So here we are again at the coming of spring, when a young man’s fancy turns towards trying to be cool.  Regardless of your age, whether you’re merely a precocious tyke, or Pope Benedict the Six Jillionth, you’ve got to be cool if you’re gonna get anything done in this world, and since I happen to possess coolness in nigh Biblical abundance, I thought perhaps I ought to write a blog with the goal in mind of helping any among you who might be suffering from want of this most critical faculty.  Perhaps you doubt that I am, in fact, a paragon of coolness.  The truth is that people everywhere agree on my inestimable coolness.  Even people I work with think I’m cool.  “Dag, Ben, you so cool!”  They say as they walk by (or possibly it’s “Dag, Ben, did you leave all those rubber trout on the floor on the tobacco barn again?”  It gets loud out there in the wilderness and sometimes they kind of mumble at me).  So anyway, as a service to all ye my readers, and indeed unto all mankind, here followeth a brief list of things that you can do to, as the nerds say, get +7 to all coolness rolls.

            First and foremost, get a catchphrase.  No one truly cool ever made it through life without choosing a good personal epigram or witty apothegm and spouting it off in any and all situations.  What you need is something that not only sums up your very quintessence, but also something completely random that nobody else has already taken and which still looks good on a T-shirt.  Calvin Coolidge, for instance, used to bandy about the saying, “I’m here to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I’m all out of gum.”  While Albert Einstein preferred, “Never put anything in your mouth that’s bigger than your head.”  And of course, you can never go wrong with making it about monkeys, which is kind of a good rule to live by anyways.  Also, it can’t be about Chuck Norris, because that one’s already been run into the ground.

            Next, get a mode of transportation that lesser humans lack.  Learning to fly or teleport or throw your mighty uru hammer, Mjollner around are all good, but assuming that you’re kind of a beginner, you might want to start out with something a bit more not forbidden by the laws of physics.  A pair of Seven League Boots is always a good choice, or maybe one of those old-timey penny farthing bicycles that Sherlock Holmes and Margaret Thatcher used to ride around on.  And of course, if you’re already out of middle school and have your license, then the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile (why is it always the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile anyways?  It’s not like there are any other weinermobiles out there to distinguish it from.  Unless of course you count BMWs.) is always a good way to go, especially if you get a hover conversion done on it.  A sedan chair is always nice too, but they usually don’t get you around terribly quickly, and you usually need waaay more eunuchs to carry one than any decent person wants to be associated with.  And of course, you could always just get a 1989 Plymouth Voyager, because those have so much panache that Ralph Nader wants to make them a controlled substance.

            After you’ve got all that taken care of, it’s time to think about doing something funky to your hair, and by funky, I mean not a mullet.  Perhaps you suffer from Mullet Recognizance Deficiency Syndrome, or MRDS (I know I do) and you’re not entirely sure what a mullet is.  In this case, I would recommend that you either contact the mullet disposal squad of your local constabulatory, or go to a free clinic where they have a bunch of little free brochures about the perils of mullets.  Now that you’re safe from the bane of Uncle Jesse, you might want to think about what you do want, like maybe a mad scientist fro, or some crazy blue anime hair, or maybe even a reverse Mohawk, like Bizarro Mr. T has.  For the more follically conservative among you, you can always just go and shave a big ol’ lightening bolt into whatever hairstyle you already have, like the Right Reverent Vanilla Ice.

            And last but certainly not least, you must properly attend to you wardrobe.  Now, I could take the time to emphasize the importance of wearing medieval armor with any ensemble, or go into great depth on the Ben Theory of Wearing Either No Shoes or Shoes That Weigh More than 25 Lbs, but I’m sure most of you already know about that anyhow.  And I’m not even gonna get started on the importance of wearing a hat from a strange and drastically different decade that whatever decade we happen to be in now.  No, I’m just gonna give you the most important fashion tip in the history of the human race, if not the entire cosmos:  Buy a teacupmammoths T-shirt.  Seriously, as you walk down the street in your mighty T-shirt, many will swoon at the very sight of you; evildoers will cringe in the shadows, and Dickensian newsboys wearing fat guy hats will cheer for your awesomeness.  But I only have them in Large and Mondo Large, so if you’re petite, you’ll either have to only wear one when you’re hulking out, wear a way too big one because it’s all gangsta style, or find twenty other medium-sized people to go in on an order with you.

            So there you have it, do as I say and the very world shall be your pistachio.  Love, fame, fortune, and an army of robomonkeys cannot be far behind!