Author: Merritt K
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Nerding Day: Hook Action Figures
David Wynn Miller was once a humble tool and die welder. At some point in the 1970s, a back-alley surgeon removed his kidneys and adrenal glands. This caused his heart to restart, jacked his IQ up to 200, and made him biologically immortal. A few years later, he went through an experience that embittered him against the American legal system. So, what is an undying supergenius who can’t pee right anymore to do when he’s denied justice? You got it: invent a magical language to thwart the global tyranny of maritime law.
That magical language is called “Quantum Grammar,” and it’s based on math. As David put it, nobody ever fought a war over a mathematical equation. Ergo, find the perfect language, and you solve human conflict. Also you can use it to prosecute legal professionals, maybe? The power of Quantum Language is such that judges run out of the courtroom when David enters. It is a robust magic system that rivals anything you would see in a Brandon Sanderson novel.
Let’s start with David’s name. He styled himself with colons and a dash, pronouncing it “David-hyphen-Wynn-full colon-Miller.” This is the most basic of Quantum Grammar techniques — adding the hyphen and colons transforms David from an “adjective pronoun fiction” to a fact existing in the now-time dimension. This frees him from the Universal Postal Union’s thrall of adverb-verbs. Pretty straightforward stuff.
More broadly, the idea is that if you can understand the Correct Sentence Structure Correct Syntax — sorry, CORRECT – SENTENCE – STRUCTURES – COMMUNICATION – PARSE – SYNTAX – GRAMMAR – PERFORMANCE = (C.-S.-S.-C.-P.-S.-G.-P.), then you attain the power to penetrate legal fiction. Yours will be the drill of truth that pierces the heavens and possibly the skull of a meddling judge.
Because “sentence” is a part of language, but also a thing that happens in court? A court is a foreign vessel in dry dock, by the way. That’s because the world is secretly governed by maritime law.
David didn’t invent this part. Maritime law conspiracy is that old-timey kind of conspiracy theory, back before everything was drawn into the white grievance ur-conspiracy of Q when baby boomers got on social media in the late 2010s. It used to be that American lunatics believed in things — specific, incredible things like Bigfoot being an immortal magician who lives deep beneath the earth’s surface or the American judiciary being secret admiralty courts with no real power. David did add a specific twist to the maritime law theory though, stating that it presides because “Earth is a vessel in a sea of space,” which is a beautiful sentiment to be expressed by a character in an Asimov novel, if not a solid foundation for legal practice.
David espoused his theories on his website, in a book, and in seminars he ran for decades which sometimes went up to nine hours long. Let’s dive into one of them.
Did you know that when the government writes instructions, they don’t use adjectives? Did you know that one third of the words in all of the world’s holy books are missing? Did you know that we didn’t elect a president in 1999? That’s because the Treaty of Versailles says that no law takes effect for 90 days until after it’s signed. Did you know that international bankruptcy has been around for 6,500 years?
Shit. This is a lot to take in. We’re talking about international banking and ancient religion. Can we bring it down to earth a little? Something a little more concrete?
Ok, a pen. I know what a pen is. David says that by itself, “pen” is a pronoun. In “the pen,” “the” is an adverb. It modifies the verb “pen.” Modification is change, change is motion, motion is action, action is a verb.
Fuck. I might be too stupid for this. In fairness to me, though, I only have a Master’s degree. David says that his course is written on a “29 reading level,” whereas a PhD is only 20. After explaining Syntax to a group of English PhD students, they told him “we have PhDs in stupidity.” Going to school dumbs you down, makes you into a good little sheep. My mind has been captured by the adverb-verb Matrix. I took the blue pill of an advanced degree and I’ve been ensorcelled by maritime law ever since.
But not David. He can prove that anyone is lying — it doesn’t matter how high up in the Illuminati they are. I don’t know if you remember the plot of The Matrix Revolutions, but David does. See, Agent Smith had an infinity number of Smiths. And Neo said 3+3=6. So the Smiths were defeated because they tried to prove that 3+3 equaled every number except six. And then man and machine learned to live in peace, because, again, nobody ever went to war over a math equation.
