Official Slacker Handbook
Page 12
-often lets you sleep in while he gets an early jump on the work
-maintains a refrigerator stocked with free beer
-has a good sense of snacks
-is close to his father, the head of a major studio
-possesses extremely low self-esteem that ensures he will never leave you to go it alone
Alternacomix
THE UNDERGROUND COMIC WORLD HAS EXPLODED IN RECENT YEARS WITH THE HELP OF THOUSANDS OF CREATIVE INDIVIDUALS OF QUESTIONABLE MENTAL HEALTH. ONE OF THE KEY SLACK ART FORMS, THE COMIC IS AS EASY TO PRODUCE AND DISTRIBUTE AS A ZINE AND HAS EVOLVED INTO AN ART FORM WITH EXCEPTIONALLY FLUID STANDARDS OF EXCELLENCE.
IT IS NO LONGER A STRICT REQUIREMENT THAT YOU CAN, SAY, DRAW IN ORDER TO BE A COMIC BOOK ARTIST. NOR IS IT IMPORTANT THAT YOU BE ABLE TO WRITE. IT IS THE CONTENT OF YOUR IDEAS THAT MATTER, AND IDEAS—PARTICULARLY IDEAS THAT THE MORE FAINT AT HEART MIGHT ASSOCIATE WITH THE PHRASE “WAR CRIMES”—ARE ONE THING THAT YOU CAN RIGHTFULLY CLAIM TO POSSESS.
PERUSE A STACK OF THESE COMICS AND YOU’LL COME AWAY REFRESHED WITH IMAGES AND IMPRESSIONS LIKE THE FOLLOWING:
accidental amputations
alienated antiheroes
alien encounters
alien sex
battery acid
bestiality
bisexuality
bloodlust
bloodshot eyeballs
castration
crackhead losers
degeneracy
degradation
dismemberment
dwarfs
ether binges
evil doppelgangers
explosions
feces
grim reaper, the
gozilla
hapless antiheroes
hedonism
idiot boys
killer bees
kinky sex
large-chested women
lesbianism
magic leprechauns
mass murderers
masturbation
messengers from the underworld
misery
missing limbs
misogyny
necrophilia
nonaccidental amputations
nubile babes
nudity
postapocalyptic imagery
primitive urges
profanity
pus
racist stereotypes
roadkill
robots
sadism
serial killers
sex-change operations
sex-organ amputations
shrapnel
sideshow freaks
spanking
surgical nuclear strikes
twisted she-freaks
urine
vampirism
vomit
voyeurism
vulcans
weird scientists
zodiac killers
zombies
Should You Sell Out?
PRO CON
You’d no longer be toiling in total obscurity. You’d lose creative control.
You could quit your job at BookNosh and sleep as late as you wanted every day. “Early, unrealized promise” is by far the easiest stage of any artistic career.
Your two best friends would no longer be the only people on the planet who could bear witness to your genius. You’d soon find yourself pandering to the impoverished tastes of the masses.
You wouldn’t have to fund your creative efforts with the proceeds from sidewalk sales anymore. When faceless corporate brass hand you a pile of money to do something, they generally expect you to finish it.
You could date Kim Basinger. Your revolutionary, neo-Marxist philosophy would have to be pablumized before they let you gab with Regis and Kathie Lee.
Everyone you went to high school with would nurse pools of envy toward you within their festering bowels. Your parents might decide not to disown you after all.
You could afford to buy a Harley. Your selfless vision to redistribute the world’s wealth might be in jeopardy if you had 500,000 Gs in the bank.
You could hire your pathetic slacker friends to run time-consuming errands for you and give you daily back massages. All of your lowlife acquaintances would attempt to ride on your coattails.
You’d soon be in a position to make all of your lofty goals and pie-in-the-sky projects a reality. You’d soon be in a position to make all of your lofty goals and pie-in-the-sky projects a reality.
Are You a Temperamental Auteur or Just Another Moody Slacker?
Quiz #4
1. A local film lab refuses to develop any more copies of your film after one of the technicians catches a glimpse of the “Rape of Naples” scene. You:
A) Wrap the processing plant in bed sheets à la Christo
B) Photocopy your private parts and print them up on a flier with a 50 percent Off Film Processing coupon and distribute widely
C) Use the censorship issue as a springboard for six-figure NEA grant
D) Embark on a three-day drinking binge
2. Your newest short story, an urbane character exploration in which the bulk of the action takes place underneath the surface of the text, is summarily rejected by The New Yorker. You:
A) Immediately fire off an abusive, threatening letter with a violently defaced photograph of Tina Brown
B) Decide to reshape it into a villanelle, a French verse form marked by five tercets and one quatrain
C) Sprinkle the f-word throughout the first paragraph and send it to a struggling local literary effort
D) Embark on a three-day drinking binge
3. A fellow cafe-goer calls your theory that Picasso’s Europhalloclasscentrism was the result of a retarded inner child, “a product of a withered little mind.” You:
A) Say, “Wither this, bud”
B) Say solemnly, “I’ve met Picasso, I’ve worked with Picasso, and sir, you are no Picasso”
C) Throw scalding coffee in his face
D) Embark on a three-day drinking binge
4. You have no more money for art supplies. You:
A) Limit yourself to media that can be shoplifted from the supermarket
B) Hock the three piece matching luggage set you received from your grandparents at graduation
C) Strong-arm young children in the park for their hopscotch chalk
D) Embark on a three-day drinking binge
5. Your mother says she will buy you a new computer, but only if you agree to type up the minutes of her weekly Colonial Dames gathering. Before you even get a chance to play your first six straight hours of solitaire on said computer, she hands you twenty hand-written pages of minutes to transcribe. You:
A) Type them up, but in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet
B) Type them up, but add, “A motion was made to begin arming for imminent conflagration with ungrateful and sullen underclass”
C) Sink to your knees and, in your best imitation of Brando, say, “The horror, the horror”
D) Embark on a three-day drinking binge
6. The other four members of the garage band you started squeezed you out in a secret midnight meeting to which you were not invited, because they “no longer felt they were in need of a mouth organist.” You:
A) Steal the amps and skip town
B) Start a rumor that the lead singer worships Phil Collins
C) Stage a grisly quadruple murder/failed suicide and watch from a hospital bed as your next-door neighbor is interviewed on Inside Edition
D) Embark on a three-day drinking binge
Scoring: For each A, B, or C you chose, give yourself 0 points. For each D you chose, give yourself 1 point. A perfect score of 5 earns you Temperamental Auteur status. Anything less than that means you’re just another Moody Slacker.
Inside The Twisted Slacker Psyche
MARTIANS VS. MASONS: CHOOSING A CONSPIRACY THEORY
When choosing a conspiracy theory to investigate, you should start out with an unsatisfactorily
explained national tragedy—like the Jonestown massacre or the crash of Pan Am Flight 103—or an ominous indication that things are not altogether what they seem: the News Election Service’s chokehold on our election process, say, or the Council on Foreign Relations’s all-pervasive influence over our foreign policy. Let’s say you decide to begin with an open-ended hypothesis along the lines of: “Jim Jones: bush-league anti-Christ or hypnoprogrammed genocidal racist on the CIA payroll?” Start poking around. Ask some questions. Skim a few tracts you steal from the anarchist bookstore. Talk for four hours with a cafe-dweller who thinks that the bump on his nose is evidence of a monitoring device implanted deep inside his right nostril by a sadistic extraterrestrial biologist. Read a dog-eared, out-of-print paperback whose preposterous theories outlined on page one don’t seem quite so preposterous by page 297. Lie in bed. Stare at the inside of your eyelids. Think.
Slowly, you’ll start putting the pieces together. You’ll realize that something smells fishy, more fishy than you would expect if you were simply dealing with run-of-the-mill incompetence, avarice, terrorism, insanity, satanism, or illegal CIA activity. A cartoon light bulb will appear over your head: There Is Order to All This Evil. There is, you realize, a Pattern.
