The Blog they’re Talking about at the Water Cooler

First blog post:

We need to make books fun again! Fun’s the currency now. Phones, nice cars, servants, and owning Pacific Islands are fun. Very fun. I live it every day as an author. It’s why I tell people not to do it. I want more islands.

Amidst managing various my estates once owned by well-to-do families (won’t name names, besides those Vanderbilts. Bad for the neighborhood. One owes me twenty bucks) I also write books. The books are entertaining, I’d like to think. I have a good one coming up. It’s about a young boy who finds himself growing up in a wheatfield, surrounded by crops with big city dreams - who swallowed tobacco once when his fourteen-year-old friends called it chew – who just won’t stop until he reaches a relatively populated area.
Nah. It’s about a mafia hitman and his insane quest to save America. And a teenage girl who says fuck a lot.


But yes, fun is what makes the world go round’ these days. We all chase fun. Nice cars are fun. Buying things is fun. The extremes and casual, or relaxing enjoyments life has to offer are fun. And above all, what is the dream of a nice house, a family with the1950’s average of 2.5 kids, white picket fences, thirty year mortgage with a wife who also works twelve-hour days, other than fun?

It’s called the American Dream! It is the grandest thing since gilded pillows. You see, America was founded by crazy people. I shall explain.

Anyone who was willing to cross the Atlantic ocean in the 1600’s was a total nut. It was a three-to-four-month trip on a wooden ship where you were likely to die of cholera, and only the most desperate or psycho made the trip. Some of them, we know as the Pilgrims!

The pilgrims? They were the people the English didn’t want. Because The Pilgrims were a little too much for a hyper-religious society emerging from the Middle Ages. And you know what the Middle Ages were like? If you need a reminder, the Middle Ages were something of a parallel to our 1960’s. Everybody was about peace, love, what you did at Woodstock when Hendrix took acid, and how the Military Industrial Complex is bad, man.

Besides that, a continental warrior aristocracy arose as a questionably natural result of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Or, you could just say, there existed a substantial force to countermand the wild hippies of the 1060’s.


Imagine this. It’s the 1600’s now. You’re wearing wool pants, a wool shirt or dress, and it’s never not kinda itchy. Your opportunities in life range from everything to growing up to be a baker, to growing up to become a baker. Or if you’re a woman, you dream of the boy across town who traps the ferrets too enthusiastically, because his dad is a minor lord!



Further context, England, 1600s:
They still burned witches for fun.

Coincidentally, the witch burning rate slowed down a bit when all the Americans left to become Americans.


So, no one ever came to America without problems, or else you wouldn’t have had a reason to come here. Few people came here because they had a true opportunity. My Great Grandfather from Greece, in the 1910’s, sailed on a boat by himself at eleven years old from Greece. No shit. No happy eleven-year-old leaves his country so he can get rocks thrown at him after he crosses the world’s second largest Ocean, and enjoys it.

It was the 1910’s. A long forgotten time, when ten people called an overcrowded apartment a tenement, while today it is known as a studio.

He hopped off the boat, smiled, was glad to get off that damn boat five-six months later, and it was like Fiefell goes West! Everything was grand! And maybe he never saw that ethnic mining massacre!

If you did the math right there, I’m twenty-three.

Point is, everyone that came here wanted to believe, or believe in a story. And the funny thing about stories is they’re made up. They’re a fiction. When one is real, when people retell it, it takes on a life of its own. Suddenly John cheated on Mary, Mary cheated on John, John bought a car for a stripper, and now… in reality, Mary just went to marriage counseling and chose to be unhappy until John dies so she may collect on the lucrative policy.

You know what most of our ancestors generally thought of when they imagined a land across the ocean that was marketed as free except for Indians? Something like this:

“It’s a magic new world! Everything is better in some way. Lots of land that is not yet only strip malls! With beautiful oceans to off shore drill, plenty of timber too! Life will be better.”

This was the land of opportunity! A new place to burn witches! Maybe there were more witches hiding over there! “Come, come, to America Bradley! The witches!” Said an Englishman circa 1609, ‘Oxford’s Examination of Things”, William S Marlboro, Duke of the West.

Then over the next four hundred years all those degenerates, our ancestors, my fellow subscribers, used up all the opportunity in the land. They drank the whole damn milk shake. Seriously, only a dick drinks the whole thing if you’re splitting it.

So, now we must search for our opportunities. And that is not fun. So, we instead make our own fun. Opportunities to chase fun, because the people before broke the other stuff. Money is the most direct and theoretically accessible way to achieve our fun. Therefore, if it isn’t worth shiny gold, it’s still worth something. Because other people agree it does.

It’s at least worth enough to go get everyone else’s money until you can buy yourself a monocle, laugh heinously and pretend, you’re Monopoly Man cackling before his servants.
The older generations drank the whole goddamn milk shake and didn’t pay the tab. So, we as the future, my fellow twenty-three years old’s, must go out and shape a new future. Because we might still be alive by 2050.

We.

My 2028 Presidential Campaign Slogan is “Make a Great Milkshake Again.”

Now that I’ve established that my country is founded by the ancestors of crazy people, the deranged, and those who even thought a women in medieval attire was a slut, we can proceed onto the next, and most important point.

America has always been nuts. Because its people have always been nuts. But if there’s something I know about nuts, it’s that they ought to band together! And almonds cost too much.

So, this is a call for unification.

To buy my book.

It’s called When in Rome, by Ian James, available on Amazon!

Sincerely, ending every week with a nickname I never had,

The Edge