Jo: H! I got a new book for ya.
Be right back, banging my head on the wall in joy.
Jo: Oh come on. It shouldn’t be that bad this time… I found it under a section labeled “TESLA.” And it’s called The Notebook. So it might be about Nikola Tesla’s lost inventions!
It's true, he was an amazing badass.
…this is what I feared.
Jo: I thought you liked crazy science!
I do. But TESLA is one of the Literary Devil’s many acronyms here.
Fangzor: Y’all should use the Dewey Decimal System before I have to choke a bitch.
Go ahead and choke a bitch then, unless you want to organize it.
Anyway, Jo, TESLA the acronym stands for Tear-Extracting Surgical Lacrimotherapy Apparatus – a thing created for the sole purpose of making people cry, to create the illusion of true quality and generate revenue for the practicioner.
Jo: Oh yeah, I was wondering why there was a kissing couple on the cover of the blueprints to an earthquake machine.
Fangzor: The real earthquake machine must be in the bed, ifyaknowwhatimean. They’re having sex, ifyaknowwhatimean. He’s putting his–
Jo: We know what you mean.
Non-literary "manual" TESLAs, usually involving instruments like the ones above used on the tear ducts, are currently banned in 39 states and 20 countries.
Fangzor: That traditional TESLA picture looks awesome. I want that done on me sometime. Maybe then I’d “grow a pair” like people keep telling me to.
No, you don’t. Anyway, Nicholas Sparks is one of the more famous creators of literary TESLAs. And here is a review of perhaps his most famous TESLA:
This book is actually about old people. Those two young people on the cover are spies.
Writing Quality: 5/10
Thematic Quality: 1/10
Reader Interest: 0/10
Overall Quality: 2/10
Let’s take a look at how this book opens, for starters.
“Who am I?”
...I'M JEAN VALJEAAAAAN!
“And how, I wonder, will this story end?”
"OBJECTION! Your honor, there is no story as of yet for which we can make any speculations regarding the ending!"
“The sun has come up and I am sitting by a window that is foggy with the breath of a life gone by. I’m a sight this morning: two shirts, heavy pants, a scarf wrapped twice around my neck and tucked into a thick sweater knitted by my daughter thirty birthdays ago. The thermostat in my room is set as high as it will go, and a smaller space heater sits directly behind me. It clicks and groans and spews hot air like a fairy-tale dragon, and still my body shivers with a cold that will never go away, a cold that has been eighty years in the making. Eighty years, I think sometimes, and despite my own acceptance of my age, it still amazes me that I haven’t been warm since George Bush was president. I wonder if this is how it is for everyone my age.”
See this? It's a board -- not to be confused with my state of mind one page into this tripe. That's spelled differently.
Unfortunately, I did read through it. So did Fangzor.
Jo: I wasn’t allowed to read it because the Hellbrarian is running out of pillows for me to cry into.
Fangzor: Yeah, well, the TESLA effect didn’t work on me, or the Hellbrarian.
Yeah. But I only cry at Disney movies, and you only cry at the Care Bears movies.
Fangzor: Hey, it’s some pretty depressing stuff!
…
Fangzor: No really. I was crying for the chumps who animated that crap.
Oh, that makes more sense.
Back to the book. There’s no real message to it, other than if you try really, really hard, you can make your old wife with Alzheimer’s acknowledge your existence again.
Fangzor: Which is a load of hooey. If you wanna do that with your old wife, you have to smack her on the ass with a live trout and recite William Blake poetry. It’s a technique my granddad taught me.
…whatever. Like I was saying, the only thematic purpose this story serves is to make you cry. If it fails to do that, you won’t take anything away from this book. The writing isn’t good, the emotion is all cheesy BS, the main characters are first-world-problemites – it’s about as necessary a book for the human race as cocaine is necessary for anteaters. What I took away was a great deal of wasted time – but thankfully, it was short. Still, I’d recommend avoiding completely.
Fangzor: Or, if you want a more authentic experience of TESLA, take a crazy straw, shove it in your tear duct, put the other end in your mouth, and suck.
That defeats the purpose of TESLA. There has to be a practicioner carrying out the procedure who you have to pay.
Fangzor: Yeah, so, you can pay yourself and double your money.
Money doesn’t work that way.
Fangzor: I’M A SNAKE, SO FUCK OFF.
Jo: There are times when I wonder why I took this internship over the pink slime factory job…
Next up: something else drippy
The Library of Agony 