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Advertisement Back in Roll-a-toke, where I went to high school, my friends (circle of friends has changed very much since then but these are good guys) still get together to play four-player anything – Mario Kart Wii was first, then CoD4 and WaW, and now Modern Warfare 2. I really appreciate that they keep the gaming true to its form. They don’t play WoW, they don’t even have Internet. Everybody’s getting high and enjoying each other’s company around a videogame, just like it was when we were kids. When I grow out of that, just kill me.

One of these guys is an Elf Wax Times writer, and if it weren’t for our basic agreement on this fundamental way of life, we would probably have forever lost contact. But there comes a time in life where one looks around himself and sees nothing familiar, and rather than again venturing into the mist, he opts, just for a little while, to get back to what’s not only familiar, but truly rewarding. In this case, it is videogames with my friends. People don’t get enough of this. Oh, and that’s right – one of your beloved Elf Wax Timers doesn’t have the Internet.

Since moving back to my college town of Larger City, USA, I have not found a friend as good as the one I left behind. You might know him as our best Elf Wax Times writer on staff. He invented Elf Wax. He wrote a program, or maybe two, that spammed MUME into the ground for hours at a time. MUME is EverQuest Online Adventures without graphics. They invented IP-banning because of him. And because I’ve been needing a distraction from reality lately, I have been playing MUME; playing this text-RPG based on LOTR is kind of nice, because it’s a chance to enter a world which he helped create, by attempting to destroy it. But that’s not really why I play, it’s just a nice effect. I actually play MUME because since moving back to the intellectual hub of Any State, USA with an income tax so high it would make the Queen of England grow a dick and jizz her pants, my brain is starving. Can you believe it? In a college town, where I’m surrounded by “smart people,” there’s not a healthy dialog for miles.

When people go to college for the prescribed amount of time, it has this effect on them in which their ideals stagnate, their eyes jade over, and they sort of get by on the notion that “I’m in college. Doing what I can. I don’t feel like I need to be doing anything extra.” Extra includes starting or helping a publication, like the glorious Elf Wax Times. Extra can also include, and does also include thinking. Just plain old critical thinking about something besides your girlfriend and your schoolwork. College makes people forget that the whole point of structured education is to serve the working world. By living under the illusion that they’re serving themselves, feeding their own heads with someone else’s drivel, they’re systematically destroying their ability to hear the real ‘other voice’ inside. It might have something to do with paying for your classes, or the classes themselves. I know that they preach self-discovery and they talk to you like adults. But professors are as indoctrinated as middle school teachers. And 21-year-old graduates are as sheep-like as sheep themselves. There’s nothing adult about being ground up in the same commercialization of human dejection as everyone else – unless you understand it enough to “be able to explain it to your own grandmother.”

See? I learned that quote in college. I think I was on LSD at the time, reading an Einstein quote on somebody’s AIM profile, but I was enrolled in classes. Just like secondary school, college lessons can be applied to the problems of college itself, or of the world in general. It’s just logic. But it’s logic presented in a deceitful way, carefully twisting your brain out of your control, and into theirs. The military-industrial complex, and the pressures it puts on a society lead us to distrust, band together in a xenophobic fury so we may better divide from one another, hate each other more than anything else but ourselves – who we hate the most. Cellularize our lifestyles. It used to be the police showed up to dangerously large parties; now, the “Party Patrol” busts everything up, adding charges, too. Welcome to the cellular lifestyle. Why do you kids still need to party when the government maintains Facebook for your use and enjoyment? The only measurable value left in our world is the artificial value of the paper fucking dollar, and people are convinced, maybe not that they’re happier this way, but that this is the best way for everyone.

Come to college – where anti-intellectualism is taught.

Out the proverbial window went the idea that there is some worldly value for things besides monetary value divided by time over output. “The Elf Wax Times is a huge success these days.” – Hey, that’s great. You going to advertise?

No, I don’t think I will. We’ve talked about the idea. We’ve shot it down inside while keeping it on the table outside. And now it’s begun to rain on the idea we left on the table outside, eroding the glitter from the thought of a Pabst Blue Ribbon banner ad on The Elf Wax Times. Advertisements are fucking ugly in ways exceeding aesthetics. Why would I put ads on the front page of this website?

