Editor's Quick Tips, Vol. #8

Today's Topic: Transportation

If you live in one of this nation's one (1) cities with adequate public transportation, fuck you. Cletus and I are stuck out here in the sticks (i.e. a city of 168,293 people), where even traversing a single store requires a 14-mile walk. I used to have feet, but they've been worn down to always-bleeding stumps, due to friction, and to corporate glee. I once received $3 to perform a bandaging of my gangrenous foot-stumps at a Wal-Mart management retreat. I got a standing ovation; I think several of the richest men in attendance shot jizz-loads into their shorts when they saw the blood.

Your car was stolen from you by a judge, who decreed monarchically from his (they're white men by law, judges) platinum-bidet-throne that your sole mode of transportation shall be skating upon your own feces. This decree is particularly frustrating to hobos, because judge-feces covers literally every surface on this Earth.

Need to get somewhere in order to make a living? Tough titty. Starve to death, please. Your life is a severe inconvenience to the cracker-ass, shit-slurping, dog-fucking judges whose whims are the dictums which define whether or not you'll be so hungry as to start eating your own flesh.

Bon appetit!

Your Future, In This Apocalyptic World

If Chipmunks are currently feasting upon your malnourished body, and complaining to Chef Entropy about the quality of the food even as you sit aghast, you're not alone. All is void, as legislated by Congress. President Obama will probably eventually enact some level of relief for hobos, but you will as a result of Bush's afterglow be long dead before Obama is inaugurated, meaning that you're already dead. If you're surprised, shut up, dead guy, because some possum is already munching your remains. If you see a rodent theme in these remarks, then you're right on the mark. Rodents will rule, starting Thursday. As the protein component of their diet, you deserve to be informed of your destiny.

Unfortunately, your destiny has been sold to China. Eat turd, a menu selection cooked up for you by House Minority Leader John Boehner.

Signed,
Editor (and Cletus).

Editor's Quick Tips, Vol. #7

Today's Topic: Rich People

Rich People think they're sooooooooooo fucking smart, just because your teeth are rotting and your liver is poisoned with lead from the stuff they make and you cry all day and they discover your secret identity. Big deal.

Want to feel proud, Rich People? Quit shitting in the creek where I get the water with which I make my ramen noodles.

These posts are supposed to contain my tips for fellow hobos. Quit hogging the key light, Rich People. Hobos, steal a Rich Person's mail. There may be a 4,000th credit card in there or something.

The end.

Five Poverty-Worsening Chain Reactions

Poverty doesn't just happen. Poverty just happens. One day you're eating a roast-beef sandwich in an apartment, and then a few days later you're scraping dried mustard off of discarded sandwich wrappers in an abandoned security-guard shack at the old closed foundry over off Broad St. It all starts with one tiny, honest mistake. And now that we Americans have traded economies with China, we can all expect an even higher likelihood that some seemingly innocuous thing we don't even realize we're doing will soon lead to us all performing sexual favors on feral dogs in exchange for clumps of delicious, life-sustaining hair. Let me show you how it works.

1. You're excited about some project you're working on, and you forget to check your mailbox for a few days. You miss your water bill and your service is disconnected. You call the water company and are told that it will cost as much as buying a 12-bedroom house in the Hamptons in order to have your service restored--apparently because each molecule of water costs $6,347.02 to manufacture.
2. You show up at a sales meeting smelling like a basketball player's feet, because you haven't been able to shower in two weeks. You do not make the sale. No money is coming in because of the visible stinklines rising from your torso. Your electric, phone, and internet services are subsequently disconnected, making your dreams of finding work impossible.
3. You can't afford to repair your car so that it will pass the emissions test, and so the state will not allow you to renew your plates. You are pulled over by one of the 9,567,371 police officers who boredly cruise your suburb (pop. 6,000) looking to boost municipal revenue. You are ticketed and sent before a judge, but your auto insurance expires before the court date arrives. The judge suspends your driver's license, gleefully bangs your car into a twisted wreck with his gavel, strips you naked, douses your entire body with lighter fluid and sets you ablaze, has you publicly flayed on the local ABC affiliate, and chews off your legs. You are thrown into a dumpster by a pair of fat, laughing bailiffs.
4. Unable to climb out of the dumpster because of your burns and leglessness, you survive for a few days by drinking flat bottle-remnants of EXTREME EXPLOSION COLA! and swallowing the odd rancid pinto bean or two. Finally, you and the rest of the trash are loaded into a truck and hauled off to the landfill.
5. You are buried under a bunch of heartless Rich People's discarded iPods and property deeds. You suffocate within a few minutes.

Think it can't happen to you? It's already starting. You're welcome.

Recipe: Hobo Risotto

Ingredients:

• White rice
• Ketchup packets
• Despair

Over a period of three months, collect discarded ketchup packets in the parking lot of the McDonald's next to the pawn shop which you visit daily, in vain, trying to sell your teeth and/or your left shoe. Yes, you could buy a whole bottle of ketchup if that bastard pawnbroker would only pay you a fair price ($400) for your left maxillary second molar. What a skinflint asshole that guy is. Anyway, once you've collected 15 or more ketchup packets, boil up some rice. Squirt ketchup packets into rice, stir, and consume between involuntary dry heaves. This recipe is easy to chew, even without a left maxillary second molar. See how everything works out neatly for you?

Hobo Business Proposition

As you all (i.e. Cletus) know, I'm trying to get my fabulous and insanely lucrative kitty-cat-lint-sculpture business going. How would you like to get in on the ground floor with an investment in this exciting growth industry? Are you drooling on your gravy-stained, stolen-from-Goodwill shirt yet? I am, but it's probably just a symptom of advanced scurvy or something.

I'm not asking for money, because of course Hank Paulson has outlawed money. No, that would be silly, whereas fashioning kitty-cat-lint-sculptures for bartering capital is anything but silly. What I need is lint--mountains upon mountains of delicious, nutritious, pliably-sculptable lint. Have wads of it in your dryer? Harvest it religiously from your stanky belly button? Sitting on a large lint-cache obtained through existing bartering channels you've devised? I want your lint, dammit, and I'm not too proud to beg.

Each pound of lint you send me will purchase one share of stock in Kitty-Cat-Lint-Sculptures, Ltd. You'll be paid dividends in the form of whatever I receive by way of kitty-cat-lint-sculpture-barter. Say I trade a lovely piece for a bottle of malt liquor: I'll mail you a Dixie cup full of booze. Sit back and watch the profits roll in as I do all the work!

Mail your lint to:
Kitty-Cat-Lint-Sculptures, Ltd.
C/O MATERIAL ACQUISITIONS
108 Hawkins St., Apt. 5
Chattanooga, TN 37415

Editor's Quick Tips, Vol. #6

Today's Topic: Phones.

As a confirmed hobo, you are not permitted to use telephones. Trust me, I tried it. I picked mine up yesterday and nothing happened, unless you want to consider the unmet need to converse with the outside world to be a "happening." It isn't, so shut up and go cry again.

If you need to talk to someone who is elsewhere, you'll simply have to walk to wherever that person is. That person will not be there when you get there. It's funny to everyone except you, so shut up and go cry again.

This whole thing is designed by rich people to keep you poor, if not to make you even more poorer than you already are. Such is the way of the world. If you don't know that by now, you'll know it by tomorrow. Pass me that bottle.