The Book Of Bape

here I am, strung out on marginal amounts of sleep, drunk from (a) beer on an empty stomach, writing to reddit’s relationship advice board at 5AM. i’m staring at the little 2”x5” text box trying to figure out what superfluous details about the last three years of my love life can be cut from my dissertation of a post so people don’t stop reading halfway through and mash “too long; didn’t read” in the comment box. the little white alien up in the corner with his cupid’s bow — a cartoon mascot that, ironically, personifies the bane of mine and countless others’ love lives — beckons me to compact some of the best and worst experiences I’ve had with the opposite sex into 500 words or less. here i am falling back on the mantras of my education as a writer, attempting to get my point across while considering my audience at the same time? i know my audience all too well: i’m a button press away from asking a horde of fat depressed gen x’ers, professional internet trolls, and goddamn children for relationship advice — not necessarily because i need it, but because i simply want to hear someone else tell me how to do what i already know i need to do.

I realize all of this as my cursor hovers over the submit button. jesus christ, i am really doing this. do I really honestly think this is a good idea? three hours ago i thought it was tuesday before realizing that yes, i have completely forgotten about the past three days. holy shit.

that could have been embarrassing.

i picked up two new penpals thanks to reddit:

matt: “Im a 22 year old New Zealand youth worker, and i like to hear about peoples lives. Especially people from overseas. I also love the personal touch letters have… Someone to talk to would be pretty cool. An american christian would be absolutely fascinating…”

…and a girl from california with a pikachu hoodie and a name i have to refer back to the contact page i made for her to pronounce. I WILL LEARN IT. eventually.

this should be fun, i hope! haven’t really sent/gotten anything back from either, though i’ve swapped emails and a couple of im’s with the latter. gives me a reason to check the mail now.*

* …that sounds so depressing. :(

If louisiana is the armpit of america, mississippi is the other armpit. tennesse is the weird unibrow, and alabama and georgia are the weird slack-jawed face. if you continue along this line of thinking, florida could be seen as a phallic symbol. if you take this into consideration, the southern political fixation on border patrol becomes completely obvious: you’d be pretty pissed too if you had illegals crawling all over your junk.

Step 1: equip yourself with a tumblr account and matching youtube account, a portal site that basically filters everyone to your other social networking sites, and a lot of free time. http://www.youtube.com/user/ErickWithNoK ,  http://www.erickwithnok.com/ and http://www.eric-striffler.com/

Step 2: Think of a title that’s guaranteed to be relevant to the large majority of the internet. the internet only requires a third grade reading level, so you don’t have to try too hard. The easiest target is pop culture, especially lowest common denominator MTV kid’s show garbage. Make it something hard to believe, shocking, or something people don’t expect. For our example, let’s go with…. “Miley Cyrus POLE DANCES at Teen Choice Awards 2009.”

Step 3: add a bit of incredulity to the title. For this example we’ll go with an interrogative rhetorical exclamation:

“Miley Cyrus POLE DANCES at Teen Choice Awards 2009! WHAT?”

Step 4: make a video using this title, but don’t actually make the video about what the title suggests it’s about. Instead, make the video about yourself talking about what the title is. People will click the link thinking it’s relevant to the title, only to find that it’s just you running your mouth for three minutes.

Step 5: Redirect people from the video to your tumblog, dangling the carrot of the actual footage they came to see in front of them.

Step 6: Rinse and repeat.

Congrats. You just upped your pageviews and your readership for multiple sites using one core piece of content! Thank God this guy isn’t running ads.