Now Seeking A Creative Muse

John Lennon had Yoko Ono. Andy Warhol had Edie Sedgwick. Carly Simon had… well, a bunch of jerkoffs who sound eerily similar to someone I’d be attracted to — and this, my friend, is where you come in.

Over the last year, I’ve relied on my consistently turbulent emotional state to fuel my writing. This worked surprisingly well and for longer than anyone could’ve predicted — who knew that rejection, powerlessness, and a general din of despair could provide twelve months of material? — but unfortunately, the power of transgressions past has puttered out and with it, my ability to tap into that “dark place” so essential to my creative process. While my mental stability no longer suffers, my output hasn’t been quite as lucky. So now I’m calling on you, dysfunctional and marginally attractive men of New York, to royally screw me over. Again.

This isn’t a job for just any decent looking douchebag. In order to effectively fill this position, you must toe the line between charismatic playboy and psychopath with a god complex. You should be attractive by unconventional standards, meaning your aesthetic should confuse my friends, family, and exes. Not a living soul should be able to discern what I see in you — this is crucial to my eventually feeling duped and resentful about our dalliance.

As for your duties, you should begin by hovering in my periphery and passively building my interest in you. I have no preference in how you go about this: invite me out to dinner and then launch into an opus on how ‘over’ relationships you are or excessively detail the reasons why I’m not someone you can date while simultaneously maintaining an overwrought obsession with someone who contradicts your seemingly stringent criteria — bonus points if they’re a porn star or one of my friends.

To get me truly invested though, you’ll have to eventually throw me a bone and give in to my advances. Our relationship should initially manifest in some sort of self-deprecating (for me) physical arrangement that I hide from the people who care about me in the spirit of knowing better. This will continue until — miracle of miracles! — we enter into something more formal. You should drag your feet as much as possible, though; make every transition really hard on me. Your agreeing to be in an exclusive relationship should kind of feel like you’re doing me a mitzvah, or something.

At this point, my friends should despise you — but don’t worry! This is all part of the job. If my roommate neglects to invite you to her birthday party or the friend request you sent to my little sister has sat idle for weeks on end, it just means you’re excelling at your position, which is all I could ask for, really. Speaking of my little sister, you should probably agree to meet my family once — just once — out of wordless obligation or pressure that you can henceforth cite every time I ask you to do something you find unappealing. Say it with me: “I met your parents, what more do you want from me?” That’s it. Very good.

Other than emotional distance, I’m open to whatever else you might bring to the table: career advice, a homecooked meal, oral sex. The ideal candidate is multifaceted (to the extent that one could feasibly mistake them as having Multiple Personality Disorder). A muse with a lot to offer will inevitably have more to deprive me of once this thing is over, thus inflicting the appropriate amount of pain necessary to jumpstart my inspiration.

I suppose that’s it! I look forward to shouldering the burden of your malformed childhood or whatever.