Each morning I wake up a wildly successful failure. I get many compliments. And the other day for the very first time, some admirer approached me and suggested I write a how-to manual for the loser from a first-hand perspective. I loved the idea. So here I am at the keyboard, stringing out the few easy steps on the road to true self-disempowerment. And my agent only gets ten percent!

Well, where does one start the reader may ask, when one wants to go nowhere?  This is the beauty of the whole pursuit: he or she, as the case may be, does absolutely, positively, without exception, simply nothing. Nothing. At all. There you have it folks.  The long and short of it.  The skinny on futility. There ain't more.  Really, except to say that it takes repeated practice over days, weeks and months. Before you know it, if my life is any example, you're over the hill and got zilch to show for it. Hooray.

Now, this is not to say that there aren't important side activities to
be pursued as well. Oh no.  The secret of superior failure is in the details. No self-respecting loser admits to his vocation without spicing up the sketchy basics with the juicy habits that takes laziness all the way to the bone.

For instance, take my waking ritual. Which take's place in my bathroom every morning at 11:00 a.m. I take a hot, sputtering shit. A good long one. The whole mess takes at least fifteen minutes. My more literate friends say to me that it is a telling metaphor for the rest of my life. I don't really know what they're talking about but I always take their word for it. They're really smart.

Well, what else stands out amidst my humdrum dealings in a typically dreary day? Oh, I could tell you about my job.  If I can really call it that. What I do is sort of hard to explain in simple terms. Usually I stand in front of people. Oh it doesn't really matter where; be it in front of doorways, elevators, bus stops, or subway turnstiles, I'm there. I usually do it just long enough to get punched in the head , kneed in the gut,  poked in the eye or slammed in the teeth or stuffed in the balls or kicked in the ass. I call it being alive.

What I do is make other people's lives a moderate to serious living hell. Oh, I don't mean in a typically ordinary hell. Not the big-screen,
stereophonic hell one can purchase for eight dollars at your local movie theatre. No, I offer a subtler brand, a new and improved version for the modern man.  A cheap, third-rate trouble in paradise for your average guy walking down the street.

The average guy walking down the street. Or trying to walk down the street. Now what could be simpler than that?  From point A to point B.  Simple, right? Not when they meet me.  No, it isn't simple then. With me in your face, getting to your destination just become a little harder than before. I may be a failure in the world's eyes and I may be permanently infertile, but I make people work even if I don't. Every morning I wake up, a wildly successful failure.