Reading for Dummies

I consider myself a man of letters, a scholar, a learned gentlemen of the zillionaire persuasion, if you will. When I’m not brushing up on my Latin, you can usually find me buried nose-deep in the written word. I’ve studied the works of the masters and spent hours debating the likes of Joyce, Hemingway, and Suess. But that was before I had this leach called “Work” suctioned to my spine, sucking out all my motivation, energy, and will to live. My brain has atrophied to the point where my head now makes a sloshing sound when I lay it down on the pillow at night. With my last firing synapse, I’m trying to remedy the situation by delving back into books. Through painstaking research I’ve discovered that books are the best jumping off point for actual reading.

The fruits of my research grew slowly, however. The first week all I did was admire the book. Week two was spent examining the dust cover. By week three of my program I decided to start sitting down in a comfortable chair while holding the book. I would prop the book open in front of me for long stretches of time, regaining the strength in my wrists, forearms, and biceps. The sorer my arms felt the more work I knew I had ahead of me.

It should be noted that throughout this process I was avidly journaling my experiences and marking my progress. This sort of stuff was bound to help others, I figured. There are no training manuals for middle-aged illiterates. There are no how-to guides for redeveloping the atrophied mind. “Aha!” I said! I had stumbled upon my first brilliant idea since reinvigorating my faculties; the only unwritten book in the popular (and lucrative) “Dummies” series. I would assemble my various scribblings, jots, and canoodlings into Reading for Dummies. I even came up with a subtitle to make it seem more legitimate, “The First and Last Book You’ll Ever Need to Read”

I ran this idea by a few trusted friends who also suffered from MPB (mash-potato brain) and they were keen on the premise, but thought a book in any form might be daunting to those who can’t yet read. After all, while the first chapter of my book entitled “What is a Book?” advocated specifically against reading and promoted “prolonged casual glances,” the advice could only be conveyed to the reader through loosely strung-together words. To top it off, I can’t and won’t compromise my feelings that picture books aren’t really books, a decision that to this day stops me from recognizing all degrees from MR’s alma mater, Central Washington University.

At this point, my bunsen burner of a neck had been lit and the soup in my skull was warming up faster than MR can write up a post about playing xbox while getting wasted with high school buddies at his wedding. In other words, brilliant idea number two popped into my head. My book would be the first book bundled with an accompanying book on tape! Books on tape and book means no more tedious lessons on all the letters of the alphabet. No more overtaxed retinas deciphering every curve and dash of ink. Say goodbye to eyebrows and eyelashes and all the other fancy ocular adaptations we evolved over the years. They are going the way of the dodo or more currently the Nealon.

It’s simple, easy, and simply easy. All you do is follow along. I REPEAT, ALL YOU DO IS FOLLOW ALONG. In fact, you can just fake follow along, changing pages whenever you feel like it. If you listen with headphones, you can pull out the book while you are on the bus or some other public place and fan through the pages in one minute, close the book and put it away. Everyone will think you are Albert-freaking-Einstein. And in a way you will be, because he couldn’t read either!

To my astute readers, the answer is “Yes.” To my Jeopardy-challenged readers, the question was, “Did you just solve the world’s education problems?” To my kneeling and praying readers, I accept your sacrificial goat-meat but warn that a great and mighty plague shall ruin your arable land unless you get me a copy of Halo 2 on November 9 at midnight.

I have a feeling that some of you doubters are reading this and don’t see the merit of my ideas. To you I say you really need a new act because I sensed you were doubting and you’ve become such a reliable force of doubt in the world that the rest of the world has written you off as doubters. There isn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind that you doubt “doubt shadows” even exist when all I see around you is shadow all the time. No diggity. No doubt.

What about cd’s you ask? I’ve thought of that. Tapes are old and not many people have tape players anymore. So that’s why I bundle Books on Tape (or CD) and Book. If you have an archival storage media, I can and will put a book on it. Guaranteed. No matter where you go, whatever you are doing, you can be listening and learning the content of a book. That is my promise. If you are on the go, I offer Ebooks on Book, CD, Tape, PDF, and ebook. Analog or digital. Kilobyte or candy-gram. Mp3 or DVD.

The DVD option, aside from the fact that writing this is the equivalent of taking a cat o’ nine tails to the corpse of a shetland pony, could be the simplest option of them all. With a DVD, you wouldn’t even need to follow along with the book while listening, you could just watch the video of someone following along to the book on tape (or cd). They would be sitting in a comfortable chair, just like yourself, with a copy of the book outstretched before them, doing all the labor! And for all the DVD heads out there, the special features would contain alternate endings where the reader of the Book on Tape or CD would vary their tone or inflection slightly on the last paragraph of the novel.

The End.

or is it

The End