The Asshole is trending

No, not the asshole himself. But I have it on good authority that this guy is a close, personal friend. Perhaps he can introduce us?

Hey, stranger. Are you winking at me?

I feel like such a trendsetter. I paid homage to The Asshole very early during the existence of this blog. What is The Asshole? The answer is complicated. It is part dream, part philosophy, and part psychology. It’s an idea as big as The Beatles, the Dali Lama and Mother Teresa wrapped into one big ball of fun. It’s best friend, enemy, lover, and confidant. And yes, it is also a namesake for a critical piece of human anatomy, that which makes life possible.

I did some research prior to writing this post. That research was a bitch. They don’t always make it easy. Sometimes it is hard to answer questions like:

• What day was my first posting?
• When was the first time I used the word “asshole?”
• When was the first time I used the phrase “Society of Assholes?”
• How many posts contain the word “asshole?”
• How many times has the word “asshole” been used in a subject line?

Search has come a long way, but sometimes getting answers to seemingly simple questions like these can be a real bitch.

But I digress. Finally I did figure out a way to answer some of these.

I learned that my first post was on September 24, 2009. And the word “asshole” made it’s debut on my blog only four short days later on September 28, 2009, in one of my personal favorite posts of all time. You can’t see it, but right now I’m beaming with pride. Sometimes I can really come through. It only took me four days to birth the asshole on my blog.

If my research is correct, I invented the concept of a book entitled “Society of Assholes” by August 12, 2010. This post was prompted by a couple of news stories including the flight attendant who got fed up with his job, grabbed a couple of Blue Moon beers and slid his way off a plane and into history. This mythical book was going to be all about the various ways us humans are shitty to each other. Naturally it won’t exist (at least by me) since I’ll never actually get off my ass to write it.

Fortunately, though, these days other people are stepping up to pick up the slack.

In September 2010, a book called Assholes Finish First was published. (That’s a little under two months after I announced Society of Assholes on my blog. Coincidence? I think not!) This most promising tome is described as “some next-level shit” by the author. Hells yeah. That sounds good to me. Perhaps we were separated at birth.

And then, this week, Slate Magazine jumped into the asshole fray with something called the ACI. Yep, that’s short for the Asshole Correlation Index. Slate Magazine is the latest passenger on the asshole bandwagon. Woot! It’s an excellent read about pretentiousness in us humans.

Damn, I even wish I had written it. Of course there’s simply no time for that. I’m too busy being an asshole, too.