Friday, August 29, 2008

Dear Sir or Madam,

Starting to-day, I would like to introduce a new project, perhaps glancing a blow off the squishy face of Charity. Every Friday, I shall salvage a forgotten article or update written by one of my many forlorn aliases. Tossed off in my youthful folly, I’d nearly divorced myself from these crude and angry forebears of my current eloquence.

However, it is important to honour the past and even more important to not force anyone wishing to honour my past to muck through websites kudzued with advertising code and mindless egotism in order to do so. Ah, it’s nice to be nice!

So, without further non-filler, here is the first of many tarnished gems in a crown of pettiness, “If I Met The President:”

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Originally Posted
Monday, October 23, 2006
for “Cottage Rumor.”

If I met the president, I’d have a lot of burning questions to ask him. First of all, I’d ask him what his favorite food is, and then I’d be like, “Hey, I like chicken nuggets too.” I would ask him what kind of music he likes and I bet he’d say something lame like, “Everything but rap,” but that’s OK. The president should have a varied taste in music. Who knows? Maybe by the end he’ll be listening to my Jay-Z album. I’d also ask the president what the W stands for, even though I already know. I bet he likes telling people. Actually, he’d probably say it stands for something cool like Wonder Woman, and I’d be like, “No way!” and he’d be like, “Yeah it totally does. That’s what it stands for,” and I’d have to believe him because he’s the president.

Then the president would show me his office. I’d ask him how they hang pictures on curved walls, and he’d say he’d never thought about that. What a smart friend the president has. We’d try to find out together. Maybe they use special presidential picture frames. Then we’d break something by accident. “Oh no!” the president would say. “Oh no!” I would say. Then Dick Cheney or whoever would charge in and be like, “Who did that?” and the president would point to me, the jerk. But then the president would say, “It’s OK. I give him a presidential pardon.” It’s good to have the president as a friend.

Then I’d ask to see his desk. He’d tell me not to touch anything. I’d respect the president. There would most likely be some sort of red button, it being the president’s desk and all, and I would ask, “Hey, what’s with that red button?” The president would get all serious and say, “That’s the button that blows up China.” Wowsers. I’d ask him if he’d ever pushed it. He’d shake his head no. “If you blew up China,” I’d ask, “where would we get Chinese food?” The president would show me the phone number of the place where he gets Chinese food. I’d ask if we can call using the red phone, and the president would say, “No, because that’s not a phone at all. It’s a rocket ship.” Then we’d pretend it was a rocket ship, and the president would play the boss of the rocket ship because he’s the president. The president is really good at pretending.

Then I would ask, “With the worst fighting and the largest toll of American casualties occurring after you declared the country of Iraq ‘liberated,’ how could you possibly think it’s a good idea to ’stay the course?’ Don’t you think it’s a bit cowardly to pass the burden of extraction to the next president?” and the president would ask me to leave. What a great day we would have, if I met the president.

~ Jeffrey Gould

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Dear Sir or Madam,

Normally when I am perusing my expansive wine cellar, my mind is at peace. Perhaps it is a calm before the storm to come, but in the company of my most special bottles and casks and plastic bags, I am quite carefree. The only dilemmas I encounter are minor ones such as which is the Bordeaux that the Queen gave me and which is the one that I have poisoned for when I next visit the Queen.

However, the other day, I was examining my prized possession — an original 1951 Beaujolais Nouveau — when I discovered this device:

Sort of evokes H. R. Giger and Dr. Seuss, doesn’t it? I had no idea what it was and certainly not how to use it nor what it might be doing amongst my Pinot Noir and Poulòuferie.

So puzzled and disturbed by the little intruder was I that I resorted to a secret brain trust. Completely outside my normal social circles, lest my lapse of omniscience be made public, these unscrupulous and cunning minds could be counted on to reveal any and all hidden truths of man and his wonders.

Closing the drapes, I released carrier pigeons and flushed carrier lizards down the toilet. I sent encoded messages to the major media centres and painted secret blood on secret doors. Soon after, the reply came crashing through an upstairs window, scratched onto a slate of obsidian with a dead man’s finger. They were busy, so I tried Craigslist.

…

hi 38 bi italian guy, goodlooking, thick beefy bod and cock 511 235 l bs 7 cut thick very masculine discrete safe neg a must, cleancut, clean say hi, you live alone ? i got a few ideas for that thing

~ Mike S., whom I now know far too much about.

…

hey man,

you’re cute
what about using it to open a beer bottle
…while it is plugged in your ass?????
michael

~ Michael B., who will be opening neither beer nor
my ass and most certainly not one with the other.

…

nice lets play

~ James H., who should be fucking castrated over a
period of weeks and then strung up by his ankles
so he suffocates on his sagging tits.

…

I later discovered that the gadget is meant to be a temporary cork for closing open wine bottles, thus making all those who claimed it was a “bottle opener” wrong beyond all the other ways they are so godawful wrong.

