Gutes Beispiel

I wrote this list as a joke for myself because I’ve always wanted to see a Harold Team named like a hardcore band from 1982. I wasn’t going to publish it, but it was minimized in my screen and when I went to show my student worker how to do a mail merge, this popped up when I clicked on MS Word. So as you read this list, please just imagine me trying to keep my cool and distract the student worker with words as I silently panic and try to minimize the word doc.

Paralyzed Sister

Elder Care Debacle

Shit Party

The Assholes

Homeless Corpses

Fuck the Cops

Tainted Semen

Kill the Cops

Severed Cocks

Rectum Dentata

The Assassination of Abraham Fucklin

Nipple Pile

The Omnipresent Specter of Death

Ed Gein Screaming

First Lady Tittyfuck

I guess you could call me Mitch Fundge because that’s my name. But in my time, I’ve been known by many a moniker. The Unknown Stranger. Ol’ Whispertits. Some asshole. But most of all, I’ve been known as a crab mogul. The Crab Mogul. King of all crab commerce in New England and the adjoining territories. No one buys or sells crab meat in these parts without my explicit say-so. I don’t care if you’re an old washerwoman selling crab rangoon to make ends meet or a sea captain betting his paycheck against a pile of South Texas Seafood Latkes in a game of craps. If I don’t get a taste of that sweet crab meat money, chances are you’ll find yourself punched in the spine at least twice.

 Now a lot of people think crabs have one use and one use only: food. But I’ll tell you what, I treat the crab like the Native American treats the buffalo – like a 7-11. I also treat analogies like I treat my wife: I cheat on them. Sorry, Darlene. I wish I was a better human, but these crab mogul ways have infected every centimeter of my being. Those crab mogul ways even use the metric system, to my chagrin. I never used to measure distance in meters or fractions thereof. Not even when I was on the lam in Europe as a youth. Goshdarnit, I love miles! I don’t care if they’re Frequent Flier miles or Miles Silverberg, the show producer on Murphy Brown played by Grant Shaud. I love ‘em! Love miles, cheat on my wife, and use crabs like a 7-11. That’s my life!

I should add, when I say treat a crab like a 7-11, I mean exactly like a 7-11. All mammals secrete Slurpee syrup, and all crustaceans secrete a Slurpee-like syrup. All animals have an overpriced canned-food section and pints of Ben and Jerry’s for $7. These things are located near the thalamus gland. And all animals have an organ known as the Pecunius, which functions as a low-paid cashier/clerk for the body’s systems. They even have an antibody gun that they use to threaten pathogens and shoplifters.

It’s true! I learned it all at Crab Mogul University. When I was at CMU, I took classes in embezzling, extortion, crab anatomy, crustacean cooking, beating people up, 7-11s, punching spines, contemporary pop culture and whipping people. Sometimes I even did interdisciplinary work. That’s how I took a class in whipping people with spines, and I graduated summa crab laude, which is how I got to be New England Crab Master (my official title). It’s also where I got the nickname Whispertits, as I fell asleep at a party once and woke up in a tub with breast implants. They were thin like a whisper, but ample enough that I had to go buy a bra until I could have them removed. But by that point (two hours later), I had grown so used to them, that I said, “Might as well get some more!” which is why I today look like a fleshy cluster of grapes.

I won’t deny that it’s lonely being a Mogul like I am. People only like you because of your melted butter vault or because you’re made of tits or maybe because once a year you dress up like Santa and throw live crabs at an assembled crowd during the annual Maine Christmas Parade. But at the end of the day, I hang up my hat made from crab meat, slump down in my throne and cry tears of lemon garlic butter. What price victory?

I think that I shall never see

A poem as lovely as a tree

Poems disgust me

They are unnatural

Afflictions in the eyes of God

They must be burned

Unlike trees

Whose beauty sings God’s song

But poems

I retch at the thought

An abomination to man and creature alike

What kind of beast

What foul demon

Created a poem?

I would rather die than read one

Those foul stanzas make me weak with sickness

I would see the would destroyed

All humanity perish

Before I saw a poem

But a tree

I can get down with that

Just don’t turn that tree into paper

And write verses on it

Or I will kill the world

Gary! Toluca! Get down here!

