to North Minneapolis and flung me out of the car again, this time removing all of my clothing first.

A large man in the neighborhood chased after me with a burlap sack for nearly seven hours before I lost him. My legs shaking and weary, my handsome buttocks permanently covered by my hand to prevent sneak rapings, I stumbled into a bingo parlor for the elderly and collapsed. In three days, no one noticed I was there. The owner, who was pushing 90, thought I was a carpet and vacuumed me several times.

My parents came shortly thereafter, telling the bingo parlor owner, “This is our rug. We need it back.” They didn’t bring any clothes for me, deciding instead to laugh as they slowly paraded me through our neighborhood, honking so the neighbors would come out and see their nude son.

A month later, my father asked if I had ever made a soapbox derby racer. I hadn’t, and all my anger from the previous incident melted away as we spent precious father and son time together building the car. When it was perfect, we loaded our soapbox racer into the car and drove to the event.

When we got there, my dad gunned it and sped past, instead driving right back to that horrendous North Minneapolis neighborhood. He stopped the car, damaged my inner ear functions with an oversized Q-top, and then heaved me out of the car again.

“Goodbye son!” he shouted as my mother cackled. “We’re going to drop off your soapbox racer at the dump and then drink chardonnay! We’ll pick you up in three days!”

Unable to stand up properly or keep my balance because of the loss of my inner ear functions, I crawled along the sidewalk like a squashed bug. Fortunately, I was able to convince an elderly woman at a bus stop that I was mentally retarded and had lost my wheelchair. I spent the full three days in her home eating Fruity Pebbles and watching Lee Janzen win the US Open.

A few days later my parents came to pick me up, but rather than letting me sit in the car, they tied me to the hood like a trophy buck and once again honked their way through our neighborhood to complete my humiliation.

I was cautious after that. I knew the first car ride my parents invited me on would just be another trick so they could dump me in the ghetto. But strangely, in five months they never offered me a ride. Perhaps it was over. Perhaps I had passed all their tests.

One night while hanging out with friends at a Perkins restaurant, I flirted with a beautiful woman at the table next to us. That night we made love passionately at her place. The next morning she asked if I wanted to get breakfast. I agreed to join her in the car.

The windows were fogged from the cold, and when I got in the passenger’s side, I found my father in her place in the driver’s seat, with my mother in the back. “Hello son!” my father said. “How about you go for a ride with your mother and I?” He again drove me to North Minneapolis and lobbed me out of the moving car, turning back only for a brief moment to inform me that the woman I had slept with the night before was my cousin.

By this time, I wasn’t afraid of the neighborhood anymore. Rather than hiding, I just took a bus back home to my parents’ house and beat both of them voraciously with a baseball bat. As they lay there bleeding, my father said, “Now you’re finally smart enough to be considered a man.” A tear came to my eye and we hugged. Then I stripped off all his clothes and threw him into the neighbor’s yard.

 
- All those people passed out in their lawn chairs weren’t drunk. They just got really sleepy all of a sudden.

- My brother wasn’t passed out in his lawn chair either. And the only reason his chair was soaked in urine was because it had been a long day and he was tired. It can happen to anyone.

- Many people say Bluesfest is just about getting drunk in a lawn chair in the daytime. I’m sure they’re completely wrong and someday someone will correct that statement.

- That weird smell wafting from the portable bathrooms was not marijuana. It was me burning sage for purification and protection purposes. I do this in all portable restrooms.

- 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.

Paul: What is this thing they gave me? A vibrating disc? I’m supposed to lug this thing around? For crying out loud!

Mom: Look at this restaurant! It’s lovely.

The vibrating disc comes alive, vibrating and flashing its lights.

Hostess: It’s flashing? Okay, great! Just stand over here and we’ll find a table for you.

Dad: What is this, another line? Jesus Christ!

Paul: We were waiting in line just to wait in a second line? Is this a restaurant or a doctor’s office? For crying out loud!

Mom: I can’t wait to eat. This will be wonderful.

A server seats the group at a table.

Dad: Why the hell is it so dark in here? I can’t see my food. Is this a wartime blackout? Are the Luftwaffe bombing? Jesus Christ!

Paul: What is this, a multiplex? Hello! Are they showing a movie? For crying out loud!

