| Manifesto February 1999 Should've Been A Super Villain I'm coming to you this month from the humble confines of a rather unusual location. I would love to feed you some shit about being in Fiji with the bud girls or traveling the world with Kenny on the pro mini-golf tour but that's just not the case. There's no easy way to break news like this so I'll just come right out and say it. I'm in PRISON. I'm Incarcerated. That's right kids. 'The big house, the joint, the slammer'. Actually, it's not even a real prison. It's a Minimum Security Detention Facility (a MSDF). The difference between the two is, most likely, quite drastic. I say that only because I have no idea what a Maximum Security Detention Facility is like. I'm a minimalist and therefore not up on the maximization of anything. I would venture to guess that it's somewhat comparable to an overstated minimization in that it's the maximum of a minimum situation. Thus, I can only assume that it's nothing like a minimum anything. I hesitate to use any of the usual flowery words to describe my new surroundings as they're nothing at all like I expected them to be. Once again I have been conned and removed by the drug-like power of television and film and am therefore at a loss to accurately depict this place using familiar prime-time A's, B's, and C's. I can say that it's a lot more relaxing than I thought it would be. I have access to tennis courts, a golf course, a gym, and a pottery room (all of which, of course, I have no real intention of using). But there is an Olympic sized swimming pool, a ping-pong room, and an arcade so I'm not totally screwed. If any of the guys are reading this I'd like to say that they do have Rush The Rock so I'll be kicking all of your asses when I get out. To be quite honest, if I knew prison was going to be this fun I would have been arrested for something a long time ago. Which brings me to my first real complaint about prison (or this particular facility anyway): I have absolutely no ambition, whatsoever, to escape. It would be altogether unromantic and devoid of any epic sense of struggle. It'd be far too easy to escape from this place and therefore a completely empty personal victory. One sand wedge malfunction on the fifth, tenth, or thirteenth and I could be sitting in a MacDonald's in less than an hour. Which would be pointless, of course, because there's already one in the cafeteria. That and a Pizza Hut. Yum, yum. I can hear it all now: Guard One: 'Where's Matt?' One week after my escape... Guard Two: 'Has anyone seen Good yet?' Before I went to prison I had no idea what a handicap was. I always thought it had something to do with personal characteristics. So that's my biggest complaint. Besides that there's really nothing to worry about in this place. There's none of the usual stresses that one commonly equates with being locked up, such as: 'I hope to god I don't drop the soap in the shower' or 'some big dude named Chico is going to make me his bitch'. Actually that kind of thing isn't really an issue in a place like this. We're allowed visits every Saturday and Wednesday and they provide the inmates with little private rooms in which to mess about with wives and girlfriends. It's kind of like hanging out with the guys most of the time and just going home for sex (and occasionally some home baked blueberry muffins. Yum-yum). In some respects it could be viewed by some men as a limited form of paradise. Those inmates that don't have wives or girlfriends have been known to 'hire' them from time to time as well. Most of the inmates in this place are white collar criminals so they're tastes run to the extreme and they can well afford them to. The guards run a little service in this capacity that's been nicknamed 'the pink express'. This service utilizes professional gold diggers that sleep with rich, incarcerated men in hopes of winning their favors and becoming their permanent fuck-puppets. This, of course, leads to gifts such as all expense paid trips to Mexico, private condo's, jets, cars, and cash. So it's kind of like a mail order bride service that supplies very attractive women that have no ambition beyond basking in the sun and shooting their mouths off about how rich their sugar daddies are. It's like a pissing contest of sorts, but sitting down I would imagine. You might find all of this rather crass but I would urge you to seriously and honestly explore the alternative. It's a fuck of a lot better than getting raped by a three hundred pound guy with a hair-sweater. I can hear thousands of people cringing all over the country right now. Hi. How are ya. So I'm sitting here in my nifty blue jump suit typing this out on one of the prison computers (there are twenty in all). They're decent machines too. The one I'm on right now is ten times faster than the one I had at home and has video conferencing. Which means I can talk to someone face to face in Borneo, in real time, whenever I like. You can't. How does that make you feel chump? There are guys in here that use these things to play the stock market, do overseas banking, and even run their companies. The video conferencing thingy allows them to actually attend board