Typically, the only way to damage the image of a breast cancer awareness organization would be to prove that it had once strangled several puppies and then damaged many priceless works of art by flinging said puppies at the art. (Flinging the puppies at art is essential, as merely strangling puppies could be justified simply by shouting “We save lives!” to distract people and then wildly brandishing pink ribbons at them.) But Susan G. Komen for the Cure—an organization renowned for giving those with breast cancer hope that anything is possible—has indeed shown us all that anything is possible by causing a deluge of anger without even strangling one puppy. The outrage resulted from Komen discontinuing funding to Planned Parenthood for their breast cancer screenings, with the rage mainly spread by the many women who use Planned Parenthood for healthcare services and by pro-choice advocates.

Before these events unfolded, Komen was perhaps best known for its sponsorship of strange, sadomasochistic events called “Race for the Cure” in which apparent masochists endured grueling foot races that could make even a breast cancer patient wince and be glad the chemo prevents her from engaging in such self-destructive, painful, and irrational behavior. Komen was also known for plastering pink ribbons everywhere, and some have argued that Komen is less a breast cancer charity than a factory for ribbons. They’ve put their little ribbons on cereal boxes, football jerseys, car bumpers, cans of soup, soup itself, dog houses, dogs, wild animals, domesticated animals, mules, etc. In their efforts to raise awareness of breast cancer, they have drowned our country in breast cancer awareness. Whether you’re eating a bowl of soup, visiting a petting zoo, knitting, or participating in a healthy game of shuffleboard, you cannot avoid being reminded of breast cancer. Even if you’d rather not think about breast cancer for one second, there is no avoiding these dreaded pink ribbons, which lurk around every corner on every object to constantly remind you that terrible things, like cancer, happen in this godless, empty universe that is devoid of purpose or meaning and that ultimately death awaits us all. And sometimes you’d rather not have these thoughts while petting a goat at the petting zoo. But Komen, with its surplus of pink ribbons, does not care if your child is crying and terrified of getting breast cancer in an uncaring universe because it was reminded of death by seeing a pink ribbon pinned through a goat’s skin. All they care about is that their organization is known, that it gets donations, and that people for some reason think that cancer can be cured by running marathons. However, owing to Komen’s disastrous decision to defund Planned Parenthood, Komen is now best known for taking away healthcare services from the underserved and needy—the women who rely most on Planned Parenthood—rather than for being a ribbon factory that sponsors charity runs. Now the only race Komen will be sponsoring is the Komen Race Away from This Organization for the Cure half marathon, a race for which record speeds are expected.

When the news first broke, Komen insisted that the decision was not politically motivated. “We decided to defund these baby-murder factories that train women to become slutty whores for totally apolitical reasons,” said a Komen spokesperson. “Our organization had recently instituted new rules for funding eligibility, which were: 1) The organization could not be under congressional investigation, 2) the organization could not have murdered countless babies in a holocaust of the unborn, and 3) the organization could not pass go and could therefore not collect $200.” However, the reason given for defunding Planned Parenthood, that the organization was under congressional investigation, was quickly challenged by everyone online who happened to run a blog or a podcast, which was ostensibly everyone. It was noted, for example, that Komen gave money to Penn State, which is also under investigation as a result of the infamous Paterno/Sandusky debacle in which it was revealed that Penn State secretly offered coaches a Minor in minors. It was also revealed that the current vice president of Komen, Karen Handel, is a failed politician with a known pro-life stance and grudge against Planned Parenthood, preferring parenthood to be completely unplanned because after all, it’s not as if something as important as bringing a new life into the world is a decision that should be made with lots of planning, and is instead a decision best made while drunk and lustily throwing yourself at a guy you just met in the parking lot of the bowling alley.

As these facts emerged, Komen was roundly and swiftly criticized all over the Internet. Even worse, after suffering a terrible blow to its image among pro-choice advocates, Komen then reversed its decision and decided to restore funding to Planned Parenthood, thereby pissing off the pro-life contingent that had been their only remaining supporters.