Mom: It’s probably so it’s romantic for couples. I think it’s lovely.

A waiter brings bread to the table.

Waiter: Careful now. It’s fresh, so it’s still hot.

Dad: This bread isn’t hot. It’s warm. Why the hell did he warn us that it’s hot when it’s only warm? Jesus Christ!

Paul: Why is the bread brown? Is it chocolate bread? Has it gone bad? For crying out loud!

Mom: This is really good bread. It’s wonderful.

Dad: It’s loud in here. Everyone needs to stop talking. Jesus Christ!

Paul: Hey! All you people who aren’t us! Shut the hell up! I’m trying to eat a damn piece of bread in peace! For crying out loud!

Mom: It’s a very vibrant atmosphere. I think it’s lovely.

Dad: There’s too much food on the menu. What the hell is a flat-iron steak? Or a hibachi steak? I don’t understand these people. Jesus Christ!

Paul: There’s nine pages of food on here. How are they supposed to get good at making anything when there’s nine pages of it? It’s all going to taste like ass. For crying out loud!

Mom: The amount of choice they give people is wonderful.

The group orders, their food arrives, and they finish eating it.

Dad: There’s too much food. I can’t eat it all. This is bullshit. Jesus Christ!

Paul: They do it on purpose to humiliate people. The people who own this place hate everyone who eats here. They built this entire restaurant just so they could laugh at people who would actually eat here. For crying out loud!

Mom: I love leftovers. This place is lovely.

Another waiter appears.

Waiter #2: Would you like a box for that, sir?

Dad: Yeah. Here, take this too. Jesus Christ.

Dad hands the waiter the empty bread basket.

Dad: Why did he just give me a look? Was I not supposed to do that? Was that not his job? Did I offend the box guy? Jesus Christ!

Paul: We’ve had four different servers during this meal. What’s that one named again? Ralph? Monty? Mitsy? I don’t know these people. Three of them need to leave us the hell alone. For crying out loud!

Mom: They’ve all been very nice. The service is wonderful.

Dad: Why is everyone in this restaurant taking photos of each other? The entire room is nothing but camera flashes. Jesus Christ!

Paul: Hey, stupid people! It’s too dark to take photos! You’ll look like you’re eating in a goddamn cave! For crying out loud!

Dad: Where is the check? We’ve been sitting here forever. What am I, invisible? You’d think with the four servers, three busboys and two miscellaneous kitchen people who have visited our table, one of them would have a bill. Jesus Christ!

Paul: It’s too dark for them to bring the check. They can’t see us. They’re all wandering through the restaurant, blinded by flash photography. For crying out loud!

Dad: I hate this place. Jesus Christ!

Paul: I hate this place. For crying out loud!

Mom: What a lovely dinner.

I’m kidding, of course. I’ve never run the same column twice. The real answer to how I think up so many ideas is that I drink a lot. A lot. Every Sunday morning I wake up, drink three quarts of gin, and then blackout for the rest of the day. When I wake up Monday morning an hour late for work, I’ll usually find a finished column scribbled on the back of a Denny’s placemat, or carved into the leg of a dead hooker.

I’ll spend my first hour at work typing the column and e-mailing it to my editor, and my second hour at work discreetly transporting the dead hooker from my car to a dumpster behind my workplace, where she will eventually be eaten by hobos. I’ll then spend the remaining five hours at work e-mailing obscene sexual comments to Chelsea Clinton, as I have done for five hours every weekday since 1996.

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.

I never really had an answer for the question. When the teacher asked me, I seem to remember replying with something witty like, “I’m six, I don’t fucking know,” though the brashness of that answer seems to suggest I’ve forgotten my actual answer and employed some creative license in its place. Anyway, the point is that I didn’t know what to say.

In my heart, I knew I wanted to wake up at noon every day, eat cold pizza out of a box on the floor, play video games for 12 hours until the soreness in my hands caused them to freeze into a hideous claw, and then fall asleep watching late night Cinemax movies wherein ladies with unreasonably large bosoms have problems that only uncomfortable-looking sex on patio furniture can solve.