I leave to go to the hardware store for two minutes, and what did I come back to? Don’t stand there in silence chewing on your teeth. What is this? I’m asking you a question! Don’t just stare around the room with those big, saucer-like eyes like some kind of kitschy ‘70s art. Tell me, what is this? What did you do to my wig?

I mean it. You better talk. Stop standing there mute. I am a person! I deserve more from you than a silent scorn and a wig tossed haphazardly in the garbage.  How will I ever wear this again? You know my scalp gets frightfully cold. It’s like an arctic night up there. I get scalp icicles. I do!  Scalpcicles. Ayyyy, you wanna a scalpcicle with your-a pizza? Come on, that one was good. My Italian pizza store owner, Giuseppe. He married a pile of mozzarella. Come on, kids, you used to laugh at that all the time.

Now you just stare around sadly and destroy all my stuff. Stop ignoring me! Don’t talk in front of me like you’re ashamed. A cool 18^th century wig is all the rage these days. Fuck the 1990s. We’re doing the 1790s. You have a cool daddy. I’m your daddy. Why won’t you call me that anymore?

Sure, I hung myself after your mom left me. And yeah, I’m dead and a spirit that you can only briefly see out of the periphery of your eyes, but still, show your old man a little consideration. He’s cold and lonely.

Oh, no, leave my phone cord collection alone!

In April of this year, I began to run out of Unemployment Insurance after being on it on-and-off for over a year. Being in a desperate situation isn’t great for a lot of reasons, but, like going to the supermarket while hungry or making any relationship decisions pre-orgasm, you make a lot of terrible, soul-devouring choices when your back is up against the wall.

The company that offered me a job is a retainer-based executive search firm. What that means is that a company like, say, American Express will need a new CFO or some other C-level role, and they will outsource that function to a search firm. Partly because it seems easier to give the work to someone else, mostly so that there is plausible deniability. Major corporations want white, straight, attractive men for the most part, and if not, then good-looking, white women. But there are laws on the books that say you can’t just hire those kind of people. You need to also hire The Filth of the Universe (AKA any non-white, non-straight, non-attractive person). But apparently there are no laws about regulating how search firms do their business, so say you want to discriminate, but you want to do it within the law, you hire a search firm.

Seeing as how the major function of one of these places is to act as a racist (and every other kind of –ist there is) filter, you might now ask yourself, who would be the CEO of a place like this? Well, obviously someone who had no problem or saw nothing wrong in this being her raison d’être, i.e., a feces-smeared beast with an anus for a soul. When I first interviewed, the one VP confidentially took me aside and warned me that she was an awful human being and that something was mentally wrong with her.

Whatever is wrong with the CEO, it is most likely epidemic in business. Working here I now know why the financial crisis happened – modern business is populated with pathological liars; greedy sub-people who take pleasure in making money for the sake of accumulating wealth; Thing-like Humans who cannot understand emotions but can amazingly parrot them; and short-sighted Person Shadows who have no knowledge about life outside of the gated community and are not intellectually curious enough to want to know.

When I describe the CEO for people, many have said, “She sounds like a psychopath.” A real psychopath, like how the DSM explains it. Whatever she is, she’s both grossly, morally and personally offensive and also highly pitiable all at the same time. I have extremely mixed feelings about her existence. The world would most likely be better if she had never existed, but at the same time, she probably has been dealt a terrible hand in life that made her such a reprehensible organism who oozes fury and frustration. Her basic psychology is that she’s childlike. She doesn’t understand the world and because it doesn’t conform to what she thinks it should be, she’s constantly frustrated.

Throughout the last eight months or so, I tweeted the most egregious things I saw/heard while working there (all without any details as I had signed a confidentiality agreement). I provide all those tweets here with some notes where appropriate. Most, with the above information in mind, need no further explication.