David really seems to like the Matrix movies. And not so much the original, but the second and third. He references the scene in the second one when Neo is “in the room with a hundred TVs” and says “it’s all about choice.” Because you make a choice to be good or evil, and if you know Syntax, you have a better basis of information to make choices to be good.
Unfortunately, judges and lawyers choose to be evil. There’s a secret truth in the legal system. All judges and lawyers subscribe to this truth: that no law or fact shall be tried in court.
You want proof? I’ve got your proof right here.
That’s the ceiling of a courthouse. Note the way that the word “justice” is split apart into the letters “ju,” “s,” “ti,” and “ce.” You know what that means, right? It means “judges title speaks no law.” They love to hide the truth in plain sight! They’re laughing at us! All judges do is issue “orders,” and as everybody knows, a word beginning with a vowel and two consonants means “no contract.” Plus, judges exist on another plane in the courtroom. The fact that a judge is enclosed in a box makes him an independent jurisdiction.
So how do you fight back? Here’s one way: write a contract that says “there are no planes in this court, we are on a level playing field.” Also, you can write in your contract that you want hot coffee at your table in court and they legally have to bring it to you even if food and drink isn’t allowed in the room. That’s because all judges are bankers, and if you want to know more about how to prosecute them, please see the information on David’s business card.
What’s that postmaster thing about? Well, here’s an interesting fact. If you place a postage stamp on any document and sign across it, that makes you the postmaster! And, of course, since a court is a foreign vessel in dry dock, when the clerk stamps your document you can sign across that and now you’re the postmaster of their boat! It’s as simple as that.
David sent Janet Reno a letter accusing her of treason and she sent him a two page letter back with steel rivets through it. Two, of course, being a highly significant number. As everyone knows, a dollar sign with one bar through it signifies a Federal Reserve note. But with two bars, it stands for a gold certificate. And only one stamp has ever been published with two bars through the dollar sign, the Red Fox in November 1999.
David went out and bought up all of the stamps and started putting them on documents to sue government officials. The judges, of course, ordered the stamps cancelled and seized. Don’t try to look this up. You know it’s true. People who don’t know will be harvested. People who do know will do the harvesting. After all, the word “human” means “monster.” It means to feed upon your own kind.
At this point, you might be thinking, alright, David Wynn Miller is a lunatic. Who cares, right? America has been 70% cranks by volume since it was founded. And that’s what I thought too, at first. David’s recounting of the Matrix sequels and explanations of how to legally hijack a courtroom with postage tricks seemed like relatively harmless madness compared to our modern Alex Joneses and Libses of TikTok, the ramblings of an immortal superman to an empty room with a camera set up on a tripod. But then something happened. The camera panned.
He has an audience. There are people in the room listening to all of this and taking notes, and they paid to be there! David Wynn Miller had followers. He influenced people to the point that “Millerese” is now a known phenomenon in court filings.
So why do people get into this stuff? Maybe it’s because they’re worried about David’s nightmare scenario– aliens show up on earth and we try to lie to them because we haven’t learned Syntax, so they throw an asteroid at us. Maybe they want to usher in the glorious future he lays out in which you turn on the TV and all 200 channels are talking about how we have one language now and there’s no more wars, where Syntax-speaking Mentats from Dune replace computers and we develop a New World Order but nice because everyone has their freedoms still.
No, it’s not that. It’s about getting out of paying taxes.
Sorry, that’s not entirely fair. It’s also about winning custody cases for deadbeat dads and not having to pay child support. The incident that radicalized David against the courts was, in fact, his divorce, an occasion which he describes as being “raped” by a judge. He believed that if only he could crack the math equation of language, he could get his kids back. And when he discovered the magical formula of Syntax, he also realized that it could be used to eliminate all income taxes.
How? Well, it’s simple, really. Putting the appropriate wizard signs in your name, e.g. “:David-Wynn: Miller” creates a ward which makes you invisible to the government. While they’re trying to tax the corporation that was created when your birth certificate was signed, you’re flying under the radar thanks to Syntax. People have actually tried this. Several of them have gone to jail!
