Cover

Copyright © Ernest Cline 2013

No part of this book may be used or performed without written consent from the author, if living, except for critical articles or reviews.

Cline, Ernest.
1st edition.
ISBN: 978-1938912-30-6

Interior Layout by Lea C. Deschenes
Cover Illustration and Design by Gary Musgrave
Author Photo by Dan Winters
Interior Illustrations by Len Peralta, www.lenperalta.com
Proofread by Helen Novielli
Edited by Derrick Brown and Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
Type set in Bergamo from www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com

Printed in Tennessee, USA

Write Bloody Publishing
Austin, TX
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To contact the author, send an email to [email protected]

MADE IN THE USA

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

I started writing and performing poetry in the mid-90s when I moved to Austin, Texas. I had already tried my hand at both standup and improv comedy when I lived in Ohio, but drunk Midwestern comedy club patrons proved not to be the ideal audience for my geeky sense of humor.

Poetry slams – and especially the Austin Poetry Slam – turned out to be a far better fit. Every week I would show up at the late, great Electric Lounge to recite my nerdy three-minute monologues about working a tech support job or loving to play old Atari games. Five randomly selected judges in the audience would rate each poet’s writing and performance with scorecards, just like an Olympic event, and if the judges liked what they heard, you could win the evening’s grand prize of fifty bucks.

As it turns out, Austin was the perfect town for my writing. I won a lot of those weekly competitions and would go on to become the Austin Slam Champion three times. I also represented Austin several times at the National Poetry Slam, where I met a slew of other talented writers and performers, many of whom are still my friends today.

I stopped competing in poetry slams in 2001, but that same year I released a self-published chapbook of all my slam poems titled The Importance of Being Ernest. I ran off copies on the printer at my day job and stapled them together myself. I also self-produced a CD collection of my slam recordings titled Ultraman is Airwolf. Selling my homemade CDs and chapbooks at local shows and on my website made me feel like a one-man punk rock band, and it also helped me make my rent more than once. But most importantly, the response I got from putting my writing out into the world did wonders for my self-esteem, and it gave me the confidence to continue to pursue my dream of becoming a screenwriter and a novelist.

Around the same time, I began to post my work on the Internet, and that’s when crazy things started to happen. Several of my recordings went viral, eventually becoming bona fide memes. The text of “When I Was A Kid” has been posted and forwarded (alas, often without my name attached) around the Internet thousands of times. In fact, I just Googled the first line of that poem in quotes and it returned nearly one million hits! My suggestion about using Airwolf as an adjective is now an entry in the Urban Dictionary. And my most popular slam poem, “Dance Monkeys Dance,” has been translated into over thirty languages and adapted into a viral video with millions of views on YouTube.

The high point of my new Internet pseudo-fame came when geek icon Wil Wheaton discovered my slam recordings and posted a link to them on the popular website Fark, which helped me sell hundreds of books and CDs. A few years later, Cory Doctorow did the same thing when he posted a link to “Nerd Porn Auteur” on the immensely popular geek website Boing Boing. In fact, those are the reasons why I would later make Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton the President and VP of the future Internet in my novel Ready Player One. It was my way of saying thank you to both of them for sharing my stuff.

Although it has now been over a decade since these poems were first written and performed, I’m still proud of them. I think most of them still hold up pretty well, and serve as great time capsule for who I was —as a person and a writer—during that time in my life. If you dig reading them on the page, feel free to pop over to ernestcline.com, where you can download recordings of many of these pieces for free.

Thank you for reading, and for being so Airwolf.

MTFBWYA,

Ernie Cline
Austin, TX
July 2013

WHEN I WAS A KID

When I was a kid

adults used to bore me to tears

with their tedious diatribes about how hard things used to be

when they were growing up,

what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning,

uphill, both ways, through year-round blizzards,

carrying their younger siblings on their back

to their one-room schoolhouse

where they maintained a straight-A average,

despite their full-time after-school job

at the local textile mill

where they worked for .35 cents an hour

just to help keep their family from starving to death.

And I remember promising myself that, when I grew up,

there was no way in hell

I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids

about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it.

But now that I’ve reached the ripe old age of 28…

I can’t help but look around and notice

that the youth of today—

You’ve got it so fucking easy!

I mean, compared to my childhood,

you live in a goddamn Utopia!

And I hate to say it, but you kids today,

“You don’t know how good you’ve got it.”

I mean, when I was a kid…

We didn’t have the Internet.

If we wanted to know something,

we had to go to the goddamn library and look it up!

And there was no email!

You had to actually write someone a letter,

with a pen,

and then you had to walk all the way across the street

and put it in the mailbox.

