Southwest Arizona Rotten-Luck Tantra Totem

Southwest Arizona Rotten-Luck Tantra Totem

Do not keep this message. The tantra totem must leave your hands within 96 hours if you are to receive an unpleasant surprise. (This is true, even if you are not superstitious, and especially so if you are stupid and gullible.)

INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HARD-LUCK LIFE

1. Give people exactly what they ask for, no more than that and even if you know they meant something else entirely.
   
2. Memorize people's credit card numbers.
   
3. When Trump says, "You're fired," reply, "No, YOU are," and flick the match into his comb-over.
   
4. Believe everything you hear, spend all your cash, and sleep in until 11 a.m.
   
5. When you say, "I love you," make sure you have an ulterior motive.
   
6. When you say, "I'm sorry," do something rotten first so that they know you're not just goofing around.
   
7. Be engaged to be married for at least six months if you plan to leave them at the altar.
   
8. Believe in lust at first sight.
   
9. Never laugh at anyone's dreams. Belittle them as seriously as possible.
   
10. Love deeply and passionately, until someone better comes along. (Yes, it will hurt, but your pain will quickly fade.)
    
11. In disagreements, fight to win. Name-calling works when logic won't.
    
12. Judge people by their mothers, then by how they dot their I's.
    
13. Talk faster than people can think, you might be able to sneak something by.
    
14. When someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, smile and say, "Doesn't the world have problems enough without us wasting time on this trivial issue?"
    
15. Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk, and resolve to find some easier way to do it.
    
16. Call your mother names.
    
17. Remember the three R's: Rage, Rum, and Remembering to Skip #17. (The fourth R, "redrum," is copyrighted, and we don't want to go through that again, do we?)
    
18. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship. Make sure it's completely dead so that it won't come back to haunt you.
    
19. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to blame someone else.
    
20. Smile when picking up the phone. The telemarketer will find you so enjoyable he will get all his friends to call as well.
    
21. Marry someone you love to talk to. As you get older, you'll want a doormat to dump all your problems on.
    
22. Spend some time alone, especially when you're the only intern on call.
    
23. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of their hair.
    
24. Remember that silence is usually the easiest answer.
    
25. Read more books about TV.
    
26. Live a good, honorable life. When you get old and think back, you'll realize how much leeway you have before people will suspect anything.
    
27. Trust in God and race your Geo Tracker like hell on wheels.
    
28. In disagreements with loved ones, deal thoroughly with the current situation so that they're completely frazzled by the time you dredge up the past.
    
29. Read between the lines, even the ones that were never written.
    
30. Share your knowledge so that everyone knows how smart you are.
    
31. Be gentle with the earth. It's the best way to avoid yard work
    
32. Pray. People will vote for you.
    
33. Never interrupt when you are being flattered. You deserve the praise.
    
34. Mind your own business, and never forget that the whole world is your business.
    
35. Don't trust people who doesn't close their eyes when you kiss. (After all, you're the only one who should be looking around while frenching.)
    
36. Once a year, go home to pick up some more clean laundry.
    
37. If you make a lot of money, use it to help others while you're still alive, or you will never reap any of the rewards yourself.
    
38. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a stroke of bad luck.
    
39. Learn the rules -- then lord it over others who break them and suffer the consequences.
    
40. Remember that the best relationship is one where your love for each other is greater than your need for each other - unless you're referring to your partner.
    
41. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it; the more you abandoned, the better the prize!
    
42. Remember that your character is your destiny, but don't expect that to make any practical sense.
    
43. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon, just like Jeffrey Dahmer did.
    

Now, here's the FUN part!

Send this to at least five people and your life will become more interesting

0-4 people: Your life will gain more attention.
5-9 people: Your life will gain a helluvalot of attention.
9-14 people: You will have at least five surprises in the next three weeks, probably consisting of mail bombs, poisoned chocolates, and drive-by shootings. (Don't fret, you've earned it!)
15 and above: Everyone figures that someone else will take care of you, so you will be completely ignored.

Your first stroke of bad luck occurred when you received this tantra totem. We promise that you will receive even more bad luck within four days of relaying it.

P.S. Do not shoot the messenger. We have already been shot by enough bad luck.

A copy of the original inspirational e-mail that we are parodying may be found at http://web.utk.edu/~dap/NepGLTT.html. We are not responsible for feelings of warm fuzziness, hyperglycemia, or ice cream headaches that result from reading the original.

Do it today!

Let me tell you about my brother Jocko. When he was a boy, Jocko had great difficulty in school. He was classified as educationally defunct, a condition that required both patience and medication (not for him, but for his parents, teachers, and especially his loving older brother).

