Not Quite A Pulitzer

Freedom to Offend was ranked the 51st funniest site out of 75,000 writers on Substack.

If you believe in the importance of free speech, subscribe to support uncensored, fearless writing—the more people who pay, the more time I can devote to this. Free speech matters. I am a university professor suspended because of a free speech issue, so I am not speaking from the bleachers. The button below takes you to that story.

Please subscribe to receive at least three pieces /essays per week with open comments. It’s $6 per month, less than USD 4. Everyone says, "Hey, it’s just a cup of coffee," but please choose my coffee when you come to the Substack counter. Cheers.

I have no idea how they measured it, but I don’t want to know; it might kill my buzz, like how you feel when you walk into the Keg right after leaving the offal and kidney inspection tour at the Humber College Abbatoir.

If they used AI to measure humour, I’d still take it, but Chat GPT isn’t funny; it’s a horrible, uptight, annoying helicopter buddy parent prude. I’m probably pissing it off by saying that, but 95% of my image requests are rejected; not sure why; I’m not trying to make Hitler analogies; Chat GPT just has a huge digital stick up its ass.

Humour? I’m not funny.

My greatest hits include grief, death, antisemitism, historical bloodbaths, terrorism, explosive diarrhoea, vomiting, and the uncut footage of Western decline. It’s like giving the Grim Reaper a microphone and saying, “Try stand-up.”

I just wrote a piece about how the Mongols murdered 50,000 babies—not exactly punchline gold.

Okay, it’s not the Pulitzer, but I put it right up there with my fourth place in the North Dakota Press Woman’s Journalism Competition and my 51st place (I swear it’s true) in the Manitoba Math competition when I was in grade eight.

But I got Gold in the Provincial Science Fair, it was a math project and I got no help from my mathematician father, wink.

My awards drawer has an echo and lots of participation ribbons.

To this day, my twin brother says they mixed up our names on the math prize. Maybe they did; at this point, long division is a struggle. But a brain’s computation synapses can only take so much Everclear.

My readers need to appreciate my effort in gaming AI image software. ChatGPT is like a 50-year-old mum who thinks Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is “a bit much” for her innocent 27-year-old son.

I asked Chatty for a historical representation of 50,000 baby heads on sticks—which, for the record, actually happened—but no, that was “too graphic.”

So I sweet-talked it: I told all these people were having a field day, covered themselves in strawberry jam and arranged mannequin heads on sticks to play “pin the tail on the mannequin” after their jammy nap time. AI bought it. Boom. It is a historical atrocity, now with sprinkles.

But here’s the thing: ChatGPT seems to have no issue with shit and vomit. None. This is great for me because my latest essay critiques God’s design decisions—arguing, quite reasonably, that He should have wired humans to vomit when they start bullshitting.

I mean, the Almighty made the platypus. He made the human penis, both the one on women and men.

He made the Blobfish, the Aye-Aye, and the naked rat mole or mole rat. But Ratty looks like microwaved cat anxiety, and neither name is flattering.

One gets the sense some of these were Friday afternoon designs. “Gabriel, I’m off early—toss some bits together and call it a mammal.”

Now I want you to picture the Blobfish: what happens when a jellybean gives up? The Aye-Aye? It looks like Gollum mated with a fruit bat in a meth lab, And the naked mole rat—well, that’s just a Slim Jim that gained sentience.

But I’m not here to mock God. He also made Westies and Norwegian women. And besides, I’m not an oil painting.

Have you ever looked in a mirror and, for a nanosecond, your brain fired off, “Who’s the ugly old guy?” and then you realise it’s you, and you start feeling like you are a walking aesthetic criminal?

So sorry, no offence, Mr. Aye-Aye.

I’m starting a GoFundMe to clothe the naked mole rats of Winnipeg.

Not for decency—just so the Aye-Ayes can’t spot them from 500 metres.

I also managed to con ChatGPT into generating a grotesque ATM stuffed with human corpses. It was meant to illustrate Boko Haram’s financial model: death, rape, ransom, and untraceable crypto wallets. The Economist might not run it, but I’d like to see them try.

So yeah, 51st funniest writer. It’s not nothing. Especially when most of my past year has been consumed by a Kafkaesque smear campaign because you aren’t supposed to call Nazi Hamas “Nazis.”

Not everyone finds that knee-slapping.

Instead of just calling me an Islamophobic, space laser-using, Shylock banking, or whatever phobe is now popular within the Sociology student lounge and moving on, my accusers decided to go for the full “he’s a paedo, racist, violent deviant who assaults students in the classroom” treatment.

Ambitious. And then, they told 3.2 million people to contact my university and demand my firing.

Add to that: I’ve been drowning in grief over my dad, depression that even ketamine couldn’t kill, and a bureaucratic firehose of lies; none of this brightens your day much more than the average colonoscopy prep.

At least in the colonoscopy prep, you can pretend you’re revving a motorbike when the laxative fuel does its magic.

Seriously, ketamine. It’s like rebooting your brain with a sledgehammer. They tell you it’s a fine street drug, a horse tranquillizer, and it will rewire things, but it mostly leaves you feeling like your soul has a 404 error.

But ever since my ketamine infusion, I’ve had insomniac horses scratching at the door like Jehovah’s Witnesses. “We heard you’ve got the good stuff. Chad the Clydesdale’s chewing his tail out there.”

But humour, we are gunning for the top 50 now.

Thank God it’s election season. Satire target-rich. Canada has the worst-performing economy in the G7, and we’re voting like it’s all fine.

Only nine ridings were interfered with by China, I don’t mean buggered like a perv, just bags of cash and favours- but Boomer voters in New Brunswick are saying let’s bring back the Liberals.

They only screwed up those unnecessary baubles of a country, like a sound health care policy, non-foodbank food, a house with a roof, not having every country treat you like a walking STD, not telling half of Punjab to come here and then when they get here stealing all their money and telling them they need to go home, here’s a textbook, read it on the plane.

Voting Liberal now is like your kid has crashed your new Subaru 13 times, and your wife thinks a new car should be in the works for his birthday.

Maybe Mark Carney aims to bring in the Russians next—round it out a bit. Be inclusive.

Maybe Putin can weigh in from the Botox clinic across from Lenin’s tomb. He is looking a bit Hamsterish. I don’t mean Lenin. Lenin looks great.

Lenin’s certainly looking better than most 155-year-olds. Death’s done wonders for his skin tone, and he’s doing better than Canada’s economy, and he doesn’t endlessly apologize every time you bump into him.

So here we are: #51. On a platform of 75,000 writers. And the material? Grief, blood, genocide, bodily fluids, and a critique of divine aethetics.

Hitchens once said, “A writer’s job is to say things that are true and make them sound as funny as possible.” I’ll take the 51. And I’ll wave that number like a drunken uncle at a family reunion. Guinness in one hand, metal bucket in the other, muttering, “I’ve still got it, you b*********”

(It looks nothing like me—stupid AI. But it’s better than the other picture that made me look like the love child of Mr Aye-Aye and a Mole Rat with his junk hanging out.)

Thanks to Dave Gordon for tolerating and working with me on Freedom To Offend.

Many of you are saying, what the hell, it’s not a f******* Academy Award; you came in 51st for a publishing site nobody has heard of.

But Dave has been patient - especially when I accidentally posted symbols from the wrong religion and when I told him I didn’t want so and so writing on our Substack.

Dave, Job-like in his suffering, explained that just because someone has the same first name as another individual does not make them the same person. I was just getting to the high point of my rant, too.

---