For now, Planned Parenthood will receive the funding from Komen, but it isn’t clear that this will continue in the future, owing to the fact that Komen is run by pro-life fucktards who may pull the funding at any time for silly politicized reasons that ultimately harm women’s health. Komen’s funding of Planned Parenthood could also be jeopardized by the fact that in another six months Komen will probably have no money left to give out as funds, and will instead be out on the street pandhandling, assuring passersby that they just need some spare change, even pennies will do, so they can catch a bus and visit their five very ill children and in no way will this money be spent on liquor or their terrible addiction to ribbons.

TV critics, FCC commissioners, and homeless people eating moldy pudding out of a dumpster have all unanimously described the latest unaired episode of Fear Factor as “the most disgusting thing ever,” with the FCC commissioner adding, “and this is including that one time I accidentally licked a cat’s anal glands.” But what could possibly provoke such disgust and outrage for a TV show that makes eating testicles seem like a familiar routine on a normal Tuesday?

As it turns out, NBC declined to air the latest episode of Fear Factor because contestants were made to do something so horribly disgusting that executives weren’t sure the episode wouldn’t cause New York to be swept out to sea in a stream of mass projectile vomit. In the unaired Fear Factor episode, contestants were made to do something far worse than eat worms dipped into vats of shit; they were made to sit through an entire episode of Fear Factor.

At first, the contestants hesitated. One contestant’s finger hovered over and tentatively pressed the “play” button, but as soon as the first chords of the Fear Factor theme song were sounded, the contestant quickly retched, vomiting up the various insects and genitalia he had devoured in previous rounds, and refused to continue.

“You can make me eat worms. And you can make me get into a vat full of cockroaches. And you can even connect a tube from my mouth to my ass so that I shit into my mouth and then eat my shit and poop out my shit in a never-ending cycle of rebirth. But this is too far,” said one of the contestants after host Joe Rogan told (or rather yelled, owing to a genetic disorder in which he’s unable to control the volume of his voice) the contestant he’d have to watch an entire episode of Fear Factor in order to win. “You have to understand, Joe,” continued the contestant, tears streaming down his face in sadness or perhaps as a result of the few seconds of Fear Factor he had watched, “I wouldn’t be able to look my children in the face if I went through with this. I would lose my dignity if I did this.” He wiped some stray giant Amazonian cockroach testicle pieces from the corner of his mouth. “And if there’s one thing I can’t give up, it’s my dignity.” He then bowed his head and walked off stage, carefully stepping around the buckets full of rotten fish heads as he did so.

As is customary, Rogan then offered the remaining contestants vast sums of unattainable wealth if they would only defile themselves in an unimaginable way. But still, none would agree to lower themselves to such a degree that they’d watch an entire episode of Fear Factor. Joe Rogan himself, who suffers from a genetic disorder making him unable to feel pain or emotion, even began to retch as he exhorted the contestants in an increasingly wavering voice to please watch the episode of Fear Factor. It is rumored that Rogan is the only person capable of hosting the full duration of the show because of his excessive cannabis use that deadens his senses and his daily forays into a sensory deprivation tank wherein he curls up into a fetal position for hours and tries his best to burn away the memories of his hosting duties.

In general, Fear Factor justifies its extreme and disgusting practices by citing obscure cultures in which these activities are normalized. If the task is to eat frog ovaries, producers will point out that the ancient Mayans frequently dined upon frog ovaries as a precious delicacy when they weren’t cutting out each other’s hearts. If the task is to drink fermented yak piss, the producers will point to the nearly vanished tribe of Yitsuishi now living in a small region in Brazil and suffering from bacterial infections and near-extinction no doubt caused by their tradition of drinking fermented yak piss. However, the producers could find no cultures that would watch an entire episode of Fear Factor. Even the brave Yitsuishi, induced into a feverish, infection-induced trance of religious fervor from consumption of yak urine, could not be coerced into watching an episode, choosing instead to flay themselves with whips and castrate themselves with primitive instruments of flint. And in American culture, Fear Factor is never watched all the way through. It survives only in short clips on Youtube, as even strong-willed Americans desensitized to reality television schlock can only handle this type of thing in small bits and pieces.

