Geniuses all think they’re so cool with their computerized voices and the theories they’re always prattling on about while the super spies we sent to stop them are being slowly conveyer-belted towards buzzing table saws. However, to be honest, I’ve always been fascinated by geniuses, and one of my secret fantasies is to one day say, “This material is made up of an element that is not of this Earth!” and somehow, probably through science, know it to be true. I figure the only way to make this happen is to become a genius. This figuring of mine raises two important questions:

Question 1: Can anyone become a genius?
There are mixed theories on what makes a person a genius. As luck would have it, I don’t know any of these theories. And that got me thinking: If it’s possible for a man to artificially turn himself into a genius, how would he do it? Is it books? I hope it’s books, because that’s what I used.

Question 2: How will I know if it worked?
My first idea was taking before and after IQ tests, but when I saw that nearly half my IQ test was to draw a picture of a pirate, I realized that all those rejections I received from the Institute of Turtle and Pirate Art must have been because I’d mixed up their application forms with IQ tests. Quick to give up, I decided to take before and after SAT tests. However, even before my genius training began, I was smart enough to know that the authorities were never going to believe that THIS time I was hanging around the high school to take the SATs. So I decided the best way to judge the level of intellectual growth was to write a proverb or musing at the beginning, and then another at the end, of my journey to brilliance.

My before proverb, and keep in mind I was not yet a genius at this point: “Don’t masquerade with a guy in shades, oh no. YOU CAN’T ESCAAAPE IT!”

Day One
Although my goal was firing mental energy blasts, I wanted to ease my way into my new genius lifestyle. I began with The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Improving Your IQ. Obviously, this early in the training, I didn’t stop to think that if this book really works, it’s going to at some point stop applying to its readers. Chapter One explained “What’s So Smart About Being Intelligent!” I noticed immediately that most of the instruction was going to be given to me by a smiling brain cartoon wearing a graduation cap, which to me seems like the smartest thing a person could ever draw. However, after several fruity comparisons of me, the reader, to the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz and how this book is going to be my yellow brick road, I started work on my new theory: After I become a genius, I’m probably going to hate myself.

I read carefully up until Chapter 10: See Me, Feel Me, Heal Yourself, where I felt I knew enough about my brain and how it applied to The Wizard of Oz that I was no longer a Complete Idiot, and maybe I was about to find and strangle the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Improving Your IQ. To make sure I was ready to move on to a book for non-morons, I skipped ahead to Chapter 25: Amygdala—Grand Central Station for the Emotional Express, and as I suspected, I didn’t have any damn idea what it was talking about. Obviously, I could no longer understand these Complete Idiots and their people’s childish transportation metaphors for why I cry every time I see a rainbow.

Day Two
Now that I wasn’t a Complete Idiot, I noticed an immediate difference in my life. My eating of things that weren’t food drastically decreased, and I managed to injure myself with only SOME of my appliances. Nursing what I’m proud to say was only a mild electrical burn from blow-drying my hair in the shower, I started in on my second book, 365 BRAINPOWER TIPS. This book was a disappointment from the very beginning, as the first TIP was to eat chicken, almonds, spinach and brewer’s yeast to make sure my brain got enough riboflavin. Here I am trying to unleashify my brain’s inner power, maybe not even to be used for evil, and this book is telling me to eat brewer’s yeast.

Putting different vegetables in your mouth made up a good 25% of the 365 BRAINPOWER TIPS, and most of the rest of it was made up little games you could play to remember words and numbers. For example, #33 reads, and I quote, “You can memorise [sic] numbers (such as telephone numbers) much better if you make up a little story. For instance, you could memorise [sic] the number 99702 in this way: Nena sang ‘99 balloons...’, Snow White had seven dwarfs, ... love is a zero in tennis, ... and two people belong together.” So being a genius is a lot like being a normal, except that calling someone fills your head with vibrant tales of phone number digits living and loving together.

I know I’m not selling this genius thing very hard, but if anyone’s interested in getting started, here’s BRAINPOWER TIP #124: “The best way to remember faces is to look out for especially pronounced features and memorize them. For the one person it could be his nose, which reminds you of an eagle’s beak, and for the next, it could be the receding hairline.” At this point in the book, I thought I might have accidentally bought a guidebook for penguin mothers to identify their young. Whether it was or not, this tip was reassuring since it showed that I already think like a genius, as I am nearly sometimes able to recognize people by the differences in their faces. There are occasions when I mistake a stripper for my girlfriend, but now that I know the trick of looking for her receding hairline as an identifying mark, I should be able to avoid mistakenly going home with her, provided she’s hatless.

Oh, and if you thought that was all of TIP #124, suck on this: It continues, “Even if nothing catches your attention at first, as soon as the person starts speaking or gesticulating, you are sure to find some distinctive feature that distinguishes this person from all the others that you have met.” Please note that my research seems to indicate that your friends will find it annoying if they’re forced to gesticulate wildly in order for you to recognize them. Explain to them that it’s all a part of you becoming a genius.