However, that’s not a good answer to give a teacher, especially when you’re six and aren’t yet aware that sex on patio furniture is uncomfortable. It’s still better than telling the teacher you want to be a horse, but not by much. I don’t remember what I answered, but I know I didn’t get yelled at, and that’s what really mattered. After all, this is the teacher who told the boy who wanted to be president, “Don’t be silly. You have to have a job first.” This bitch meant business, son. You had to make up something that sounded reasonable and ambitious.

Oddly enough, even while employed as an adult, I still found myself making up a description of my job that sounded reasonable and ambitious. This is probably because 90 percent of office jobs consist of e-mailing people to ask them where certain pieces of paper are, and then following up daily on said pieces of paper so you can get them, put them somewhere else, forget about them, and then say “I don’t know” and spend a week half-assedly looking for them when someone else e-mails you. But that’s another topic altogether.

Fast-forward 25 years to the present and I was living the very dream that I was afraid to admit to my teacher. Unemployed for 18 months, I woke up every day at noon, ate cold pizza, and played video games until I passed out from exhaustion, boredom, or a combination of both. I upgraded things a little by eating the cold pizza without actually getting out of bed first, and by replacing Cinemax movies with that “Family Feud” nipple slip video that’s making the rounds online, but I was still living the dream.

For about a month, anyway. As the old saying goes, everything is good in moderation and anything gets old when you do it every day, and I quickly found myself bored of video games, pizza, and even nipple slips. The only thing that could have made the irony worse was if my first grade teacher had suddenly appeared in a time machine, shouted “I told you so, doofus!” and then jumped back into the time machine and disappeared.

Caught by surprise, as time machine heckling victims usually are, I likely would have shouted some weak comeback like, “I have over 2,000 kills with the ACR in ‘Modern Warfare 2′! It’s an impressive amount!” but she probably doesn’t know what an ACR is, and time machines are really quick so she probably wouldn’t have heard the second sentence where I described that my statement was impressive.

So with me at wit’s end, it was with great relief last week that I was hired for a month of temp work. I was excited to be employed again. In 18 months, I had nearly forgotten what outside was like. Did you know it’s summertime? Apparently, that’s why it’s so warm now. I was also excited to talk to actual people again. I had taken to talking to Dom DeLouise’s Captain Chaos character in “Cannonball Run” as if he were someone who was physically in the room.

Sadly, my newfound enthusiasm only lasted two days before I discovered an undeniable truth: No matter how long I’m away from work, I still throughly despise it when I return. Almost instantly. It doesn’t matter what the job is, where it’s located, or how important it might be. I just hate work. The early start time, the hours in traffic, the dimly lit cubicle, the bosses who don’t share my enthusiasm for game show nipple slips. Even after 18 months of living so similar to a hobo that I was often mistaken for one by friends and colleagues, I still hated working.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time analyzing this and deciphering what it means, and after careful consideration, I’ve decided that the girl in my first grade class who said she wanted to be a horse was probably the smartest out of all of us. Sure, if you break your leg they send you to the glue factory, but it sure as hell beats working there.

Why such a long wait? Well, first of all, I’m lazy. I can barely be bothered to shower daily. Asking me to author an entire book any sooner than 33 years from now is just wishful thinking. Second, I have the attention span of a small dog. These columns are 850 words because that’s all I can write before seeing the mailman out the window and getting distracted. Third, by waiting 33 years, I figure I may be able to increase my readership from three people to upwards of 12 total readers, quadrupling my potential profits.

Of course, in 33 years my parents will either be senile or deceased, which wipes out two of my three current readers, but I can counteract this by getting married and having 7-12 children whom I will force at gunpoint to read my work.

You should buy my book, reader. Obviously I can’t force you at gunpoint, like I will with my kin, but I assure you it will be well worth your hard-earned dollars. You can read all about the time I drunkenly stumbled nearly seven miles from The Anchor Bar in Superior to my college house at the top of the hill in Duluth. You can also read great stories from my Los Angeles years, like the one day I spent as a production assistant on the Playboy TV show “Jenna Jameson’s Who Wants to be a Porn Star.”

Spoiler alert: It wasn’t porn, just a game show with occasional topless ladies. David Duchovny’s “Californication” has more nudity. Disappointing, I know. But I got to sit in as a “celebrity judge” during rehearsals, and Jenna Jameson laughed at a joke I made and tussled my hair. True story!

