No, YOU’RE Fucked Up!

“Demons”
by Scott Oglesby

Let’s face it, we all have demons. My demons are the same as your demons; they probably just use different Facebook accounts. It is my sincere hope that by sharing my story, showing you my moments of weakness and sharing with you my hard won victory, you will have an added strength when you need it most. Luckily for me, the dreaded demons only attack “sometimes.”

Sometimes they come, hungry, in the middle of the night eating away at the back of my brain until I give in, turn on my computer and vigorously masturbate to midget porn. Lately the midgets are able to take me where the “strap on lesbians” no longer will.

Sometimes they arrive as I’m eating my breakfast and strongly suggest that I throw my one hard boiled egg and half a fucking grapefruit at the nearest wall and just eat the frozen sausage and pancake on a stick that I was supposed to throw away when I started South Beach three days ago, but didn’t because, well, nobody stays on a diet forever and why waste food? The demons tell me that I could even dip my Jimmy Dean delight in the Baconnaise sauce that I love so much. Those fatty, sugary demons are dastardly demons indeed.

Sometimes the demons show up mid-morning, tapping my shoulder when I’m feeling really lethargic, probably because I gorged myself with a ridiculously heavy breakfast, telling me to see if Rick from copywriting will front me another teener of blow to get me through the day. They tell me that I can quit again next week, when I’m back on my diet and feeling peppier.

Sometimes they come during my lunch hour when I realize that I did way too much coke and it turned out to be really, really good, which is unusual for Rick’s shit, so the demons insist that I need a taste of the brown, junk, chiva, smackdaddy- heroin, (God, I even love its nicknames) because I urgently need to come down a notch or two or I’m likely to suffer cardiac arrhythmia. I did eat all that fat and cholesterol this morning. Oh God damnit, I don’t want to die like this. Agh! But then I tell myself not to let the blow make me paranoid, that I always let the blow make me paranoid and I’m just beginning to slip into cocaine psychosis, like always. Then that particular demon speaks up again and asks me why I’d take the chance? I mean it’s my heart we’re talking about here. Besides, the detox from last time wasn’t as excruciatingly painful as I told people it was. That was just me trying to garner sympathy, like I always do. It was no worse than the common flu. I won’t even need to detox if I only do a little. Rick will understand; he didn’t give me the heads up on the purity of that coke so he kind of owes me, honestly.

Sometimes they come at night, after I realize that I’ve been nodding out at my desk for the past 7 hours, and they merrily inform me that this would be the perfect time to pick up a fifth of scotch, call the escort service and order my specialty; the midget.

Sometimes they come while I’m lying in bed, worn out from a hard day at the office and utterly spent due to indescribably awesome sex with a midget, and they are screaming in my ear to just have one cigarette. The midget is having one right now, surely I can give myself over to this one, small, harmless pleasure. I tightly close my steel trap mind to those manipulative, demonic voices however, because I’m so much stronger than that.

Scott Oglesby lives in Southern Spain after being exiled (yes exiled) from the United States after a series of unfortunate incidents involving C list celebrities and duct tape. He is currently hard at work on his third attempt to cook eggplant parmesan to perfection and thus, satisfy the judges.

“Maximum Efficiency”
by Scott Erickson

My main problem with working is that it requires work. Rather than think of myself as “lazy,” I prefer to think of myself as efficient. If efficiency is defined as “how to get more as a result of less work” then maximum efficiency would be “how to get everything as a result of no work.”

Thus, maximum efficiency became my life goal. But how could I achieve it?

Someone in a New Age bookstore introduced me to the book Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain. According to the book, all you need to do is visualize your goals, and then your “thought energy” conspires with like-minded energy and manifests your goals in the material realm. No work required!

I visualized night and day. I visualized till the cows came home. I visualized while the cows hung around. I continued visualizing as the cows took off again.

I visualized myself standing proudly in front of my huge Hollywood mansion. I visualized a gold stretch-Cadillac limo pull up the driveway. I visualized Scarlett Johansson stepping out of the limo. I visualized Scarlett Johansson shedding her clothes. This led to further visualizations that went on for hours and hours, and eventually include Liv Tyler.

But no matter how much I visualized, none of my thought energy manifested in the material realm. I felt betrayed. I wanted to write an outraged letter to Shakti Gawain, but I couldn’t afford a stamp.

As I was attempting to visualize a first-class postage stamp, I received the insight that changed my life. It struck me with the force of something really forceful that all the effort I was expending to avoid work was “in itself” a form of work.

But what were the implications of this insight? I couldn’t decide if it meant I had to accept the necessity of doing work, or if it meant I had to give up the work of not-working. But could I give up work without working at it? Would it be possible to not work at not working?

At this point, my mental processes looped themselves into self-perpetuating feedback, kind of like amplifier feedback inside my head but with ideas instead of guitar noise. Imagine one thousand Jimi Hendrix guitar solos all at once, but with no sound. Weird, huh? Then everything got quiet. Then everything went dark-for a long time.

Things are better now. Every day I get three decent meals and a clean change of underwear. Someone cuts my hair and trims my nails, since they don’t trust me with sharp instruments. For some reason they also don’t trust me to bath myself, so I’m bathed by a nurse who slightly resembles Scarlett Johansson if I squint my eyes a certain way and ignore that it’s a male nurse.

But the important thing is that I have finally achieved my dream of not working. I have finally achieved maximum efficiency. Although, as is usually the case with achieving dreams, there were ramifications I had failed to take into account, such as I’m not allowed to play with Legos because of the choking hazard.

I feel like there’s a moral here-something about how the true purpose of dreams is to transform the dreamer, or maybe something about being careful what you ask for because you might get it, or maybe something about being careful of any dream that involves Scarlett Johansson.