Jarod Kintz
This is it, this is my biography. The story of Jarod Kintz begins now.
Let’s knock out the trivial first. I was born in Salt Lake City on March 5th. Now that you know my birthday, please feel free to get me birthday presents. Notice how I used the plural, presents? More than one gift would be greatly appreciated. Appropriate gifts include gold coins, bars of silver, and large tracts of land (preferably beachfront property). Or you could just buy me a drink—soda, natural, because I don’t drink either alcohol or high fructose corn syrup.
Skipping ahead a few years, and a few hundred miles, we come to Denver, Colorado. For a few years I attended Mackintosh Academy. In the second grade, along with English, I studied French, Spanish, and Japanese. Out of all those language classes, I remember one word: Andrea. That was my girlfriend at the time, the one who left me for my best friend. I guess I remember two words, as I remember his name too, but his name is almost sacred, as a name that shall never be uttered.
Right after second grade ended my family moved to Jacksonville, Florida. It was Jacksonville that I would come to know as home, and would attend the rest of my schooling until college.
At this point I was a mediocre student. I believe I had a perfect 2.0 grade point average from third grade until I graduated from high school. My favorite classes were art, P.E., and lunch. Oh, is one of those not a class? No way—I believe art is still considered a class.
When not cracking jokes in class, I would be doing one of three things: drawing, passing notes, or sleeping. In high school I started to not only be mentally absent from class, but physically gone too. I’d skip class like a flat rock skips across a pond.
After high school, it was on to college. In all I have attended six colleges. I bounced around like a dodgeball on a trampoline. If you count the college classes I took starting my junior year of high school, then I got my four-year degree in nine years. And if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it at least twice as well as everybody else—or at least at least twice as long.
I graduated with an English degree from the University of Florida, but I took creative writing classes from both UF and Florida State University. All though college I fancied myself a fancy man, because I was an aspiring writer. Mostly I wrote t-shirt slogans and other pithy things. In the spring of 2005 I did manage to sell a line of t-shirts to Urban Outfitters.
That is my lone success in life. Seriously. Well, so far anyway. But my story is just beginning. I plan on failing my way to success. I have been rejected by literary agents, publishers, MFA programs, all sorts of women. But still I keep writing.
I have written many “books,” and I use the term books loosely. Mostly they are just compilations of my random thoughts and one-liners. But I like writing them, and people seem to like reading them. and that’s what it’s all about, right?
All my books are self-published, either through iUniverse or the wonderful Amazon Kindle program. I encourage everybody to write. Share yourself with the world. If there is one thing I like to impress upon people, it’s that you can do it, even if you can’t. Just keep can’ting until eventually you can. And you can quote me on that.
“To most people, if you’re muttering, you might as well be speaking a foreign language. I should know, because in college I took two years of muttering.”
“I think eulogies are wasted on the dead. It’s the living who need to hear kind words spoken about them.”
“Science doesn’t listen. Science has mice growing out of its ears. Wait, I mean human ears growing out of its mice.”
“The internet is a knowledge omelet. Sometimes I just want the purity of scrambled eggs that only a book can provide.”
“Sunburns are so embarrassing that they always make me blush all over.”
“If somebody pushed you down a well, I’d rush over and toss you a bucket, because I’m fucking thirsty.”
“I want to be like air. Invisible, yet everybody needs me in their life.”
“I’m like a tree frog when it comes to birthdays. Basically, my thoughts on birthdays can be summed up in two words: tree and frog.”
“If you replace the letter "s" with the letter "x," you can make a lot of plural words naughty. For example, "fences" would become "fencex," and I'd say good fencex makes good neighbors.”
“She had breasts that sagged to her knees. But that's ok, because when it got cold, I could see her nipples through her kneepads.”
“I don’t dress like I have any money. And I don’t have any money, which helps enable me to dress like that.”
“Tickets are 40 bucks at the window, and 190 bucks if you actually go through the window to get them.”
“In five years I want to go equally as far as I have come in the last five years. No, farther. Five years ago I embarked on a journey that led me to this point, so five years from now I’d like to be six years older.”
“I think coffee is the best drink known to man. I also think that wine is the best drink known to woman.”
“I often wonder about lifetime warranties. The lifetime of whom or what? A fly that can live to be a month old, if it was born in the beginning of February?”
“Love reminds me of when I was six and had a pet goldfish named “Silverbird” that I carried around the house, petting it like a cat. Needless to say it died. So I ate it.”
“Distributing unsolicited You’re Welcomes, it’s a thankless task. It’s almost as if people don’t want to see me at 4 AM as I knock on their doors.”
“If facial expressions had fur, then I’d snuggle your sneer. It’s so ugly it’s cute, like one of those little dogs, the kind Ryan Lilly has.”
“One javelin through five people is like a murder kabob. Saves bullets.”
“I train for the winning moments, hoping all those seconds off the clock will lead to firsts. I train for seconds, that’s all—not even a cumulative minute—and that’s why I only ever earn seconds. Still, I’d rather have time and silver than gold and sweat.”
“I can’t work well when I am under stress. It reduces me to normalcy. Stress is my kryptonite. And I usually don’t change in phone booths, though I do take long distance showers there.”
“In 50 years, I’m going to tell my grandchildren, “Back when I was growing up we didn’t have teleportation devices. We actually had to walk to school. In the snow. And shoes hadn’t even been invented yet.”
