Bagel Posthumously Awarded "Yitmotty"

hiter-than-white white man Red Bagel, founder and sometime-Editor of the commune was awarded his own publication's "You the Man of the Year" Award for the sixth year in a row, to no one's surprise. Bagel has been missing and presumed paranoid since the November re-election of evil incarnate George W. Bush, and Bagel's brother Gay presented the award posthumously to his own brother at a ceremony at the commune offices in Flatbush, New Jersey, even as Bagel's Caucasian manservant Rascal insisted his "master" was alive and willing to accept the award behind closed doors.

Gay Bagel, a miserable shell of a man, praised his brother with backhanded compliments on Red's lifelong career of spending a lot of time on something never once profitable.

"What can we say about Red that has not already been said in the poetry of stoned hippies everywhere," said Gay Bagel, reading from a fill-in-the-blanks form eulogy he acquired from the Internet. "My brother waged a war against the mentally stable everywhere in his attempts to spread the word of liars and morons. Without him around, the world is a little less prone to idiocy. But I've come here to bury Red, not to praise him, if I could but find the body. If I found him alive, then I would have come to bathe him and get him a clean suit, or at least have him cut his fingernails and stop dragging the name Bagel down into the sewers he smells like. I suppose all I really want to say here is: Red, if you are alive, anywhere, there are a lot of bills that haven't been paid yet and nobody can figure out how to get into the commune lockbox. All you here are witnesses—the man is this much closer to being declared dead, and soon I will be the boss of all of you."

And for the first time, the entire commune staff burst into tears at the thought of Red's passing.

Despite the sombering moment at the event, things cheered up when Rascal, representing Red Bagel himself, took the stage and promised us all our fearless editor was in the best of health, and thankful for his sixth consecutive win, making him the only person ever to win the YTMOTY, or "Yitmotty."

"Crikey, don't it beat all?" rattled the Australian manservant, who wore his best T-shirt to the ceremony. "Red misses y'all, I can assure ya, and soon as he feels it's 'all clear' to return to the surface, he's gonna join us for a three-week binge party of nothin' but lager, mates! Now… what say we drink up, for Red's sake?" Rascal, already drinking heavily before the announcement, devolved into a parade of Australian caterwauling understandable to no one, Australian or otherwise.

The event continued on into early evening hours, until most of us had drunken ourselves into a haze and all efforts to keep Omar Bricks away from the stereo finally failed. As 1980s nostalgia bombarded us through twin speakers, a few reporters spoke well of Red Bagel and his missing ass.

"There will never be another like Red Bagel—a man entirely devoted to his vision of a better America," said former Acting Editor Ramrod Hurley, now acting like a drunk. "An America of tomorrow, without fear and prejudice, without the suffering of the common man, and with a government forthright and honest with its own people. And now that he's gone, I call dibs on the boss job."

Hurley was bound, gagged, and wrapped in garish paper. The stamp on his head ordered us not to open until X-Mas, and I had to heartily agree.

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If you're like me, you're starting to wonder if they're ever going to come out with a pill that makes everybody beautiful, or if that was just the Twilight Zone blowing smoke up our asses. You also thought that by now the world would be overrun by test-tube baby freaks, babies with super powers or at least alarmingly rounded skulls like built-in helmets from gestating in a big glass tube. Isn't that some scary shit? You bet your cold sweat nightmares it is! I'd probably be the president by now if I hadn't lost so much precious sleep to the threat of a test tube baby creeping up out of my toilet tank with piano wire in hand, yikes.

But, unless you're living on the set of a Korean horror flick or you're the late Howard Hughes, that's a future that never came true. Why?

Finding an answer to that question involves a lot of legwork spent freak hunting, which is sort of like freak dancing except you don't get to rub your crotch on a girl. The reason this freak hunting is necessary is because you can't answer the question of why there aren't any test tube baby freaks running around until you've made sure there actually aren't any. After all, for all you know your neighbors could all be test tube babies grown up, and while you're at work they have meetings in each other's living rooms about how creepy it is to live next door to the freak who got squeezed out of a vagina thirty years ago. No wonder they never invite you to their BBQs, that's a disgusting image.

After a quick poll of everyone who happened to be in the commune offices this afternoon, I determined with statistical certainty that there aren't any grownup test tube baby freaks out running around. Nobody in the office was a test tube baby, anyway, though editor Red Bagel recently appeared on television eating babyback ribs and Lil Duncan once was allowed to skip a roadside sobriety test because she was wearing a tube top. Granted, the commune staff constitutes a limited (in more ways that one) sample size, but it's hot outside. Also, there was a Fed-Ex guy here who was on the wrong floor and he wasn't a test tube baby either, so I say that seals the deal pretty convincingly.

So what happened to all of them? Were they rounded up as infants and processed into lunchmeat? Or did they grow up together as a bizarre clan in a cloistered and secretive governmental environment, like Utah?

While this would explain an awful lot about Utah, there's no way the government would ever leave evidence of such an Orwellian conspiracy in plain sight of any random Olympics spectator or people who got lost looking for Colorado. The government likes to save that "in plain sight" hiding trick for when aliens crash land right at the same time SNL needs a new batch of writers for the season.