David Wynn Miller ruined people’s lives with his insanity. And I can kind of see how it happened, too. Even when he’s spouting completely incomprehensible garbage, he retains an even tone and a professional demeanor. A guy like that telling you that he’s got a trick that will help you even the odds with the government? That’s a pretty appealing thing to a desperate Fox News viewer.
In a video where he’s at least a decade older, David goes on a tangent from Syntax to explain that there’s a cure for all illnesses — the “zapper,” which controls DNA’s crystalline structure with radio frequencies. For instance, arthritis is caused by flatworm, and you can simply kill it if you have the right radio built for you.
Later, David’s explaining that you shouldn’t invest your money or keep it in banks. An audience member asks if cash is really the smartest way to save given that inflation inevitably reduces its value. He calmly pivots to talking about solar flares and the likelihood of one wiping out all of human civilization. By this time, then, he was helping people to wreck their lives not only legally, but also medically and financially.
But David must not have been able to find the right frequency for himself, because he had a heart attack in 2017 and died the next year. And his followers didn’t lose any time mourning — one of them immediately published a video where he “court martialled” him, stripped his authority as a judge, and took the mantle of postmaster-general of the world for himself. An ignoble end for the pre-eminent judicial wizard of our times.
Sorry, I mean FOR THE FORMS OF OUR PUNCTUATIONS ARE WITH THE CLAIM OF THE USE: FULL – COLON = POSITION – LODIO – FACTS, HYPHEN = COMPOUND – FACTS = KNOWN, PERIOD = END – THOUGHT, COMMA – PAUSE, AND LOCATION – TILDES WITH THE MEANINGS AND USES OF THE COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE FULL – COLON OF THE POSITION – LODIAL – FACT – PHRASE WITH THE FACT / KNOWN -TERM OF THE POSITIONAL – LODIO – FACT – PHRASE AND WITH THE VOID OF DAVID WYNN MILLER = DEAD – MANIAC
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Russell Bauman who pays in gold certificates, thinks in Syntax, but still pays taxes just in case.
Remember Today’s Special, the Canadian TV series that instilled the deep desire to spend a night in a department store in an entire generation? That show featured the expressive puppets of Noreen Young, and as a result we once got to see an adorable mouse learn about the horrors of alcoholism firsthand from a ginned-up photographer.
But Today’s Special wasn’t Noreen’s first gig. And it might surprise you to learn it wasn’t even her first use of puppets as a vehicle for an anti-drug message. Slither aside, Curt Hiss, because a member of the goddamn Order of Canada is about to make you look like the fucking garbage you are.
That’s right, these are professionally made, government-awarded doobie-smoking puppets. Let’s meet Dr. Cooper and His Friends.
You aren’t going to find much about Dr. Cooper online. It seems to have been a series of videos created by Noreen Young for the Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario in the early ’80s to be shown in schools. There were six in all: “Butt it Out”, “Never Listen to A Bottle”, “Alcohol, The Inside Story”, “Pas de Pot Mon Pote”, “Keep Off The Grass”, and “Nothing To Sniff At.” Of these, only the last two are available online. Oh, and “Pas de Pot Mon Pote” is a French saying meaning “no luck, my friend,” but also might be a weed pun? Like most Canadians outside of Quebec, I speak only grade school French and the talking pineapple that taught me didn’t explain drug slang.
But that’s another story. Let’s get back to Dr. Cooper.
We open on Dr. Cooper’s lab and oh, shit, right off the bat we’ve got a song. It’s about making choices and getting the facts. Great! I’m sure these puppets will provide us with the undiluted truth on cannabis consumption.
There’s one weird line here, though, where the unseen singer says “All you know is getting high makes you feel small / ’cause the higher you go the harder you fall.” I’m not sure that’s how it works? For less experienced drug users, weed doesn’t really have a comedown in the same way that, say, MDMA or cocaine do. But this was the ’80s, so there was still a lot we didn’t know about drugs. Dr. Cooper was on the forefront of that research.
