Arthur Graham’s Reviews > Gone with the Mind > Status Update

What would you say if someone said to me, "I don't think there was any reading. I don't think there's any autobiography. I don't think there's any fucking video game. I think you and your mom just came to a mall, came to a food court, sat down, and had something to eat. And I think you just stood up on a table and started talking like some fucking nut job."

Armin Meiwes was a forty-two-year-old computer expert from a small German town called Rotenburg who, in 2001, posted an advertisement on the website Cannibal Café stating that he was "looking for a well-built eighteen- to thirty-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed." Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes, an engineer from Berlin, answered the notice, and was then, as advertised, slaughtered and consumed by Meiwes.

Okay, last couple of things before I get started . . .

I remember telling someone once that urologists put such a tremendous amount of Vaseline on their fingers before they do a digital rectal exam that your asshole ends up feeling like an eclair or a cannoli.

But that's what nonfiction is, people. Shitty feelings and encounters with death. And that's why we're here tonight.

"Would it be so terrible for a man who perseveres under the Damoclean threat of cancer and the ever-present specter of assassination to simply try and have one last meal with his old mother in the food court of a mall?"

At some point in this preliminary stage when I'm still just trying to figure out what this book could actually be, the Imaginary Intern appears . . . which changes everything.

Before I start, I'd like to say: Fuck everyone who said I was too paradoxical a hybrid of arrogant narcissism and vulnerable naïveté to succeed in life (even though they were right). Also, I'd like to dedicate this to all the nematodes and hyperthermophilic bacteria who live in deep-water sulfide chimneys around the world. Good days are coming, boys.