Let’s Read: How To Be Cool

Godless nerds, listen: for only $7.99 you can own a book containing all the secrets of being cool. This guide on being cool was published in 2018 and it’s called…

There has never really been a book like How To Be Cool by Todd Marcell. This is more like a hastily written speech for a preacher speaking in the background of a Tyler Perry scene. It’s fifteenish random bits of wisdom an uncle you’ve just met would say to you at your middle school graduation. It’s only 36 pages long (I had to count them by hand because there are no page numbers) and five of them are completely blank. Todd then used one page for a dedication, four to list the names of jobs, one for the table of contents, one for his email and actual home address, and one for a picture of a street sign at the intersection of Success Ln and Failure Dr. If you had every country in the world send their 50 coolest representatives to some kind of international council and they voted on the coolness of every picture ever taken, I firmly believe the fucking intersection of Success Lane and Failure Drive would be declared the least cool thing possible by Earth’s duly-elected Cool Council.

If you’re looking to un-nerd yourself, step one is looking at this radforsaken image and recognizing it as the opposite of cool. This is a PowerPoint slide in a presentation made by Satan for dead murderers who hate PowerPoint presentations. A person capable of opening a book called How To Be Cool with the least inspired business stock photo should not be trusted with adjectives. If this man calls something “sexy” you should assume that could mean anything from diarrhea to yesterday’s diarrhea. For a Coolness Author, dedicating an entire page to this picture is functionally no different from dedicating an entire page to a story about getting sent home from camp after a lifeguard had to pull a Garfield pool toy off your dick.

We haven’t actually started the book yet, and already you see two of the other notable features of How To Be Cool. The first is that Todd Marcell isn’t quite sure how to use punctuation or capitalization. In a time of ubiquitous spellchecking, in this “Revised Edition” of what is effectively a 23 page book, he randomly throws commas and capital letters into walls of misspelled words like the coolest kid at camp scattering tears onto the Garfield pool toy that won’t let go of his penis. The other thing you might notice is how Todd managed to stretch his very brief thoughts on coolness into 23 pages by using the biggest font the church computer had. If one more kid in this article fucks a Garfield toy, I will have written more words about How To Be Cool than the author included in How To Be Cool.

Weird Fact: Todd Marcell dedicates this terrible mistake to his father, William Smith, which is the same name of another author who wrote a book called How To Be Cool. Will Smith’s is a sarcastic “funny” book about dorkiness because anyone deciding to call their book How To Be Cool has no goddamn idea what that means. A book called How To Be Cool is like printing “Pussy Destroyer” on an XXXXXXL Cleveland Browns jersey. The product, by the very nature of its existence, will always be a ridiculous lie.

If you were hoping we’d eventually get to some tips on impressive ways to cross your legs or uncool condom flavors to avoid, sorry. This book is mostly about God. That might not sound super crazy, but let me remind you the first sentence in this guide on being cool is demanding the reader join the author’s religion, and the second is the author asking the reader what “cool” means. Assuming the picture of the intersection of Failure Dr and Success Ln only counts as one strike, STRIKE TWO, Todd Marcell.

The intro was about “Finding You,” but Chapter 1 is all about “Finding Self.” This is done by dropping whatever you’re doing, right now, and asking yourself who you are for the one million and first time. It’s not too late. I’m not sure something this poorly thought out deserves a joke. This is the first draft of a script where Tony Robbins swaps bodies with Adam Sandler. You would cut away from this rambling nothingness to a shot of Tony Robbins getting fucking annihilated at Adam Sandler’s rodeo clown job.

Chapter 2 is all about Confidence. I think Todd said it best in the first words of his chapter on Confidence, and I quote, “Confidence Confidence what is confidence? Confidence.”

Everyone has their own idea of cool. And while I don’t think anyone should define too much of their personality by this type of thing, I’m Generation X, so coolness to me usually means an ironic silliness that exposes the hypocrisy of a tired, broken establishment. And it’s hard to get a more elegant example of that than a religious author praising the power of “Communication” with 8 inches of incoherently punctuated gibberish. I think I have to take a lot for granted regarding the author’s intent, but this, by my own rules regarding silly irony, is cool as fuck. I dream about the day I’m cool enough to type an entire page without thinking about it or proofreading it and then end the whole thing with In the

If you want to know how uncool I am, I spent thirty minutes adding and removing a period to “In the” and thirty more worried you’ll discover that little boy with his dick in a Garfield was me.

I mentioned earlier how four pages of this is a list of jobs, but it’s important you know there was no more to it than that. He finishes the final chapter by saying, and I quote again, “I’m telling you it is a feeling like no other and that’s real talk so being cool isn’t so bad after all uh,” and then there is suddenly a bulleted list of jobs under the header List of Careers. So if the man who made 11 spelling mistakes in his 700-word chapter called “Educate Your Self” has inspired you to start a cool career, maybe check out Glazier or Lodging Manager. Or Customer Service Representative! Travel Agent! Derrick Operator! Chef! Even Cook!

Since Todd took this strangely short list of jobs from a Webcrawler search of “all jobs ever please +cool,” they are underlined like hyperlinks. Well, except for the two he clicked on before he copy and pasted them. Apparently Todd was interested in being a Ski Instructor and a Veterinary Technician. I normally wouldn’t bother including such a useless, jokeless observation, but in addition to forgetting where, to put commas I have no idea what’s cool anymore probably ski instruction? Anyway, thanks every, one and In the