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.
“The morning always has a way of creeping up on me and peeking in my bedroom windows. The sunrise is such a pervert.”
“Stairs, are they going up or are they going down? They’re so confusing! If love were a physical thing, it would be stairs.”
“I want to be the first and second man to dance on the moon. No, I won’t moonwalk. But I will Cha Cha—with my clone.”
“I belong, and my penis, it be long.”
“A blanket that has arms to hold you when you are sad, now that's what I call a comforter.”
“Money is seen as a great evil. But I've never seen a pile of cash stab someone.”
“Through the window yesterday I saw a fool talking to himself, and it made me laugh, until I realized it was a mirrored window.”
“I like making money. I make it out of wood. I make nickels mostly.”
“I wish I had five wives, one for each day of the workweek. This would leave me the weekends to enjoy time with my two mistresses.”
“You can tell a lot about a person's character by how they do life's menial tasks. For example, I saw my neighbor washing dishes, and I could immediately tell that he was an adulterer by the way my wife's naked body glistened through his kitchen window.”
“I've been trying to start a garage band for over a decade now, but father won't move his car.”
“I want to be an actor. I’ve already started taking steps. Yesterday I applied to be a waiter.”
“I’m not courageous. In fact, when I shadow box I wear boxing gloves that are outfitted with flashlights.”
“Last year I built a Courage Machine, but I thought it might be noisy and was too afraid to turn it on. So I coated it with glue, covered it with cat hair, mounted it on my wall, and started claiming it was an exotic animal I killed on a Safari in Africa. I'd like to believe people believe me, on account of it being so strange that it has to be true.”
“Sometimes I ask myself, "Do I have the courage to do the right thing when it matters most?" And that answer, I'm afraid, is silence.”
“Is there anything more pathetic than a flower that doesn’t get enough sunlight and dies, because it couldn’t get out of bed until four in the afternoon?”
“On the scale of tomato to ketchup, my girlfriend is definitely a 57.”
“You can’t put a price tag on love. But if you could, I’d wait for it to go on sale.”
“I can tell if two people are in love by how they hold each other’s hands, and how thick their sanitation gloves are.”
“When I saw you, I saw love. When I saw you naked, I saw lust. When I saw you with my clone in a dream, I saw the future.”
“Love one person at a time, that’s the motto I’ll try to get my clones to live by.”
“I want to write my own eulogy, and I want to write it in Latin. It seems only fitting to read a dead language at my funeral.”
“I have always loved camping, ever since I was eight, and was forcibly stuffed in a trunk and dropped off in the middle of the forest. My dad was a complex man, but I believe he was trying to show me the value of camping.”
“His name was Tom Tombstone, and if he had a middle name it was probably Death. But I didn’t call him Tom, or even Mr. Tombstone, because he introduced himself as Robert Winston. And I wondered how this stranger could shake my hand, look me in the eye, smile, and expect me to believe such a bold-faced lie?”
“Some people try to change the world one life at a time. Others try to change the world one death at a time. And I try to change the world one bucket full of dirt at a time.”
“Love is what you make it. Unfortunately, I can’t make it today, as I have a doctor’s appointment.”
“If love were a dolphin with wings and a unicorn’s horn, being ridden by a blind leprechaun dressed like Rasputin, would you believe in second chances for love at first sight?”
“Love is a bicycle with two pancakes for wheels. You may see love as more of an exercise in hard work, but I see it as more of a breakfast on the go.”
“I love Huey Lewis, but not the News, because the News is too depressing.”
“What is art? Art is tar, rearranged. Art is tar on canvas or tar on tarp or tar on a naked body. Art is a bird chirping changed into something visual. Art is an image of a thousand beaks breaking into the office of a quack doctor. I know that doctor, and I've personally spoken to ten of those beaks. Art is rhythm, two hands clapping at a urinal while a third shakes off pee to the beat. Good art stays with you your whole life, especially if that good art is a tattoo. Good art is my name, written backwards, inked on your upper lip in a furry font. Art imitates life, just as life imitates Orafoura. Art can be anything from a Manet to a Monet to a painting of money to a missile. Art can save the world, or devastate it. (We could drop another big bomb on Japan, though I'm not advocating dumping Basquiat paintings on Hiroshima). Art rhymes with a bodily function, and everybody should let their creativity rip everywhere from the privacy of their bathrooms to small heated boxes with four of their closest friends. Art is thinking outside that box, and desperately trying to escape.”
“I’d love to try to sell a blank white canvas to an art dealer. And when he asks what it is, I’d tell him, “It’s a landscape painting of Key West, from the perspective of an optimistic blind man.”
“My favorite color on canvas is nudity.”
“If I could capture the rays of the sun in a can, I'd paint a canvas with it and have you look at my work until the memory of my work was burned in your mind and your retinas burned out.”
“Batman’s cape would make a great canvas for a cave painting.”
“Snow on one side of the canvas, silence on the other. I’d call that a perfect painting.”
“A blank canvas is so abstract that only imagination can fill it. But wait! Don't hang it on the wall like that. It's upside down.”
“Two become one when two are in love—or when the waitress asks about our dinner bill. I’ll pay next time, I promise.”
“I want to grow a flower for every time someone tells me “F*** you.” Then I’ll go back to that person and pin the flower on their lapel in a gesture of friendship. And while they are looking down on it in astonishment, I’ll bunch up my knuckles and punch them in the face.”
“I want to be the Everyman and take an IQ test and get a perfect 100.”
“Bring on hyperinflation! I want to be a millionaire with minimal work.”
“I have slightly less than 60 miles to go, and I’m going slightly faster than 60 miles per hour. I should arrive in a bad mood.”
“The way I wrestle five-year-olds makes me think if I were ever attacked by a pack of midgets, I’d be OK. ”
“I never understood the term “Ass hat.” Not until I misplaced my Fedora, and decided to cover up my disheveled hair with underwear.”
“The closer I get, the faster I have to go. Otherwise, I might be late to the very place where I’m not even expected. Adding to my tardiness is the fact that I don’t even know where I’m going. And I can’t get from here to there when I don’t even know where I am, let alone where I’m going. All I know is I’m going fast, but not fast enough.”
“If you could smell my smile, you’d nose how bad I want to kiss you. But you can’t, and I don’t.”
“The most the average person probably reads in a day is a STOP sign or two. And based on how people drive in Jacksonville, I don’t think they even read that much.”
“There are shades of schadenfreude. My favorite shade is bright red, from a haughty spanking.”
“I could have thought up a lot of things, but many great people had to go and live before me. They might have stole my thunder, but I’ve got a tight hold on the lightning.”
“I’m not descended from anybody. All my ancestors are ascending from me.”
“I want to meet the girl of my dreams, and then immediately try to sleep with her—for between six to eight hours.”