She is gross, by the way. She wears more makeup than all the band members of KISS combined. After the show, everyone on the production staff whose hair she tussled was given a bottle of lice shampoo and a tetanus shot.

My book will be kind of like Tucker Max’s, except the stories will be real and well-written, instead of a bunch of implausible horseshit written by a pathological liar. Instead of endless fake stories about me getting freaky with impossibly hot ladies, you’ll get real stories about how I failed to score with four ladies in one summer because the passenger side door on my car was broken and they all had to climb in through the window on dates.

So be sure to set a reminder for yourself to buy my book. Does your cellphone’s calendar app go to 2043? If not, just write a reminder on a piece of paper and store it in an airtight vault so it won’t disintegrate before my book’s release date.

This book publishing plan of mine isn’t particularly shocking or new. I first announced plans to write this same book six years ago, and I’ve renewed said promise every year since then without once following through. It’s become a Ryan tradition that every year around this time I announce my book, spend roughly four hours working on it, and then get distracted by a documentary about koala bears on The Discovery Channel and forget about the book completely. It’s like an annual New Year’s resolution, except I’m too lazy to pick an exact day to lie to my friends and family each year.

However, if you add up the four hours I spend on the book each year and multiply it by six years, that’s 24 hours of work so far. So in 33 years, it’s reasonable to think the book may actually be finished. I’ll be 64 years old at that point, and with how slow the publishing industry works, I’ll likely be 72 years old before the book is actually in stores, but I’d like to think the book will still serve its original purpose of getting me laid.

God knows this column has been sorely lacking in that regard.

“But Paul,” you ask, “Will there be any big scandals or revealing items of gossip in your book?” Of course! Have I ever told you about the time the entire cast of Glee and I overdosed on mescaline, kidnapped a bunch of babies, and ate them? It hasn’t happened yet, but I’ve got 33 years to make it happen, and very little else to do with my time before then.

Oddly enough, the whole reason I started this book in the first place was because I didn’t have anything else to do. Seeing how now, six years later, I still have absolutely nothing important going on in my life, perhaps I’ll actually follow through this year. Don’t hold your breath, though. After all, this is me we’re talking about here, the guy who once got drunk and lost the contact lenses he was wearing. But even dopey, jug-eared morons like myself score a few wins here and there.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I still hold this horribly flawed belief. The fact that I’ve been writing this column for eight years and only one person has ever recognized me in public – some dude working the front desk of a Best Western motel, who neither confirmed nor denied that he liked my column, only that he had read it – has no bearing on my beliefs. I truly, honestly believe that sooner or later, I’ll be sitting at an Arby’s or something and a bosomy newspaper groupie will sprint up to me and sexily whisper in my ear, “I laughed really hard at that joke you wrote about farting. Would you like to come back to my place?”

Ladies reading this column may think I’m insane, but if you ask around, you’ll find that this is not a delusion that is exclusive to guys who write for mediocre alt-weekly newspapers, host boring college radio programs at three in the morning, or play in shitty local bands. Even guys who just work regular jobs and do nothing in the public eye often think to themselves, “Someday, I’ll be walking to the convenience store in my stained sweatpants, and a hot lady will appear, notice how awesome I am, have sex with me for no reason whatsoever, and then disappear into the evening.”

Ask your guy friends, ladies. I’m sure some won’t admit to it, but they all have beliefs that someday a stranger will, without having met them or spoken a word to them before, offer free, no strings attached sex with no provocation. There’s a reason why Penthouse Forum is still popular after all these years, and it’s certainly not because men have become more realistic about how much effortless sex someone as ugly as them should be having.

Mind you, this belief in pornographic serendipity is not to be confused with the idea of “love” or “meeting the right person”. As men, we all assume someday we’ll meet a relatively attractive girl who doesn’t hassle us too much, and once she’s maintained that low maintenance status for a few years, we’ll acknowledge that rare quality by putting a ring on her finger. But these fantasies about strangers have nothing to do with finding a mate. It’s the ridiculous belief that no matter how boring our lives are, we all deserve a groupie.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find this belief holds true regardless of age. I have no doubt that even wrinkly, wheelchair-bound old men keep Viagra in their pockets because they too believe they will someday cross paths with their own personal groupies. According to the 12 hours of television elderly people watch every day, this modern world of bikinis and birth control is filled with sluttiness and random sexual encounters. Not only are these late night Cinemax moments based on real life events, they’re as commonplace as bags of lettuce at the supermarket.