Check this out: he built a machine that just blasts cigs. That’s its whole job, to rip darts twenty-four seven. Melvin, Dr. Cooper’s dog assistant, is puzzled. “I thought we already did tobacco,” he says. “Let me stick my face directly into these chemical fumes,” Martha the mouse says.
I can’t lie, it’s surreal to see a Noreen Young mouse puppet that looks kind of like sweet, innocent Muffy from Today’s Special breathing in an entire 1985 Burger King smoking section’s worth of secondhand smoke. But hold on, that’s not tobacco!
It’s marijuana! Do not touch — in the ’80s, pot had the same contact-fatality effects on puppets that fentanyl has on police officers today. Martha has a puppet conniption, screaming deliriously about how she smoked dope before careening across the room in the full throes of reefer madness and immediately passing out.
Imagine this: you’re a researcher studying drugs. You come into your lab one day to find your assistant collapsed on a table. What’s your first thought? Do you check to see if she’s ok? Dial 911? Start a fire to cover up your crimes and move to Manitoba before the RCMP gets wise?
If you answered yes, you aren’t cut out for this line of work. Dr. Cooper’s first and only thought on spotting his unconscious lab assistant is: “Sometimes I think Martha gets a little too excited to be a scientist.” Man, she has tiny puppet mouse lungs! Proportionally speaking, she just inhaled an entire Cheech and Chong movie’s worth of the devil’s lettuce! But Dr. Cooper is remorseless and without feeling. He’s detached. Cold. The perfect scientist. Martha could learn from his example.
Today, Dr. Cooper is running a special government project on weed that I guess involves building a drug-smoking robot and hotboxing his lab. It also involves Mike.
You might think Mike seems like a nice fella. He’s a self-described “expert” on pot who’s been smoking dope for years. But Mike is a fool. He is a guinea pig. He is grist for the mill of science, no more deserving of our concern or respect than the drug-smoking machine. He asks Dr. Cooper if it’s alright if he lights up a joint. Go right ahead, Dr. Cooper says. Go right ahead. You’re part of the experiment, Mike. Smoke your accursed hemp and we shall observe its effects on the dried-up husk rattling around in your skull that was once a human brain.
Here is the experiment in its entirety: Mike is going to try and do his job while baked. In this particular instance, his job is installing a coat hook on the wall of the lab. Almost immediately, Mike starts fucking it up.
Which, fine. I get the idea: drugs impair your coordination and abilities. But Mike’s been smoking weed for years while somehow holding down a job as a handyman. So what gives? Well it is the ’80s, so maybe Mike’s used to stems and seeds and Dr. Cooper hooked him up with the high-grade medical stuff. The alternative explanation is that Mike gets like this whenever he’s high, which by his own admission is pretty frequently. This opens up a much darker possibility: that Mike is not among the titular Friends of Dr. Cooper. He is, instead, a pitiable homunculus, a subhuman figure of ridicule and derision whose claim to existence extends only so far as he is able to continue putting various psychoactive substances into his body for the Canadian government.
Hold on, though, Martha says. Isn’t smoking dope against the law?
Smash cut to three grinning, racially diverse officers of the law shouting “stop!” It’s time for the title number. Keep off the grass! Keep off the grass! Don’t play the fool! Who knows where you’ll end up when you break the rules?
I despise these cop puppets. Puppetry by its nature is a whimsical art which can bring a frog or sexually voracious pig to life and touch even the most jaded adult with a sense of childlike wonder. To construct a cop puppet, then, seems like it should run contra to the puppeteer’s code. Especially a cop puppet who sings “Can’t smoke it, grow it, give it away / Buy it, sell it or send it in the mail.” That’s the kind of bastard slant rhyme you can only get away with if you’ve got a tiny puppet badge and gun.
The police officers sing “These are the rules we must obey / so let’s have fun the legal way.” What, like beating up racial minorities and shutting down gay bars? Is the law to be the measure of morality? I pay your salary, you jovial fucks. Don’t make me call the puppet ombudsman.
