Wednesday 4/3/19
Okay: This may be the last chapter of this I give away for free. If you are out there in publishing, and you want to make some money, contact me. This is straight up bloody hilarious. And it's also kind of touching. I don't see why hundreds of thousands of copies of this book, or more, cannot be sold. Truly funny books are basically nonexistent. Think how few funny people you know in life. And people are even less funny on the page, where it is harder to make someone fall over giggling or even wryly smile. This is not a mean-spirited book, even as it satirizes meatheads, perhaps one of the last groups one can satirize right now in society without being branded sexist or racist. And meatheads are good sports and they would like this book, too. It taps into aspects of our time, as language devolves, and we regress along with that. Our connections break down, our sense of self breaks down, our self-esteem can break down, and we are all in the same boat, and, paradoxically, the meathead can help us understand that and feel better. Here's what this book is going to end up as: thirty or so chapters--the first five are now up on this blog--each 2-3 pages long, with the meathead in various situations, places, relationships, roles. It's endlessly quotable, a great stocking stuffer, perfect to do memes from, imitate, give to your brother, laugh at over how dumb guys can be. But the book itself is not dumb, because it's me writing as well as I can write, just in a different vein this time. I laugh my ass off reading this back to myself, and I don't laugh a lot these days. You just keep reading over parts again and again and laughing each time. About 100 pages in the end. I am 1/6 of the way done already, and I started Sunday.
Chapter 5
Sleep study.
“But bro,’ a meathead named Chad said to a nurse who had told him he had to keep his shorts on. He was hooked up to many machines and not in the mood.
Does the universe send out signals that we may be the unwitting recipients of? Chad sometimes thought this. He called it a “universe poke.”
I sometimes think it, too, and that is why I think I should gently remind you that this Chad is not necessarily the Chad of past adventures, nor was the last Chad the Chad before that.
Oh, sure, we could tell you about a meathead named Darren, and a meathead named Rocco, probably less about a meathead named Clive—but you never know—but let us just stick with Chad, even if each Chad does not necessarily stick with the other Chads.
“Shit be real, bro.”
Yes. He is correct there. It be.
Chad had many night terrors and he rode the T a lot.
(Wait, our bad—all of these Chads lived in Boston or passed through there at some point. “Meta, bro.” No. Stop it. We are not going down that route. Authorial-input Chad, you pipe down, and let us get back to the business of the other Chads.)
One day on the T as he headed to Revere for some sun and skin—for Chad had bitchin’ sunglasses that were good for ogling—he saw an ad for a sleep study for people with nightmares and night terrors.
“Fifty bucks to go to bed? And the bed has rails so you can’t even fall out? Hmmm.”
Once Chad produced a “hmmm” it was nearly certain that he was going to do whatever it was that first made him make that sound.
But he did not like to be restricted when he slept.
“Look. This is called the art of compromise,” he said to the nurse. Her name was Carol. She was smoking hot, but this was not about that. This was about wisdom and precautionary measures.
“Normally, and I don’t mean this to get you going, like, for realz, I get that you’re working and can’t hook up or anything at work and probably all you can do is touch yourself in a closet. We cool. I respect you. But normally I have to be clothes-free Chad to sleep. Or we are going into the Terror Dome. So what I’m saying is, I’ll keep my top on, for you, because that helps you keep your job, but down below, underneath the covers, where it is intense, especially at night, when anything can happen, I need to be free. Free me, fellow C-Dawg.”
He scooched his hips into the air.
Chad was set on fire a lot in his dreams. The worst part about it was he was almost always the one who lit the flames. Sometimes he set his studio apartment on fire. Other times he blew up his own car. At the Fourth of July there were bonfires on beaches that he leapt into. He sure as shit ended up in hell a lot, and that was nothing but fire. There had been a pre-study interview.
“Doc, in the hell one, Dream Chad—you can just use DC on the form, like the comic books”—for Chad intuited that doctors were probably readers and they had a lot of down time at work—“goes to take a break from working in the fire fields growing Satan’s herbs, because that’s what you do for work there, and he tries to take a shower but when he turns on the faucet all of these flames comes out. He gets flame blasted right in the face. Then when he tries to clean his darkest places, you know what I mean as a medical man, you can imagine how real that shit gets. Bad real. Not magical feeling real. You know what I mean by that. Ta ha ha ha ta.”
Then he thought of a joke.
“Shower head. Get it? Ta ha.”
As Chad lay in bed, hooked up to machines, with his top and his bottoms on, he began to think that maybe Dream Chad wasn’t such an ally after all.
There was the possibility that he was an inversion of everything decent about Real Chad. Chad did not quite put it this way.
“I think Dream Chad might be an ass backwards little Beta Boy.”
There. He had said it. Or thought it. He couldn’t remember which. So he then said it, just so that it was on the universe’s official record.
He figured that God probably recorded everything. No sense not making it official, just in case someone accused him later of thinking something else.
“No dealio, God,” he also said, before mouthing that he was sorry and had not intended to transgress, which was a word Chad actually knew and used it a lot, given that he knew that one.
“Who wouldn’t, right?” as he concluded.
But a Beta Boy! He might as well have called Dream Chad…Pontius Pilate. Wait. He didn’t know that one. Darth Vader. Wait. Vader was an asskicker.
Well, anyhow, someone really bad who was a man but not a real man and someone who showed weakness rather than was strong enough to hide it and pretend everything was fine.
As he became more and more tired, Chad thought more on his new theory about how the clothes he wore to bed in the real world followed him into his dream and made it easier for him to be set on fire.
In sixth grade a teacher had told his class that a lot of women in Victorian times caught on fire because of the clothes they wore, which led Chad to turn to Anna Davis next to him—“smoking hot, natch”—(naturally)—and say, ‘S’up? I know how that can be fixed ta ha ha ha ta ha.”
Detention sucked.
But so did trying to kill Dream Chad, which is what regular Chad—“ain’t nothing regular about me, bro”—had set out to do.
It was like a sleep study miracle. Real Chad had somehow, via the divine grace of said miracle, made it through the blockade that separates Reality from Dream.
He stood naked—“Result!” as Real Chad put it as he emerged into Dream World—in front of Dream Chad.
They were in hell, working the Devil’s fields.
“Why are you blowing up my dream spot?” RC asked.
“How dare you level such a charge at me,” DC replied.
“Whoa, bro.”
“You didn’t know we were this smart, did you?”
“I sensed it, my brother. Dream brother.”
They hugged it out.
“I will return to the surface world now,” naked Chad concluded. “Keep fighting the Chad-erific fight in these fields of Satan.”
And with that, he departed, and awoke.
“Jackass,” thought Dream Chad, who then said it aloud, as he picked up his hoe again, just to make sure his thoughts made it into hell’s official record.
“Because everything is recorded, you know.”
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