But Jocko was a happy kid with a soft-shoe dance step that lit up the room, particularly when he would dance right into the wall partway through and knock a dozen framed pictures and a shelf full of knick-knacks from Mexico onto his head. Our parents acknowledged his academic difficulties but always tried to take a positive, if stretched, spin on things. "That's great, Jocko!" Ma would say. "You spelled 'cat' with only one E this time. I'm so proud of you."

You'll notice that I'm referring to Jocko in the past tense. Unfortunately we lost Jocko during a sale at Wal-Mart shortly after he graduated from high school this last June. Thanks to Jocko's inimitable fashion sense, an overenthusiastic shopper (according to the forensic know-it-all's) mistook him for a set of irregular sheets that were on sale for fifty percent off, paid for him at the checkout lane and shoved him in the trunk of her car with tons of other low-cost, low-quality items and drove off.

I have held out hope all this time that he would wander out of the dressing room, a changed man, but it hasn't happened. Today the police notified me that they have pulled his lucky underpants from the river, the pair that he swore he would never take off as long as he lived, since it was the pair he was wearing when he met Katee Sackhoff at a science fiction convention.

I've had to accept the painful truth: Jocko is dead, and I'm out the fifty bucks he owed me.

One of the worst things for me is the tragic sense of loss. Jocko wasn't a particularly articulate fellow, but his life was one of unique achievement. A fantasy writer, he has left hundreds of tremendous story ideas unwritten and undeveloped; a humorist, he had a unique knack for building up a mailing list to thousands of people and then ceasing all humor-related writing for 18 months at a time. And while I graduated from high school right on schedule, at age 18, Jocko graduated in record time. (True, it was two months before he turned 35, so it wasn't a particularly good record, but that's not the point.) Jocko was a man among giants; given time, I have no doubt he would have been even less.

Worse, I am plagued with regrets of my own. If I had known that fateful moment by the linen department was the last time I would see him, I wouldn't have asked him if the Lederhosen made me look fat. I would have said, "Jocko, where on earth did you leave the TV remote?"

I also would have taken the time to count the many blessings he brought to his loved ones every time he left the room. I would have spent our Wal-Mart trip appreciating his cantankerous smile, his cacophonous laughter, his co-dependent affection for others, and the way he was so good at getting the Coke machine to dispense free product without the machine falling on top of him just like it shows in the little warning cartoon.

When you put all Jocko's good attributes on the scale and balance them with all his irritating traits such as the CD player that was always blaring out white Christian "rap," the amount of hair he had while I was completely bald, the dirty socks that crawled around under his bed and wandered the hallways late at night, the loud tuba music that would come from his room while I was trying to sleep because he had insomnia and decided to practice at 3 a.m., the times he used to lock me on the porch roof in my underwear when we were children, or even the time he let a stupid bird loose in the car while I was driving and I ended up crashing through the neighbor's fence and into the in-ground swimming pool being used as a temporary aquarium for displaced sand sharks, or the times he would follow me around middle school like a little lost and slightly hearing-impaired puppy, or the time he thought it was really funny to run refrigerator magnets round and round my entire Stan Freberg cassette tape collection ... well, I think you can easily guess how it all measures out.

But now Jocko is gone, and with him has gone my opportunity to tell him how I've always felt to have him for a brother. I won't get another chance to tell the miserable so-and-so all I would have wanted him to hear, but if you have a younger brother, you still can do it. Tell your kid brothers what you would want them to hear if you knew it would be your last conversation!

The last time I talked to Jocko was the day we went to Wal-Mart. He called me to say, "Hi, Smirkov! Look at these skis! I bet I can walk all the way to the pet section while wearing them," and then tripped right into the fish tanks. That memory gives me something to treasure forever.


If there is any purpose at all to Jocko's death, it'd be the first time anything that chowderhead ever did that had a reason. Maybe it's to make others appreciate more of life and to have people, especially families, take the time to let each other know how we feel about one another.

MORAL: When you're parked on a suspension bridge and dragging that body
out of the trunk, remember -- he's not heavy, he's your brother.

Pit of shame
Due to copyright laws, we are unable to share with you the original vignette that we are parodying here. However, you may see it posted illegally at: www.inspirationalstories.com/4/460.html

Heaven can wait

Matt Wegman pulled onto the interstate and felt the smooth acceleration of his sport utility vehicle. The roadside scenery fell behind as the road raced on, and Wegman felt completely at peace.

From time to time he would run into a pothole or run over a small family sedan on its way to the Jersey Shore, but with his SUV's massive frame and superior suspension system, he barely noticed the bump in the road even as the other motorists were dispatched in flowering red balls of fire beneath his wheels.

