I can tell you with reasonable precision the moment I learned that I was not like other boys.  

It was November 30, 1985 in the late afternoon.  I recall that it was a cold day, and the almanac gets my memory’s back here.  My birthday earlier in the month was the second-latest of all us sixth graders. (Ryan Lockwood’s was, of course, just before Thanksgiving).  I sat with the Swell Guys and Ryan—and probably Bill Butler and Tom Clemons, and maybe a few others—in the center of a theater at the Chicago Ridge Mall watching two muscular, hairless men—one black, the other white—pummel each other on a giant screen.  It could have been Friday, the 29th, but… I guess it doesn’t matter. 

For this brief period, before the December and January birthdays began, we were all 11 years old.  All the same age.  All on the cusp of our teenage years.  Yet one of us was quite different.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am an alpha shark.  I must swim and kill constantly—or I will die. 

In 2001 a major international pizza franchise came to me and said, “Alfons, you’re a shark.  We’re getting eaten alive by other pizza fishes.  Help us kill again!”

Within 24 hours I pitched this company—which you have definitely heard of—a concept so game changing that it would soon catapult them to the top of the pizza chain food chain: the Full House XL®. 

You’ve enjoyed it many times I am sure.  It had a thinner crust than their pan, a thicker crust than their thin, and it was extra large.  This chain now has—according to Wikipedia, a crowd-sourced internet encyclopedia that I was instrumental in launching—over 6,000 restaurants in the United States and 5,139 additional “huts” in 94 countries and territories around the world.  Those numbers continue to surge every quarter, and are the direct result of the revolution effected by the Full House XL® paradigm shift.

Close your eyes.  All of you.  Now imagine that you are me. 

PROFILE OF DENNIS O’TOOLE
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
CITIZEN MONITORING CORPS, SECTION 5878, GROUP K

(Obtained via Freedom of Information Act request by Dennis O’Toole)

FULL NAME: Dennis Patrick O’Toole.
OTHER ALIASES: D-Train, D-Nice, NewFridgeD, Big D, Cornish Den, D-O-T, and DenDen.
PREFECTURE: Great Lakes, Urban District 7.
DOB: 11/05/1974
DOD: Pending

ETHNICITY: White/Caucasian
GENDER: Male, though when given the opportunity to write manually on surveys that ask for “sex” instead of “gender,” O’Toole has written “Yes” each time since he was 11 years old.
OCCUPATION: post-humanities-major office drone


HEIGHT: 5’7”
WEIGHT: 135 lbs.
EYES: Protean: varies from green to blue to gray, depending on his shirt/attitude

RELIGION: Leftist Roman Catholic
CONFIRMATION NAME: George (rec’d 12/8/1987, Archdiocese of Chicago)

POLITICAL BELIEFS: Semi-pacifistic, pro-regulatory leftist with permissive views on taxes, restrictive views on gun control, and fence-sitting views on abortion.  Comprehensive voting history attached.

THREAT LEVEL: MAUVE

On February 2, 1922, Shakespeare and Co. of Paris sold the first copies of James Joyce's masterwork, "Ulysses."

On July 31, 2013, Amazon at last rekindled that noble endeavor: one of challenging readers, raising the bar for other writers, and pushing the very boundaries of Literature beyond what the common man thought possible. On that day, Amazon began selling the first copies of THE PORKING OF MADAME R: AN EROTIC MYSTERY.

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