This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
Carlos was bored. Not the type of boredom that makes you open a streaming app knowing damn well you’ve already watched every half and quarter-decent show available, so you just stare blankly at the home screen until you pray for a meteor to fly through your window or a zombie apocalypse break out to free you from your omnipresent late stage capitalist malaise.
No, Carlos’ boredom reached far deeper. It was psycho-spiritual, in his bones, in his soul. He felt comatose, though he was perfectly capable of seeing and navigating the world around him.
He stared at his watch.
It was 12:15 PM.
He stared out his balcony, which reflected South Florida’s mercilessly bright sun off the ocean and sand. 200 feet below, hordes of tourists and seasonal snowbirds milled, preened, and swaggered about a quarter by 9-mile stretch of sand imported from the Bahamas.
He stared back at his watch through multicolored optical spots.
It was still 12:15 PM.
“Fuuuuck…” he sighed.
He prodded the metal straw sitting in his midafternoon smoothie whose bespoke, proprietary blend of antioxidants, probiotics, and micro and macronutrients was supposedly tailored to each individual client’s specific dietary needs so they would literally only ever need to consume these prepackaged shakes for every meal until they died—ostensibly leaving behind an exquisitely healthy corpse.
All Carlos knew was that they tasted almost exactly like cardboard dissolved in soy milk and made him excessively gassy, but he was too damn bored to do something as potentially creative or engrossing as make himself a sandwich. Plus, he needed to look after his figure, and he’d rather not put too much thought into the effort.
Carlos slowly slumped forward in his high-top chair so that the side of his head and chest slid across his marble-topped kitchen island, arms extended before him. It was smooth and cool to the touch.
“It’s nice to feel something,” he thought to himself, followed by, “Why is everything I own so shiny?”
He raised his eyes from the marble and glanced around the penthouse he bought the previous year. Everything was very reflective but also, somehow, very dark—from the steel-gray, metal-brushed refrigerator to the polished reclaimed hardwood floor to the minimalist aluminum shelving units to the L-shaped leather couch placed in his recessed living room before a massive, paper-thin television. It also didn’t help that the entire perimeter of the apartment was composed of floor-to-ceiling windows seemingly designed with the sole purpose of bouncing a blinding glare off Carlos’ belongings at just the right angle so that it perfectly focused on the back of his retinas regardless of where he stood. The place seemed awesome when he toured it with his real estate agent. Now it just made his eyes water uncontrollably—or maybe that was his undiagnosed depression.
“Stop being dramatic,” he mumbled into the countertop. “You have everything you could ever want.”
Two years ago, Carlos was called into his vice provost’s office at MIT shortly following the TED Talk debacle. The graying Boston Brahman sitting across the clear plastic desk then informed him that, “Our classrooms are full of brilliant, impressionable, and hormonally riled young men and women whose attention needs to be focused on the contents of your head rather than…”
He cleared his throat and shot a quick glance south of Carlos’ belt, “that of your pants.”
Carlos shifted uneasily and subconsciously placed his hands over his crotch.
“I’m sorry, Professor Adab,” continued the vice provost. “But that means we must put you on indefinite administrative leave.”
Carlos’ myriad fellowships, speakerships, guest lectureships, and traveling professorships all fell in rapid succession. His life had run on a hyperbolically accelerated course practically from birth. It therefore made some sense, he thought to himself, that it should come to a crashing end just as he turned 23.
His academic and research careers over, Carlos was nevertheless deluged with work opportunities—99% of which were porn. Brazzers, Bang Bros, Smash Pictures, practically every major pornographic studio and creeper with a cell phone wanted to see his dick. He turned them all down, choosing instead to wallow in the darkest recesses of his Cambridge basement apartment.
Then, one day, he received an email from an influencer management agency that promised him no exploitation, no manipulation, and no porn. Carlos looked them up. They were legit, managing the accounts of some of the world’s largest sports, fashion, and movie stars. Then Carlos looked at his dwindling checking account and decided to take the meeting.
They were very understanding, very patient, very receptive to Carlos’ ideas. The agency built him an in-house studio replete with green screen and ring light where he recorded lectures at a desk, staring directly to camera, on what he thought were the most interesting scientific topics of the day. His managers edited, scheduled, and posted the videos on various social media platforms, taking a 70% cut for their efforts. Carlos was able to partake in his passion for educating the masses and everyone won because everyone made money.
