January 6th, 2000 Day 6 folks... time to take a deeper look into this new year. 2001 Already? - part 2 - By Gary Survivors With the advent of the Survivor series version 1, the in production version 2, and the in-planning version 3, it's important that we not forget about natural selection and the fact that it's amazing we've lasted this long. A few friends of mine got in a discussion one day that left me in a coma for several weeks. It was about overpopulation, and how we're living longer, having more babies than ever, and curing more and more diseases every day. The problem that results is that we're rapidly overpopulating the earth. This isn't humor here, it's true. The rate of population globally has gone up so much that the US has begun to construct entire cities and buildings out of the dead, and many scientists have formulated various graphs that I frankly don't understand but that they shake at me and go "No GOOD! No GOOD AT ALL!!! we're DOOMED!" As I laid in my hospital bed, oblivious to the wind tickling my bare ass, barely registering vital signs, I realized that we aren't doomed. It occured to me in my catatonic state that we have what no black plague or war could do for the controlling of earth's population. We have idiots. If nuclear missles won't keep us in check, extreme sports will. The answer was right there in part one of this feature. Our survival genes are one by one switching off and more and more of us each day are finding ourselves jumping off of buildings and into canyons, strapping ourselves to explosives, and trying to pull sic tricks on our skateboards. That's how we're going to make it. Most of our current offspring have been born with a population control thermostat built in. The appropriate number of them will kill themselves for the good of the world. I'm writing a book about this. I'm gonna be one of the ones who lives and gets rich off of it. Anyway, no worries America. Still, regardless of my revelation, I'm not having babies. There, I've done my part. Of course, if I ever found myself trapped on a small deserted island, all by myself, the first thing I'd want to do is have babies to keep me from going crazy with lonliness. I just saw CastAway with Tom Hanks, and the whole time I'm sitting there telling my mom "Why doesn't he just have a kid to keep him company?" She told me to be quiet and that she'd explain it later. She shut me up for the rest of the movie by attacking my understanding of 80's television. She said "There's a couple of things you need to learn about the Facts of Life." I brooded for the rest of the movie. I saw every episode of The Facts of Life. I know everything. In fact, the only thing I don't understand is why Tootie was such a bitch. Sure she went to a sexually repressed all girls boarding school. Sure she was the youngest and therefore could never do anything the other girls did. Okay, yes, she was like the only black kid in the whole state. But are these good reasons to have an attitude? Wait, let me think about that... Okay, I've decided yes, she had about 3 or 4 times the necessary reasons to be a bitch. Tootie, you have my blessings. You know really they were all rotten spoiled girls. The only one with any heart at all was that Mindy Cohn character. You can tell I like her best, 'cause I remember her real name. I think her tv name was Natalie. It doesn't matter, you'll know who I mean when I say the fat one that looked kinda like Roger Ebert and a bullfrog had a kid. That's funny... that's exactly how I define Boss Nass. Anyway, she'd make the greatest wife, I think, and I bet she'd want to do all the same stuff as me, like having affairs and amicably divorcing within a year. Speaking of all-girls schools, as a high schooler, I had what might at first sound like a blessing. My bus stop was in the parking lot of an all-girls school. I was all excited for the first week, which is how long it took me to realize that "all-girls school" basically means "guys in drag." I swear, they had burping contests in the parking lot, farting contests in the lobby, and "see how far we can throw Gary" contests on the basketball court. They were like men. Prison men. Facial hair, chest hair, butt hair (they mooned me frequently). It was hell. But it gets worse. My parents thought it would be swell for me to go to my own private torture chamber, the brother school of the all-girl school. For those of you barely following along, they sent me to the all-boy school. Try to keep up now. Parents, this is a public service announcement. Don't send your kids to single gender schools. It scars me, I mean them. Stuff was alright for the first year, mostly shows of machismo, people throwing each other in to the lockers, no one ever taking a shower in the gym, and the constant echoing of the overly-said phrase "I'm not gay." Eventually, whether any of us were gay or not, about 1/8 of my class spontaneously became female, against their will, and were sent, against their will, to attend the all-girls school, where we can only assume they were ripped in half and devoured by the amazon beastwomen. I was never bothered by the monstergirls, or our own transgenderites, as we called them because I was rather large for my age, but really because I was a fast runner. So what have we learned here? We've learned that I have a short attention span. Four tangents ago I was talking about overpopulation, the survival of our species, and Tootie, from the Facts of Life. No wait, Tootie was a tangent. I guess all I really wanted you to walk away with here was this: kids, don't have sex, and if you do, wear a condom. If that isn't hitting home than say it my way: kist, most of you are ugly, horrible people. Don't commit the sin of creating more of you . Space Odyssey   No, I haven't forgotten. Believe me, I've tried. Not because 2001 was a bad