Wednesday, November 22, 2017

This was a school project where we had to write a how - to paper. Mine started out as kind of a joke, but it kinda got too real so be warned.


A question I’m often asked is, “is there a way I can be you, or even just a little more like you?” It seems to be a recurring query in most conversations I have, so I decided I’d finally sit down and see what I could do. I am intimately acquainted with the state of being that happens to go by the name of Lou, and following these steps, will allow someone to in some part address the issue that is the undersaturation of Lou.
The first thing to do is cop the look. For this, pay a visit to the nearest thrift store and find the men’s clothing section. I’m talking jeans and t-shirts. Do a cursory sweep, and if there is any clothing in a particular dark shade of purple, pick that up immediately. It might not necessarily fit, but that’s not important yet. Next, go to the jeans section and find some plain jeans that look like they’ll be a fairly tight fit, but not quite skinny jeans tight. The final step is to go and get the smallest v neck t shirts available in the store, and any sweaters that are laying around. You can go try them on, and if they’re tight and blue/purple enough, you’ve got a wardrobe! Don’t worry about shoes, any shoe will do. You’ll only wear the vans knockoffs to the skate park though.
Now that you have the look down, you’re gonna want to take a look at your hair now, because that’s the next thing you’ll have to work on. As a rule of thumb, if it doesn’t at least barely hit your shoulders, it’s gonna need some work. That’s okay though, because you do still have time. While you wait, go ahead and visit the black hair aisle at walmart. It won’t be labelled as such, but you’ll know you’re there when you start to smell the coconut oil. Get any product with coconut or shea in the name. Argan and castor oil are also options. At the end of the day, as long as your hair is shiny and as black as possible, you’re good.
Finally, you absolutely can’t be Lou if you don’t act a little bit like him. This is the tricky part, but once you get into it, you’ll do just fine. First, you have to understand that before middle school, he’d been led to believe that he was a really special person. The realization that he actually wasn’t will inform a lot of his, and now your choices in the future, as he struggles to be what he’d always thought he was born as--exceptional. You’ll need to develop a fascination with people’s reactions, and those reactions should come to be a major reason behind most things you do. The idea is to do things that will have people saying stuff like, “Holy shit, I thought he was joking,” or, “I didn’t think he’d actually do it, Jesus Christ!” You wanna value your life, but at the same time, do remember to look at everything as really just a big piece of performance art. One way to begin to do this is to joke about stuff a lot. Every now and then, actually do what you’re joking about, and you’ll be able to throw people off balance a bit, which is what you want. If it gets to be too much for you, that’s fine--I’ve had that happen myself, actually. Don’t mention it to anyone, but it shouldn’t be too hard for you to modify the way you operate just enough that you’ll be good.

Now I can’t promise that following these steps will make you quite reach maximum Lou, but you can use all this information as a sort of starter kit. Life is more improvisation than not anyway, so as long as you understand the basic idea, you should be good. If you’d like to be able to know exactly when you’ve reached maximum Lou, I’d advise that you watch other people. When the theatre kids and the mormons begin to sort of hold you at arm’s length, but old people love you, you should be just about there. Ultimately, I don’t think worldwide maximum Lou would really be a good thing because we would all collectively just get too hyped and die, but we could so far use quite a bit more Lou, so go out there and be Lou!