Naturally, this is not the first time Fear Factor has courted controversy. The last time, it was in the news because NBC refused to air an episode in which a contestant drank donkey semen. Prior to that, there was a bit of a dust-up over an episode in which white supremacists were made to touch the soft, ebony skin of a real-life black person. And before that there were the episodes in which contestants were forced to read War and Peace rendered entirely in Comic Sans and Papyrus fonts, to eat food from Hooters without the pleasant and palate-distracting presence of large orbs of female secondary sexual characteristics, and to spend over 16 minutes in the presence of Newt Gingrich.

Aside from the controversies generated by individual episodes, Fear Factor itself, as a show, has also been heralded as one of (possibly two of) the signs of the Apocalypse and as the progenitor of today’s ubiquitous and much-maligned “reality television.” Prior to Fear Factor’s emergence, television rarely featured the consumption of any genitals at all, and people making out with large, rainforest-dwelling insects was something you could find only on pay-per-view or in David Lynch films, if at all. Now, of course, that TV executives have realized the relative inexpensiveness of producing a show in which people are made to eat dicks, such sights are common fare on primetime TV. A typical evening on NBC could now easily be mistaken for a poorly designed community college course in animal husbandry, Sex Ed., and the history of the city of Hiroshima from 1945-1949 somehow all intertwined into a mass of unintelligible schlock, with Joe Rogan (a man with a rare genetic disorder that causes him to host Fear Factor) as the extremely loud professor.

When questioned by reporters, an NBC executive reportedly said, “At the present moment we have no plans to air the episode of Fear Factor in which contestants watched Fear Factor, on our lawyers’ advice.” He paused. “The episode with the donkey semen, however, is still a possibility, pending the results of the paternity test.”

I won.

This Halloween, the trick-or-treaters won’t be knocking on my door—because I’M THE ONE WHO KNOCKS!

If you can’t tell who I am dressed as, then clearly you do not watch Breaking Bad, and clearly you have not been exposed to the best character ever invented: Walter White (aka Heisenberg). Any kids who can guess my costume will get some cherished blue rock candy along with their Snickers bars.

Some people, usually sociopaths without any sense of empathy and libertarians, claim that the government can’t do anything right. They insist that any project, no matter how simple, somehow becomes irreparably fucked up should any bureaucrat or government funding touch it. This probably partly explains why some libertarians don’t want to see any federal funding for abortions: no one likes a botched abortion.

Being a liberal, I find the assumption that governments automatically ruin everything to be a bit overstated. Governments ruin things no more or less than Wall Street bankers who bring down the entire U.S. economy. However, even my steadfast belief in the role of government is sometimes tested. The food pyramid, for example, is just one such government hack job that continually flusters me and forces me to question the wisdom of government intervention.

You see, the food pyramid is among the worst symbols ever devised. And this is including the Nazi symbol. Charles Manson and his followers must have thought they were being rebellious and inflammatory when they tattooed swastikas to their faces, but the effect would have been more chilling had they simply tattooed the food pyramid to themselves.