“Call him to make sure he’s not a kike.” #awfultempjob

8 Apr

“They thought the candidates were too Jewy.” #awfultempjob

11 Apr

“The client doesn’t want a fag.” -the CEO of the company I am at. #awfultempjob

18 Apr

“Call that one guy and then call that Indian.” #awfultempjob

22 Apr

Instead of (at least fake) concern, my cold is greeted by anger from one of the other admin assistants. #awfultempjob

26 Apr

Secretary and CEO had a screaming match. Secretary screeches a “fuck you” and storms out. #awfultempjob

11 May

CEO thinks the word “fiefdom” is actually “thief dome”. #shittytempjob

17 May

At first, I thought I was only going to be in this job for a month or two, and something better would come along. This did not happen. Over the course of my time there, I was in touch with five to eight temp agencies and sent out over 230 cover letters/resumes. Welcome to the New New Economy! About a month in, when I realized I was going to be here for a long time #awfultempjob morphed into #shittytempjob.

Have you ever leveraged your Six Sigma training to drive buy-in across channels of a highly-matrixed organization? #shittytempjob

18 May

My boss asked her assistant how to spell “tomorrow”. #shittytempjob

7 Jun

“It’s going to hit her like a dead balloon.” -the CEO #shittytempjob

13 Jun

“She couldn’t develop a fucking dead dog if it bit her in the ass.” -the CEO #shittytempjob

13 Jun

CEO: “Is that how you spell ‘lose’: l-o-s-e?” Me: [mouth agape] #shittytempjob

14 Jun

CEO yells at recruiter for not having candidate meet her, then yells again for wasting her time when she hates the candidate. #shittytempjob

24 Jun

CEO is on vacation but calls every 20 minutes to berate the one admin. #shittytempjob

1 Jul

As is said, the fish rots from the head down, so the office took on the characteristics of the CEO. People were constantly undermining each other, and as I learned in my last few weeks, the one VP had been consistently blaming me whenever he made a mistake. The other admin, who, as you can see above, the CEO treated like a mix of garbage and feces, would habitually lie to the CEO about me to make herself look good. To save my job once, I actually had to go back into some old documents, find the last person that edited them and take screencaps to prove that it wasn’t me. These are all adults that I worked with, all well over 50-years-old.

CEO yelling at her admin, demanding to know the spelling of “wants.” #shittytempjob

14 Jul

Instead of asking me what I am working on, the CEO will question her assistant, “What is he doing?” while I am right there. #shittytempjob

20 Jul

CEO’s grandson is at the office. Have to treat him like the omnipotent boy in that Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life” #shittytempjob

22 Jul

CEO screams, “Go make these corrections!” I turn to leave. CEO yells again, “Where are you going?” #shittytempjob

25 Jul

CEO will even lie to clients/candidates about the temperature in New York when on the phone. #shittytempjob

26 Jul

CEO giving me directions: hands me some papers and says, “This needs to be done like this,” without explaining either ‘this’. #shittytempjob

28 Jul

CEO loses papers within five minutes of me giving them to her and then yells at me because they are missing. #shittytempjob

5 Aug

If CEO believes X is true, then X is true, even if the facts/reality say(s) that X is false. #shittytempjob

8 Aug

In same breath, CEO yells that we waste too much paper & then makes a new rule that we must print out every database change #shittytempjob

8 Aug

People here are so passive-aggressive, I can’t even be asked directly to do a task. Instead: “Do you think X should happen?” #shittytempjob

8 Aug

Can understand the fake debt crisis a little better as every crisis at work is self-manufactured by the CEO. #shittytempjob

8 Aug

CEO screaming at recruiter, calling her a “fucking moron”, knowing full well A/C maintenance guys are working in the office. #shittytempjob

10 Aug

Any single mistake you make is treated as a chronic problem and requires a detailed reprimand. #shittytempjob

10 Aug

Multi-millionaire CEO who weekends in the Hamptons cut Post-Its from the budget “because of the recession”. #shittytempjob

12 Aug

CEO has short memory. Screams at VP to set up an interview and then 10 min later asks him why she has an interview scheduled. #shittytempjob

18 Aug

Writing a status report whose format changes every time the CEO looks at it & I get yelled at for not knowing the new format. #shittytempjob

19 Aug

This was probably the most frustrating/angering aspect of the job. The CEO is a creature of whims, and as has been shown, constantly follows those whims and expects everyone to as well without communicating her new whims to them. She’s like a goldfish with a five-second memory. Because she’s unable to communicate her wants in a normal way and also dictates the agenda for everyone, it causes constant chaos, especially when she’s under pressure.