movie. Not by any means. In fact, it was a great movie. Despite the fact that I had to exercise and get in shape enough to be able to watch it all the way through in one sitting, and that it moves about as fast as the Horse Whisperer, and that one has to take it with a grain of salt, considering how long ago it was made, it's awesome. The reason that I've tried to forget about the movie is so that I won't get too upset once it starts to get overused. I want it to seem new. I'm going as far as meditation to forget the movie even exists so that when I start to see things like "Radio Shack: The Space Odyssey Clearance Sale!" and HAL for Gameboy Color, or my favorite so far "Don't worry, it comes with our exclusive Millennium Money-Back Guarantee!," I'll be able to say "What is this Space Odyssey of which you all speak?" and then I can use the internet to rediscover it all over again. Not since 1984 has a year had such popular appeal, and I plan to get in on the action. I want a single red contact lens, which you'll all understand once HAL becomes mainstream again, and I want to redesign my room to be like a circular tube, with all my furniture glued to the walls and ceiling. Chicks are gonna dig me once this 2001 starts to become pop culture once more. Everytime I do something wrong, I'm going to proudly boast "It must be a human error," and my shirt's gonna say the same thing. I rule. Still, 2001 pretty much fails to deliver about everything the movie promised we'd have. No monolith, no sentient robots to destroy us anywhere, and no Dr. Dave Bowman. This sucks. 2000 Failures   I decided to write this section, not just because it's a catchy title that wraps up the whole idea of my story in an unbridaled bittersweet duality, but because it's such a good and interesting tale. I published a book not too long ago. Cleverly, it was entitled "Gary Fixler Just Made Twenty Dollars," a title that would come true with each purchase of my book, of which my publisher, Sunshine Publishing, ran a first run of 2000 copies. Unfortunately, this title did not ring true, as not one of them sold. Part of this was because nobody knew under which section of the bookstore to file it, and partly because the cover image was a scanning electron microscope image of one of my butt hairs. . I don't know. It seemed hysterical and purchase-worthy when I made it, but I guess most people couldn't tell it was a butt hair at that impressive magnification and so the whole joke just fell apart. Actually, several copies sold when I created my own little private media circus at my local book shop. This means, basically, I got my friend to videotape me loudly entering incognito and boisterously proclaiming how exciting it was that there were still some copies of the book left to buy. Of course, later when I came back to return the few copies I bought so I could buy some food, all the people were in line behind me and in front of me. They pretended they didn't know I was the weirdo who got them to buy the book, and this worked well for both parties. I was embarassed that I'd made such a scene earlier and that I had to return them all just to be able to eat, and that one of them figured out that it was a butt hair on the cover and told everyone and then they looked at me, and probably also my butt. As for further embarassment, they were embarassed to have been scheistered into purchasing my book. Oh, and that's another thing. I was embarassed that they were all returning it. And of course, they were embarassed that I knew they were returning their copies. The levels of embarassment keep on going from this point on until we all got our stuff returned and left in utter embarassment. The worst thing of all is that I had to call up my printer in Taiwan that day and tell him no more copies (they were still printing the first run by the time we knew it flopped), and he started crying. I felt so bad. He had to tell over 40 young Taiwanese children that they were out of work and there would be no more writing (I had insisted that everything be handwritten so it felt more personal). I can't tell you how badly I felt that all those kids had to stop working. Factory life is fun, especially in Taiwan. There's all kinds of big machines to look at, and loud noises which are great for kids with their short attention spans. And I know they were all having a great time dilligently copying every single one of our "strange and beautiful American symbols" that we call letters. Now they're stuck, probably bored out of their minds in grade school, and it just kills me. It simply kills me. The Future is Free   But not banner free... If advertisement in the 80's and 90's was not enough to inspire you, advertising in the 00's sure threatens to do so with an iron fist. With freebies like Instant Messenger, NetZero, and misinformer.com leading the way completely paid for by advertisers, it simply will not be long before each of us, and everything in our homes looks like an $80,000 Nascar, covered in ads, with all of us raking in the dough. Oh yes friends, it's going to be a good year, hell, a good century. Buy low and sell high! Stick it to the man, however you can! Are we men or are we mice!? Keep clicking on them banners! Spread us around like butter... Tell every car you cut in front of who loves you! (PDF format - Acrobat Reader required - 393k) (JPEG format - Computer required - 53k) ~Both formats will appear sideways. Don't panic. They've been designed to print length-wise on normal letter sized paper. Just pick one and print it! (The PDF may appear darker than it prints, but printed, will look better than the jpg) Download your misinformer.com bumper sticker today! and of course, let's not forget about merchandise! Alright, that's enough for this year. Jimmy says "Buy misinformer t-shirts, or I will crush you with my mind!"