The only reason they haven’t experienced such an event yet is because they were born a little late for the movement. But soon – maybe when they’re 90, maybe on their one hundredth birthday – they’ll be rolling their wheelchair to the bus stop when a scantily-clad lady stranger jumps out of an alleyway and molests them in the most favorable of ways. Of course, that sort of thing would probably kill them, but when you’re 100 years old and it’s time to be dead anyway, death by sluts is a funeral fit for a king.

I’m not sure if women have this same groupie fantasy. They pretty much have groupies already; all they have to do is show up at a club with a low-cut dress and they’ll have 20 skeezy stalkers grinding against them in seconds. And I’m almost certain none of them would appreciate even a handsome man jumping out of an alleyway and molesting them in their wheelchair.

Perhaps Brad Pitt or Justin Bieber could get away with ravishing old women in wheelchairs, but even then the women would have to be fans of them in the first place, which once again swings it back to the topic of men having groupies. The only logical parallel to men’s groupie fantasies I can think of is women who believe they will someday travel to France and be romanced by beret-wearing, stubble-faced men of “Le Resistance”.

Anyway, enough of this topic. I don’t have time to sit around discussing such things. It’s time for me to go grocery shopping, and I have to shower, shave, and spray on some cologne first in case one of the female checkout clerks randomly came across my Facebook page online, became smitten with me, and wants to fornicate on the register counter’s moving beltway.

 
“We went store.”

*slap*

“We went the store?”

*slap*

“We went to the store?”

“Very good, Anneli.”

 
It’s not like I don’t want to work. Living your life like a character in “The Big Lebowski” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In real life, white russians have far too many ingredients to be affordable on an unemployment check, and your landlord won’t look the other way on your late rent payments if you attend their slightly homoerotic solo dance recitals.

At least not my landlord. I’ve offered.

There just isn’t much work for anyone these days, let alone a man whose main talent lies in thinking up synonyms for the word “poop” that you can print in a newspaper. Trying to find a job in 2010 is like trying to find a Jew in Germany in 1944. The few that remain are hidden, and only known to friends of the people close to them.

And as if things weren’t bad enough, now I’ll also be going to hell for writing that last paragraph. When it rains, it pours, dear reader.

So my parents coming to visit just makes an already hectic existence even more so. I have to bribe all the hobos in my neighborhood to leave for a few days so my parents think my community is safe. I have to hide all the heroin paraphernalia from my apartment and remove all the dead cats I drowned in my toilet for fun. I have to get Tara Reid to move out of my bathtub.

I have to pay a junk pickup service to remove all the discarded toilets people have dumped on the front lawns of the abandoned homes in my neighborhood. I have to politely ask the creepy Hispanic guy pushing a cooler full of ice cream down the street while honking a bicycle horn to take the day off from trying to molest children. I have to give local gang members my Playstation 3 in exchange for not spray painting “I love (n-word)” on my parents’ rental car.

I have to hide all my valuables so when my parents visit they’ll think I’m much poorer than I really am and buy me stuff. I have to check the U.S. Geological Survey earthquake website, because there’s no way in hell my crappy building will remain standing if anything over a 3.2 quake hits. I have to remove all the Avril Lavigne songs from my iPod in case my parents check to see what I’m listening to.

And again, it would also be helpful to find a job so my parents don’t drag me kicking and screaming back to Minnesota. I plan to follow the same rules girls follow while on a blind date. I’ll get my own drinks and be careful to never leave them unattended, in case my parents try to slip me a roofie. I will meet them in a public place with lots of people where I can scream for help if they try to use chloroform on me and put me into the aforementioned burlap sack.

I almost got hired for a job last week. It was a receptionist position at a union training center where they teach illegal immigrants how to fix refrigerators. The only requirements listed on the Craigslist ad were “Must be able to read and write proper English” and “Your urine will be tested monthly.” It’s a shame I didn’t get it. I do so adore having my urine tested perennially.

