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.