And it would take, like, a week to get there.

And there were no MP3s or file sharing!

If you wanted to steal music

you had to go down to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day and tape it off of the radio,

and then the DJ would usually talk over the beginning

and fuck it all up!

You wanna hear about hardship?

You couldn’t just download porn.

You had to bribe some homeless dude

to buy you a copy of Hustler from the 7-11.

It was either that or jack off to the lingerie section

of the JC Penny catalog.

Those were your options!

And there was no call waiting! If you were on the phone

and someone else called—

they got a freakin’ busy signal!

And we didn’t have Caller ID either!

When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was!

It could be your boss, a collection agency, your mom,

your drug dealer—you didn’t know!

You had to just pick it up and take your chances, mister!

And we didn’t have any fancy Sony PlayStation video games

with high-resolution 3D graphics.

We had the Atari 2600

with games like Space Invaders and Asteroids.

and the graphics sucked ass!

Your guy was just a square!

You had to use your imagination!

And there were no multiple levels or screens.

It was just one screen, forever,

and you could never win.

The game just kept getting harder and faster until you died. Just like life!

Those video games built character, Sonny Jim!

And when you went to the movie theater—

there was no such thing as stadium seating!

All the seats were the same height.

If a tall guy sat in front of you, you were screwed!

And sure, we had cable, but we still only got, like, 20 channels!

And there was no on-screen menu!

You had to use a little book called the TV Guide to find out what was on!

And there was no Cartoon Network!

You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning!

Do you see what I am saying?!

We had to wait all week!

You spoiled little bastards!

See, that’s the problem with you kids today.

You’ve got it too damn easy!

You’re spoiled!

I swear to god, you wouldn’t last five minutes…

Back in 1987.

THE GEEK WANTS OUT

At first glance

I probably appear to be a somewhat ordinary,

somewhat average looking fellow.

Calm, harmless, at ease.

But this is by design.

You see, it is through decades of research and rigorous training

that I have crafted this façade of normalcy.

And now, through intense concentration,

I am able to function in a social setting.

I can speak at length with educated people about

pertinent matters of public importance,

such as literature,

or the current political climate in Europe.

I am capable of conversing with you

without ever revealing that just underneath the surface

of this manufactured veneer

there hides an altogether different person.

A monster, some might say.

My alter-ego.

He is the opposite of the image I project.

He is the antithesis of Cool.

He is the last person you want to get

trapped in a conversation with.

He is The Geek.

The obsessive science fiction movie watching,

comic book collecting,

Monty Python dialogue memorizing,

Dungeons and Dragons playing GEEK

that I struggle daily to keep hidden from the world.

But The Geek Wants Out.

He want to talk to you.

He wants to give you his doctoral dissertation on why

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

is the greatest fucking film of all time!

He wants to bitch slap you because

you’ve never seen Big Trouble in Little China.

What? Have you been living in a fucking cave?!

He wants to kick your ass in Star Wars Trivial Pursuit.

And he will.

Because he’s a fucking Geek.

And he wants his toys.

He wants the complete set

in mint condition,

still in the box.

He wants every item on the planet

that is even remotely related to Ultraman.

Because Ultraman is Airwolf!

He could give a squirt of piss

about sports or politics or rhetoric.

Such things are of no consequence to him.

What matters is the release date of the

next Lord of the Rings movie!

You see, The Geek can’t wait.

The Geek has no patience.

He wants what he wants when he wants it.

And all he wants is stupid shit!

He wants his own TARDIS.

He wants his own light saber.

He wants to buy a DeLorean.

And he wants to drive it 88 miles per hour.

He wants movies.

He wants to see the Director’s Cut.

He wants the impossible to find Japanese bootleg with

6 minutes of never-before-seen footage.

He wants to watch Blade Runner. Again.

He wants to watch Brazil. Again.

He wants to watch A Clockwork Orange.

Again and Again!

But I deprive him of these things, as best I can,

until I can no longer ignore his voice

screaming in my head.

I am Jekyll. He is Hyde.

I am Bruce Banner. He is the Hulk.

Especially the Hulk from issues #272 to #378.

But no longer!

I am putting a stop to all this nerdy shit right now!

I’m an adult, for Christ’s sake!

And this body isn’t big enough for the both of us.

One of us has to go, and it’s gonna be him.

I banishing the Geek forever to the Phantom Zone,

just like in Superman II!

Because, in the end…

there can be only one.