meetings from prison. It's fucked up. The funny thing is that most of these guys are throwing cash around that they stole. This one guy, Morris Hawthorne, uses the computer to transfer cash from bank to bank in Europe because the government and the cops are still looking for it. So old Morris, he just gets a coffee, lights a smoke and moves two hundred million dollars around from one bank to another every three days or so. He even has an accountant that e-mails him with secret little codes and tells him if the money's in jeopardy. Brilliant! I like Morris. He's a crafty one, he is. Actually, the average IQ in this place must be well above the genius level. I seem to be the only person ruining their curve. It's like MIT behind bars. There's even one freak who's in here for hacking that still does it every day using the prison computers. Just last week he turned off all the lights in Boise Idaho for a solid hour. The guys threw a party for him to celebrate. There was Champaign. Very expensive Champaign. Oh ya, and this chick that jumped out of a huge cake. Her name was Wendy. She tasted like creamed Coconuts. So, as you can see, it's not like prison at all really. The cells, if you can call them that, are pretty big and have track lighting in them. My bed is comfortable and the toilet's relatively space aged. It's not altogether unlike a Comfort Inn room sans the phone, complimentary religious text, and curtains. They don't even lock the cell doors at night. You can wander out into the common area any time you like. Sometimes I stay in the arcade well past lights out. Galaga looks wicked-cool in the dark, let me tell ya. But as far as most of the inmates are concerned the cells are crude and completely unacceptable. These are guys that are used to five star hotels. Not being able to order room service at 4 am is rather annoying I guess. The guy in the cell next to me (to the right) is known as Chip. Chip's real name is Winston Myers III, though his good friends call him Willy (and god are they annoying: Well Willy, Muffy got that new Mercedes but, ha-ha, the blasted thing just stopped running one day and she had to call a tow truck. So she had to get a ride to the club in the truck with some ungodly grease monkey. Marla says it took her a week to get the smell out of her clothes, ha-ha-ha). Somebody get over to 'the club' with a flame thrower, would ya. There's good work to be done there. So Willy's prison name is Chip. The guys call him that because he's one of those stuck up old school rich boys that considers everyone to be beneath him. Due to the fact that most of the millionaires in this place are what's called 'new money' or 'nouveau-riche', they're just not on Chip's level. So they call him Chip because he's got a rather large one on his shoulder. He asked me the other day if I knew why they called him that. I told him that everyone thinks he has a smoking short game. He asked me how a short game could possibly smoke. And this guy graduated from Princeton? I went to community college for art and I ain't dat dum. My other neighbor (to the left) is a wacky old guy named Frederick Leiber. Old Freddy's in the slammer because he happened to crash his Bentley into a fence while under the influence of alcohol while receiving an oral examination from a fifteen year old girl (which he swears said she was twenty five). The first time he told me about it I laughed my ass off. I guess if you're going to go to jail at the age of seventy two it might as well be for something as young and stupid as that. Freddy blames the entire thing on some guy named Stevens who, as it turns out, was his chauffeur. It seems that Stevens lied about being sick so he could bang one of the maids above the garage. I tell ya, being loaded must really rule. All you have to do all day is pretend to look busy and always make sure you're banging someone you shouldn't be. A little brandy, a cigar, and then it's off to bed. Mission accomplished. I don't know about you, but it beats drinking Columbia and messing around with some chick named Candy in the bushes while trying not to puke on your shoes. So it's safe to say that I have two of the most pretentious individuals in the world on either side of me. But they're not so bad. Prison, I find, is the great equalizer. It doesn't matter how special you think you are in here because, after all, you're IN HERE. So everyone's the same basically. The only difference being that I can't pay guards to bring me Cuban cigars and the occasional bottle of twenty year old scotch. Which, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't really matter. DuMaurier's and a plastic bottle of Jack will suffice. But I know what you're thinking. I've known for the last ten minutes. You're all asking yourselves the same question. It's eating your guts up like some big leach, all black and writhing in your gooey insides. You want to know why I'm in here. You wanna know what I did. So, just to be a super smart ass, I'm not going to tell you. Not yet anyway. I'm kind of curious to see what those little buggers do to your guts, all gooey like they are. They're in there right now. Chomping away. Chomp-chomp-chomp. I've started writing