My flaw, my only flaw, is the flaw of not being perfect. While I’m unsure how this flaw affects the lives of others, it has surely been a thorn to my proverbial side (and my other one). As a child I would gaze into the stars and dream of being a scientist, or if not that at least one small boy on top of another boys shoulders inside a trench coat pretending to be a scientist.
Neither of these dreams came to fruition. Instead of being at the forefront of major breakthroughs in Stockholm I was in a hotel in Long Island. It was my responsibility to go around from room to room and make sure that the shower caps were properly calibrated. This work was as dull as it was unfulfilling.
One day I felt that I could not go on living any longer, but then something happened that completely vanquished this feeling. I was arrested. I had been caught winking at a female body builder. Luckily my judge was magnanimous; he softened the punishment and only enjoined me to one lifetime in prison.
I managed to cut my life sentence short by turning two of its words into a conjunction and was very quickly out of the slammer (while I must confess there are still some aspects of prison I miss to this day, particularly our weekly scrabble game.)
When I returned home I immediately re-entered the dating scene. My first marriage to the dreaded Mrs. Turner ended in divorce due to irreconcilable similarities and had left me weary to relations with the opposite sex, now I felt almost compelled to find a significant other. Being too old for singles clubs I, frequented dating websites. I had exhausted the all of the major sites Biology.Com, Snatch, eLarceny, to no avail. I had the worst luck with JMate.com; it said the perfect woman for me was Eva Braun.
On some inconsequential spring day I happened to stumble across an ad in my local news paper:
INSOLATED BLACK HOLE CREATED IN GLENWOOD LABS
LOOKING FOR HUMAN GUINEAPIG TO LEAP INTO GAPING VOID
PREFERABLY A MAN WITH NO HUMAN ATTACHMENTS, UNFULFILLED CHILDHOOD DREAMS, AND A BALANCED CHECKBOOK
IF YOU SURVIVE YOU CAN USE THIS EXPERIENCE AS A TAX DEDUCTION.
For reasons you can already guess this ad intrigued me. I felt I was perfect for this job considering I already fulfilled two out of three requirements. I drove down to the labs and the scientists immediately chose me for the job, I’ll never forget the scientist’s words when he saw me “If there is any man to chuck into a black hole and never see again, it is him!”
I remember my last few moments before entering the black hole, I was televised nationally, I had a big ad for Johnson’s Baby/Motor Oil emblazoned across my chest. The scientist counted down from five, when he reached two he started counting up to one hundred seventy three, then he counted down to zero.
Many claim that when a human body enters a black hole it turns into spaghetti. This is untrue. Your body actually turns into a Caesar salad. Inside the black hole I learned the universe’s most intimate secret; it has a crush on Steven the shy boy in its social studies class.
Some think that once you go through a black hole you wind up in another dimension, this theory is wrong. Where you really end up is on the roof of Cowboy Jack’s Old Western Casino in Las Vegas. I was standing there donned in cowboy raiments, constantly taking my gun from my shoe holster and firing. I was completely made of neon. For months on end I would do this work day and night before throngs of gamblers. I enjoyed doing this, it was the most creatively fulfilling job I’ve ever had.
Then one day who should walk by but the dreaded Mrs. Turner. She recognized me immediately climbed to the casino’s roof and seized me and brought me back to her abode. I tried to fight to return to the casino, I even took her to court but New York State Law plainly says that in the event that an ex-husband becomes a neon sign his former spouse is entitled to full custody of him. I’ve been unhappy, but at least I’ve been able to write this memoir by leaking neon from my intricately folded wires onto the shag carpet that is now beneath me.