“My initials are J.O.K., and then there is a silent "E" on the end. And not only is it silent, but it's also invisible.”
“Last week I was very ill. I'm finally starting to feel like myself again. Which is great, because before I felt like Napoleon. And let me tell you, my clothes were much too large.”
“I painted my walls yellow, with melted butter, because I recently discovered that I had a popcorn ceiling. It’s this kind of reasoning that leads me to think I might make a great politician. Vote for me because hey, I can’t be worse than the other guy.”
“I sometimes lie awake at night wishing I had all the answers. But I guess only God has all of them, while I only have one answer: I do. Now I just have to wait for the perfect question to use it on.”
“Sometimes I wish I had been born with cat fur, whiskers, and a tail, though I guess I am grateful that at least I was born with my very own litter box.”
“If jellybeans came in a broader flavor base that included emotions too, I’d avoid the red ones, because they would taste like rage.”
“I don’t understand people who eat Chinese food with chopsticks when the restaurant also offers silverware. As a tool, chopsticks are inferior to western utensils like the spoon and fork. So why use them? That’s like showing up to a math test with an abacus, knowing that the teacher is going to be handing out calculators.”
“It’s possible that I couldn’t handle the truth, but I sure wouldn’t mind fondling it to find out.”
“I was looking for a reassuring hand to hold and steady my own, and I finally found it on the other side of my body.”
“I may not be the greatest American, but I am a better American than all the people born in Canada that still live in Canada. I wish Justin Bieber were one of those people.”
“I guess I should be thankful. Full of thank. But what is thank? I can't eat thank, so I know my stomach isn't full of thank. I can't smell or breathe thank, so I know my lungs aren't full of thank. I'm not even sure how much thank I could fit in the trunk of my car. But I do know one thing. It's much easier to give thanks than something that actually costs money to give.”
“I think it would be funny to dye somebody’s pool red and then throw dead fish in it. And before you run out of there, you could leave a stone tablet with these words etched in: God is angry with you and has decided to go all Egypt on you.”
“With issues regarding nipples, I always try to stay abreast of the subject.”
“My dreams have wings. But not soaring eagle wings, more like the wings of a butterfly—colorful and easily ripped off. The last time my dreams got ripped off was when I shopped at Walmart, the place where freedom soars like a caterpillar under the foot of oppression.”
“I think I have a strange thing growing out of my neck that causes me to think too much.”
“I got a small package in the mail today, and I thought it was the midget stripper I bought off eBay. But it was just a pair of shoes I ordered. Didn’t matter, I still made them dance for me.”
“If my initials were Y.E.S., I’d probably go around smiling all the time.”
“I am a contraction. I am I’m.”
“When I visit England, I want to bring back the best souvenir an American can get: a British accent.”
“If beards flowed like rivers, then I’d stop shaving my facial St. John’s, and I’d have one of the few major beards in the world that grew north.”
“When I was a little boy, say 17 months old, I lived in the forest. I was raised by bears. We had a good time. We laughed a lot. At least I think we laughed a lot. I can’t really say, because I was too young to remember.”
“My left hand is my bad hand. I spank it with my right hand. You might call it clapping, but I call it discipline.”
“Courage comes in many forms. One of them is the ability to run at high speeds while wearing adult diapers.”
“It’s spring now, and I was just thinking that I haven’t been in love since the fall. The fall of the Roman Empire.”
“I am excited to report that I may have gotten a job as an elevator attendant. It's a three-flight elevator, and my primary objective is to push one of three buttons, 1,2, or 3. I know, it seems complicated, but I am sure I am intellectually mature enough to handle it. I feel confident that I have this job because the owner of the elevator operating company, Mr. Pushkin, of Pushkin Push-button Services, shook my hand, winked at me, examined my index finger for button-pushing capabilities and then licked my armpit. It was very flattering. Since he is obviously a man who is continually rising in the elevator world, I asked him for some life advice. And do you know what he told me? He leaned in close so that his blue eyes were about two inches from my face, and then he leaned around to my ear and whispered, “Some men never leave the ground floor, and some men rise to the top. Still other men, like myself, enable these penthouse executives to reach the pinnacle of their company. But I never carry on conversation in an elevator, or at a urinal, and I’d never install a urinal on an elevator, for fear that men would be more inclined to converse freely as they traveled and emptied their bladder.” And without hesitation I replied, “Mr. Pushkin, I never shake a man’s hand after he just got done pissing, or shake my penis more than three times after pissing, but I am certain that I could operate an elevator equipped with a urinal. I know how to keep both my mouth and my pants zipped shut.” That’s when he glanced down and noticed that my fly was down. I was so embarrassed until he reached his hand down to my crotch and zipped me up as he winked and said, “It happens to the best of us.” And that’s when I noticed that not only was his fly unzipped, but his penis had been hanging out the whole time he’d been talking to me.”
“Love is like a banana, and I keep it in my pocket on cold days to warm up my hand.”
“I would offer to meet up for some coffee, but I don’t drink coffee. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to burden you with my personal problems. It’s just that I haven’t been the same since the Folgers fiasco of ‘04.”
“When somebody tells me they’ve had a bad day, I always respond in a somber voice, “Yes, I’ve had one of those too. August 15, 2004.”