I Always Dreamed Of Writing The Worst American Novel

Anyone Can Write Great Shit. Where's The Challenge In That? I Once Answered Every Question On The PSAT And Got Them All Wrong. That Was A Real Challenge.

Some people are born despite their best efforts. I am one of those people, due in early September, but arriving fashionably late in mid-December.

While most babies cry at birth, I was just rude. “Fuck you assholes,” I cursed, scrinching my tiny fists until I could unfurl two chubby birds of paradise, “I was just getting to the good part!”

Only recently has my PCP pinpointed my problem to an overactive curmudgeon gene stuck to the side of a mutated civility strand.

“What can I do?” I asked Dr. Bizarro, who specialized in internal hemorrhaging.

“Why you asking me?” Dr. Biz answered impolitely with another question, “That’s a question for your insurance provider.”

Today the climate is not too bad. The weather, on the other hand, truly sucks. We have been told to refrain from breathing outside. It’s a good thing I’m a cave painter.

I failed my first IQ test. Didn’t do much better on the second one either.

I learned to swim in Long Island Sound when my old man took me fishing out of Cos Cob for flounder and tautogs and threw me overboard. That’s how his father taught him to swim.

I decided right then and there that tradition ended with me, so shortly after my first wet dream, I cut my nuts off with pinking shears.

My mother was pissed: “Now I’ll never have grandkids.”

After my scrotum healed I got a job delivering the Long Island Star figuring since I wanted to grow up and be a journalist, I had to start somewhere, like Clark Kent. I wore glasses. I was a wimp. I dreamed on occasion that I could fly.

There were lots of Nazis around at the time, mostly in the government and the corporations that owned the government. Sort of like today but more primitive, technologically.

People were scared of red.

It was a terrible time to be a kid, but to be fair, in America, any time is a perfectly terrible time to be a kid. Have you met many of the adults?

Kids are expected to be seen and agree to whatever they are told. If they don’t get the message, there’s always juvie or enlistment where they’ll make a man out of you regardless of your stupidity level, race, religion, gender, or favorite phone app.

I was arrested in the fourth grade and not in a retarded way.

Oddly enough, despite hundreds of encounters with our community police state over the years, I still have a clean record. I chalk this up to passing for white, although I had no idea that’s what I was doing.

I was always the Indian in our neighborhood Cowboy games, back when cap guns came with rolls of ammunition that me and Danny used to scrape off and make bombs with.

I thought I was just being lucky and God loved me, even though I didn’t believe in God.

Belief is still a concept that makes no sense to me. Whenever I encounter it, I usually say “I have to use the bathroom or I’m gonna shit right here.”

Most people have no inner lives.

One day I will succeed in what I was put here to fail at.

And so ends the Pataphysical Serendipity Prayer.