Only, no one made money. Carlos’ viewership statistics and ad revenue were hopelessly anemic for the first three months. Carlos was despondent, sure he was once more about to spectacularly and publicly fail at his second career, but the agency knew exactly what to do. It brought in a branding expert, who restyled Carlos’ wardrobe, getting him to wear progressively tighter and more revealing clothes. He lost the khakis and polo shirts for short shorts and sleeveless Ts. They also convinced him to move from drabby New England to sunny, sensual Miami Beach, where his audience could better connect with his sexified aesthetic.
This brought in much more money, allowing Carlos to buy his own penthouse condo to serve as a more fitting backdrop for this new, social media broadcast persona. The hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing into his bank account also helped expand the Overton window of what he was willing to do to earn even more.
He agreed to allow his agency to rework his entire business model wherein, in their words, “Impressions will be drawn into the top of a marketing funnel via free, highly shareable content that then incentivizes viewers to convert to a monetized format by leveraging previous brand exposure into a call to action to premium audiovisual assets.”
In non-bullshit parlance, this meant starting an OnlyFans account and strutting around in tiny, sheer shorts with a full-blown erection. It also meant millions of dollars because, as he discovered post-TED Talk, everyone wanted to see his dick. So, in summation, yes exploitation, yes manipulation, and just barely no porn.
Things only went dismally uphill from there.
Carlos began pulling in millions of dollars, which, as a first-generation Filipino immigrant, allowed him to support his family to a degree he’d never dreamed. However, also as a first-generation Filipino immigrant upon whose shoulders his working-class mother and father seemingly placed all their aspirations and dreams, his public downfall meant his parents no longer spoke to him. They still cashed his checks, though. Carlos’ lola back in Luzon called him every few days, but she didn’t have a smartphone. The thought that his erection built her a state-of-the-art, three-story villa made Carlos simultaneously wince and smile.
At first, he took advantage of his newfound celebrity to have an awe-inspiring amount of sex. Everyone wanted him, so he could be selective about who he slept with. When the empty monotony of meaningless on-demand coitus sank in, he upped the ante. Threesomes (FFM and MFM), foursomes (FFFM, MFMF, and MMMF), swinging, pegging, leather play, rope play, foot play, navel play, elbow play, knee play, he even had a brief foray into furries (not his thing), but, eventually, everything bored him. He simply, perhaps permanently, lost the ability to climax. It didn’t help that his sexual partners kept trying to take pictures of his dick. So, he stopped hooking up altogether.
And so, we arrive at the present. Carlos recorded six videos a week—three fully clothed, three fully risqué—on topics his agency chose based on its analysis of the latest social media trends and algorithms. This took about four hours in total. Carlos spent the remaining 112 waking weekly hours catatonically working out, catatonically eating (see: downing powdered cardboard smoothies), or otherwise catatonically waiting to repeat one of those two activities.
In his more lucid moments, Carlos told himself he still educated millions of people around the world on pressing ecological problems. He spread awareness of critically important issues that threatened the lives and livelihoods of his enormous audience. He was important again! He was moving the needle! He was making a real difference! But then that same lucidity reminded him that the reason they watched him and not Bill Nye was because they weren’t interested in the latter’s penis.
Carlos glanced back at his watch.
It was now 12:35 PM.
15 minutes until it was time to catatonically walk to the gym.
He unlocked his phone and scrolled through his DMs—a terrible idea, he knew, but he had a quarter hour to kill, so why the fuck not?
Unsolicited dick pic.
Unsolicited dick pic.
Unsolicited butthole pic.
Unsolicited dick pic.[1]
Unsolicited vagina pic.
Unsolicited dick pic.
Cat meme. Funny.
Unsolicited tits pic.
Unsolicited butthole pic.
Unsolicited dick pic.
The odd thing about all the penises was that, more often than not, they were coupled with messages from supposedly straight men aggressively demanding to know if their pieces were bigger than his. Carlos didn’t have the bandwidth to undo that patriarchal Gordian knot. He locked his phone and decided to leave early to the gym.
He threw on a hoodie, facemask, and sunglasses (his customary uniform when leaving his apartment, as the last thing he wanted was to be recognized), grabbed a water bottle, and walked out the door.
[1] Huh, that one has a piercing.
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