S14: 92 Wks Until INDECISION 2016 - Top 14 Fake Presidential Candidates Named After Writers

I woke up this morning getting ready for work with the news on because that "YOUR WORLD IN HOWEVER MANY SECONDS" thing on CBS makes my attention-deficit brain feel some type of way, and then they had Rand Paul on there already talking controversial talk things in anticipation of President 2016, and it really freaked me out that there's literally a dude named after Ayn Rand running for actual President of America, like that's not something in a sci-fi movie from 1985 starring Roddy Piper and Yaphet Kotto but a real thing in real life. But I also realized it's exactly 92 weeks until Election Day, so I figured I'd better start giving you weekly updates headed into that MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF ALL-TIME (which it will be marketed as, I guarantee it - like it will be science and polar bears and middle class homelessness against predator drones and terrorism and animated flag gifs). So this week (hahaha, like I'm even gonna remember to do this shit again) I'd figured I'd pretend there were 14 guys named after writers who were running as well, that would be preferable to Rand Paul.

#1: Burroughs Vachon - Named after William S. Burroughs, some sort of cajun/creole fucker from Louisiana, who I guess is sort of libertarian but refuses to identify by that shit. For example, he always makes a point of saying he's for "decriminalization of drugs" rather than legalization because "whenever lawyers get involved, it's gonna suck, and then probably involve business, and any time you make a business of something, it's gonna be controlled by assholes."

#2: Fanon Washington - Named after Frantz Fanon, last name from slave ancestors taking last name of great nephew of first President of the United States. Fanon thought about changing away the last name but decided to wear it as a means of embarrassing his ancestors' "owners". Eventually has to drop out because of physical incident that put Al Sharpton in E.R.

#3: Kerouac Bernard - Named after obviously Kerouac, but just some chump ass college dude who changed his name to it, so it's not like he actually had to ferment with the madness of the actual name his entire life, meaning it's an assumed identity as opposed to one that has been burnished into your very essence, every molecule feeling the judgment and bias of everyone who learns your fucked up name. Trust me, I know - I've been called "Raven" since birth.

#4: Du Fu "Duffy" MacMillian - Named after T'ang era Chinese poet, but raised in hills of Kentucky so sort of ended up being Duffy because you know, motherfuckers can't say weird shit like that out in the sticks. Your name could be some slurred variation on a epithet, but not something foreign-sounding. Du Fu is an "individual constitutionalist" meaning he supports the personal constitution of each individual, but also doesn't really know what that means. He owns all the Poor Man's James Bond books though.

#5: Atwood Paul - Rand Paul's fourth cousin, paternal grandmother's side, but with same last name somehow, named after Margaret Atwood, and endorsed by old growth forests, who support Atwood's efforts by uprooting their largest two kin in every voting district in America, who stand outside the polls on each side, looking all intimidating as fuck, cock diesel tree muscles like they're gonna choke all humans to death, but then all they do is put kids up in their limbs and swing them and people are like "Oh man, Atwood Paul's campaigners are great" and they all want to vote for Atwood Paul, but then conventional candidates get them outlawed and have police cut them with chainsaws but since they are come-to-life trees and not regular trees they bleed human blood and it's pretty horrible, nobody ever forgets it for thousands of years.

#6: Moore Hammond - Young lady named after Alan Moore (the dude that wrote the word part of V for Vendetta), who you would think would be all revolutionary and weak Guy Fawkes masks and Anonymous would support her and all that, but actually she's just a chubby (no diss - she's still beautiful) comic book nerd running under the Green Party banner because I don't know, the Greens are okay I guess.

#7: Borges Luis Acosta - Named after Jorge Luis Borges, just the last name part because the middle name is his uncle's name too, and his last name was his father's and his father's father as well, because that's the type of world we live in. Borges Acosta at first is pretending to be a respectable Republican Latino because that's what he thought he was supposed to be, but then he got snowed in at an airport with Ted Cruz one long Wednesday layover, and decided that America destroys natural Chicano beauty, so he joined up with the Brown Berets organization in an attempt to make Aztlan a reality again, through the immigrant vote, which is not actually an immigrant vote at all. This of course is too confusing for most Americans, so they just assume he's crazy, and nobody votes for him. Also none of that really excites me as I write it, mostly because that last name Acosta suggests Oscar Zeta Acosta, who is a personal hero, and I'd rather do acid and shoot guns than care about politics or make up stories about fake Presidential candidates. My birthday is next week - somebody mail me mushrooms.

