I have an addictive personality. It is a burden of unparalleled proportion. When they first hear of my condition, cruel people often try to get me hooked on things. They offer me drugs and alcohol and chocolate. They make inane bets or throw dice at me. Desperate nymphomaniacs try to get me to make love to them. Other, more clever people have me clean their homes or do their laundry, all in the hopes that I will become addicted and continue to work for them gratis. I have had girlfriends try to get me hooked on buying them gifts and friends who get bored with trying to make me an alcoholic in favor of trying to get me hooked on enabling their alcoholism. I’ve been given term papers to write, taxes to calculate, sermons to pen, cages to clean, eulogies to compose, essays to construct. I admire people’s willingness to take advantage of a potentially damaging situation (albeit to me and not them), and I do not fault them.
However, without fail, each and every amateur social scientist who crosses my path becomes the victim of a cruel irony. For my addictive personality does not make me prone to become an addict. To the contrary, it ensnares others and causes them to be dependent upon it. I have the nicotine of disposition, the crack-cocaine of character, the Pringles of personality. Those who try to devise ways to harness what they believe to be my addictive powers usually become addicted to devising ways to harness what they believe to be my addictive powers. It is a tragic loop of dependency. Sad, yes, but beautiful in its simplicity. For we all need somebody to lean on.
I should warn people, I know. I have tried it, only to create advice addicts. I have worn signs and sent cautionary circulars in the mail to no avail. I have tried enshrouding myself in mystery, dressing in a friar’s habit and adopting his vow of silence. People became convinced I was a messianic superhero. I had more junkies than ever. I went to graduate school for math. I emulated Tom Snyder, Al Gore, and Carrot Top. I took up a gravel collection. Result: bupkas. Despite all, the rays of my addictive personality shone through, and addicts sprung up like wildflowers whose chlorophyll convert my wit and charm into bioelectricity.
My entourage continues to grow. By reading this, you have started down that slippery slope. You will find yourselves returning to this site everyday in the hopes that I have written something new. Some days I will have, and those will be the good days. Other days I won’t have, and you’ll scour the archives for a forgotten gem. The content of my pieces will no longer matter. You will love whatever I write, even if it’s merely a short description of some signs I saw on the street that day. Any talent I had will become atrophied, yet my success will continue. This will aggravate my peers, and their curiously strong mix of resentment and admiration will elevate me to Caesar-like status, only to end in my murder at the hands of a conspiracy of those closest to me. Et tu, Porter?
Yet every cloud has a silver lining. In this case, I’ll no longer need to wrack my brain thinking of good punch-lines.