They represent everything I hate about society, information, the media, our thought processes which advertising poisons. We won’t do that to you, dear readers. Although we stand to make possibly tens of thousands, we have jobs outside of this website. Good jobs, provided lovingly by Lebal Drocer, Incorporated. We work hard to suckle on the tit of the hard-working, and it pays. Not great, but well enough so we may healthily bring you the Truth. If we advertised Elf Wax Times, we’d be no better than Maddox. The Best Advertising Site in the Universe. The Onion did it, so why shouldn’t George Ouzanian? That’s Maddox in case you don’t know. We figured it out somehow, and we got stoned in high school, called his mom and told her about the site so she’d give us his phone number. She did, and we called him asking for beer, telling him the site was really funny. “How’d you get this number?” And that’s how Maddox’s mommy found out about Maddox, and it created a lot of grief for him. I used to feel bad for doing that. Not so much anymore.

Every day, I listen to the “people” I ‘work for’ fucking up the economy in real-time behind my ears, and I think about how they get away with degrading my quality of life, and yours. Every day, your beloved Roajoke writer goes to his work, which is better than mine in all ways, and thinks about the shit I hear where I work, not knowing that I hear it, but agreeing nonetheless. We need this as people. Why don’t you have it?

I lost a good friend when I came back to this dump of a city. My smartest friend, the friend who laughed with me about shit nobody else even realized is going on, the friend who helped me move, and who chopped a mountain down with the edge of his hand is back there in the life I left behind. He was the only friend who ever thought on my wavelength, and I think it might be because we learned how to make music together. From the first-or-second day we met, we’ve always thought on a higher plane together. That’s not the clandestine Elf Waxian arrogance you’ve come to know and love – the truth is that musicians think on a higher plane while playing music than most humans are able to recognize. I left him behind to pursue my useless college degree. Mother Fuck this place, and this world, and fuck you to help propagate it; you sick fucking bastards.

And now things have changed. I’m having to get by without him; keep this site going without him egging me on to do it; keep seeing things my way, and not television’s way, or the Dollar’s way. But Our Way. I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t afraid of losing who I really am. I’d be a bigger liar if I said I don’t care about becoming someone better. I’d be Oral Graham if I told you money doesn’t actually matter to me, and I’d be a sell-out for admitting it.

So stay tuned to the Elf Wax Times for a brand new ideology.

“The reason our institutions, our traditional religions, are already crumbling is because THEY’RE NO LONGER RELEVANT! It’s time for us to create a NEW philosophy, and perhaps even a new religion, you see, and that’s okay because that’s our right. We are free children of God with minds that can imagine anything, and that’s kind of our role. How do you evolve ideas? I’ll give you an example right here… Why is the drug czar in this country, well I’ll go back, why do we HAVE a drug czar in this country? A. B, Why is he a cop? Why isn’t he a guy in recovery who’s HAD an alcohol and/or drug addiction and overcome it, and why doesn’t he HELP people with the same problem, with compassion rather than condemnation? Why do we put people who are ON drugs in jail? They’re SICK! They’re not criminals. Sick people don’t get healed in jail. See it makes no sense! And if we evolve the idea, you see, the planet might be more compassionate, and something like HEAVEN might dawn.”

–Bill Hicks

Oh hi! Didn’t see you there. It’s difficult to see anything beyond The Elf Wax Times’ blinding white flurry of success, but we’ve got a finger on the pulse, and we hear you asking yourselves:

How can I get more people to read my [worthless] blog?

It’s a two-step process.

Don’t be such a fucking douchebag. Seriously.
And don’t start a blog.

A long time ago, I was sitting online, my ass was numb, I was talking to my friend and I felt like I needed to break the uncomfortable silence, so I said “fuck people with blogs” to which my friend responded, “Nobody cares what they have to say.”

“Of course not,” I said. “That’s why they start blogs.”

And that’s the kind of fucking genius thought-dissemination that absorbs your blog’s readership before their sunken eyes even leave The Elf Wax Times: your puss-blog about how you don’t get any puss because you’re a giant, throbbing, cheese-flushing pussy is simply not entertaining, and everybody knows it already. Some blogs are so bad that it boosts our readership when people come here in need of healing.

Maybe it’s because you don’t have any insights beyond what simpletons uncover within an episode of Touched by an Angel.
Maybe you really don’t get any pussy and you try to post about it on the internet, but your half-assed approach to writing fails to capture even the wildest sexual imagination of, say, a pubescent child, who, possibly having never seen the internet before, couldn’t even pay twenty-five seconds of attention to your sex-laden drivel if it were printed off and handed to him to read as an alternative to restriction ad infinitum. In fact, for most folks, reading your blog is probably the equivalent to tasting some cold, stale piss.

But we’re talking about children here. All children are retarded, so they’re a bad example and I should not have used them; if for no other reason than people hate to be reminded of children. Check back next year for an apology.

Conversationally, The Elf Wax Times reporters, staff writers, editors, and our glorious masters are intellectually potent, and should we have a moment in our busy day of cooking up and serving the truth, we need to read thought-inspiring equivalencies of miniature Cat’s Cradles, should we get the chance to read anything at all (usually we have our assistants read to us as we masturbate to rare, uncensored Asian pornography).

So, to us, your Tucker Max attempt at a blog leaves a taste in the mouth of cold piss, too. That is to say, we see through your attempts to piss in our mouths from behind your dual-core PC and you fail to even keep it warm, much less hit your target, whatever that may be. Nobody knows what you’re trying to accomplish. You’re worthless and you suck.

Let’s briefly drop the pissing metaphor for a moment to talk more about why people hate blogs.

I hate blogs because they fail to properly inform. The Elf Wax Times takes an ambivalent stance on blogging, because it is not officially recognized as a medium of any form. A blog is simply something you accidentally click on Google because it contains the most keywords in the most relevant order contained in your search. Maybe you host a copyrighted picture nobody else has, and so people click it, save it, and never see your site again. In all likelihood, if you think people are visiting your blog because your “statistics say so,” look closer and you’ll see that accidental clicks account for at least 99% of your “readership,” and the only reason copyright lawyers have not yet contacted you is because no human is actually looking at your “site.” [Editor’s Note: blogs are not real websites.]

Nobody is looking at your perspective on the world. Nobody is sharing in your unique, subjective experience of reality in the abstract. Nobody is taking the journey as your narrative prose degrades into broken poetry with faulty rhyme scheme followed by ellipses and a question mark. Nobody feels the way you do, because your mechanism for emotion is so completely distorted that you actually believe people are reading your fucking blog. Normal people are not as self-important as blog “authors.” [Editor’s Note: blogs are not authored by anyone because authors write for a living, and bloggers do not.] Nobody will ever identify with a blogger.

Blogger

Now, I know I’m just farting into the wind here, so we’re going to have to break it down another level.

You write a blog, you have one. You maintain one, as you put on your resumé or MySpace page. No cute girls are reading it. Maybe there are two people who make comments on your posts from time to time, under the unspoken arrangement that you reciprocate. One’s a fat chick, the other’s your online friend who once agreed over AIM that the government sucks. You put a lot of time into your CSS code, your margins are perfect, the padding fucking fits and you feel good because you’ve got shit all figured out, so this doesn’t apply to you – right? Oh boy. How glad I am not to be you. How thankful I am not to be so misled, so delusional, so willing to lie to myself as you; so wrong as you are.

I’m talking to you, blogger. Blogosphere. The bastion of truth–shit, I mean, self-importance. Your thoughts are impure, your opinions invalid, broadly unsubstantiated by anything other than your George W. Bush “gut feeling” fueled by the insights of Neil Cavuto, or name-a-CNN-pundit.com.

Your vision is filtered through orange glasses or red, depending on where we’re at on the Terror Alert scale. At best, you’re the unseen, unheard afterthought of a political mechanism – lost to all keepers of history but your own web browser. At worst, you serve the political machine as they reference your voice among millions in the blogosphere, speaking for you, making determinations about you, without reading you, or knowing you, or seeing you, or even consciously being aware that someone like you might actually exist.

And we here at The Elf Wax Times for once share their anti-sentiment. So without further ado, fuck you and your little blog, too.