Helping Out the Community

No! That's the problem! The community isn't working at all, so I have to do it for them!

I've got it pretty good. I've got my health, a fantastic body, and a paid position on the staff of one of the internet's leading humor websites. With all of my success, it's easy to ignore the problems that other people - ordinary, less successful, unsexy people - face every day. I didn't want to become one of those cold, callous celebrities who takes his fabulous life for granted, so recently I decided to give something back to the community, and of course, when I say "decided," I mean, "the state is forcing me." Also, when I say "give something back," well, I just don't mean that all. I'm not actually giving anything back, so much as I am giving in the first place, since I can't really say that the particular community I'm helping out has given me anything to begin with. I go to college here, so I pay through the nose to live here in the first place, and I really only commingle with members of this community when I go into town to visit one of the numerous restaurants, where I always pay my bill in full and tip generously. I take nothing from this community that I do not pay for in some way, shape, or form. So I can't really claim that I'm giving anything back. Really, I'm just being generous by giving the community some of my time, and frankly, I expect to be paid back in full.

Despite my general disdain for the community at large, community service would be somewhat pointless without it. So once I resigned myself to actually helping these people, the trick was to figure out how. How could I use my particular skills to help out the men, women, and children of this city? I tried my hand at a number of things, all of them well-intentioned, but somehow, things just didn't quite work out the way I had planned.

Soup Kitchen

"No soup for you!" Ha! I love it! And apparently, so do the homeless.

Ah, the needy. If there's a more self-centered subsection of the general populous, I haven't met them. Everything with the needy is always, "Me, me, me." "Feed me" this, and "clothe me" that, and "shelter me from the bitter cold and freezing rain" these, and "cure my scurvy" those. Never giving so much as a thought for what other people want. They take and take and take and most of them don't even work! And yet, for some reason society continues to coddle these mooches, and thus it is considered noble to take part in giving the needy what they want. If you ask me, that's really doing a disservice to the community, as it's really just teaching these people that they can just form lines wherever they please and expect to be fed and immunized and such. But I suppose giving them what they want does stop them from whining, at least for a little while, and I guess that's doing the community a favor. It's gotten to the point where a guy can't huddle around a trash fire in a rusty barrel under a bridge anymore without being panhandled. Sheesh.

Well, anyway, I wanted to do my part so as to prevent the state government from, you know, sodomizing me, so I volunteered my time down at a nearby soup kitchen. And lo and behold, in came the so-called "needy." More like "wanty," if you ask me. Without so much as asking for a menu or an apology for their frightful personal appearances and bodily odors, showing a total lack of all social graces and a disregard for procedure, they piled into a long line, eagerly awaiting whatever brothy delicacy they could con out of the taxpayer that day. Now, I'm the sort of guy who can make the best out of any situation. When the first needy person made his way down the line to where I was dispensing cream of mushroom, I immediately launched into a full recreation of the legendary Soup Nazi routine from Seinfeld. Let me tell you, the mild chuckles from the other volunteers were so encouraging that I did a repeat performance with the next person in line! As a second needy person left the line empty handed, his shaggy, flea-ridden head hanging in a perfect illusion of dejection, I couldn't help but break out in a grin. There's no feeling like well-executed comedy, and I could hardly believe how willing these needy people were to play along! I couldn't believe that the only two needy people with such well-developed senses of humor would have been the first two in line, so I tried again with the third person. Once again, I let my spot-on "No soup for you" ring forth, and the needy person, this time a young woman, also gave me a perfect confused look and walked away soupless! Amazing! Well, I wasn't about to stop there. Soup is soup, but to reproduce such a classic scene so many times in a row is the sort of thing that only happens once in a lifetime. I wanted to see how far I could go. I never thought I'd make it past another two or three people, but wouldn't you know it? Every single person in line walked away without soup! Just incredible! Who knew the needy were so dedicated to the performing arts? It wasn't until the second person dropped dead of starvation, leaving behind a smelly, hairy, scurvy-laden corpse, that I decided perhaps my comedic talents could best serve the community elsewhere.

Story Time

Aw, aren't they cute? Too bad they're all morons.

Children love me. I don't know why. I don't particularly care for them, and I do my best to make that as clear as possible. "I don't particularly care for you, child," I'm known to say. And even still, children flock around me like I ooze candy out of my pores. And believe you me, of all the various things I ooze, candy is not one of them. My little cousins have historically found me especially entertaining as a punching bag. Well, not me exactly. Really just my groin. And people wonder why I've got such a strong anti-child agenda. Well, I was willing to swallow my prejudices and combine my flair for the dramatic with the inherent love that children have for me by starting a story hour at the local library. More than twenty fresh-faced youngsters showed up and gathered in a semicircle at my feet as I regaled them with the classic tale of Jack and the Beanstalk.

I learned something that day: kids are fucking retarded. I mean, I know my testicle-pummeling cousins are a little screwy, but everyone else's kids are just plain retarded. Take this shining example:

Me: "Not long ago, but just long enough that no one left alive today still remembers, there stood a village of meager economic prospects. On the edge of this village there lived a boy named Jack, who shared a tiny, sparsely furnished home with his mother, a woman who had no formal education herself, but was still able to impart words of wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of hardship, and who was by no means incapable of fulfilling her maternal duties and also filling in as a father figure, since Jack's real father had left when the boy was still an infant to pursue a romantic entanglement with the bride of the local magistrate. Of course, as we can all imagine, that relationship was doomed from the beginning, and the magistrate soon discovered his wife's infidelity and had both her and her lover beheaded, but then he was a bit of a philanderer himself, which is probably what caused his wife to seek other means of satisfaction. The whole mess really just enforced a double standard which was prevalent at the time and which still persists, to a degree, today. As I was saying, Jack lived with his mother, and the only other occupant on their property, which was quite limited, to be sure, was an ancient, withered creature, bovine in nature."
Precocious Child: "What's a bovine?"
Me: ".................What are you, retarded?"

Well, that didn't go over too well with the parents. You'd think they'd just be desensitized to the fact that their kids are 'tards by now, but I guess that's just not the case. Oh well. Something told me it was time to find another way to perform my community service.

Home Construction

Well, I had basically determined that I wasn't going to complete my community service goals by doing anything that required, you know, any sort of actual interaction with the community. But there were still plenty of options left wide open to me. I decided to try my hand at helping to build a new house from the ground up. Now, I know what you're thinking. "But Ben, you write for a website! How could you possibly hope to accomplish anything that requires physical strength and coordination?" I appreciate the vote of confidence. Thanks a lot. I'll have you know that I'm actually quite handy with a set of tools, in the sense that I haven't chopped off my hands yet.

Now I ask you, who wouldn't want this over their front door every day?

The team I joined was just about to break ground on a new house for a family of four who lost their home in, uh, a hurricane or a plague or a nuclear meltdown or something. I'm not really sure. The family told me, but I did my best to tune them and their two retarded children out, lest I get myself in more trouble. Construction got off to a good start. But as I was going along, working from the foreman's blueprint, a thought crossed my mind. These people lost their house. They had their home and all their belongings stripped away from them. They didn't just need a new house. No, these people needed to have some fun. And what kind of house is the most fun? Why, a funhouse, of course! Taking my cues from the Greek god of carpentry, Jesus Christ, I decided to keep my good deed a secret and worked from the funhouse blueprints in the spongy gray filing cabinet I call my brain without even filling in the other members of the team, for fear one of them would let it slip.

I worked with the speed of three men, invigorated by the sheer goodwill of my scheme. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that one man working with the speed of three men and a different blueprint is still not as efficient as ten other men working with the speed of ten men. The end result was that when the house was finished, there were a number of points where my design intersected the original design that the rest of the team had been working on. This wouldn't be such a problem, except that a number of those intersection points were in the middle of rooms. Personally, I could see how a family could get a great deal of enjoyment out of their master bedroom/plastic ball pit, their two car garage/moonwalk, their luxurious kitchen/room-that-shakes-violently-because-that's-considered-fun-for-some-reason, and their full bathroom/hall of wacky, distorted freak-mirrors. I guess this family felt that their kids were just too slow to appreciate the subtleties of the foyer/gravitron, though, since they had us tear the whole thing down, and I was kicked off the project.

So I'm still looking for a good way to do some good for the community. If you ask me, I don't think I should be penalized for the fact that the community and I have differing ideas of what "good" means. At the very least, you'd think that people would side with my definition. After all, I'm a professional writer, whereas they're just a bunch of grown up 'tards. Oh well.

I Live for the Weekend: Weekend Web That Is!

Hello friends, Zachary "Spooger Joe" Gutierrez here with another edition of everybody's favorite feature to print out and wipe their asses with. This week it isn't pretty folks. We've got fat ass juggalos, cumshot husbands, foreigners looking for love, horny housewives, and kids who jerk off to cartoons, fur, and their mother's sex videos. Today is not a proud day for the internet.

If you don't feel brave enough to read this week's Weekend Web I'll understand. We'll be setting up a tent in the parking lot for those who would like counseling after viewing today's feature. Hope to see you there!

– Ben "Greasnin" Platt