So I didn’t get into Stanford. They have this program where they give you money to write for two years and I thought that sounded like a swell idea so I sent them my direct deposit information, etc., but then they said something about other people wanting this money, too, and how I’d have to like apply for this thing, like compete with other boring-ass writers, people who go around saying “well, actually, I’m a writer” which is offensive and noxious and usually false. So I filled out the application and turned it in on time and made love (because that’s what it was, friends, not cheap, tawdry sex, but sweet, deep love) with no less than three professors and still no go! I get the same old photocopied rejection letter as the other 995 unworthy applicants! The nerve!

So I’d like to include my application essay here for you both to read. Imagine that you’re an English professor at an esteemed and pricey university conveniently located by a Burger King and a Ross Dress For Less. You’re impotent and palsied and looking Painful Death square in the eyes and you’re coming to the grim realization that you will never contribute anything worthwhile to the world and that your existence for the past 30 years has consisted of inventing convincing reasons why you’re a valuable member of society and should get tenure and you’re reading through an obscene pile of wretched and depressing application essays. OK? You there yet? Now beat your overlarge head against your fluorescently-lit steel desk and squint. Now take a look at my essay and try, just TRY to keep yourself from flinging grant money into my face:

WELL ACTUALLY IM [sic] A WRITER BY JOSHUA ALLEN

I piss out literature. Seriously. Words strung into clauses strung into sentences strung into paragraphs strung into like more paragraphs come streaming through my urethra. My toilet bowl gets clogged with short stories. I have to plunge out the novellas. The plumber is happy to see me every week so he can catch up on the next chapter. Haiku cling to the rim unless I get out the Lysol Tile and Tub Cleaner. My waste products are rich in character development, thematic explorations, and crisp dialogue. I’m a biological anomaly, created for the sole purpose of generating text. My freakish nature has been repeatedly studied by experts at STANFORD UNIVERSITY and they just keep scratching their balding pinheads in bafflement. Here’s a brief excerpt from my last session with three esteemed psychobiologists at your fine school:

DR NOVA: I just don’t get it! DR AVON: He secretes prepositional phrases from his lower back! DR NUH: He just suffered from a hacking, phlegmy cough and what emerged from his esophagus was nothing less than the finest depiction of blossoming womanhood in a small Southern town that I’ve ever read! DR NOVA: Let’s just say that Ulysses has nothing on his bowel movement here! DR AVON: I suppose all we can do is funnel huge grants into his direct deposit account and STAND BACK!!!

Do you have the swollen cojones to argue with science? Do you have the rampant cruelty to resign me to an empty life of customer service instead of placing me in a nicely-furnished rec room and allowing me to excrete one magical and PROFITABLE novel after another? Don’t you think I’ll cut you a deal? Don’t you think my agent/proctologist will slide a healthy percentage your way? A healthy percentage which should be sufficient enough for you to retire early and turn your wasted, useless life into a distant memory as you blast away at your already-withering brain with expensive sex and narcotics? Allowing me to move in and take your place as Emeritus or whatever and run the Creative Writing department with an iron fist, brainwashing the other feeble-minded “writing students” into doing my wicked and ribald bidding, turning office hours into a nonstop nightmare of violent sin, faculty meetings into a Caligulan cesspool? Don’t you think it’s a WIN-WIN SITUATION you vile, stinking puppets? Don’t you think it’s time STANFORD UNVERSITY accepted its miserable fate and accepted me as its new master? WELL DON’T YOU???

THE END.