The One Minute President began in 1983 as a collaboration conducted on two typewriters between myself and Paul Fericano, founder of the Stoogist Poetry Movement and Poor Souls Press.  I was ending a run of a column called All the News to Give You Fits at Multnomah Monthly Magazine.

I seem to remember that Paul had a Smith Corona electric at the time, and I had a nearly worn out IBM Selectric II that I bought with a grant from the Southern Federation of State Arts Agencies following the publication of Stinking and Full of Eels when I was living in North or South Carolina, following a stretch in Arkansas.

For me, the book was inspired by a series of time management courses I took while an employee of the Multnomah County Division of Assessment and Taxation, where I began as the secretary to the tax collection manager and slowly worked my way out the door by becoming head cashier, information specialist, and suspected computer criminal.

In Oregon, it is a crime to “knowingly and without authorization” access a computer, regardless of intent. It was my job to analyze what was going on in collections, but in the process I discovered several back door access routes to the systems that I didn’t think I should have access to. The memos reporting those findings were the basis for a grand jury investigation that ended with a settlement that provided the down payment for the Portland Pataphysical Outpatient Clinic, Lounge and Laundromat compound twenty miles east of Idiotville.

In the midst of the typical bureaucrat cluster phuck (BCP, for you text messaging afficianados, as opposed to the more popular MCP, or mongolian cluster phuck, which I assume has some politically incorrect racial perjorative connected with it which I don’t give a shit about; chiggers are chiggers; wops are wops) I was experiencing, The One Minute President was not a diversion. It was for me a pure expression of what I saw every day at my job.

The One Minute Manager was actually recommended reading for middle management, for whom I hold an abiding contempt. If God had meant for life to have meaning, He wouldn’t have created middle management.

I began using pseudonyms in the early 70s when helpful editors at little magazines rejected my work as being too sardonic or too cynical, when all it was was too liminal, and the world really doesn’t appreciate liminalism. Literalism, people can get into. Figuratism, not so much. A liminal viewpoint doesn’t hold much sway in a binary construct, and the nation of miserable phucks (NOMPH™) is committed to a binary vision, if it is committed to anything at all.

My personal view is that the NOMF is predicated on the belief that the use of unmuffled internal combustion engines is a fundamental right, and if it isn’t expressly included in the Bill of Rights, it should be. The reason for the second amendment is to protect the unmuffled internal combustion engine fetishist from sensitive types, such as liberals and wimps.

To return to the original tale, I was ready when the first Macintosh came out in 1984 to abandon the typewriter. I was tired of having to retype manuscripts when the typical small press liberal asshole editor who bothered to use my SASE returned my work with coffee, queef, or cum stains.

I was actually looking for an Epson with Valdocs at the time. My colleagues at the county kept telling me to buy a Wang if I needed a word processor, despite the incredible cost, but I figured a computer could do more, so that’s what I was looking for when I passed the window of a Byte Shop and saw this kid drawing pictures with a one-button mouse on an original 128K Macintosh. So I bought one that day, and the first complete draft of The One Minute President was completed using MacWrite and fit on a portion of a single 400K floppy.

The method Paul and I used was simple. The original One Minute Manager book was the jumping off point, and we worked on the fly before e-mail and the Web was widely available, so the postal service was our communication channel.

I'd write for awhile and send my stuff to Paul, who would veer off in his direction and send the package back to me, along with suggestions for changes to stuff I'd written. I'd incorporate his new material into MacWrite (later in Microsoft Word because the local computer typesetter had a guarantee on WYSWYG for Word), add new material, suggest revisions to his stuff, and send the whole thing back to him.

This went on for several iterations until Paul flew up to Portland for a few days, and we argued and bitched and came up with a final draft (the original draft, by the way, was produced on an Imagewriter I.) that no publisher in the known universe wanted to touch.

So we published it ourselves as part of Yossarian Universal News Service, before we were forced to go underground to hunt grubs for food. Here's the original logo for YU News Service that I made in MacPaint.

It's difficult to see, but that's Snowden pushing the news out the asshole of the plane. That's right, Snowden was faking his injury, the gold-bricking liberal coward!

By the way, I still have a few boxes of the original printed versions of The One Minute President for those who want to purchase something to hold in their sweaty palms while waiting in line to be interrograted. To order your copy, send a check or money order for $10 (USD) payable to Jean Ligi at 45986 NW Hartwick Road, Banks, OR, 97106, USA. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery.