Dear Employee,

I would like to thank you for all the hard work, long hours, dedication, and sacrifices you have made to help in my quest to line my pockets with gold.  You’ve made me an extremely wealthy man, and in the process I’ve fed you booze, teased you with hot girls, and given off the illusion that “we care.”  And boy did you buy it!  In fact, you bought it so much that I paid you as little as I could get away with; the bare minimum amount to keep you slaving away for my glorification.

To show my appreciation, I’m spending millions of dollars to throw myself a ridiculous, over blown, ego stroking party, where you’ll be able to stand at the base of a 15′ stage and worship me as I parade around as if I was a rock star.  But don’t even think of getting close to me, and it would probably be best to not make eye contact with me either.  I’ll rope off a special section for those suckers who paid to have the honor to lobby for my company so the laws would land in my favor and I could rake in even more money for myself.  Oh, and there’ll be plenty of booze on hand, but only the first two are free, the rest I’ll be making a huge profit off as you overpay for them with pleasure.

The best part of the party is, it doubles as a PR stunt and actually gets the media thinking that my company is a great exciting place to work!  Instead of sharing the wealth with the people who have worked hard to make me a filthy rich man, I’m spending it on myself.  Is that really a surprise?

Your’s Truly,

Egomaniacal CEO

p.s. Ha! Ha! Fuck you!

The most interesting thing about Van Halen is they were more popular (i.e. sold more records) as the one dimensional Van Hagar than as the original with DLR.  Why?

I think it’s two things.  First, they were more generally appealing as Van Hagar, writing more radio friendly songs and not being even remotely experimentally, unlike the original, more dynamic version.  Second, they found the winning formula with 1984, which rocketed them into popularity.

But there’s something more interesting going on here.  As the edgy, often times experimental Van Halen, they were a better band.  And by better, I don’t mean more musically gifted.  Rather, they had a rabid fan base that anticipated every record, every single, and every concert they produced.  They looked forward to it and was willing to plop down money to be a part of it.  Sure they didn’t make as much money or sell more records or get more radio play, but they had something going that could’ve lasted a very long time, something that Van Hagar destroyed the second they formed.

There’s a big difference between making a record for your truly rabid fans and the general masses.  As a rabid fan, you want them to be pushing the envelope, even if they go a little too far and it’s unlistenable.  You want them to experiment with different styles, different sounds, different instruments even to try and go beyond what you’ve heard from them before.  It’s not always going to work, but your loyal, rabid fans will most likely support you through it, unless, of course, you shit in their mouth and keep producing crap.

Or you shit in their mouth by becoming hugely popular, which is exactly what Van Hagar did.

I’m not saying they sold out.  They couldn’t have, because how could they have known that Van Hagar would be more popular than the original?  But what happened did destroy them, creatively, musically, and financially.  They became hugely popular and as a consequence, they became a commodity.

When you’re making a record for the general population, you can’t be experimental.  You can’t push the envelope, because if you fail, that’s it, people will jump off the bandwagon and abandon you.  So in order to continue the level of popularity, you have to keep churning out the same hit (garbage) and keep following the formula and keep appeasing to the executives, the distributors (radio in this case), and the generic housewife who just a few years early, had no idea who you were.

And the worst part of all, when you reach a level of general popularity, nobody cares any more.  Even though they’re buying the album and going to your concerts, they don’t care.  Because when you eventually fizzle out, when your formula becomes old, they have something else to glom onto, the next big thing.  There’s always someone on your heals who can follow the same formula, except they’re younger, better looking, more appealing, fresh, etc.  When that happens, you’re toast.  Career over.  It’s very hard to recover once you’ve been tossed aside.

Bands achieve longevity by flying under the radar and appealing to their core rabid fans.  As a result, they become richer than any megastar super band.  The lesson here?  At all costs, don’t become a commodity, build something that a handful of people care about and the rest will fall into place.

If you went down to the Wal-Marts and bought a cheap ass toy and put it in the little collection box at your job, then you can feel good knowing you made the most minimal effort possible to help someone celebrate Christmas.  And who knows if those toys actually make it into the hands of kids whose parents really can’t afford it (or they get sold on ebay, or they’re given to kids who don’t really need it).

It’s all good now though, we can go back to forgetting about them.  I’m sure they’ll be around next year.

Now Santa could no longer carry a whip on his jolly rounds, bringing joy to all the children of the Earth.  The whip he used not only to whip his loyal, subservient, repressed reindeer, he also used it, while drunk, to whip girls he found in bikinis.  It was rare during the Christmas season, but every once in a while during his pass over Miami, he’d find some young, hot girl in a bikini just walking around in the middle of the night.  (He even pitched Google on a girl-in-a-bikini-finding-device to install on his slay to make the search easier.)  The authorities decided it was time to take that whip away after his unfortunate incident with the reindeer.

Santa’s biggest problem has always been keeping his elves in line, who he compassionately refers to as his own personal “joy makers.”  Not because they work in a sweat shop building toys for the fat man to keep the spoiled kids happy, but because sometimes, late at night, when Mrs. Clause is on the rag, and Santa has had a few, he slips his Santa dong in their mouth while they are sleeping and proceeds to “date” their mouth.  Franco was his favorite.