Get me out of here. I want to see Mike again.
Uh oh! Mike died from weed inhalation.
Just kidding. He took a little nap and now he’s back grappling with the Dark Souls boss that is an incredibly straightforward home improvement project. Witnessing this, Dr. Cooper’s assistants have questions. What happens if you smoke dope over a long time, like Mike?
Well, Dr. Cooper explains, most people who smoke heavily also take a lot of drugs, which complicates things. So maybe Mike’s on PCP and meth too? But there’s more, Dr. Cooper says: dope changes you. “You don’t get along with your friends anymore, your grades fall, you can’t play sports as well, and you forget things.” I’ll be generous and give him three out of four. But not getting along with your friends? The famously ill-mannered and difficult to get along with stoner?
Mike protests: he smokes dope all the time, and look at him! Dr. Cooper smiles smugly, saying that he couldn’t have put it better himself.
Again: if Dr. Cooper believes that smoking pot is turning Mike’s brain into slurry, why not try to get him help? Because, of course, Mike is no friend of Dr. Cooper. But Mike isn’t the only puppet who’s getting zonked out of his gourd in this series. Let’s move on to “Nothing to Sniff At.”
There’s only a short segment of this one available, courtesy of our pals at Retrontario. I don’t know if it would make more sense in context, but the tone here is decidedly more gothic and surreal.
Melvin wakes up in a darkened lab, screaming about how “it isn’t fun” and how “he’s got to stop them.” He tries to run out of the room, straight past versions of Martha and Dr. Cooper that I can only describe as afro clown draculas, while menacing organ music plays.
But woe, hallucinating puppet dog — there is no escape from the fortress of the afro clown draculas.
Melvin then simply pops out of existence, and we see that evil Martha and Dr. Cooper are watching some children huff glue over a CCTV setup. “That’s it! Go on… inhale deeply!” Evil Martha insists, statistically giving at least one Canadian child an extremely specific fetish which they now pay artists thousands of dollars a month to bring to life again and again.
Evil Dr. Cooper excitedly tells Martha that glue can ruin the inside of your nose and cause brain damage. Now a pair of children appear on the screen and he exclaims draculously, “Alright! Glue… for two!”
He’s genuinely psyched that these kids might die from concentrating and inhaling glue fumes. Martha is less sanguine. Even as an evil hallucination, she doesn’t have the bold determination to transgress normal human ethics required of a true scientist.
Melvin reappears, hollering “don’t listen to them!” Then he wakes screaming up amidst a veritable smorgasbord of inhalable adhesives. Dr. Cooper (real, non-clown dracula version) is untroubled by this, simply saying that Melvin performed the day’s experiments without waiting for him.
But what exactly was the experiment? Gather up a bunch of volatile chemicals and make a dog honk on them to see what kinds of brain damage he gets? Dr. Cooper runs down all of the things that chemical fumes can do to you, up to and including fucking killing you to death, and we’re out.
The strangest thing about “Nothing to Sniff At” is that there are two versions of it. There’s the English one we’ve been discussing so far, and a separate French version. I don’t mean that there are two dubs — I mean they seem to have shot two separate videos using different versions of the same puppets.
Compare and contrast. Here’s Melvin in the English version again:
And here he is in the French one:
What the fuck happened to him? That French-Canadian glue must hit a lot harder. As they say in Quebec, “attache ton chapeau quand tu renifler de la colle, c’est le sperme du diable!” But it’s not just Melvin. The draculas look different, too. Or maybe they just cranked the lights up because they weren’t afraid to show those glue-sniffing Francophone kids the true face of evil.
Melvin even has different hallucinations in the French version. The bricked up door is gone. In its place are a series of nightmarish faces which rush towards the camera.
How can we explain this? Maybe French-Canadian kids in the ’90s were just more hardcore and needed to be really terrified to stay off the glue. I don’t know. I do know that nearly all knowledge of Dr. Cooper and His Friends has been wiped from the internet.