CEO will scream at a VP & then 5 min later, have a long one-sided conversation where she gossips about colleagues’ sex lives. #shittytempjob

19 Aug

Status and power are everything to the CEO, so she would often have long conversations with clients and friends and the VPs where she would just gossip about people they knew, especially about topics dealing with money.

CEO thinks a candidate is low-class for using the word “kickass” & in the same breath calls a VP a “fucking retard”. #shittytempjob

19 Aug

CEO (screaming): I told you, you have to show this stuff to me when it comes in! Admin: I did CEO: I wasn’t paying attention! #shittytempjob

23 Aug

CEO threatened to fire me for not following a rule she made up a moment before yelling at me. #shittytempjob

26 Aug

CEO yelling at me: “He is not working! Do you understand? W-O-R-I-N-G!” #shittytempjob

29 Aug

Asking the CEO to clarify a single word she wrote sets her off. She throws a tantrum, ripping pages out of a resume. #shittytempjob

30 Aug

Just heard from the CEO’s office that someone was “too Jewy” for a certain position! #shittytempjob

16 Sep

Got reprimanded for taking lunch today. #shittytempjob

16 Sep

CEO commented to a British candidate about how nice his teeth were because “usually British people have terrible teeth.” #shittytempjob

22 Sep

Was reprimanded first thing today for being on time and for not being 5-10 minutes early. #shittytempjob

20 Oct

Woman came in to interview & CEO refused to meet with her because she was overweight even though she is perfect for the job. #shittytempjob

20 Oct

Updating a man’s 2005 resume. New version has removed all mention of his involvement in the sub-prime loan market. #shittytempjob

20 Oct

“The chances of that happening are a fucking snowball falling from Africa to…New York” The CEO AKA the Yogi Berra of business #shittytempjob

21 Oct

Used the phrase “sword of Damocles” which angered the CEO causing her to scream at me for using “those stupid words.” #shittytempjob #helpme

28 Oct

CEO asks what I’m doing. “I’m in the middle of doing X.” We talk for another minute & she asks, “Is X done yet?” #shittytempjob #Iwanttocry

28 Oct

CEO brokered a $1+ Million deal but was not satisfied because one of the people in the deal didn’t call her when it was final #shittytempjob

2 Nov

After being at work for 3 min., CEO wanted to know the status of a project I said I’d start Monday #comicallyawfultempjobthatisunending

14 Nov

“Have we sent out an e-mail to that Indian?” -CEO #amusinglyawfultempjob now back to #shittytempjob

14 Nov

“I’m so fucking angry today I can’t breathe. Get that fucking bitch on the phone.” *throws a pen* -CEO’s tantrum today #shittytempjob

15 Nov

One last parting shot, CEO referring to a candidate: “He can fuck off, that little asshole.” #shittytempjob

1 Dec  

Last week here. Got reprimanded just now for using a small notepad instead of a legal-sized one. #shittytempjob

6 Dec

Temp Job Parting Shots: a client rejected a candidate because he had “bug eyes”. #shittytempjob 

6 Dec 

My new job is at a place with friendly, nice, collaborative people that are all working to help each other succeed. I could not be happier. I feel that’s a tad maudlin (because I have difficulty accessing my emotions and the slightest bit of earnestness embarrasses me), but the last eight months have been filled with such a constant barrage of electric negativity that I think I deserve a little sappiness.

Excerpts from Ayn Rand’s forthcoming book of remembrances, written before her death in 1982 with strict instructions to be released thirty years after she has passed.

One time I found a dog lying in the road. A beautiful dog some might say. A chocolate lab with shimmering fur. Soulful eyes that betrayed a deeper intelligence, something beyond mere animal. A spiritual awareness of existence, perhaps. A car had hit him and driven off without stopping. Now, I could have helped that dog, but instead, I waited hours while he whimpered in sad pain and eventually died. Then I sold the carcass to a homeless man for a dime and used the proceeds to buy a Hershey’s Candy Bar. Is there anything more perfect than the machine of capitalism that transforms a fool pet into delicious chocolate? I think not – the candy had almonds!

