Category: Stories

I understand why old people smoke—like, it makes sense if you were in a C-47 over the Netherlands and then your buddy Stu handed you a Lucky Strike and then jumped out and got blown to smithereens by flak, and then you wrote to your best gal and said “I’m gonna give Mr. Hitler a knuckle sandwich courtesy of ol’ Stu”, and now you smoke. That makes sense. But I don’t get why people my age smoke, especially since I grew up in late ’90s-early ’00s Palo Alto so with my friends that smoked it was like, hey, you can’t use smoking to help you look cool while angsting or rebelling. You gots nothing to angst about. We’re all rich as thieves. I’m low class by Palo Alto standards since my mom was a librarian, but I can go literally anywhere else in the country and they will just give me a motorcycle. Our Aibos are made out of fucking platinum, lady, platinum. Why would you smoke.

Anyway, I’m guessing that’s a huge problem for tobacco companies. It seems like they’re taking all their US marketing money and dedicating it overseas to make Gujaratis and Polynesians chew tobacco like some goddamn relief pitcher, and US legislation isn’t moving fast enough to allow Marlboro to make good money in the ol’ Humboldt Honeydew… the ol’ Tijuana Postholers… the ol’ British Columbia Her Majesty’s Own Marijuanulated Smokeable Goods. No, they need a new idea. One that combines a healthy aspect that’ll appeal to the young people with the “This is America and fuck you” spirit of their moneymaker. And I have it!

THAT IS CORRECT. Beef jerky that you can tear into strips, light, and smoke. Or you can eat it. But if you smoke it, it’s like a cigarette except it makes beefy smoke, then you can eat it. This is up there with my Kinect cable car game when it comes to good ideas, because there is no downside.

It comes in perforated chunks, so it’s easy to deal with. There could even be an extra-chunky “cigar” version for cigar aficionados who want to stop smelling like assholes. It could not be more simple. Cut, light, smoke, eat: Hambalo’s Smokeable Beef Jerky.

This may not have quite the same consumer potential as the Ennui Smartwatch, but here’s another idea that I think has real potential for the corporate back-end market.

I guess I spaced out for about 20 minutes and was thinking about companies commoditizing farts, like, electric farts that make corporate logos. It could be in a pill form, and use nanobots or something. I don’t know. We’re still in the R&D phase. So far we’ve only mastered text-based farting — graphics are still a problem. The next step will be full unicode support, including emoji.

For now, though, the initial plan was that a company could have a batch of their fart-logos made, and hire someone to go around putting these in people’s drinks, making them violently ill and delightfully synergistic.

However, I ran this by legal, and an hour later a lawyer came and blew out a notarized fartsponse in my office; it turns out that putting pills in people’s drinks is kind of a party foul, especially at locations like metropolitan opera openings and if the plaintiff—ah, experimentee—might or might not be the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic. Court records suggest that the experimenter, my unpaid manservant Milosz, is actually a bit of a Hungarian ultranationalist on his one day off each year, and had Prime Minister Sobotka farting distorted pro-Budapest imagery throughout La Bohème. Once again, our apologies to the fine people of the Czech Republic and I wish to stress once more that nobody is more sorry or less responsible for Milosz’s actions than me.

Anyhow, that didn’t pan out, but then my board of director cat suggested that humans are vermin who will do anything with enough incentive. Why not just pay them? Surely there is some amount of money that will convince people to spend a day farting the Audi logo. We need to monetize America’s most gaseous people.

And lo, our new business model was born. As I said, we still have to perfect imagery-gas. But this is a top priority, as our text-based social fartwork is just not taking off as we hoped. But we hope that, in mere months, customized Brandolin™ pills will be available for gaseous co-marketers to spread the word about your business, illegitimate, coup-ridden government, or unlicensed space program.

I have a business idea on which the ground floor has available space: smartwatches for ennui.

It uses advanced motion detection and all that junk to measure the user’s listlessness and dissatisfaction with the state of their life. Like the Apple Health thing, or Fitbit, but for people that are into more than all that jumping and leaping and running about business. So it records all this data, and — the word “gamify” having been run solidly into the ground at this point — it rewards your sadness with a series of achievements.

Using Bluetooth it can sync with the wearer’s phone to collect enhanced statistics like “Quantity of Cup-of-Soup Bought” and “Hours Spent Driving Aimlessly”. I think this device can revolutionize the sort of modern emptiness that epitomizes modern Quebec. And it can revolutionize your emptiness too, American investor. Let’s aggregate our co-marketing strengths to do the stuff. Ennui Watch. www.partybutts.club, my tree fort, eight o’clock. Bring a Chinese OEM and a copy of AutoCAD. Together, we can own and operate the dream of every human, which is to have a data center inside an old missile silo, and have lots of blinking lights in there.