BOTTOM BUNK MESSIAH

The second semester of my sophomore year at college

I shared my dorm room with Jesus Christ,

and I think I can honestly say that I wasn’t the least bit trepidatious

about sharing my dorm room with a foreign exchange student

because I figured that anything had to be better than my last roommate:

who was a dim-witted, misogynistic, knuckle-dragging

football-playing business-slash-physical education major

whom I had considered killing

in his sleep

on several occasions,

just to get him out of my room,

out of my life,

and out of the gene pool.

But luckily he was now serving five to fifteen years

on three counts of date rape

at a Cincinnati correctional facility

where, if there is any justice,

he is being sodomized on hourly shifts.

So in comparison, I figured bunking with this low-key Yanni

look-alike from Bethlehem would be a welcome change.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I first met “The Lord” as he was moving into our dorm room,

and I helped him assemble this rickety-looking entertainment center

that his step-father, a carpenter, had made for him

as a combination birthday-slash-Christmas present.

I immediately sympathized with how bad it must suck having

a birthday that falls right on Christmas, because you know that

everyone is just gonna lump all your presents together.

But he just gave me a confused look and continued to unpack

his wardrobe, which consisted of six togas

and two pairs of Birkenstocks.

In a few weeks, he started to get on my nerves.

First my VHS copy of Monty Python’s Life of Brian shows up

broken and in the trash.

Like I’m not going to figure out who did that.

Then his friends, or “apostles” as he called them, started to crash

in our room. Just a few of them at first, and only a few nights a week,

but before too long there were TWELVE of these assholes,

and they were sleeping on our floor

seven nights a week.

And one of them was always stealing my Pepsi.

I suspect it was Judas.

After a while, the whole “Son of God” thing

started to go to his head.

He started to get reckless.

He started curing frat boys of their gonorrhea for a nominal fee

to make a little money on the side.

Then one night his girlfriend, a political science major

named Mary Magdalene, had a party.

She only invited about 30 people, but over 200 showed up.

And by then Jesus was already baked off his gourd,

and when the beer ran out

he started turning the tap water into Heineken.

Right in front of everyone.

When people started to complain that there wasn’t any food,

he took a few slices of cold pizza out of the fridge,

started tearing them into pieces, and somehow managed to feed

everyone there!

Then our coke-head pal Lazarus ODs on a speedball in the bathroom

and before anybody can so much as call 9-1-1, Jesus yells

Lazurus, come out!

The guy jumps up without so much as a hangover.

It was like something out of a George Romero movie.

Well, after that, people started to talk.

People start to follow him to class.

He started to give speeches.

He was hip. He was happening. He was popular.

He was “Big Messiah On Campus.”

There was talk of a Nike contract.

But that all came to a tragic end on Easter weekend.

When I came back from home I was told the tragic news:

He had been killed in a bizarre fraternity hazing ritual involving

two other pledges, some Romans,

and several expulsions.

Well, naturally, I was upset.

Until they told me that if your roommate dies,

you get straight As across the board in all your classes.

Some people say Christ died for my sins.

All I know is—I got an A in Astronomy.

Of course, after I had told all of my professors to kiss my ass,

Jesus shows up on the south quad three days later,

apparently having faked his own death.

No one ever saw him again after that.

His disciples came and cleared all of his stuff out of our room,

but accidentally left behind a pair

of his Mickey Mouse boxer shorts,

AKA “The Shroud of Turin,”

which I sold to the National Enquirer for a cool million.

Maybe he wasn’t such a bad roommate after all.

NERD PORN AUTEUR

I’ve noticed that there don’t seem to be any porno movies

that are made for guys like me.

All the porn I’ve come across was targeted

at beer-swilling, sports bar dwelling alpha males.

Men who like their women stupid and submissive,

men who can only get it up

for monosyllabic cock-hungry nymphos

with gargantuan breasts and a three word vocabulary.

Adult films are populated with these

collagen-injected, liposuctioned women,

many of whom have resorted to surgery and self-mutilation

in an attempt to look the way they have been told to look.

These aren’t real women.

They’re objects.

And these movies aren’t erotic.

They’re pathetic.

These vacuum-headed fuck-bunnies don’t turn me on.

They disgust me.

And it’s not that I’m against pornography.

I mean, I’m a guy.

And guys need porn. Fact.

Like a preacher needs pain,

like a needle needs a vein,

guys need porn.

But I don’t want to watch this misogynist

He-man woman-hater porn!

I want porno movies

that are made with guys like me in mind!

Guys who know that the sexiest thing in the world is

a woman who is smarter than you are.

You can have the whole cheerleading squad.

I want the girl in the tweed skirt and the horn-rimmed glasses…

Betty Finnebowski, the valedictorian!

Oh yes.