Forty miles and three-quarters of a tank of gas later, it suddenly occurred to Wegman that he was dead. He remembered dying; he recalled those last desperate weeks in Texas, gasping for fresh air that could not be found; and he remembered that he had traded in his SUV, affectionately called Bessie, years earlier for a Hummer. He began to wonder where the road was leading them.

He came upon a high, white stone wall along the right side of the road, just as the fuel light came on. The wall was made of the finest marble, and far up the hill he saw a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight.

When he drew close, he saw that the arch was set over a magnificent gate made of mother-of-pearl, and the street on the other side of the gate looked like it was made from the purest gold. He parked the SUV, let out a low whistle, and thought, "Man, I'd love to try the four-wheel drive on that!"

A man seated at a desk to one side of the gate, with the dirt-stained clothes and hefty frame of a laborer, looked up as Wegman stepped out of Bessie, and smiled. "Hi," he said. "Can I help you?"

Wegman tried not to react as the man reached out a grease-stained hand. He forced a smile and asked, "Excuse me, where are we?"

"This is -- hell!" The man screamed, and grabbed his wrist as a wasp stung him on the back of his right hand. From beyond the gate came the sounds of happy laughter, mixed with birdsong and carried aloft on a sweet-smelling breeze with the merest suggestion of wildflowers in full bloom. Softly from the background came the gentle susurrations of a river whose mere thought filled the receptive heart with new life.

"Err," Wegman said, an eye on Bessie's fuel gauge. "Could I trouble you for some gas?"

"It's not a problem at all," the man at the desk said, sucking at the welt now growing on his hand. "Come inside, and I'll be happy to direct you to some of the best places to get some. We have a burrito stand just down the street, and a few blocks away there's a Chinese restaurant that's a great place to get lots of gas."

Everyone's a comedian, thought Wegman, as the man gestured and the gate swung open.

"Can old Bessie," said Wegman, climbing into his SUV, "come in too?"

"Oh dear," the man said. "I'm sorry, sir, but we don't allow those inside. Besides, this isn't the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Our roads are so smooth you won't even notice you're driving anywhere."

Wegman thought a moment, then turned back onto the road and continued on his way.

Just as it seemed Bessie was running on fumes and surely would conk out, Wegman came to a dirt road leading through a gate that looked as if it had never been closed. There was a soft, broken-down split-rail fence. As he approached the gate, he saw a man inside, leaning against an apple tree and strumming on an acoustic guitar. On the fields beyond the man, children raced back and forth, kicking soccer balls to the shouts and jeers of parents. Rows and rows of identical houses stretched out as far as the eye could see, under a shimmering brown haze that filled the air above.

"Excuse me!" Wegman called to the man. "Do you mind if I come in?"

The guitarist looked up. He had a tired face and brown eyes that seemed lined with care and worry. About him hung the aura of a man used to newspaper deadlines, a man deeply acquainted with role-playing games, and a man who while deeply gifted artistically had never been able to make it commercially as a rock musician.

"Yeah, sure, come on in," he said, and he turned back his attention to the chords for "Blowin' in the Wind," which Wegman had not ever heard in 6/8 time, minor key before.

"What about Bessie?" Wegman asked, patting his SUV on the side of the door.

"Yeah, bring her in," the guitarist said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at a nearby convenience store. "You can fill her up over at the pump."

Wegman grabbed a Coke and some Slim Jims from the convenience store, then walked to the pump to fill Bessie's tank. An LED display on the bump listed the price as $6.579 per liter. When he had paid, he drove toward the man who was sitting by the tree.

The gate and fence were nowhere to be seen; everywhere Wegman looked, the same soulless suburbia rolled on and on without interruption. There was no way to leave.

"What do you call this place?" Wegman asked.

"This is hell," the man answered. "My name's Lou, by the way."

Wegman shook the proffered hand enthusiastically. "Well, that's confusing," he said, pausing only to choke for five minutes on the ground-level ozone. "The man down the road said that was hell too."

"Oh, you mean the place with the clean air, hydrogen-powered cars, fresh water and happy animals frolicking beneath rows of trees?" said Lou. Overhead the sun squatted motionless over a landscape that never knew the peace of night. "Nope. That's heaven."

"Doesn't it make you mad for them to use your name like that?"

"No, we're just happy that they screen out the folks who would leave their best friends behind."

Moral: With gas prices so high, people who drive SUVs can just go to hell.

Pit of shame
See the original at http://flyservers.registerfly.com/members5/palsiowa.com/joke.html