A Brief Memorandum on Existence

One of the things I truly pride myself on is being a good narcissist. I may not be a leader of any one field in art nor science, but I daresay that I put to shame even the total of their achievements to shame in terms of my ability to be proud of the vast extensions in human understanding I have blessed the world with.

—I create, forming portraits of characters that are either pieces of myself or pieces of other people improved to be more like the way they should be in real life. You could almost say that the body of my literature is a sort of self-help book written specifically for you, dear reader.

—The determining factor between yesterday’s pulp and today’s classics is the collective thoughts of a wide sieve of critics, who point out the merit or lack thereof ascribed to a given work. While this process takes many decades and careful analysis by a variety of persons representing a spectrum of perspectives, I like to think that in twenty years my ideas about cinema will have taken full possession of our collective taste. Imagine a world in which people talk about the director of Indiana Jones and people are totally like, “yeah, that guy Spill-what?” and history lessons teach of Tina Fey who became President for being both the funniest and hottest woman in America. Pessimists take heed—our future is indeed bright, for I live and breathe and think.

—Sometimes people say that having children is the ultimate act of narcissism, creating a living being who essentially a shared copy of yourself and one other person, but I think there’s absolutely nothing prideful in simple procreation. In fact, a woman who carries another man’s child ought to be considered a hero after my example catches on. I am going to forego natural biology entirely, choosing instead to insert my mitochondrial DNA in its entirety into a neutral donor egg and having these test tube babies brought to gestation in thoroughly controlled laboratory environment. In fact, the best plan Barack Obama could put into his platform would be to quadruple resources devoted to this type of research and diverting every course of study into helping me to this end, so that within three generations 38 percent of the Earth’s population will be Bradley clones. You see, tomorrow really is a better day.

In summation, if you just skimmed this little memorandum, you basically committed the equivalent to smoking an entire dime bag of cannabis before every class in your high school education, and will probably wind up with a non-functional brain returning to the penitentiary for the third time just like every other common drug-dealer, thief, and felon.
Or you could save yourself one big lifetime of pain and suffering and go back and re read—carefully—this vital communiqué.

Pat yourself on the back for 45 seconds well spent. I can’t begin to express the tremendous honor you have in reading each electron that makes up even a fraction of each letter that I have here deigned to inscribe.


5.2.08