Once you settle on the notion that all forms of evil are fundamentally interconnected, you are in a position to determine culpability. You are in a position to seek an answer to The Question.
MARTIANS
It is of course impossible to do justice to the science of UFOlogy in a limited forum such as this. There are as many theories as there are theoreticians, maybe even more. Perhaps the only thing resembling a general consensus is that the government is not revealing everything it knows. Project Blue Book and Project Grudge are universally regarded as official snow jobs. But the fact that the Air Force has in its possession nine extraterrestrial craft which it studies at the top secret Nellis Air Range in Central Nevada, or that four different races of aliens have ben captured and monitored by our higher-ups, or that leaders in Washington and Moscow are, in fact, in cahoots with our secret alien overlords is, frankly, mere speculation. While UFOlogists of all stripes take the governmental cover-up for granted, many intriguing questions remain to be debated. Are the aliens visiting our planet benevolent, albeit misunderstood, real-life ETs? Or are they sadistic and cruel, intent on using earthlings as a source of amusement, labor, sexual gratification, and—heaven forbid—food? Did they first arrive sometime after 1945, intrigued by the detonation of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, or have they been visiting for hundreds of thousands of years and deliberately accelerating the evolution of man? Do they make use of black holes or similar “space gates” to travel enormous distances through the universe, or do they come from a space-time continuum that is parallel to our own? Are they trying to keep us from hastening our own extinction, or do they purposefully sow worldwide strife to keep us from joining arms and waging war with them?
The pendulum swings of speculation stem from conflicting reports of various UFO contactees. Classic alien sex/kidnapping contactee cases like that of Antonio Villas-Boas of Brazil indicate that perhaps the aliens simply hope to introduce half-human love children to their native planets. Others attribute the “missing person” phenomenon to whole scale alien abduction, reporting that, while they were allowed to leave the spaceships after a period of time, countless humans remained trapped inside. Finally, if the aliens are calling the shots in an inter-galactic conspiracy of unfathomable dimensions, you can rest assured that there would be a massive disinformation/propaganda machine set in place, and people who tried to speak out would be publicly ridiculed and placed on the cover of The Weekly World News right along side Monkey Boy and the Woman Who Has No Head.
ALIEN LEXICON
ACONIN: A(nother) CON(scious) IN(telligence)
BEFAP: BE(ing) F(rom) A(nother) P(lanet)
ETI: E(xtra) T(errestrial) I(ntelligence)
GALAXIAN: Generic term applying to all beings from a particular galaxy
MANADIM: MAN(ifestation from) A(nother) DIM(ension)
NEBECISM: The theory that advanced beings from elsewhere in the universe influenced man’s evolution and history
OPTIMAN: OPTI(mum) MAN, an earthling who has been modified to endure the stress and tension of an interstellar journey
UFONAUT: Intelligent being who pilots a UFO
USO: Unidentified Submarine Object
ZEROID: Creatures or animals that live in space
MASONS
Just as employing the vernacular “Martians” doesn’t mean that you believe that our space visitors hail from Mars, casually using the word “Masons” to refer to secret societies involved in conspiracy doesn’t necessarily mean that you think your uncle Wayne, a Masonic initiate, is on a quest for total domination of the world. Indeed, state-of-the-art conspiracy theory pretty much leaves the Masons alone, except insofar as they serve as a recruiting camp for the real bad guys, the true conspirators: The Illuminati. The Illuminati—or the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria-are on a quest for total domination of the world. They are the personification of Nietzsche’s will to power. Their nefarious goal is to bring about one world, ruled by a top secret cabal of five Illuminati elites, in which personal liberty and freedom as we now know it will cease to exist. Now, briefly: The Illuminati were started (or revived, depending on whom you listen to) on May 1, 1776, by Adam Weishaupt, a defrocked Jesuit and thirty-second-degree Mason residing in Bavaria. He subsequently traveled to America, killed George Washington, and served as our nation’s first president for two terms (which explains both the infamous pot crop at Mount Vernon and why portraits of Washington look like they were modeled on two different men). Weishaupt’s thinking resulted from the collision of German mysticism with the Enlightenment and his theories eventually incorporated both an Outer Doctrine and an Inner Doctrine, the latter of which articulated a conspiracy to rule the world.