a book. I've got nothing better to do with my time so I figured I might as well get it over with. Up until now I had a very detailed plan concerning the creation of such a work. I vowed that I'd wait until my thirty fifth birthday (some seven years and a bit) and then I'd start. I also vowed that, no matter what, I'd only ever write one. If it's shit then my plan is as good as gold. If it rules then I'll piss everyone off and just disappear. Perhaps to Fiji. Where I'll spend my days playing mini golf with the bud girls and the ghost of JP Patches. Why JP? Because any clown that has a bottomless pit right outside his front door is cool with me. Death of a salesman indeed. I can see him now, up there in that sparkling, mineral-water-like-paradise. He's playing bumper pool in the craziest rumpus room imaginable. He's up two games on Jimi Hendrix and Albert Einstein is looking on from across the room trying to figure out how he's going to beat some clown at a game that's possibly more complicated than the theories of relativity and the infinite universe combined. You might think I'm full of shit but make no mistake about it. Bumper pool is one of the toughest, most mind numbing games ever invented. And, like most great things in this world, it's popularity rivaled the social status of a super hot, flirtatious cheerleader that considers holding hands to be a stand up triple. In short: it came and went like spray cheese (except in North Dakota where spray cheese remains a wonder of modern science to this day). So I'm writing a book. It's a book about robot bananas. They're called Bananabots. It goes something like this. These tiny little yellow robots were created by a South American scientist to replace human combat troops in the jungle. The theory behind them is as follows: when the enemy is walking through the jungle the Bananabots simply drop from the trees and begin to peel. Once half peeled they start to spin around really fast, using their peels to slice the enemy to bits below the knees. So this scientist creates these things but discovers too late that he's made them far too intelligent for their own good. There's a fault in their programming. So the little Bananabots go mental and kill the scientist and everyone in his little town. To make matters worse they also learn how to build new Bananabots themselves. So for five years the Bananabots stay in this little South American town multiplying until one day a group of lost American tourists show up and a group of the more elite Bananabots stow away in their luggage. They hide there until they're back in the States, where they all pop out of the luggage and start killing everything in sign. Eventually the Bananabots kill the majority of the people in North America and enslave the rest. So, you've got an entire continent that's ruled by little banana robots that are blood thirsty killers. This eventually leads up to the 2004 Olympic games where they win 32 gold medals prompting the European powers to build a giant robot super monkey to invade North America and eat all the Bananabots. So they build the giant Monkeybot and send him over to eat the Bananas and the world is saved. But little does everyone know that there are still thousands of Bananabots back in the little South American town where it all started. I'm not sure what'll happen after that but I'm sure it'll be as brilliant as the first bit. And to think I owe it all to being in prison. It's like a magnet of creativity. It just keeps pulling good ideas out of my head. I can't help myself. Since I've been here I've been able to secure the funding I need to make Water World 2 and have even been offered the head coaching position of a new NFL team (The Boise Barbarians). I've never played the game in my life and, to tell you the truth, don't really like football all that much. But what the hell, it could be fun for a while. Anything to give that 'Gipper' speech to room of steroid junkies making 10 million dollars a year. So I'll coach the team for half the year and spend the rest of the time constructing an even more expensive floating city on which to shoot ten minutes of footage for Water World 2. Then I'm going to blow the whole set up. There's a certain amount of excellence in that. To have a small army of people build a floating set for three years only to use it for five scenes and then blow the whole fucking thing sky high. You've gotta love explosions. Pop goes the weasel. So? So what. That's pretty much all there is to life on the inside. I wish there was more but, alas, there isn't. I'm currently working on a scheme to get myself transferred to a minimum security mental facility to do some comparison shopping. My thesis statement looks something like this: Do affluent criminals in a regular minimum security facility have it better or worse than slightly criminally insane affluent prisoners in a minimum security mental institution? Or. How much difference is there between some rich old guy who crashes his one hundred and fifty thousand dollar car and gets caught drinking and driving while getting blown by a Brittany Spears compared to some old guy that dresses up in a clown suit and does the same thing?
