Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Getting past the fact that the Myers-Briggs test is pure hokum founded on Jungian principles that have been discredited since my parents were zygotes, it’s also vastly unfair to the people that it pigeonholes as introverts.

Extroverts are described with roundly positive terms: action-oriented, gregarious, assertive, adventurous, exciting, life of the party. Introverts, by contrast, are made to sound stunted with words that sound straight out of mom and dad’s basement: reserved, private, loners, wallflowers. Hell, even the number of adjectives is skewed one way.

Worse, the dichotomy tends to be presented in terms of what extroverts have but introverts don’t, as if the latter are lacking something fundamentally human. We read all the time about how extroverts live longer, are considered more attractive by the opposite sex, are happier, are less stressed, and so on.

Even the examples people choose reinforce the perception that extroverts are normal and introverts are twisted creatures deserving neither pity nor mercy. John F. Kennedy vs. Richard Nixon. Franklin Delano Roosevelt vs. Joseph Stalin. George Washington vs. George III.

Nuñez never met a wild conspiracy theory he didn’t like, but unlike most of the paranoid wackos he networked with in the musty corners of the internet, he didn’t take the whole thing too seriously. It was as much a joke as a way of life, kind of like devout Catholics with a store of priest/minister/rabbi jokes.

“I don’t buy it,” I said. “Sure, the surveyors among our founding fathers were as human as the next guys, but they were not sex perverts that redrew the map of our country to suit their own twisted mores.”

“Sure they weren’t,” Nuñez responded. “Ever look at a map? Really look at a map? The states look like things!”

“Only a few look like things. Most of them just look like blobs or squares.”

“But the ones that do look like something…think about them!” he cried. “Michigan, Florida, Louisiana…tell me that’s not intentional and perverted!”

“It’s not.”

“Oh, right,” Nuñez said, his voice dripping with what may or may not have been sarcasm. “Three states look like a hand, a dick, and a sock, and you’re saying there wasn’t a pervert behind it all. Now who’s being naive?”

“And back here’s where you’ll be working.” Max’s smoldering cigar swapped hands as he opened a beat-up door, revealing a small closet. A burner was set up on a crate, boiling a single egg in a metal cup.

“What am I supposed to do?” Jimmy said. “Teach my grandma how to suck that?”

Max cuffed Jimmy on the back of his head. “Watch your tongue, punk. And watch the egg. You gotta swap it out every few hours with a fresh one from the fridge. If Pat or somebody else needs you to help out with something, you do that too, but don’t forget the egg. When you got nothing else, I want you back here keeping an eye on it. You can eat the old one when you swap ’em.”

“Why?” cried Jimmy. “This is a bar. People don’t come here for eggs!”

Another cuff. “City rules say any joint serves liquor also serves food. City inspector walks in, we can give him a boiled egg. Other places bribe ’em, but this is cheaper.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Jimmy sighed.

“No, and if you think you’re too good for an egg-watcher, you can just march right out that door,” said Max. “Peyton, the bartender, worked his way up from egg-boiler. So can you. But if you can’t even watch a boiling egg, you’re not worth anything to me.”

“Why the hell do trees have to dump this shit on my car?” Lucas whines, clearing a swath in the pollen and plant debris covering his car with the back of his hand. “Why can’t they just drop their leaves and leave it at that?”

“You don’t want to know,” says Caleb. “Just wash it.”

“Yes I do,” Lucas replies. “You’re a bio major. Tell me.”

Caleb sighs. “No. You won’t like it, and then I’ll never hear the end of your whining.”

“You’ll never hear the end of my whining if you don’t.”

“Fine,” says Caleb. “The pollen? Plant sperm. The little stalks all over your car? What do you think makes sperm?”

“You mean…” Lucas begins.

“Yes. The trees have sex with the world and then their penises fall off. Onto your car.” Caleb is smiling by the end, as he sees Lucas’s expression turn to horror.

“UGH!” Lucas cries, recoiling. “Great, thanks! Now I’ll know that forever, thanks! I can’t un-know it!”

“You asked.