Problem? Yo, I'll Solve It

Today’s start:

You are Bill Gates, and you are trying to solve the world’s problems one at a time. What’s the first thing you are going to tackle? Why?

Of note, the book providing this prompt was published in 2011, which I think was before Bill Gates was at the center of weird conspiracies about vaccines and how providing them to kids in other countries was probably a way to inject people with microchips, which people were very against, a fact they posted about a lot on Facebook, which is 100% transparent about the fact that it’s tracking them, from their smart devices, which are also 100% tracking them at all times. Christ, at least the Bill Gates chips would theoretically cure diseases. Facebook ain’t cured shit.

2011 was probably when “Bill Gates” was a stand-in for “money is no object.” Seek, kids, 2011 was before you could get super rich by doing things like promising to build a train and then just not doing it and instead wasting a lot of time owning a social media platform and ruining it comprehensively.

Do we remember when Twitter was fun? I remember when Twitter was fun.

This is tough territory for me because, okay, whenever I do hypotheticals like this with my wife, Poonmaster Flexxx, I like to use a rule called the “No World Peace Rule.” Because when you have hypothetical genie wishes, hypothetical billions, whatever, the easy, boring answer is world peace.

Because, like, if world peace is an option, you either answer world peace or don’t, and the only discussion that comes from it is like, “Why not world peace, you monster?” And then I have to say, “Because I think the fingernail coloring tech from Total Recall 2 or whatever it’s called is super cool, okay?

No, I don’t color my fingernails, and no, this would not prompt me to, but…whatever! Isn’t that more fun to talk about than the fact that we can’t stop blowing up countries?

Point being, let’s take super serious, world changing shit off the board because while it’d make the world much better, it’d make this newsletter very boring.

If you REALLY insist that world peace stay in there as an option, here you go: World Peace. I desire world peace. We could live in an amazing world, we could probably make incredible progress, everything would be great.

The End.

For the rest of you, let’s do this.

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I recently watched the movie Roofman, a movie where Channing Tatum plays this guy who escaped prison and then lived behind a bike enclosure in a Toys R Us, having full run of the store during the night, sleeping during the day, and somehow parlaying this life situation into a relationship with Kirsten Dunst.

This is always an issue I take with Hollywood. I mean, on one hand, when a guy is being awfully cloak and dagger about where he lives, and when he claims to be an undercover agent in what appears to be a smallish town in North Carolina, but at the same time seems to have no problem immediately telling you he’s an undercover secret agent — how does this person end up with Kirsten Dunst? How does that make sense?

At the same time, it makes TOTAL sense because the person in question, in the movie, is Channing Tatum.

Which, you know, I get it. Is he probably scamming me and taking advantage of a situation? Yes, seems entirely possible. But it’s worth the risk.

Something I discovered while watching this movie, I love the idea of having a secret little living space. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s from childhood when I always wanted to build a fort or a treehouse or to read comics on the goddamn roof. I guess I just wanted to have a little under-the-radar spot to call my own.

Breaking Bad had this with its laundry lab. And to a lesser extent, in that moving truck the guy used to secretly transport Walter White, the one with the hollowed out space or whatever.

Breaking Bad seemed to like these sorts of things almost as much as I did. No wonder that show was such a success, who DOESN’T love a little hidey hole?

Roofman is based on a true story about a guy named Jeffrey, who really did live inside a Toys R Us and later expanded his hideout into an adjacent Circuit City, a project that’s the antidote to every HGTV remodel if I’ve ever heard of one. “Well, it’s open concept, and over here is a bottle that I can pee into!”

Jeffrey was eventually caught, and one of the keys to identifying him was that he left a fingerprint on a DVD found in his hole. The DVD was Catch Me If You Can, which a lot of people have made hay about because it’s kind of an ironic movie to provide evidence of a crime, but at the same time, it’s probably better than, I don’t know, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2. At least it’s a real movie and doesn’t bring up questions about…creepiness. Imagining a guy watching Catch Me If You Can inside the walls of a toy store, seems like an intelligent criminal killing time, kind of living the way most of us do, just rent free in the walls somewhere instead of rent-ful in a space slightly bigger than the space between the walls. So maybe not like most of us, but a lot like the ghost of a Victorian child in any number of haunted house movies (I assume that very few readers of this are Victorian ghost children, but if you are out there, love the Angus Young outfits).

Imagining that same guy watching Superbabies? Eew.

There’s a lot to be said about Jeffrey’s portrayal in the movie. To some extent, they make him out to be a good guy, or maybe a not-bad guy. He starts robbing McDonalds restaurants because he can’t afford a bike for his bitchy daughter who turns her nose up at an Erector set, which is a GREAT toy! I had one. It was fun, it’s like Lego except it uses nuts and bolts and also tends to have sharp pieces that can REALLY cut you up, plus you get to say “erector” a whole bunch with impunity, a true thrill for any child.

But, like, let’s not get away from the fact that Jeffrey was robbing people at gunpoint. Not just people, people working the opening shift at McDonald’s, a thing I’ve done during my lifetime.

In fairness to Jeffrey, if a robber came, locked us in the freezer, then called the cops to let us out as soon as he left with all the money, I’d probably have been okay with it provided we could have the rest of the day off. However, I don’t actually think we would’ve gotten the day off, or at least we wouldn’t have gotten paid for the day. Being held up at gunpoint during the beginning of a McDonald’s shift is only slightly less traumatizing than having moms scream at you because you don’t have the last Happy Meal toy from the set that pieces together to form Inspector Gadget, something that is kind of bullshit, but that definitely isn’t the fault of the 15 year-old register jockey.

I looked online, and all I really found is that Jeffrey “mostly” didn’t harm anyone during his robberies. Which isn’t totally insignificant. I mean, “mostly” is a useful word when we talk about how I “mostly” put a bunch of things on a spreadsheet correctly, or “mostly” managed to not look at pictures of Kirsten Dunst online for several hours to confirm she’s still a babe, but “mostly” avoiding committing assault isn’t all that great. It’s like coming out of the bathroom after having diarrhea and saying you got it “mostly” in the toilet.

Is Jeffrey a monster? I say Yes, and I say Yes because he did make life tough for some people who really had it tough already, but I mostly say Yes because he left a fingerprint on the bottom of a DVD.

What is with this? I check out DVDs and CDs from the library all the time, and it’s RARE to get one without a fingerprint on the bottom. Which I expect when I check out something like Superbabies, discs that are likely touched by children or adults who have lube-covered hands, but when I check out Inside Llewyn Davis? A non-horror A24 picture?

So, here’s what I would do with all that Bill Gates money:

I would develop a coating for discs that, when touched, makes your hand smell like absolute shit for 2 weeks. The slightest grazing of the data side of a disc would doom you to a stench that made everyone sure you hadn’t washed your hands after taking the most heinous shit of your life. I’m talking about, you’re in bed, your stink hand under the pillow that your head is on top of, and the smell permeates through the pillow, even if you have some fancy memory foam pillow that weighs like 15 lbs.

You might wonder why I would do it this way instead of developing a fingerprint-resistant coating. And that’s an excellent question with an even excellent-er answer:

Stopping the fingerprints moving forward would be a good thing, but it wouldn’t punish all the people who’ve put their stupid greasy fingers all over every disc up to now.

Diabolical? A little. Vengeful? You bet.

And that, friends, is why you should make sure to subscribe to this newsletter on a paid tier. If I make a comfortable living, I’ll never pursue a lavish living. I’ll be very content to cruise through life, writing dumb bullshit instead of really applying myself and making the world an objectively worse place, if in no other way than on an olfactory level.