When I was a child, the pyramid was a hopeless monstrosity trying unsuccessfully to promote healthy eating habits. It did so with the image of a bland triangle with horizontal divisions, with the bigger lower base representing the larger quantities of grains, vegetables, and fruits we children should have been eating, and the smaller divisions toward the top representing the tastier, less healthy foods like dairy and meat that we were already eating. At the pinnacle, though, were fats and oils, with the warning to eat them sparingly. The design was busy and confusing. Instead of making me think about eating healthy, it made me think about pyramids. And then Egyptians. And then mummies. And then mummy curses. And then I got scared and ate candy because that’s what I did when I got scared—I found solace and comfort in fats and oils. Not only that, but it seems apparent the designers had never seen a Christmas tree or Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which were also triangular objects. In Christmas trees, for instance, there were only crappy ornaments at the bottom, but the kickass light-up star (or sometimes a less kickass, but still better than the lower ornaments light-up angel) went at the top. Similarly, with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, basic survival necessities like food and shelter were at the bottom, but items more important for a meaningful and fulfilling life were located at the top, like self-actualization and happiness. But the food pyramid inverted this tried-and-tested method in which things at the top of triangles are better than things at the bottom. At least, it attempted to invert this long-standing precedent. Instead they put grains and healthy shit at the bottom, and fats and oils and cheese at the top. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the essential stuff for survival was at the bottom, but the stuff that gave you happiness and purpose and meaning—the fats and oils and cheeses—were at the top. But the government panel that created this graphic did not consider this possible misinterpretation. They had inadvertently emphasized these unhealthy items as perfect and delicious, the pinnacle of all foods. They had unintentionally created a graphic that appeared to be saying, “Here is a pyramid with the tastiest foods put into order for you, where the tastiest ones at top are the best, and fuck those vegetables and grains at the bottom. Those are just there for support. Kind of like how the bun and the lettuce are just support teams for your meat. Now would you like some fat and oils on your burger?” And even though it said to eat oils and fats sparingly, few people in America knew what that word meant. This was America, after all. The only words we know here are money and pie. And also incoherent chants of USA! USA! USA!

To rectify this, no doubt, the food pyramid was subsequently redesigned. Instead of having  horizontal divisions, which led to the inadvertent thought that items were arranged from top to bottom by tastiness, they used vertical divisions. And instead of filling the pyramid divisions with an endless number of words and pictures that explained each division, they just left the divisions totally blank. In short, they took it from one inept extreme to the other. The overly wordy, confusing prior pyramid had been replaced with a pyramid devoid of any context or explanation whatsoever, with an unlabelled color code and a picture of a weird stick figure with weird praying mantis arms apparently trying to climb to the top of the pyramid where the fats and oils used to be. It didn’t seem possible, but the new design was an even bigger monstrosity than the old. The following image is almost an exact replica of this new and improved food pyramid, as drawn by me:

Anyone who glances at this image instantly recognizes what it means: that whoever made it is retarded. No, I can’t even say that, as it is an insult to people with severe mental disabilities. It looks as if it were made by a paraplegic dog whose mouth was stuffed with an assorted color of paints and then made to spew it everywhere. Far from resembling a food pyramid, it instead looks like a lone figure bravely ascending a mountain of homosexual vomit. This is worse than thinking of Egyptians and mummies and mummy curses. Instead it conjures up images of festive, proudly-gay vomit that has been converted into an escalator for stick figures with troublesomely enlarged appendages. And nothing makes me hungrier for oils and fats than constantly being forced to think about the gays vomiting in such a manner that poorly-drawn men can climb atop it.

Given the long and sordid history of the food pyramid’s attempts to convince children to eat healthy foods and successes in making children binge eat in fear of mummies and gay vomit, the Obama administration has rightly taken it upon itself to remedy this disaster by creating a new image that will better represent the facts of healthy eating.