After his little run in with the law, and suffering numerous butt rapping in prison, Santa is more feared and revered in the elf community.  Franco contemplates suicide every day now, because Santa is more violent on their little “dates” these days.  And since elves and Santa never die, it’s become his own personal living hell.

Suffice it to say, Santa will never be viewed the same again.  And the experts recommend buying a cork for your butt and an old school hockey mask for your face when you’re sleeping on Christmas Eve.

Or maybe it’s time to just stop fucking giving money for the piece of shit.  BitTorrent, I hear, is a snazzy little piece of software goodness that allows you to…you fucking know what it does.  I think “stealing” it, then donating some money directly to the artist is a good system.

So far in my lifetime, I’ve paid for and downloaded one movie from iTunes, Louis CK’s Hilarious.  It’ll be the last, because now I have to join the digital criminal underworld to break the fucking DRM so I can consume it as I please.

Thank you God for giving us greedy corporate America.

Let’s release some angry, hungry Lions, whose only hope of scoring a meal is taking down a weaker, fatter, slower human in a crowded mall.

Let’s make being fat, lazy, stupid, and/or unconscious a penalty, a disadvantage to simply being alive, a punishable offense.

Essentially, let’s stop catering to the weak, and start forcing everyone on this planet to be conscious, alert, and fit at all times.

Is this too harsh?  Is it unfair?  It definitely goes against the system, a system that has rules and laws in place to protect the weak.  A system that is built to keep people fat, lazy and dumb, consuming everything they come across without thought.  Hungry Lions don’t give a fuck, they just want to eat and survive.  A fat lazy human on the other hand?  What’s their need to exist?  What motivates you to keep on living?

A steady diet of video games, T.V. and electronic distractions are exactly what the system has in mind.  Keep stuffing horrible food down their throat and they’ll obey every command.  Keep promising “the good life” and they’ll keep showing up for jobs they hate and spend money on things they don’t really need for the opportunity that someday, they’ll be showered with money and pussy and will never have to try again…ever.

Or maybe I’m just projecting?  Perhaps there is no end goal or a destination that comes from walking around as a mouth breather.  It could be that you’re just born and raised to be a pawn, and that is ordinary, and beyond that you have no understanding.  So it is your life, all you know and ever will, which I suppose in a sense is just fine.  After all, I’ve always believed in the mantra “ignorance is bliss.”  Maybe self awareness is a trait we should strive to eliminate, so we become a collective.  Maybe that’s our destiny as humans?

Unfortunately, there’s no turning back once you come online.  Once the switch flips to bring you into awareness, there’s no turning it off.  The mouth breathers become apparent and stick out like Santa Clause dry humping a telephone pole.  You tend to notice things like that.

So let’s get rid of it.  Forget it.  Let it go.  Get over it. You can remember it, fine, and be conscious that it could happen again in the future, when all those new terrorists we’ve created over the last 10 years start coming of age.  If you lost someone, how was that any different than losing them in, say, a car accident?

Let’s stop allowing corporations and all the other benefactors of tragedy to associate their brand with our remembrance, our emotional connection to tragic events.  Because that’s what they’re trying to do, psychologically, subconsciously tie their products to our emotional connection to the event.  So whenever we think of 9/11, we’ll also think Verizon, or Budweiser, or State Farm.  I mention those companies because I just saw 9/11 inspired tribute commercials from them during the football openers.  Absolutely disgusting.  If they really cared and wanted to pay tribute then they wouldn’t have taken advantage of the tragedy and tried to tied their brand to it.

But their motivation doesn’t lay in actually paying a tribute.  It lay in connecting their brand in our minds with something emotionally powerful.  Every one of those piece of shit companies, and all the others, including the media conglomerates who are taking advantage of you and me, should be blown up, literally.  Of course, we can do the next best thing: stop consuming the garbage they’re trying to brainwash us into consuming.

America, Fuck Yeah!

If any of the shit that’s pawned upon us actually was effective, the self help business would simply go away.  If there was such a thing as a “cure” for whatever ails you, then why has the genre thrived for so long?

The easy explanation is because all of it, even the stuff that you think is true, is absolute horse shit.  It’s interesting, no doubt, as most psychological analysis are.  But effective, actionable?  Think about this, if your doctor, whom you believe is all knowing, all seeing, all righteous, like a proxy Jesus, gives you a sugar pill and tells you it “cures” whatever disease he says you have, then what is the likelihood that that sugar pill will actually be effective in treating your ailment?

Self help works a lot in the same way.  You adopt a new philosophy for a while, think you’ve found the answer to your shitty life, praise the method for turning your life around, then, over time, fade back in to your old ways.  Much like the placebo effect becomes much less effective when you realize you’re taking a sugar pill.

Magicians use the same trickery.  Sleight of hand is nothing more than playing into our desire, or more powerfully, our belief, that there’s something at work larger than ourselves, guiding us, watching out for us.  The trick works because we want it to work, so therefore we shut out the deception and tend to not notice what’s really going on.  It’s way more entertaining that way.