For decades, the Canadian government has tried to hide its felt-covered shame. No more. Those responsible have now been brought to justice.
Dr. Cooper died under house arrest after being convicted of using government funding for unsanctioned human and animal drug trials.
Melvin the dog was reunited with his twin. Together, they ran an unsuccessful ballot campaign to ban glue from Canadian households.
Martha smoked weed again and died.
Mike started a podcast with two of his friends who thought they should record their conversations because they were so funny but also, like, really smart? He currently makes several million dollars annually through direct sales of his personal nootropics track.
Drug-smoking machine was rescued and placed with a loving family on a farm in Saskatchewan, where it still resides today.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Yvonne Clapham, who was inspired to build their own drug-smoking robot but forgot what they were doing halfway through.
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Hunk Week: Big Lenny🌭
What is a hunk? Must a hunk be handsome and well-groomed? Or might he simply be, as the term suggests, an enormous, unwieldy slab of beef?
For too long, a restrictive understanding of hunkdom has stifled inquiry into the subject. On the occasion of this Hunk Week, I submit that we move towards a more expansive definition. And so I present to you an article that I probably could have written at any time over the past two years of my tenure at this website, but decided to try and shoehorn into this celebration of studly meat monsters purely to trouble the category of hunks.
Maybe I’m just yearning to trouble some categories because it’s been years since I left grad school. Or maybe it’s because following trends is for fucking cookie cutters. Yes, it’s finally time to talk about the man, the myth, the misfit maniac himself: Big Lenny.
I have been obsessed with Big Lenny for over half a decade now. He first came to my attention as well as that of the broader community of online lunatics through his association with an amateur bodybuilder named Jason Genova. In the 2010s, Genova acquired the particular sort of internet antifandom that blossomed in the dark corners of forums and social media as a result of his boastful YouTube videos and his odd behavioral and verbal quirks. He had a habit of coining terms like “pissening,” a combination of “sickening” and “piss” that, much like “bimonthly” can mean twice a month or every two months, can refer to something kicking ass or sucking shit.
The Genovaism par excellence is “enjoy the ments,” a phrase derived from his stuttering pronunciation of the text on a motivational poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Commenters soon became addicted to the “ments” generated by Genova’s antics. He was precisely the kind of attention-seeking, dim-witted, self-aggrandizing maniac that the internet loves to hate. And as he became aware of his “fans,” he attempted to mobilize them into a personal army of pisstroopers, directing them against companies who declined to sponsor him, other bodybuilders, and eventually just about anybody who annoyed him in a practice he dubbed “Order 66.” Yes, that’s from Star Wars. Yes, he called himself the Dark Lord of the Sith. Yes, he tried to have a hip-hop career under the name J Cream where he rapped about having vanilla flavor and being on disability.
Through Genova, the internet was introduced to a colorful cast of characters who came to be known as the Delray Misfits, named after the World Gym in Delray Beach. Of these men, one in particular stood out. I mean, fucking look at him.
Big Lenny, aka Leonard Persin, aka Fat Fucking Lenny, aka the Tom Platz of Abs, aka Mr. 18 Forever was a sight to behold. He was an enormous, bald man with yellowing eyes and skin darkened with the drug Melanotan to the point that he confounded the average white American’s keenly honed race-sense. His physique fluctuated depending on whether or not he was gearing up to compete, but even at peak performance he exhibited a huge, muscle-bound stomach as a result of steroid use, a condition known as Palumboism.
Big Lenny was, in other words, a freak of the human physical form. He pivoted to bodybuilding after failure to achieve success as a football player — his father’s dream for him — and subsequently being kicked out of the air force. Certainly, Lenny attained a unique look as a result of his training regimen. But if that were all there was to him, he never would have developed the cult following that he did. See, Big Lenny embraced the identity of the freak. It was a key part of his philosophy, which he frequently expounded upon, mouth and nostrils twitching, in the early Delray Misfits videos and later on his own YouTube channel, The Big Lenny Show.