Michelle Obama has already made a point to fight against childhood obesity with the Let’s Move! campaign. Savvy children are already finding loopholes for that, though. Because eating involves moving one’s mouth and hands, and because the campaign slogan only mentions moving and says nothing about eating less, several thousand kids have taken the slogan to mean they should move more by eating more potato chips. Still others have confused it with meaning they should move to a different city, perhaps one well known for its fatty, unhealthy food and from which the Obamas hail: Chicago. In short, the program has not reduced childhood obesity yet. It is no wonder that the Obamas are now trying to spearhead a revitalization of a campaign that attempts to educate people about healthy eating through images of pyramids. (And is it just a coincidence that they would be so intent on revising an image that depicts pyramids, which are found in Africa, just months after Obama had released a fake birth certificate attempting to prove that he was not in fact born in Africa? Hmm…)

The new logo has not been released yet, but inside sources have said it will be in the shape of a plate, with portions sectioned off representing the various food groups. I predict it will look something like this, given past efforts and the previous debacle of the food pyramid:

Holy shit, that’s beautiful. However, this is my own design. The real design, seeing as how the government is designing it, is likely to be an abomination equal to or greater than the original food pyramid, eating shellfish, and/or gays marrying each other. And it will probably have many of the same problematic misinterpretations. For instance, it sort of resembles a pie chart, which will make people think of one of three things:

1. Pie. Apple pie. Chocolate pie. Peach pie. Key lime pie. Pizza pie. Basically any kind of pie. And basically any kind of pie is exactly the sort of thing you don’t want this image to evoke, because any kind of pie is unhealthy and would be filled to the gills with oils and fat, if pie had gills. Thankfully it doesn’t have gills. There are too many oils and fats in pie for the gills to fit. There is no room left for the pie to breathe underwater.
2. Pi. Also known as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Also known as 3.14159265… okay, you get the idea. It is not good for children to be thinking of pi, because it will make them obese. For one, it has infinite digits, so it makes kids think they can eat infinite pies. For two, it has to do with circles, and circles are round and beautiful, leading children to rationalize their growing obese pot bellies as beautiful when in fact they are disgusting.
3. Hannah Montana. Kids will think of Hannah Montana when they see this new design for nutritional eating because they are always thinking of Hannah Montana. They fucking love that Hannah Montana. I think they should somehow try to incorporate Hannah Montana into the design to make it better and to pre-empt this thinking of Hannah Montana. Then the kids will be like, “I just thought of Hannah Montana. And now Hannah Montana is in this plate depicting healthy portions of nutritional foods to eat. That would be informative if I weren’t now thinking about Hannah Montana again.”

In summary, I am not optimistic about the prospects of this redesign convincing children to stop eating, provided there is no Hannah Montana themed element in the design. Instead of wasting time and energy and money on such crude designs, Obama should be spending money on scientific research into how to make vegetables taste like cookies. Kids eat too many oils and fats not because of failed food pyramids misleading them or failed infographics or pictures of plates. They eat oils and fats because they taste like cookies. So they should just make vegetables and fruits taste like cookies, and then also use science to make cookies taste like vegetables, and then make a picture that says “VEGETABLES TASTE LIKE COOKIES AND COOKIES ARE GROSS AND TASTE LIKE ASPARAGUS AND WILL MAKE YOUR URINE SMELL WORSE THAN USUAL.” And then they can put that on a picture of a plate or something. That will be the only way to make kids eat healthy.

I have writer’s block. The mere fact that I call it writer’s block proves that I have writer’s block. If I didn’t have writer’s block I probably would have been creative and coined a new term for it, like unsayingnessarrhea, which is funny because it combines a non-concept like not saying anything with the process of eliminating watery, non-viscous stools. I’m not sure why that makes it funny, but you’ll have to take my word for it. Alternatively, I could have just compared my writer’s block to something else. That’s called a metaphor. But I have writer’s block so I can’t think of an appropriate metaphor. I just want to compare everything to donuts. I guess you could say that writer’s block is like a donut because it’s very filling but ultimately empty inside. And that’d be a pretty good metaphor if I didn’t have such terrible writer’s block and want a donut really badly right now.