Your Questions. My Answers. Dial 1-900-Idiot Savant. Let's Review! When you send in a list of questions please keep a copy of them for reference. Once outside of my germ free bubble dome my oxygen tank only holds so much life giving air, so I'm limited to responses only. So keep those questions handy kids. 1] Everyone keeps asking me so I guess I should answer this question. No, I do not do drugs before I write the manifesto. I enter into a trance like state that's brought on by ingesting massive amounts of nicotine, Goodies, Cherry flavored Nibs, and (from time to time) lime flavored Jones Soda. Before the conception of the manifesto I used to write everything down in a huge book bound with human skin and get together with some friends every year in the woods to exchange ideas and trade baseball cards. Okay. (In addition to this I would also like to verify Robyn York's suspicions that I, myself, do not write the manifestos. You're right Robyn. I pay some guy to do it for me. Just like you pay people to lie about liking you in public. Smart ass enough for you sweetheart?). 2] These answers are for Liz.
b) Yes. It's me. c) If I knew the answer to that I'd write a self help book and make millions. 3] Apologies to everyone in Saskatoon that couldn't get into the Super Bowl show. It was one of those weird private things where the band plays for twenty minutes followed by dancing bears and juggling midgets that light themselves on fire. 4] These answers are for Jonah.
b) I hope so. c) Someone jumped on stage and took a pick out my hand while I was playing. d) I've already explained that. e) No. I love football (or what dummies call s-o-c-c-e-r). 5] These answers are for Tianna.
b) No, I haven't. Still Life With Woodpecker. c) Do your paper on Mattopian Society. 6] These answers are for Marnie.
b) I'm not. c) The kind that smells like coconuts. d) Yes. I can't tell you that. e) I don't know. I just to it that way. f) Connery. g) Yes. I can assemble complicated explosive devices. h) Probably never. They show no interest in it. i) Thank-you. j) One of Marnie's questions was this: If you had to go on a blind date with a girl named Bertha or a girl named Heather, which one would you choose and why? My answer is as follows: It doesn't matter. I'd call either of them 'honey-pants' anyway. 7] There was no credentials attached to the 'I wanna be in your next video' package. 8] These answers are for Al.
b) No. c) What? d) No. e) Maybe. f) Yes, I agree. g) Yes. h) There's not going to be. i) Okay. j) It sucks. k) It's one of those theories that should have remained a theory. l)No, thank you. 9] These answers are for Lynsey.
b) No, I haven't. It's the only famed coaster I have yet to ride in Canada. c) Vanilla. I don't much like chocolate ice cream. 10] Meg. Just a joke. I'm beginning to realize that poor attempts at humor are against the law. 11] HEY. This big hey is for Clarisse. 12] Adrienne. Actually we had planned to call the band SNOWAXE but Alabama Motel Room was released to radio while we were on the road and we were stuck with MGB. No word of a lie. As far as the interview thing goes let me just say this. If you can convince any of those guys to do them instead of me then I'm all for it. I just make shit up anyway. I'd love to sleep in for a change. And, no, I don't live in Vancouver. The whole band lives in a space station located behind the moon. 13] Mike. I'm the Anti-Christ. 14] Jennie. Your answers.
b) Not much. c) I don't answer my phone and I do a lot of yelling. d) Teletubbies e) No. I actually dislike Thai food quite a bit. But Dave and Ian love it. f) It was about a small, perfect period of time that disappeared too quickly for my liking. 15]These answers are for the half Canadian Matt.
b) Talk Talk c) No. 'And the monkey flips the switch' is an accurate statement. d) I try not to. e) Anyone from Star Wars, obviously. f) My word for today is 'MINXEN'. A combination of Vixen and Minx. g) It's always best to keep everyone guessing as long as possible. Hey! Whatever Happened With That Whole Mattopia Thing Anyway? It's been four months since I released the updated application for citizenship and I've received well over 5000 responses. That's a lot of applications to sift through. Not everyone is Mattopian material. The fine people down at the immigration office are going through things with a fine tooth comb. The last thing we need is a bunch of boring, opinionated, radical types wandering around ruining our decadent fun. You guys wouldn't believe some of the stuff I was sent. Just for fun, or because I'm just a mean bastard, here's some of the stupid shit that was sent in on some of the applications. Where do you stand on the following issues: a) Abortion: Doctors that do abortions deserve to be shot. Killing people is wrong and abortion is murder. Would you, in the event of war, disagree with a policy of mandatory service?
Do you currently hold a degree in dentistry or orthodontics?
Do you suffer from dyslexia?
Home telephone #:
[Please note that the person who wrote this had already filled out their address on the application and I fully intend to get on an airplane to Edmonton so that I can stalk them]. Where do you stand on the following issues:
Where do you stand on the following issues: g) Capital Punishment: It's cruel to kill animals just because they don't have a home. They should make some place where they can live if they don't have any owners.
[You know, there's just not enough I can say about flame throwers. So many uses, so little time].
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