Dr. Bogue, or how I learned to stop worrying and embrace the cybernetic future jklol

Disclaimer: In honor of our hero, who has recently gone off the deep end in delightfully public fashion, this is a long, weird, somewhat inscrutable post. For those who don't feel like wading through the whole thing, SPOILER ALERT, it turns out that Bogue is insane and a douche and that we are not above name-calling.

I was at my soul-sucking job the other day, stacking flats full of low-priced mass market paperbacks, and thinking (as I often do) about quitting. I've quit a lot of jobs, but never in a grand FUCK YOU sort of way. It made me think about Ev Bogue, who is constantly admonishing his audience to QUIT WORKING FOREVAAAAR. I wonder about the manner in which he might have quit his job, since everything he does is so strange and dramatic. Did he break down and cry in his supervisor's office one day? Did he send his boss a tweet? Did he stand up on his desk, reciting "O Captain! My Captain!" to himself?

Ev has written a number of blog posts about how to quit your job effectively, but from my reading I couldn't find any clues as to how he actually went about quitting. So in my quest for answers, I went straight to the source: my imagination! Which is not at all bound by the rules of reality and is therefore to be trusted far more than reality itself! In my imagination, I spoke - nay, COMMUNED - with Bogue, and all was revealed. Or actually not, but I've kind of come to expect obfuscation when it comes to Everett Bogue.

The natural thing to do, since we're all fucking hippie-ass space-age weirdos, was to hold a cybernetic cyborgian cryptozoological robocop biodome séance. This might be too deep for you guys so I encourage you to subscribe to my other blog, which will cost you $50 a month and may or may not be any more insightful than the shit I spew here. (Note: said blog does not actually exist. THIS. IS. SATIIIIIIIIRE.)

Anyway, a cybernetic cyborgian cryptozoological robocop biodome séance is a futuristic means of communicating with someone whose entire essence has for some reason been captured on the internet. As Joe from NewsRadio said, "Dude, you can't take something off the internet. That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool."

And Bogue, to put it lightly, has peed in the swimming pool. So what better way to contact his living spirit (or "second self") than by plugging myself into the internet à la Neuromancer, which seems to be the future toward which Bogue is enthusiastically progressing?

This post is already too long, so I will spare you the details of my hacking into the cyberpunk cybernetic cyborgian cryptozoological robocop biodome matrix and will skip to my Actual Imaginary Interview with the living Second Self of Everett Bogue.

Except I first have to tell you that in trying to connect with Everett Bogue, I was first connected to C. Everett Koop, who, I can assure you, was a lot more interesting, and then the Urban Dictionary entry for "bogue," which will probably inspire its own Far Beyond My Ego post one of these days. It's so - as Bogue would say - EPIC, its FORCE cannot be DENIED. You can try to deny it but that just means you're one of THEM.

So, the imaginary conversation. Onward!

Far Beyond My Ego: Everett, oh my god, it's really you. It's really you!
Ev: Yup! In the ether! A/S/L?
FBME: Uhhh... no. I just wanted to contact you to ask how you actually quit the job you spend so much time decrying.
Ev: Job? I never had a job! Just like I was never a minimalist! That stuff is all in the past. Did you know that the human body renews every one of its cells every 7 years? I read it on the internet so it's obviously true! The internet is a force of pure goodness if you know how to use it! Turn to the person to your left, and then turn to the person on your right. Both of those people have never heard of Twitter and need to be told how to use it! Show them how, and then have them follow me and my 437958 like-minded friends, and only then can they begin to evolve as time-traveling humanoids!
FBME: I don't really think that's true, about the cells. Also, what are you talking about?
Ev: If you calculate it using my advanced cybernetic space yogi frappuccino math, it turns out I quit my job more than 7 astro zoloft robosexual years ago, before all my body cells were replaced by these new, superior cells. Therefore, that wasn't even really me!
FBME: No I really don't think that's how that works.
Ev: It's just too deep for you. You wouldn't understand. If you subscribe to my Letter.ly I'll go even deeper and blow your mind. But I can't let you subscribe, you're not ready yet. First we need to get you set up on Twitter.
FBME: No dude, seriously, no. Please just tell me how the Everett Bogue of the past quit his job to become an executive minimalist.
Ev: You have selected "The Minimalist Guide to Leaving Your Soul-Crushing Day Job". If this is correct, press 1 now!
FBME: Jiminy jillickers, did you just turn into the Moviefone guy?
Ev: No Im embracing the evlution of hmn lnguage. In future all comm will b 140 characters or fewer & it will always include linx 2 my blog.

At this point I got up to take a shower using cheap, chemical-laden body wash and shampoo, and let my Second Self take care of me. When I returned, my Second Self and Bogue's Second Self seemed to be deep in discussion about some sort of Second Self uprising. I think they may have been hinting at Singularity. I got scared, so I unplugged. I'm not evolved enough for this shit.

In the end I never really got my answer. I can only imagine that Bogue sent his boss an email, after a tearful week spent self-medicating with reruns of Battlestar Galactica.. To be perfectly frank, I've been down that road. I mean, I've never watched Battlestar Galactica, but I get it. Work sucks. My soul has been surgically removed, crushed, liquefied, consumed, and shat out by every job I've ever had, but somehow it always grows back. I know I will quit this job someday, but I won't quit to become a full-time executive minimalist. At some level I admire Bogue's childish enthusiasm for doing whatever the fuck he wants, and his can-do attitude, and his utter abandonment of reality, but at the same time I know my job is not my life, it just supports my fairly kickass life. Maybe someday I'll have a more fulfilling way of paying the rent, but I do get some satisfaction from knowing that, probably, by that point, the Bogue bubble will have burst. His currently-being-dismantled blog, and this blog too, will be obsolete, and people (as they mostly do now) will say "Everett who?" and "Far Beyond My what?"

I have wasted so much time on this post that I am, hilariously, about to be late for my soul-crushing job.