I have writer’s block. It’s so bad that I can’t even be bothered with transitions to new paragraphs. I simply start them haphazardly, justifying it to myself by saying that this is what Hemingway would have done, and then getting a weird sensation in my gut when I remember that Hemingway rarely combined concepts with diarrhea for cheap humorous effect and when I see that the sentence proclaiming my similarity to Hemingway has begun to completely lose its meaning as it careens away from the topic into a mist of absurdity that in no way resembles his terse, short prose about manly things like fishing. This is long, rambling prose, if it can even be considered prose. And it’s about gender-neutral topics like insecurity and my inability to write.

So now I am writing this story about how I am unable to write, because creating paradoxes is one of my favorite hobbies. This is also why I like to lie about lying and lock myself in boxes with cats that are both alive and dead because I refuse to observe them. This isn’t difficult because I’m just as good at ignoring cats as they are at ignoring me. Of course, some would say these are not actually hobbies. But this would mean that my hobbies are not hobbies, which is another paradox, and which proves my point. And also doesn’t. But that’s the point. Paradox! It fucks your mind like a penis that is inside your mind. That’s a simile. I never said it was good. I have writer’s block.

Lately I have been trying to write stand-up comedy routines, because I’ve been overcome with an absurd desire to talk to a bunch of strangers about strange things. I never want to talk to people about strange things in other contexts, like at the grocery store or at a stop sign. So this strange compulsion to talk to strangers from a stage and make them laugh at me seems a bit out of place and concerning.

Most of my comedy notes are written on my phone in poorly typed memos. They are cryptic and surreal, saying things like, “Peacocks. Female peacocks are female dick birds with huge dicks. If human females were smart, they’d be like peaheans [sic], use sexual selection to make all men have huge, cumbersome asses. That way they could be good at sports.” I figure that saying things about peacocks that are slightly misogynistic will win over the audience. I’ve also written things about atheism, politics, and how the bullying in my childhood was a lot like the Isreali-Palestinian conflict and the Cold War. However, I’m not confident enough to talk about socially-conscious and important things to an audience of drunk strangers that probably won’t like what I have to say. And also because it’s not funny. So I’ll probably ditch the atheism and politics and instead talk about peacocks and those little spike things you put on the ends of corn on the cob. These are the kinds of things everyone can relate to.Everyone has known a peacock and everyone loves those little corn on the cob spike things. These are the good, clean topics that anyone could get behind. In other words, I haven’t even performed yet, and already I’ve sold out. But at least I won’t be merely iterating a list of yo-mama jokes. I prefer to talk about the inadequacies of fathers.

When I took creative writing courses in school, my teacher told me to just write about anything if I was unable to come up with anything. The process of free-writing was supposed to be a cathartic activity that dusted the cobwebs off the writing centers of my brain and allowed the creative juices to flow. This was how he described it, at least, but I’m still relatively certain that creativity is not released as a juice. If it were I would definitely drink some of that juice because they would probably sell it in stores. But all the neurologists I know assure me that creativity cannot be drank. My other, cooler friends, however, insist just the opposite, that creativity can be drank, although the liquid that provides the creativity also impairs driving and other higher cognitive functions. Apparently those aren’t needed for writing. And after looking over some of the things I’ve written, I can see there’s some truth to that.

The main thing holding me back, of course, is that lately I have been interested in politics, but politics lately has been dreadfully boring. The only news seems to involve Republicans slowly announcing their candidacy for the presidency and endless disputes about the continual excitement of the budget. I could, of course, stray from topical humor and write about philosophy, or science, or even history, but writing about these topics would likely involve having to research something and write at length about it, so I figured it better to simply write about how I have nothing to write about.

It kills me. There is plenty to write about. Scientists are constantly making discoveries. The world is constantly changing. Just in the Middle East, people are setting themselves on fire and protesting and trying to overthrow dictators. But this isn’t interesting enough for me. It just doesn’t pop. What needs to happen is the Middle East needs to pop. Or snap. Maybe even crackle a little bit. If it did that I’d definitely write about it. Because then I could humorously compare it to a breakfast cereal featuring elves. That’d at least buy me a couple of lines to write.