In Lennyism, a freak is an individual. A misfit. A maniac. Opposing the freak is the “cookie cutter,” someone who wants to be like everybody else. Someone who fears and avoids pain. Who lacks discipline. Who is addicted to porn. Who uses drugs. Who has a lot of tattoos. Who is a vegetarian, maybe, or a communist? It’s not always clear.
Lennyism is a chameleonic belief structure which requires years of study to even begin to understand. For instance, is banging transgender women, or “tantentens” in Lenny’s dialect — referring to a tanned babe who looks like a ten and has, ideally, ten inches — an enjoyable pastime or a sin? Is America the land of opportunity or was it, as Lenny once suggested, a mistake to declare independence from the white-run British Empire? You may as well ask if a dog has Buddha nature. Mu.
Anyway, we’re not here to talk about Lenny’s confusing and oftentimes objectionable philosophy. Judge not a man by his words, but by his deeds.
Deed the first of Big Lenny: furtively gobbling an entire raw egg. Please, watch the entire video. It’s twenty seconds long. It will be the best twenty seconds you spend today and on each subsequent day of your life.
It’s a perfect piece of film. First, there’s the exaggerated crunch as Lenny pops that egg into his maw. He turns to walk away, before the cameraman Andrew asks him “what the fuck was that?” The question causes him to swivel towards the camera, his expression that of a dog caught in the act. We push in on Lenny’s face, remnants of the egg visible between his still-chewing teeth as he insists that he doesn’t have anything in his mouth, eyes darting back and forth wildly. “Is that a raw egg?” Andrew asks. Lenny knows he’s busted. No use denying it. “Don’t let the viewers see this,” he pleads. Too late. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen it all.
There’s something that troubles me about this video, and it’s not the obvious thing. See, egg shells contain perfectly good calcium. No sense in wasting it — unless you’re a cookie cutter. No, that’s not what bothers me here. Having viewed this footage thousands of times, what perplexes me is why Lenny should feel any shame or insecurity about his actions. Isn’t caring what other people think of you the mark of a cookie cutter? Should not a freak be proud of his freakishness? What is the sound of one hand clapping? If you taser Big Lenny, will he fall down?
That last one wasn’t rhetorical. This is deed the second of Lenny: weathering the storm.
“It’s not if I’m ready or I want to do it, I have to do it,” Lenny says before exiting the World Gym one morning, nostrils flaring in anticipation. He pulls his shirt off and stands on a grassy patch of land by the parking lot, explaining that he is afraid of needles. The camera pans to the right, revealing a boy who can’t be older than eight or nine years old. By volume, he is approximately one eighth of a Lenny. The boy raises a Taser as Lenny flexes, saying “this is for you, Christina!”
Brief aside: Christina is not Lenny’s girlfriend, wife, or relative deceased in a tragic lifting accident. She is Christina Broccolini, a French-Canadian actress best known as one of the hosts of the 2000s series Mystery Hunters, which is essentially Unsolved Mysteries if you replaced Robert Stack with perky teens. It’s unclear how Lenny became aware of her, but he believed she was a kind of “spiritual healer.”
Cynics will say it was a dangerous cocktail of GHB, HGH, and exogenous testosterone which allowed Big Lenny to stay standing after the Taser prongs hit him. I believe it was his faith in Christina Broccolini. Regardless of the explanation, there are the plain facts on film: Lenny stumbles backwards, grinning and grunting, then tears the wires out of his stomach, leaving the darts embedded in his flesh before launching into a diatribe about cookie cutter drug addicts.
Both the Taser and egg incidents took place at the Delray Beach World Gym. But gradually, we got more of a picture of Lenny’s life outside of bodybuilding, and it wasn’t especially pretty. So, in 2017, the misfits put up a GoFundMe asking for $250 to hire a cleaning service to deal with Lenny’s pad. They received four times that within a span of hours. You might be thinking that a thousand dollars to clean someone’s house seems like a lot of money. Brother, it wasn’t nearly enough. Readers of a sensitive disposition and anyone currently eating may want to skip this next section.
