Into The Tingle-Verse: Living Inside My Own Butt For Eight Years, Starting A Business And Turning A Profit Through Common Sense Reinvestment And Strategic Targeted Marketing
“We start by investigating the ecosystem of my anus. Barko explains that even though it looks fantastic from the outside, there is no telling what waits within. Fortunately, what we find is a stunning collection of hills and valleys, a gorgeous landscape covered in lush green forests and beautiful flowing rivers.”
Welcome back, buckaroos and ladybucks, to the second to last day of Tingle Week :’). For today, I decided to read, honestly, one of the most bizarre but inspiring books I’ve read this week, Living Inside My Own Butt For Eight Years, Starting A Business And Turning A Profit Through Common Sense Reinvestment And Strategic Targeted Marketing, about:
“After a horrific car accident, Travis finds himself stuck with a seemingly insurmountable stack of medical bills. Desperate for work and drowning in debt, he’s left with nowhere to turn until the wealthy investor, Barko, enters his life.
Barko knows a good butthole investment when he sees one, and soon enough he is hard at work turning Travis’s anal passageway into a successful vineyard and real estate development known as Plobus Valley, an attractive name that translates to ‘place of sweet riches’ in the language of the natives who inhabit Travis’s body.
Through common sense reinvestment, Barko and Travis develop this butthole into a thriving business, but as the two of them approach eight years of partnership, a dark secret threatens to tear them apart and pound their butts.”
I know this whole week, I’ve been stunned by each book I read, but this one takes the cake for absurdity. I want to know what goes through Chuck’s mind to think of stuff like this. We start the story with Travis getting hit by a car. The driver is uninsured, and Travis isn’t wealthy enough to afford healthcare insurance for himself. He’s a struggling student who’s now five million dollars in debt from hospital bills (I don’t know how this is possible, but Travis is very much giving off that he was born with glass bones and paper skin). One night he meets Barko, clad in a green velvet suit and matching top hat covered in dollar bills. He is wealth personified with his golden cane topped with a dollar sign (to be honest, he sounds very tacky to me…also, he’s giving off Riddler vibes with his outfit).
Travis really saw Barko wearing this lewk (pronounced Luke) and said, “I trust this man.”
“Even I am surprised by how well I take him, due mostly to the fact that I’m not at all gay. There’s nothing gay about a man taking his own economic strategy in a hardcore deep throat, I remind myself. This may be the business of love, but it is still a business.”
Throughout the book, I was left super confused about how everything even happened. The book takes place in Travis’s butthole, where he and Barko are somehow able to build a community with massive infrastructures like airports, warehouses, an arts district, and a vineyard, for example, all in this man’s butthole. Travis will bring this up and how much he and Barko invested into Plobus Valley. I’m just trying to understand how they’re BOTH able to access and witness this growing and thriving community in Travis’s butt.
In the end, it’s revealed that Barko was a figment of Travis’s imagination. He was just an insured man who stumbled upon the secrets to financial success to help him pay off his astronomical hospital bills by living in his own butt and developing a new commercial and residential hub. I don’t know what’s more inspiring than this story.
“‘But, aren’t we the same person?’ I ask. My sentient knowledge cracks a smile. ‘I suppose we are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t love each other’… ‘Travis, will you marry me?’ my own sentient investment strategy asks. ‘Of course I will,’ I tell him. ‘Of course I will.’”
An Amazon reviewer described this book best, “This work is pretty meta, but I think serious students of literature will “get it.” The prevailing themes of romance in times of economic hardship, and of a health insurance system in crisis have deep contemporary relevance. And, there’s butts” (Askew, 2016, para. 1).