The Illuminati don’t really care if you know they exist. They put their pyramid with the eye on the back of the dollar bill and their leader’s likeness on the front. Everything from the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (da-da-da-DUM, morse code for V, Roman numeral meaning 5, a sacred number for the Illuminati) to the first line of Moby-Dick (where Melville tells you he’s a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah) tells you that the Illuminati are real. They are smart enough to realize that they can’t remain completely hidden, so their strategy is obfuscation.
Illuminati theory explains the strangely inevitable quality of America’s drift toward totalitarianism and why party politics so often seem like nothing more than a massive confidence trick. And the push for gun control laws, the concept of computerized fingerprinting to prevent entitlement fraud, law enforcement’s abuse of electronic surveillance, and the much-hyped “war on crime” all take on a slightly ominous tone when you think that invisible forces behind our government are trying to saddle us with a worldwide dictatorship that will last forever.
novus ordo seclorum:
MASONS IN THE WHITE HOUSE
Ronald Reagan
Gerald Ford
Harry Truman
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Warren Harding
William Taft
Teddy Roosevelt
James Garfield
Andrew Johnson
James Buchanan
James Polk
Andrew Jackson
James Monroe
George Washington
Plus just about every last signer of the Declaration of Independence (including Benjamin Franklin).
Conspiracy a-go-go
The JFK debacle was just the tip of the iceberg, the papery skin of an onion that you could peel for a life-time—from Oswald to the Commies to the Mafia to the Cubans to Castro to the CIA to George Herbert Walker Bush—without ever uncovering the real truth, the True Conspiracy.
Most Americans are content to sit back in their straddle-loungers and swallow the self-serving propagan
da served up by the ruling elite. But not you. Your ears perk up when you hear the words “Trilateral Commission.” You anxiously scan the classified ads searching for thank-yous addressed to St. Jude. You break into a cold sweat when you stumble upon the word “fnord” printed in The New York Times.
Test your conspiracy theory know-how by taking the following quiz:
True or False: In 1888, Cecil Rhodes created a secret society to establish total domination of the world by the English, which continues to function to this day through Oxford University, Rhodes Scholarships, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and is underwritten by Morgan and Rothschild banking interests.
True or False: Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Order of Illuminati, killed George Washington and served himself as our first president for two terms. The Illuminati are ultimately responsible for the French Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, the American Revolution, the Pope, the Kennedy assassination, the Manson family, the Rockefeller dynasty, the numbers 5, 17, and 23, the New Age movement, The Nazis, UFO visitations, the Universal Price Code, and the pyramid with the eye on the back of the dollar bill.
True or False: The Gulf War never actually took place.
True or False: Abbie Hoffman—Sixties wild-eyed pot-head radical, Eighties entrenched well-paid radical—was actually a CIA agent-provocateur.
True or False: The Jonestown massacre was actually part of a mass mind-control experiment by the CIA, a renegade offshoot of the top-secret MKULTRA program, which experimented with hypnotism and LSD in an effort to create a guilt-free, mind-controlled Manchurian Candidate assassination.
True or False: Posing as a petrified hippie rock band, The Grateful Dead is actually a British Intelligence operation in deep cover.
True or False: Human beings are a slave race living and breeding on an isolated planet in a minor galaxy. Once a prime source of labor for our extraterrestrial slave lords, we remain to this day their possession. Our planet’s wars and disasters are part of their effort to control us and keep us imprisoned, and the plague that killed one-fourth of the population of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe was actually an act of biological warfare by our alien custodians.