From the jump, Lenny’s house is a nightmare. Not pictured here is the patch of ground where he says he pisses daily, next to the outdoor washing machine he once took pictures of a trans sex worker urinating atop. A lot of Lenny’s life revolves around piss, and his house smells so bad his associate Brad can’t even bear to step inside.
And it’s hard to blame him. The place is terrifying, a filthy mire of trash and unidentifiable stains.
And it probably goes without saying, but the bathroom looks like something out of a survival horror video game that also kills you in real life three days after you play it.
But the piece de resistance in Lenny’s pad is the steak pan he keeps in the freezer. It’s there for a “very good reason,” he says. The reason is that he used to just leave it out unwashed after cooking his steaks and it started to fester with maggots. That didn’t deter him, though: he just ate the maggots. Free protein!
It’s hard to say if he was joking or not, since Lenny displayed some self-awareness of his image and was keen to capitalize on his niche microcelebrity. And so, when Jason Genova retired from bodybuilding and disappeared from the internet, and the Delray Misfits scattered as the World Gym shut down, he teamed up with Robert “Robzilla” McGowan Jr. to shoot video content out in a society that was entirely unprepared for contact with him.
Around this time, Lenny also said that he was taking on personal training clients. And here I have to admit that in the darkest depths of my pandemic malaise, strung out on what at the time I thought was a lot of ketamine but which turns out to be much less than it takes to coup the United States government, I considered taking Lenny up on his offer. It was these videos of Lenny unleashed upon an unwitting world that made me reconsider.
Here, Lenny mumbles “oh my god, Marcia Brady” around a mouthful of blonde stranger toes. In another video, filmed at a Boca Raton hotel with Jay Masters, aka “The Bedroom Bully,” Lenny invades a boomer pool party, remarking to the camera “I would imagine these older women are really good at anal sex” before picking one up and swinging her around. She and the rest of the women react to Lenny’s presence as one might to a loose gorilla — with nervous acquiescence to its whims and a conspicuous effort not to show it their teeth.
Lenny follows this up by delivering the world’s worst karaoke rendition of REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Loving You.”
In light of these episodes, I decided against traveling to Florida to get molested by a racist orange Shrek. Instead, I paid Lenny to do a Cameo for my Dark Souls character.
And as it turns out, that was the closest I would ever get to meeting Big Lenny. The life of a maniac misfit is a hard one, and a few years ago they started dropping one after another. Jay Masters passed away in July 2023. Robzilla followed him on August 14, 2023 at just 31. And in October of last year, Big Lenny died at 54 of congestive heart failure.
What is Lenny’s legacy? Some funny videos? A dedicated following of forum dwellers who probably followed his life more closely than anyone who actually knew him? A trail of rattled Floridian female gym-goers? All that, certainly, but there’s one more thing I seldom see mentioned in connection with him.
In a video where he describes the origins of the term “cookie cutter” — he learned it from a man who looked like Columbo, apparently — Lenny mentions that he’d been training at the World Gym in Delray Beach since it opened. And you know who else was working out there back then?
Yes, 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi. It’s impossible to know for sure, but it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that during their short time at the gym, the pair were on the receiving end of a Big Lenny lecture about porn addiction. Or, the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center might have witnessed Leonard Parsin lean over his gym bag and stuff an entire egg, shell and all, into his hungry mouth. Would such a hypothetical encounter have redoubled their resolve or, perhaps, instilled a fleeting moment of doubt in their aims? None can say.
All I can say is this: Big Lenny had weird energy. He was a man whose incoherent, deranged worldview was no doubt influenced by the prodigious amounts of Soviet chemicals, testosterone, and MDMA he routinely consumed, not to mention his abusive upbringing by an overbearing father. In many ways, he was a piece of shit. In some, he was an inspiration. He was a contradiction, a nontraditional hunk, a testament to the extremes which the human organism can attain with sufficient drive and single-minded madness.
So RIP Big Lenny. Thanks for the ments, I’m glad I never met you, and may flights of big-dicked lady angels sing thee to thy rest.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sarcophski, a walking slab of beef who always eats the entire egg, shell and all.
