text: My life is a farce. Just yesterday, my master sends me down to the swamp. He says, swim down to the bottom of the bog. Down there at the bottom, you’ll find a piece of seaweed that feels just a *little* bit different than all the other pieces. Pull that piece. Nothing will seem to happen, but something *will* happen--another piece of seaweed somewhere else will feel different now. So go find that one. And do that until all the pieces feel weird. Then pull all those seaweed pieces out, one by one. Two at a time ain’t no good. Gotta be one by one. Then line ‘em up on the shore. Wait for the hot sun to come out, the one that comes out on Thursdays. We got three suns. Cold sun, Color sun, hot sun. Gotta wait for hot sun. So hot sun comes out, dries out all the seaweed. Now it’s rigid. Except it ain’t brittle like regular seaweed gets when Hot sun does it’s thing to it. It’s fucking hard like a rock. It’s the hardest god damn thing I’ve ever felt. I’m feeling pretty good. So I ask my master, what next. What do I do with this rock hard seaweed. He tells me, okay. So take that seaweed, and you’re gonna weave a basket out of it. A basket. Okay. So a-weaving I go, and I make a nice basket. He says okay. Now buy a hot air balloon. And attach it to the basket. I tell him hey man, I made the basket too small. You didn’t tell me what the basket was for and I made it way too small, there’s no way I can sit in this if it’s a hot air balloon! He says, that’s part of the test. So I buy a hot air balloon. Attach it to this rock hard seaweed basket thing. And he says go up to the ionosphere in this thing. Fine. Okay. I barely know where the ionosphere is but I figure it's upwards. So I stand in the basket, one foot only, that’s all that fits, and I light the flame of the hot air balloon, which is hot as all hell on my head because I can’t sit down, because the basket’s too small, and I ride it up to the ionosphere. It’s starting to get real cold, even with the flame and all from the hot air balloon. I’m getting real worried that the balloon is gonna deflate, because the air’s so cold and thin. The oxygen is hella thin. It's completely inconvenient to breathe, in a way I'm loving roughly 0%. I call my master and I say okay, I’m in the damn ionosphere, what now. I did everything you asked. What do I do. He says okay. He googles something. He’s kind of trying to hide that he’s googling something but I see him do it, it’s facetime and I can see him typing something on his phone with a really puzzled look on his face. So I say it. I don’t care that he’s my master, I let him have it. “Hey man, I see you’re googling shit. You’re just making this up as you go. You don’t have anything to teach me. The only thing you’re teaching me is that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing!” So I say fuck this guy. And I lean to my left and I fall my ass out of the hot air balloon on purpose, and I’m plummeting to earth with my arms folded, because I’m pissed off and I want everyone to know it. I see the earth racing up to meet me. I’m about to hit a rocky outcropping and I’m about to cry, I’m visualizing my body breaking on those rocks and my ribs and my lungs cracking and collapsing and all my blood flying everywhere, and my hands being pulverized to dust and my eyeballs flying out of my skull and going 500 feet, and I’m weeping uncontrollably, the images are flying through my head faster than I’m even falling, and I cry out to god. And I say, “fuck you, you old bastard. You’re gonna make my fucking eyeballs fly out and my knees pop off and my feet explode on this crumby old fucking rock outcropping. You made these rocks and you made gravity and that’s why you’re the dumbest old bitch alive.” And suddenly I stop. I look down. I’m an inch from the rocks, from the rocks that were so sure to end my life, but I’m not falling. I’m levitating. I look up and there’s my master. He’s levitating me. He tells me I passed my final lesson. I was ballsy enough to call him and god a dumb old bitch. And then, I fought him in that rock outcropping, and I kicked his head clean off with my first punch. And that’s how I got to be the proprietor of this dojo here. So it’s 45 dollars for the first month, and then 90 for the rest. Yeah. We send you a bill in the mail and you mail a check. No, I’m sorry, we really don’t do direct deposit. Yeah. Sorry.