When I lived in Crimea, there was once a mining disaster. Crimea’s greatest export is coal, and the landscape is dotted with doorways to hidden realms beneath, entrances to worlds of soot and rock. To think, this ground garbage can be transformed into pure, unadulterated joyousness: coins and multi-colored paper. That is the world we have created!

On the day of the mining disaster, I was but a girl, but I remember the older woman whose uterus I emerged from dragging me to the mine because that is where her male marriage partner had been working to provide us with those gorgeous coins. Water emerged from the woman’s eyes as the man’s body was pulled from the mine. He had been torn in two as one of the tunnel supports collapsed, and bits of viscera squelched about on the ground, some small pieces floating up into the wind like dandelion seeds. As the woman screamed, I noticed an American dollar just lying near a rock. I quickly grabbed it and knew this was a momentous day. An entire dollar!

In 1963, I had a front row seat in Dallas for the president’s assassination, which was traumatic and horrifying to say the least. I was disgusted, and never have I been so morally offended as I was that day, the day when Lee Harvey Oswalt’s bullet pierced Kennedy’s skull with the velocity of thought. An hour later, after they had caught him, it was announced that this assassin acted of his own accord. Repugnant. Can you believe that Oswalt did this for free because of some ideological schism? He performed an act without receiving any money in exchange. I will repeat that because to hear it once is unbelievable on its face: he performed an act without receiving any money in exchange. What a repulsive, disgusting, putrid action. To see someone murdered right in front of me was amazing, but to find out the life was taken pro bono has chilled me to this day.

I was setting the typeface for the latest edition of The Objectivist Newsletter when Alan came to my door distressed and hopeful. “I did it Ayn,” he said, his voice quivering with a mix of regret and elation, “I left my wife. We can be together. I don’t have to sneak around any more.”

“Ok.”

“I don’t care that she was just diagnosed with MS. I don’t care that my daughter will grow up never knowing her father. I just want to be with you, my love.”

“Uh-huh,” I said absentmindedly, as I continued to set the type for my latest brilliant article. “Hand me that letter ‘a’ from over there.”

As he handed me the letter, I thought it best to be blunt. “I don’t want a relationship with you, Alan. I love that your last name has the word ‘green’ in it, don’t get me wrong, but you are nothing compared with myself. I let you enter me on occasion, but to defile my temple with the inferior jizz of a droopy-faced beast on a regular basis would be like vomiting repeatedly on a pile of money.”

He burst into tears. “Oh shut up, would you?” I asked. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ll let you strap on this roll of silver dollars and fuck me.”

Alan sadly acquiesced, and though his fuck-power was only half-heartedly employed, the stock tickertape I inserted into my anus helped bring me to a screaming orgasm.

One day, upon waking up, I found a note outside my apartment door that read, “Mr. Steward will call upon you at 5:00 pm”. As I get many visitors who leave formal notes announcing their arrivals, I thought nothing of this. At 5pm, Mr. Steward showed up, dressed in a finely-tailored suit and a black fedora. Half his face had been scarred by an accident. “Ms. Rand, I give to you this box. Inside is a button. If you press this button I will give you a million dollars, but someone in the world you do not know will die. I will give you 24 hours to thin-” As he spoke, I ripped open the box and pressed the button. “Do I get two million if I press it again?” I asked as I continually pushed the button. “What’s the limit?”

“Stop it!” he bellowed and grabbed the box from my hand. “What’s wrong with you?” Mr. Steward stomped out of the house. He threw a suitcase down in the hallway as he stormed away. “Here’s your money, you trashwoman,” he yelled as he impatiently hit the elevator button repeatedly. “I hope you choke on it.”

In a moment reminiscent of Winston Churchill, I replied, “My good sir, the only thing I would choke on is what passes for your wife’s cooking.”