First, I want to copy her Trig homework

and then I want to make mad passionate love to her

for hours and hours,

until she reluctantly asks if we can stop

because she doesn’t want to miss Battlestar Galactica.

Summa Cum Laude, baby!

THAT is what I call erotic!

But do you ever see that kind of woman

in a contemporary adult film? No!

Which is why I’m gonna start writing and directing geek porno!

I shall be the quintessential nerd porn auteur!

And the women in my porno movies will be

the kind that drive nerds like me mad with desire:

I’m talking about the girls

who used to fuck up the grading curve!

The girls who were in the Latin Club

and the National Honor Society!

Chicks with weird clothes, braces,

four-eyes and 4.0 GPAs!

Brainy, articulate bookworms,

with MENSA cards in their purses and chips on their shoulders!

My porn starlets will come in all shapes and sizes.

My porn starlets will be too busy working on their PhD

to go to the gym.

In my kind of porn movies

the girls wouldn’t even have to get naked.

They’d just take the guys down to the rec room

and beat them repeatedly at chess,

and then talk to them for hours

about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle

or the underlying social metaphors in the Alien movies.

Buy stock in some hand cream companies

because there is about to be a major shortage!

And I’m not just talking about straight porn, oh no!

There should be fuck films for my nerd brethren

of all sexual orientations! Gay Nerd Porn movies

with titles like Dungeons and Drag Queens.

This idea is a fucking goldmine.

I am going to make millions.

Because this country is full

of database programmers and electronics engineers,

and they aren’t getting the loving they so desperately need.

And you can help:

If you’re an intelligent woman who is interested in

breaking into the Adult Film Industry…

and if you can tell me the name

of Luke Skywalker’s home planet,

then you are hired!

It doesn’t matter if you think you’re overweight or unattractive.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t think you’re beautiful…

You are beautiful.

And I will make you a star.

IF NOSTRADAMUS WERE A GUIDANCE COUNSELOR

Yeah, I know that you’re a senior in high school

and that I’m your guidance counselor

and that you’re here in my office

seeking some counseling and some guidance

because you’re worried about your future

you’re terrified of your future

just like every other snot-nosed punk

who comes rolling into my office.

I know, because I sit here all goddamn day

listening to you little shits whine and moan,

expecting ME to make you feel better,

to assuage your fears,

to tell you that once you get out in the real world

everything is gonna be okay.

To say, “Don’t worry, Johnny, it’s all gonna work out.”

Well, I can’t do that anymore,

and you know why?!

Because I’m Nostradamus,

and I can SEE into the future

and you’re all FUCKED!

You’re goddamn SAT scores don’t mean shit!

You’re doomed!

Do you really want to know what the future holds? Do ya, Johnny?

Because I can tell you!

You’re gonna start out by being a below average college student who

rarely shows up for class, smokes a lot of pot, gets a Tasmanian Devil

tattoo, has unprotected sex with countless anonymous partners, gets

arrested for setting fire to the ROTC building, and then drops out

halfway through the last semester of their fifth year to follow Phish

around on tour.

Then you’ll wind up spending the next few years as a very successful

heroin addict/porn-star who stars in over 430 films, including Anal

Rodeo, Romancing the Bone, and Edward Penishands.

This will segue nicely into your first suicide attempt,

a long stay at the methadone clinic, and a three-year stint in the food

service industry, after which you’ll move back home, where you’ll

spend the next year lying around on your parent’s couch, eating

Cheesy Poofs and watching the Discovery Channel.

When given an ultimatum by your parents,

you’ll finally go back, finish college, get your degree in Art History,

and then run right out and snag yourself a 401k cubicle job at some

huge multinational corporation that makes napalm and pesticide so

you can pay off all those student loans in a timely fashion, maintain

your impeccable credit rating, get yourself a twelve-disc CD changer

installed in the trunk of your Toyota Camry, while you wait for your

employee stock options to split again so you can buy that 3 bedroom,

2 ½ bath mortgage in the suburbs with a chemically treated lawn and

a power leaf-blower.

About this time you’ll marry someone you meet at work that

you don’t really love, but hey, let’s face it, you’re not getting any

younger. You’ll cheat on them out of sheer boredom whenever the

opportunity arises, the two of you will crank out a couple of kids for

the tax break, you’ll get yourself some personalized license plates to

make yourself feel special, go into therapy, and start getting gray hair

just in time for your mid-life crisis.

At which point you’ll realize that you’ve spent the majority of your

adult life deep-throating the corporate cock, without ever doing

anything remotely creative, and that when you die the only thing

you’re gonna leave behind is a pile of empty Prozac bottles and 1.6

children who hate your fucking guts and swear to god that they will

never be anything like you.

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