Being that I have never left a bottle of wine unspent once sprung, and I certainly have no intention of starting now, I alas have no use for it. I shall present it to the Queen, armed with some inventive multi-tasking tips.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Dear Sir or Madam,

To review:

LOL ~ Laughing Out Loud

LOP ~ Laughing Out of Pity

LOB ~ Laughing On a Boat

ROFL ~ Rolling On the Floor, Laughing

SMTL ~ Swallowing My Tongue, Laughing

LFSP ~ Laughing in the Faces of Startled Paramedics

LMAO ~ Laughing My Arse Off

LMao ~ Laughing at the tenets of Communist China

LSEA ~ Laughing at Someone Else’s Arse

SPGG
WGNT ~ Short, Punctuated Guffawing Giving Way to Good-Natured Tittering

LAII
AWHT
IHAT
SLTT
WICM
FIAS
WKAT
BYML
WFSP
IAHB
GWUL
WFMT
RDOL ~ Laughing Although Inside I Am Wondering How it is That I Have Arrived at This Station in Life, That These are Who I Call My Friends and I Am Somehow in What is Known As The Best Years of My Life, and While the Feeling Soon Passes I Am Haunted By a Ghost of Wistfulness and Unspoken Longing Which Follows Me Throughout the Remains of the Day, Out Loud

LTIPM ~ Laughing and Then I Poop Myself

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Dear Sir or Madam,

No matter who you are or where you come from or what you happen to look like today, all of humanity is united in that all of us, at one time or another, have been in possession of a sticker. I believe it comes with the opposable thumbs and neuroses.

I have seen children well into their teenage years eagerly grope at colourful stickables in doctors’ offices. They don’t care what’s on it as long as they feel they have been moderately compensated for pain and humiliation endured. Stickers of Pokémon are used as currency in the microcivilizations formed by abandoned children in Japanese shopping malls. Even the most deprived third world urchins know stickers in the form of adhesive medical strips given out by aid organizations. They are told they are images of biscuits and they believe them because they do not nor will they ever know what a biscuit looks like.

I, myself, had a gold star placed upon a Shadows of Holocaust-Era Fascism paper I wrote in grade school. Immediately afterward, I received three more on an Irony in the Education system report.

I have my own stickers to-day, you know. It’s true. Here is a preposterously oversized image of one:

If you would like one of your own, and can ignore the obviously sinister means by which I must obtain them, simply send me an emily requesting one, and I will be happy to oblige, as long you distinguish yourself somehow. It isn’t that hard. Try writing it in Hendecasyllabic verse or be from the future or something. Here’s a good one: explain to me in logical terms how you are me.

Once again, send it all to Hell via gentleman@gentlemancomics.com.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Ah, yes, here we are. Now, to set down The Grande Steampunke Timee Machinee. Ahem… klunk. Now, to get to work and, oh dear… Why, this isn’t January. Oh well, an easy mistake to make. Augusts are the same colour as Januaries, after all.

Oh no! The Timee Machinee! It is gone! Stolen by Canadian terroristes! What havok! They will get maple syrup on the dash! It’s going to be all gummy.

And now they’ve activated it. Such terror grips me, I cannot move — save to continuously write down every word I am saying. The machine propels the marauding Canucks through Heisenberg’s Torus and they sing robust songs about how blocks of wood can sometimes be similar to women.

Oh, they were eaten by a dinosaur. The End.

…

Dear Sir or Madam,

What fate! What cruel, convenient fate! That I am to be stranded here in this foreign era! An ocean of time — well, perhaps not an ocean — a fjord of time, whose icy corridors contain a mad blackness wherein you were deprived of my wisdom. And my wisodomy.

Ah well, I am going to have to buy a new iPhone to grossly underutilize, but at least I am now even younger than my friends. In addition, it seems that today is the one year anniversary of when we began this marvelous adventure. How serendipitous!

Let us reflect on a year one third well spent. What you have learned from me is incalculable. I know because I tried to calculate it and the calculator said, “No,” though that might have stood for “number.” What have I learned, though? Now there is a decidedly more interesting question. (Because I’m in it.)

Perhaps my comics were muddily drawn, their stiff characters belching non-sequiturs in a lifeless white void, certainly mirroring my view of humanity. And perhaps my rather verbose epistolaries were ignored by certain viewers, due to a common mental retardia found on the Internet. Have you heard of it? It reduces the window of cognition of casual readers to the size of the proverbial eye of a needle. The intellectual equivalent of stomach stapling, but not as funny because it does not involve fat people. Commonly known as tl:dr.

So, let us try something new. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I shall try and trot out one mind-dazzlingly brilliant observation or featurette. An hors d’oeuvre of knowledge, if you will. A bite-size morsel that I shall gently feed you, massage your jaw to ease mastication and, and then rub your belly whilst cooing softly as you digest. I shall assist with excretion too, but only if you let me sell the photographs to German websites.

As Winston Churchill once said, “There is nothing quite like a good [be]gin,” and thus I shall begin again. Tomorrow.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

P.S.

Would you be so kind as to send me an emily? Someone needs to keep the fatherless women with the dead eyes in my inbox company. Say anything. I love the sound of birds squawking. If you require a prompt, here it is: What would you like to see on this page in the future?

I’d also love to give advice, or rather, I believe I need to. No, no… to put it another way, you need my advice. Ask me your questions and grant me your hardships and I’ll try to keep the sniggering to a minimum.

gentleman@gentlemancomics.com