Self help works in the same vein.  A charlatan discovers an area he/she can exploit, exploits it, receives instant praise, then washes his/her hands clean, claiming “cure.”  Where “cure” is nothing more than our belief in such; our desire to desperately want there to be such a thing that exists in the world.

But it doesn’t.  It never will.  ”Cure” is magic, and there will always be a magician who can exploit our burning desire for such.  And there will always exist suckers like me who want to find the “cure,” and fix the shitty life that we’ve whittled out for ourselves.

But we can’t fix the shitty life unless we address the actual cause, and not simply rearrange the symptoms, as self help does.

So what is the real cause of a shitty life?  The answer usually lies in your perception, the difference between what you think your life should be like and what it actually is:

Quality of Life = what I think my life should look like – what my life actually looks like

Self help takes advantage of this equation, but focusing on defining the what I think my life should look like variable, defining to meet their needs, not yours.  Then in order to balance the equation, you have to do the work the raise what your actual life is to the level of what it should look like.  And the magic of it all is that some people’s equation is almost balanced.  A few tweaks here and there and a shitty life become an OK life.  Those are the people you hear about.  The ones in the magazines and getting interviewed by Oprah and writing the book about how they turned their life around.

They fail to mention that it only took a little tweaking to raise their level of living, and perhaps a little luck and good timing along the way.

For the rest of us, it’s simply a matter of lowering, or better yet, eliminating altogether what we think our lives should look like, and just accept how it actually looks.  What looks and feels like a shitty life to one person looks and feels like the life of a rock star to another.

Oh, wait.  We’re just talking about fags, right?  People who predominately choose to fuck the same sex?  They haven’t been persecuted, held down, or otherwise punished for the choices they’ve made.  They haven’t been forced into a role, other than not having the ability to get married.    Hmmm, I guess the lobotomizing of humans is the birthright of the weak; those whose only satisfaction in life lies in literally trying to legislate away our natural instincts.

Fuck them.  I will continue to use “gay” as a means of calling someone out as weak, especially when it’s aimed at a man.  Women?  Who cares.  Let them fuck whoever they want.  They are the submissive gender anyway, and they’re supposed to be weak.  But men?  Yeah, when a man bends over and takes it in the ass, either by will or by force, he’s being dominated, taking on the submissive role.  Clearly this is not a healthy strategy for extending the human race.

Think about it.  If a gay gene actually existed, where it was not possible for a man/woman to get aroused for the opposite sex, that’s a threat to our very existence if it’s allowed to propagate.  Then that would truly be a disease, and in which case instead of being “tolerant” we should just kill them off so as not to allow the gene to live on.

Now I’m not saying let’s start murdering the homos.  That would be pointless, because the truth is, there is no gay gene.  They are not forced into fucking the same sex.  They may strongly gravitate towards the same sex, perhaps based on male/female ratios in a given area, or whatever else mother nature dictates, but if forced into a corner and they had to fuck the opposite sex to continue the species, they’d make it happen.

For now though, “gay” is most definitely a fearful response, and one of natural instinct.  I would imagine if we were all naked in the jungle fighting for survival, and along comes a homo, we’d no doubt kill him/her, because they would most definitely not be considered the “fittest.”  But gay is in no way, shape, or form anything like other racial slurs, whose intentions were/are to oppress a people based on some characteristic they have zero control over, like the color of their skin.

Besides, I’m sick of the rule makers trying to protect the feelings of every fuck headed group on the planet.  I propose we eliminate the distinction between those who choose to fuck the same sex and the rest of us who are more naturally inclined breeders.  We’re all sexual creatures.  We all like to fuck.  So we’re all in the same boat.  But I still reserved the right to call out that person who displays submissive behavior as weak.  If he doesn’t like it, fuck him.

How have we cornered ourselves into such an oppressive system?  How did it come to this?  Is it just a natural evolution from forced slavery?  Are people actually better off/happier giving up their lives to a corporation monarchy?

I fucking hate it.  I feel like a submissive bitch every time I have to “request” time off.

I guess it’s an exercise in control, demeaning you to begging for access to YOUR time, which they feel they own.  It’s putting you in your place, as the beggar asking the king to toss you a few scraps of leftovers.  Just like training a dog to be obedient, your master-boss revels in the delight of having almost absolute power of you.  Make no mistake about it, no matter how “nice” your boss is, he/she loves the power trip.

Time is the only thing we really have.  It’s the only currency that is consistent, that will never change.  Those that own the time of others are the powerful, the wealthy few who lavish themselves at the expense of the ignorant masses who think they’re getting a deal; sacrificing their time every day in exchange for a paycheck.  A paycheck that gets rapped by the very people who give it out.  A paycheck many use to try and emulate the bullshit lifestyle of the haves.

You may think this is just some whiny, whoa is me nonsense.  Fine, fuck you.  If you’re happy slaving away for someone else who will shit on you any chance they get, then have at you.  Most people remain ignorant, fat, dumb, and content.  Too lazy or scared to try and make a change.  Those are the folks that the system feeds off of.  The system loves a subservient, docile, well trained, obedient human who will do menial, degrading, labor for them so they can fund their own little kingdoms.

Fuck them.