Long story short, it turns out all the test tube babies are now working at McDonald's. Well, not all of them, some work at Arby's and the other fast-food chains, but they're not allowed to run the giant meat slicer so they have to have at least one normal human on the staff there to make sure nobody gets very gradually decapitated. But nine out of ten test tube babies are now plugged in behind the counter at fast food restaurants; the tenth is making sure the salad bar at Old Country Buffet has twice as many olives as anything else.

How did this come about? In recent years, all the recent immigrants with poor English skills have been opting for higher-paying customer service jobs, leaving the fast food industry in need a cheap and unreliable workforce that could be made into McNuggets if the freezer ever crapped out unexpectedly. The first test tube babies began to come of age in the late 90's, but were generally useless since it turns out the mother's umbilical cord transmits some kind of nutrients that are important for fetal brain development. So the test tube kids were basically permanently stoned all the time.

What had been a frustrating problem for the government and their caretakers was a gold-shitting goose for the fast food industry, since they'd been looking for replaceable bands of idiots to run their restaurants for years. A few small changes had to be made to accommodate the new workforce, as the tubers' domed noggins required the addition of embarrassing foam mesh baseball caps to the standard fast food uniform to keep customers from flipping out and screaming uncontrollably mid-meal. But in the end the fast food chains got their wish: workers with no will to break who were willing to scrub Horsey sauce out of booster seats for eleven cents an hour and no benefits.

And really, terrible as the jobs might be, it was a step up for the tube babies, who'd lived most of their lives in lockers like the cast of You Can't Do That on Television. The only real losers were consumers, who haven't got a fast food meal right since 1997. You ever try to order something without pickles at one of these places? I rest my case. You'd have better luck getting them to notarize your living will. One time the guy just handed me a big bag of pickles that was stapled shut, it's like dealing with the rejects from a mannequin factory. Come to think of it, I think that was in a Twilight Zone episode, too. Eerie.

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Let the word come down from the Mountaintops, which is Red Bagel's nickname for the commune offices: Clarissa Coleman needs work. Sure, anyone who knows me knows I want work, but now I need work. My legal troubles are finished now, you may have seen the segment on Court TV or read about the out-of-court settlement in the paper, or The Guinness Book of World Records, the page on outrageous payoffs. Damn Jerry Nascar, that's all I'm saying. As for you-know-who, the nice lady who filed the lawsuit, I'm not legally allowed to mention her name ever again. So let's pretend I'm referring to someone else whenever I use the word Skankabitch.

Getting back to work, which is what I'm here for, let's just say the settlement is bad enough, but I've got legal fees by the buttload. Before all this, work was just some way to have fun and a shortcut to fame. Now it's do-or-die. I'm not having luck finding too many high-profile film and television roles to pay the bills—of course, that was the story before Skankabitch sued. So now I have to shorten the list of stuff I won't do even more. It's a talent clearance sale—every one must go.

It's a great sale for producers of weird shows. C.S.I., you listening? I'll even play a dead body. Bullets fly through my head, shatter brain and bone and crap—it looks like it hurts, but I'll try anything once. Any shows where I have to wear a prosthetic piece or a mask or anything, I'll do it. Put me in a gorilla suit, who cares? I don't even need any speaking lines. I'm eager to work. None of it can be any more humiliating than playing the ukelele with Taco on Conan O'Brien.

I turned down a reality series last year, before this bullshit came along. If you're one of those producers of Help! I'm a Celebrity, Don't Give Me a Sexually-Transmitted Disease I'm ready to talk contract terms now. Maybe you'll get on the air this year if you get bigger star power than Willie Tyler and Lester. So put me on the show. I'll call house meetings and everything, pretend like my feelings are hurt and stuff. I watch all those freak shows.

Not everybody's a producer, I know. Some people aren't involved with the wonderland that is television, not officially, but that shouldn't stop you. You want to make a funny home video? Have your kid swing a croquet hammer, hit me in the nuts—I don't have nuts, of course, but for a good-size paycheck I'll act like I have nuts. Rig a house to fall in, I'll make it look like it all happened by accident, I'll even make the funny noise so the video people don't have to do that. Or we'll sing some duet like Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond, I'll make them really believe you don't bring me flowers no more. Hell, I'm not picky. Don't send the video in, let's just make it for your own entertainment, you and your friends. We'll recreate all your favorite episodes of Who's Your Daddy?.

It's not limited to shows either. I can do the stage. We'll put on a burlesque act, like they used to do in France when it was classy and cool, or like they do now in Alabama. I do tame shit, too. I'll sing the Fabulous Thunderbirds at your daughter's Bat Mitzvah. I can do birthday parties, private Labor Day telethons, whatever your big deal is. Have a friend who's in the hospital and think it would be funny for a celebrity to visit them? Let's do it. Let's make it happen.

What I'm trying to say is, I need money, and I'm not picky. Just in case I didn't make it obvious. And just to save anybody else the troubles I've gone through, don't ever hire Jerry Nascar as an attorney. He knows dick about the law, like the judge says, and his "Thirty Minutes or it's Not Free" offer is trickier than it sounds.

I have to go over to Nascar's office right now. I'm doing a commercial for him to help pay off the legal bills.

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