#8: Miller Stone - Named for Henry Miller, because his parents were freaks if you know what I mean. Raised in conservative Utah in most unconservative ways, has two pet orangutans that he calls Hugh and Mann and he takes them everywhere so that when he gets bored with whatever public event he has, he can give them a sign they understood (because they used to go camping a lot in Bryce Canyon together, like a lot - all the fucking time when he was in college because college kids were so full of shit) and the orangutans would go into the crowd wreaking havoc, and he'd yell, "HUGH! MANN! HUGH! MANN! HUGH! MANN!" and they'd fuck a bunch of shit up then come back and Miller Stone would go, "Sorry folks," and exit stage left.

#9: Dostoyevsky "D.D." Murdoch - Named by his father after the famous Russian author, because his father was a horrible super-literate drunkard, like used to exist all over but don't any more because of Ed Sullivan and rock-n-roll and cheap factory-produced piss beer and all that crap that's made America not America, you know? The young Dostoyevsky had to work at an auto parts factory to help make money to care for his drunkard father (who was suffering from kidney problems and eventually liver cirrhosis as well in the end, not to mention undiagnosed PTSD from the war before they knew PTSD was some real shit you couldn't just be like "suck it up, man"), and studied at the local library in Cleveland before going to community college and then regular privileged kid college and then getting a graduate degree is some sort of sociology shit. As a kid everybody called him D.D. because the other name was too hard for kids, and D.D. stuck because it made him seem not like a pompous ass intellectual but a chill dude, so whenever he was on panels with Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek, he'd stand out as a chill dude. Plus Vice magazine let him have a column for a while during their "let's pretend to be legit but not legit" phase WHICH THEY'RE CURRENTLY STILL IN.

#10: McCarthy Jenkins - Named after Cormac McCarthy, because his dad was the basis for a minor character in Suttree. In fact, there's about a hundred legends of the rural south that Cormac McCarthy based all his minor characters in that book on. There was nothing special at all about McCarthy Jenkins, other than he thought he'd run for President, claiming he was all about "manifesting jobs" through "cloud-based manufacturing" except it had nothing to do with digital products. He literally wanted to trick the Chinese into building factories on clouds then have use the HAARP beams to make windstorms that blew them over U.S. waters in the Pacific Ocean.

#11: Burroughs Mankin - Also named after William S. Burroughs, but from northern California. He didn't really want to be President; he was just a performance artist who wanted an excuse to "go viral" except he never did, just making kinda funny but awkward videos from his apartment with about 134 views each.

#12: Thompson Duke - Named after Hunter S. Thompson, and Duke wasn't even his family's last name but his dad was such a huge mark for HST that when the young Duke was born in the hospital to his father and mother in the mid-1970s, his dad said, "His name is Thompson Duke" like in Raoul Duke, but the doctors were like, "Lol, sir you and your wife's last name is Entwistle, not Duke", but his dad was adamant (and on angel dust - and also the docs didn't actually say "lol" because that didn't exist back then yet) and held a kukri machete to the throat of the registrar/notary public/nurse lady or whatever the fuck that does the birth certificates until she did that name on the birth certificate. Entwistle was remembered as screaming, "CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT KIND OF DOUCHE MY SON WOULD BE IF HIS NAME WAS THOMPSON ENTWISTLE? C'MON BRO, HIS NAME IS GONNA BE DUKE, IT'S GONNA BE FUCKIN' DUKE, BRO." Thompson Duke's dad never died, in fact he lives on a small compound in Belize to this day, because it's like Central American brown people, but they speak English still.

#13: Percy MacArthur - Named for Walker Percy, famed Southern writer that I don't know at all, but some dude on Twitter suggested him. Unfortunately for Percy MacArthur, not too many other people know Walker Percy either, so they just thought "Percy MacArthur" sounded like some sort of  Montanan industrial tycoon from the late 1800s. It didn't help MacArthur that he wore a monocle, although it was at least made of that lens material that goes slight tint shade in the sunlight, but then that was even weirder, a motherfucker wearing like monocle sunglasses, talking about being President.

#14: Shakespeare Greenheart - Named after Shakespeare, and this is actually a name I made up for a collection of sonnets that I mailed to some hoity-toity poetry publisher, but they haven't officially rejected yet, so I haven't officially self-published it instead yet, so I'm pretending it's a fake Presidential candidate in order to plant the notion of  "Shakespeare Greenheart" into your head. This is how you do next level digital era marketing - you create obscure characters that don't actually exist, then bury them at the bottom of lists that nobody reads. But when the book actually comes out, robot algorithms see the phrase cross-referenced in different places, and then I'm gonna sell a million books of poetry in 21st Century, and get a gold sheath for my dick, and move to Belize and raise fighting goats and have to pet orangutans just like Miller Stone.