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Barry Feltzer is not a smart man. That’s not an insult, it’s just a statement of fact. Indeed, Barry himself is acutely aware of his intellectual prowess, or lack thereof. To mitigate this, he has become a huge consumer of information. See, Barry knows that when you don’t have the juice upstairs to form quick, coherent arguments on your own, the best substitute is the ability to rattle off related facts. Even the smartest person in the world would be reluctant to argue too much on a subject he or she isn’t too familiar with when confronted with a dumb person armed with statistics. So, Barry manages. He wakes up every morning, brews the worst blend of Folgers available, and rather than leafing lazily through the newspaper like his father, he boots up his six-year-old Dell laptop and begins soaking in his information for the day. There’s only one problem. He believes everything that he reads.
It’s a typical morning for Barry. Once he finishes surfing Firefox–he recently deleted Internet Explorer, due to a survey that showed Internet Explorer users tend to have lower IQs (this survey never actually happened)–he heads out the door. He gets into his 2003 Mazda Miata and carefully starts it. It’s his baby, after all. He saved for this car for months. Barry admits he misses the red paint job it came with, but sanding it off to the primer so that the bright red doesn’t cause him to get more speeding tickets is certainly worth the money he’s saving (never been proven). He sits in traffic for a while, bored. All around him, cars are speeding past while he remains immobile. You see, Barry watched a video the week before explaining how changing lanes in heavy traffic statistically leads to longer commutes due to to the varying nature of lane speeds. So, at all costs, he chooses to stay in his lane, ignoring any and all opportunities to switch over to a quicker lane.
(This lasts for an hour or so until a tow truck removes the broken down car sitting directly in front of him.)
Barry doesn’t take the confrontation from his boss very well. In fact, it’s not like he even needs this stupid job in the first place. He has a vast inheritance, which is carefully managed by a Swiss banker. The only reason he even has this job is to pay the banker’s “portfolio fee.” He has been assured that as soon as all of the paperwork he’s sent in (birth records, social security number, bank statements) the money from his great uncle he never met will soon be sent to him and he’ll be sipping mojitos–a drink he picked up when he found out it was Hemingway’s favorite (it wasn’t)–on the beach. He’ll also pack some delicious PB&Js. Thank God for George Washington Carver inventing peanut butter (he didn’t). Perhaps he’ll vacation in Australia. He’s always wanted to see toilets that spin the water the opposite direction due to the reversed polarity of the Earth’s gravity (not only untrue, but it doesn’t even make any sense).
As it is late November, everyone else is getting into the holiday spirit. Barry chooses to abstain from the Christmas traditions, however. He finds it sad that America celebrates a holiday cobbled out of various Pagan traditions (sort of true) with a figure at its center, Santa Claus, who was invented as a marketing ploy by Coca-Cola in the 1930s (absolutely not). Perhaps his girlfriend would have celebrated not celebrating Christmas with him this year, except that he broke up with her due to the lack of blow jobs she gave him. Oh, no, not because he’s selfish. Quite the contrary. You see, semen that is swallowed is rich in protein, and it actually helps to prevent the chance of breast cancer. Because she refused to go down on him three times a day for her own good, he realized that she didn’t take her own health as seriously as he would appreciate in a mate.
(Jizz doesn’t prevent breast cancer. Or any cancer. It’s sticky, it smells weird, and it has no nutritional value whatsoever. We ask that ladies choose to swallow in spite of these facts.)
The breakup was rough for him, especially since he had just bought her a ring to put on her left ring finger, since that’s the one with the vein that goes directly to the heart (all veins go to the heart, it’s their job). I mean it wasn’t an engagement ring, but it certainly cost a lot of money since it used to belong to the royal family of Nigeria (Nigeria is a presidential republic).
He stops at a bank on his way home to pull out the cash he has to mail to his Swiss banker friend (who inexplicably has a P.O. box in Jackson, Miss.). He considers bringing his mace, since it’s already dark and he’s in a bad neighborhood, but then he remembers that if someone tries to rob him at the ATM, all he has to do is surreptitiously type in his PIN backward and it will automatically notify the police (which is probably annoying for the guy who has a PIN that’s the exact opposite of Barry’s). He then goes home to his empty house and gets ready for bed. He takes seven different types of multivitamins (even though your body gets most necessary vitamins from food), takes his last pee break (which is where the excess vitamins immediately go), and straps on his protective mask, which prevents him from accidentally eating any spiders in his sleep (spiders don’t crawl into your mouth, they have no reason to).
It’s okay though, because Barry rationalizes to himself that ultimately his life is meaningless in such a vast world. After all, there are now more people on the planet than have ever existed in history. This is actually a nice, philosophical thought. (Made completely useless by the fact that there are currently seven billion people now, and there have been more than 107 billion humans who have lived in history.)
So, he drifts off, fondly reciting in his head all of his favorite Albert Einstein quotes, none of which were ever really uttered by Albert Einstein at any time, ever.
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