I also had an interview the previous week at a temping agency in Beverly Hills, where I’m pretty sure the guy interviewing me had a serious cocaine problem. He kept sniffling, and couldn’t stop fidgeting with his hands. He hasn’t called me back either. Again, it’s a shame. If there’s anything I enjoy more than having my urine tested perennially, it’s finding a job where I definitely wouldn’t have my urine tested, ever.

Oh well. My Lebowski summer continues. Except instead of delivering bags of used underwear to pretend kidnappers and hassling high school kids named Larry in Van Nuys, my life is more like a sequel to the original movie, where the Dude’s unemployment is running out and his parents come to visit, and the majority of the storyline is spent watching him feverishly clean his apartment so his mom doesn’t criticize.

- Fireworks are illegal in Minnesota, but that’s why Wisconsin was invented. It’s not the only reason Wisconsin was invented – a place to buy beer on Sundays and a connecting piece of land for attractive women from Michigan to reach us are other reasons – but it’s the main reason we haven’t built a wall yet.

- Never point or throw fireworks at another person, unless they slept with your wife.

- Placing your small child on a wagon and tying a “Patriotic Power Blaster” fountain to his back may sound like a really cool idea after nine or ten beers, but he will hate you for it when he grows up disfigured and realizes only prostitutes will sleep with him.

- Sparklers look very innocent, but they can become a dangerous weapon when inserted into someone’s anus.

- It’s a well-known fact that children who are given sparklers by their parents have a 95 percent chance of magically turning gay. But by the time they reach high school that will be very trendy, so you’ll be doing them a favor.

- Homemade fireworks are God’s little way of removing stupid people from the planet. If someone you know even brings up the possibility of making their own fireworks, encourage them as much as possible. It’s God’s will.

- Serious tip: The best fireworks are Fierce Tiger rockets, Missile Base aerial barrages, Fiery Frog fountains, and Crackling Ground Bloom spinners. You will not be disappointed by these items, unless you blow off your fingers while using them. But even then you’ll probably still be impressed.

- If you plan to attend the city fireworks show, be sure to bring a blanket or jacket. Otherwise everyone will see you fingering your girlfriend.

- If you’re a TV news reporter, the best way to send parents into irrational hysterics with your newscast is to insert a firework into a watermelon and then show footage of it exploding. If you’re not a TV news reporter, this can be a really fun party trick to impress your friends.

- When sending invites to a July 4 gathering, don’t send Evites. Those are so 2004. The proper vogue is to create a Facebook event page and attach a photo of you vomiting at last year’s gathering.

- If no one attended your barbecue this year, it’s probably because last year you wouldn’t stop making jokes about people putting your wieners in their mouths.

- If your husband or wife suggests having a healthy Fourth of July barbecue with marinated tofu and other vegan entrees, it would not be unreasonable to lock them in the trunk of your car for the duration of the weekend.

- Grain Belt Premium is not only more American than apple pie; it will also get you drunk faster.

- Pets love loud noises. Make sure to bring them to the city fireworks display and let them run around without a leash.

- Do not put sunscreen on your dog. It will just piss him off.

- Never drink and drive. Instead, call a cab and then jump out and run away when it stops at a stoplight near your house.

- The Fourth of July is a great time for having sex outdoors. I highly recommend the Tilt-o-Whirl ride at the local carnival. It’s both challenging and exciting, and if you slip Sparky the ride operator a twenty, he’ll keep the ride going until you’ve finished. He will, however, insist on taking photos.

- Remember the golden rule for holidays: Underwear and pants are both optional, but you have to choose one or the other.

- Serious tip: If you’re planning to have a party while your parents are out of town, it’s almost inevitable they will know. Parents have a special skill for knowing such things. However, most parents are also cool enough to not confront you about it unless you break something or neglect to wash their bedsheets to remove the stains. So make sure you do that.

- No matter how bad the economy is or how dire your circumstances, this day has been set aside for you to stuff your face, drink until you puke, and blow stuff up. And that, dear reader, is what makes America so great. And every other country. But for the sake of the holiday, let’s pretend it’s exclusive to America.