“Fuck you.” And with that, he was gone. I spent the money trying to build more of those wonderful button-boxes that convert sad, little lives into glorious reams of cash. Sadly, I was never able to perfect the machine, but luckily, a man employed in one of my factories died in an accident, and the life insurance I took out on him paid off.

Postscript: This is the day John Paul I died. You’re welcome!

Ayn Rand’s memoirs Seinlanguage will be released in March 2012 on HarperCollins.

Between work, searching for a new job, improv, sketch, storytelling, and having a life, I haven’t had much time this month to write specifically for this. The following sketch is taken from an improv class I had a few weeks ago, and it’s pretty illustrative of why I’m not a huge fan of basing a sketch solely on a game of the scene, rather than a character game or relationship game between characters. It’s an experiment though, and the specifics are funny, but I think performing this would be kind of empty, though as an improv scene, it was fun and people enjoyed it.

Read More

I’m egregiously behind about ten sketches with this, but those are the breaks when you work a shitty temp job and spend 2 or more hours a day looking for a new job. Some stuff has to be shunted to the edges. I’ll see what I can do in the last 12 days though because I have enough premises that I want to work on.

Rex Delegate is a reprise of the earlier Franklin Skunk sketch, re-written with a new premise. We performed Franklin Skunk once and then FS revision 1 once, and we’ve not been too pleased either with the results (some decent laughs, but nothing uproarious) or with our performances because, well, in its older form, it wasn’t that fun to perform.

Wrestling Team just got back from The Boston Improv Festival, where we performed our musical Rockefeller Centaur, which is totally weird and crazy, but at its core, it had a relatable premise about hating your shitty job. The new show we’re writing needs that relatable core. Mark and I interviewed Henry from Murderfist for our podcast this week as well, and talking to him reinforced our love of creating insane characters that spring out of a believable premise. Lately, we’ve been writing a lot of gamey sketches because we realized we needed a spine for the things we write, but we perhaps went too far in the direction of structure and wrung all the fun out of the sketches.

Rex Delegate is an attempt to arrest this. The relatable core is a newspaper editor that thinks sex sells, and then tries to insert sex into every part of the newspaper process. There are some similar beats to the Franklin Skunk sketch, but not a lot, so I felt ok saying this was a completely new sketch.

I think this counts as day six, since I wrote it on the train yesterday. Mark and I were writing a sketch where there’s a guy with very obvious Nazi insignia but who isn’t a Nazi. One of the original things he had was an oversized oven that he said was “hot enough to burn bones”. I thought that was a funny selling point, and it made me start to think of some shitty industrialist after the war trying to sell off the surplus of Nazi items.

Read More

Mark and I have been working on a new show called Grumpkin Hollow. The overarching idea is that the Mayor of a small town called Grumpkin Hollow has decided to commit suicide at the town hall meeting, and each scene after the initial one involves the town gossiping about it and reacting to the news.

Franklin Skunk is a character I performed live once. He wrote the original draft of X-Men: First Class, but really turned in slashfic and was fired immediately. Pretty much everything he writes is slashfic, including a story where Wanda Sykes’ character from Curb Your Enthusiasm hooks up with Wanda Sykes’ character from Pootie Tang.

In this sketch, reporter Lonnie Grelp comes to Franklin, the editor of The New Grumpkin Gazette, with the story about the Mayor, and Franklin turns it into erotic fiction. It moves on from there into a kind of insane ending.

Mark and I performed the first draft of this a week ago, and it went really well for the first minute or so, and then the laughter kind of evened out. Looking at the sketch, we realized that everything Franklin does is the same, and nothing is heightened as the sketch progresses, so in the new draft, we rectify that by giving a clear progression to Franklin’s game. We also grounded it more in the real life world of the newsroom, so the characters can interact with their surroundings. One final thing is that Lonnie was always adversarial to Franklin, so we never ever got past him protesting. In the new draft, he is initially repulsed, but eventually goes along with Franklin in the hopes that he can at least get some facts into the article.

I’m not going to post the sketch because it’s actively part of what we’re currently performing, but if anyone’s curious, we’ll be performing it on the 14th at Sketch Block at Under St. Mark’s at 9pm.