Read Online Assholes Finish First by Tucker Max, Maddox - Free Book Online Page B

Max, PWJ, GoldenBoy, El Bingeroso, Credit, Jojo, SlingBlade
    Subject: Depression
    Ah yes, I would like to welcome all of you to the world of depression. I know it well.
    I would be happy to conduct a seminar on how to cope with depression for those of you newcomers to the scene. The price of admission will be one case of domestic beer. In the biz, we call this “medication.”
    Also outlined in the course will be proper masturbation techniques, clinically known as “a reason to get up in the morning.” And finally we will teach basic rugby techniques, also “legalized assault.”
    As for getting out of your dead-end jobs, I have no tips, as I cannot even get into one.
    That was bad, but it was this email from SlingBlade that made me book the early ticket:
    From: SlingBlade
    To: Tucker Max, PWJ, GoldenBoy, El Bingeroso, Credit, Jojo, Hate
    Subject: re: Depression
    These are actual quotes from a conversation Hate and I had last night concerning the state of our lives. You can judge for yourself how we are doing (bonus points for matching the quotes to the person):
    “The problem is I have no beacon, nothing to look forward to. Or even any hope that anything good will happen to me… ever.”
    “One of us needs to get laid.”
    “Just one of us?”
    “What are the odds of both of us getting laid?”
    “The problem with this interview is that I have to get them to like me, and at this point, I don’t even like me. They’ll ask,‘What do you have to offer us?’ The answer, of course, will be I have nothing to offer you or anyone else.”
    “I’ve decided to compile a list of reasons why I shouldn’t kill myself. As you can see, the paper is blank.”
    “I could never kill myself. What if it doesn’t work? Then I’ll have failed at the only thing that could save me from my failures. Where do you go from there?”
    Oh yes—did I mention that Hate and I tried out for
The Weakest Link
last week? We were rejected. Apparently, when pitted against unemployed steelworkers in a competition of intelligence, we come up lacking.
    I pulled up to their place about 4pm on Friday. Describing the awfulness of what I found will be a struggle, but let me try:
    The apartment was in one of those shitty, beat-up complexes that was probably cool when it was built in the late ’60s but now looked like it was one drive-by shooting away from converting to Section 8. The piles of animal shit everywhere were a nice touch, but what really seemed to tie everything together for me was their apartment screen door hanging by a single hinge. With a little more artful disrepair, it could easily be used for a movie set in a postapocalyptic world. I half expected to see packs of stray dogs fighting over decomposing carcasses and feral children scurrying into sewers.
    Inside, I was momentarily impressed, because it looked like SlingBlade and Hate had painted their apartment in really cool shades and designs. Then I realized those shades and designs were not interior design—they were huge water stains in the cheap drywall.
    SlingBlade and Hate were in front of the TV, sitting in those fabric camping chairs you can buy for $15 at Walmart, playing Tetris against eachother. There was no other furniture in the apartment. Unless you count SlingBlade’s action figures on all the ledges as furniture.
    As he got further and further behind in the game, Hate was becoming more and more enraged, and of course SlingBlade was talking shit to him about it: “Hate, your spatial-reasoning skills are inferior to mine” and “Do the pointless spinning geometries of Tetris remind you of anything?”
    As Hate’s bricks stacked perilously close to the top of the screen, SlingBlade got the four-block single piece and cleared his screen. This was the final straw; Hate could no longer stomach failing in both the real world he lived in and this virtual world he was trying to escape into. He threw his controller at the TV and left for rugby practice.
    SlingBlade