Tucker Max School Of Entrepreneurism

I discovered Tucker Max a few years ago when I read I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Later I found it had been made into a movie, which didn’t make any sense to me because it wasn’t exactly a plotted sort of novel. Most of the time when I watch a movie I basically get pissed off that such drivel comes to the screen and it makes me feel the agitation that whatever I am working on is not going to hit the screen or the bookstores, while this mindless, uneducated trash is going to hit the NYT bestseller list and then get made into a movie. That is like my dream. I can come up with mindless, uneducated trash. No problem. Aim high, Nana always said. In fact, my internal dialog is mainly just a pitch meeting. Always. Ok, so a virgin guy with awkward social skills visits his aunt in Des Moines, where her car wash is under threat of foreclosure, and these horrible developers want the land, and these smokin’ hot neighbor chicks volunteer to help raise the money to save the car wash by getting really soapy and wet. And the nerdy guy gets laid. I must confess that this is usually the extent of my ability to conceive of a plot. If I haven’t seen it in a B-movie already, it’s likely I can’t conceive of anything original. But you know, human drama is always the same story told over and over. Sometimes you cook meth to reclaim your life, and sometimes you hold a bikini car wash. Sometimes you need to dispose of a body.

I won’t say Tucker Max is uneducated or necessarily mindless, because he is intelligent and hilarious. And his writing is comfortable. He is a misogynist with a heart of gold, and who doesn’t love that? I personally like midget sex, and Tucker is unashamed about it. I was nearly moved to tears to see the photo of him holding the hand of the midget he bedded in his second book, Assholes Finish First. So cute. But perhaps you aren’t turned on by a guy who gets drunk and uses poor young girls to feed what you might call his low sense of self-esteem masquerading as sexual prowess. That’s ok, because this guy is also a case study in success, and perhaps in the relative merits of being brutally honest and unashamed. He was turned down by every major publisher he queried. Not 499 out of 500, but like 1,000 out of 1,000. So he did what any self-respecting failure does. He took matters into his own hands. He started a blog back when it was still a novel idea—and not every mommy and internet marketer had taken to the web like cockroaches to pour out their impoverished souls—and he built a following by giving away his work for free, and then the publishers came knocking. Sure, it’s not Walter White kind of empowerment, but it’s something. And of course, that is why all these words here on my blog are totally free.

Which brings me to today’s idea (borrowed from Seth Grodin), which is that if you don’t start, you can’t fail. If you don’t actually rent the Winnebago and buy all the precursor, there will be no blue meth. I am mostly doing this to remind myself of this fact, and that failure isn’t as bad as never trying in the first place. Carpe Diem. I personally have the photos of the midget to prove it.