Day Three
Now that I knew 365 different ways to remember numbers and differentiate people with different sized noses, I considered myself at the very least mostly genius. It was time to move on to the good stuff. I purchased Telepsychics: The Magic Power of Perfect Living by Dr. Joseph Murphy, who also wrote Amazing Laws of Cosmic Mind Power. The first page of Telepsychics explained the science as thus: “You will learn how to visualize future events and, if they appear to be negative in nature, to change them through the application of metaphysical powers.” And after I read its 230 pages of religious babbling, dream interpretation and controlling the very forces of the cosmos itself, I’m confident in saying that I’m ready to strap myself to a young man’s back and teach him the ways of the Jedi while he jogs through a swamp. As of press time, there is no problem at any point of time in this universe that telepsychics and I can’t solve, usually by launching a little something out of my brain that goes by the name of A LASER.

Day Four
Now that I controlled time with powers beyond mystery, I adventured through the stars with Huey Lewis and the News on our talking Cosmo Bike, only to return at this exact point in my experiment. I figured the only thing I had left to conquer was Death itself (even though there was an incident in the wild west where Mr. T and I, through a series of tricks and punches, prevented his cold touch from claiming the soul of a sick Indian boy). To do this, I went to the bookstore to buy Keep Your Brain Alive, so that if it’s even possible for me to be killed anymore, my brain can live on in some kind of attack suit. The book was conceived and written by Lawrence C. Katz, Ph.D. and Manning Rubin, from what I assume were tiny offices they’d set up in the bubbling jars that contain the disembodied contents of their former skulls.

To my surprise, it was not a book of schematics of various super devices in which to house my brain and allow it to continue its destructive rampage, but “83 Neurobic Exercises to Increase Mental Fitness.” These ranged from the moronic: “Try brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand!” to the insipid: “Wear earplugs when you join the family for breakfast and experience the world without sound.” It was sobering to find out that the parts of becoming a genius that weren’t just stupid all had to do with deliberately making a fool of yourself.

Day Five
So far my brain is no longer an idiot, empowered with vegetable tips, capable of metaphysical clairaudience, and neurobicly fit. All I had to do now was keep it that way. So I bought a guide on sharpening and restoring my memory called Female and Forgetful. It was a book for aging women who forget to pick up their kids or walk into a room and forget why they’re there, but at this point in my intellectual climb up Megabrain Mountain, imagining myself to be a woman was pretty easy. In fact, I went one step further by imagining myself to be a woman with luscious breasts testing out a waterbed with the fashion world’s most exciting supermodels. This took most of day five and illustrated the type of non-linear problem solving other geniuses have used, such as Alexander the Great’s cutting of the Gordian knot or when Kurt Russell and Peter Fonda surfed after a speeding convertible on a tidal wave in John Carpenter’s Escape from LA.

Female and Forgetful was almost entirely a pharmaceutical guide to naturopathic remedies for the brain-fog elderly women suffer, and none of the drugs suggested seemed to have any effect on my intelligence. On the other hand, I do have several new vaginas, and my ears leak in nine different colors.

Day Six and Beyond
While my new base in the heart of an active volcano is great, I’m finding that being a genius makes it hard to enjoy the parts of my day that aren’t spent polishing my monocle (that is also a deadly throwing star). Every time one of you monkeys tries to speak, it’s like I’m listening to a T.G.I. Friday’s waitress describe a funny t-shirt she saw. And even though my intelligence is now probably hundreds of somethings too high to be measured, I’ll follow through on the plan I formulated back when my mind wasn’t a lethal weapon and write a proverb.

My post-genius proverb:
“True happiness is being at a place in one’s life when your innocent caveman brain can take a line of fatuous lyrics right out of Cory Hart’s ‘Sunglasses at Night’ and think it’s a proverb.”

No one likes to hang out with stupid people. Even stupid people shun those who they (stupidly) determine are more stupid than them. This explains why there are so many lonely geniuses out there… If you have an IQ of 180, you certainly aren’t going to want to socialize with those 170-IQ morons, let alone the rest of the drooling, mindless public.

So, what is a friendless genius to do? Simple: Join a high-IQ society of like-minded booknerds. That is, if they’ll take you. As you’ll see, the entrance requirements for some genius clubs are off the charts…

Mensa
www.mensa.org The most well known of the genius societies is also the easiest to get into. Mensa accepts any applicant who demonstrates an IQ in the top 2% of the population, or one out of every 50 people.

Internel
www.internel-iq.org
Only half of Mensa’s membership would qualify for Internel, which takes only the top 1% of the world’s thinkers.

The Top One Percent Society (TOPS)
www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/ tops.html
Whlie TOPS has the same IQ-entry-requirement as Internel, their focus is less on socializing and more on intellectual pursuits.

Colloquy
steveheller.com/colloquy
Accepting only geniuses who rank in the 99.5 percentile or higher, Colloquy is an online high-IQ group that was created to avoid the mudslinging and flaming that plague other genius message boards.

Poetic Genius Society
www.poeticgenius.com
This poetry-centric club only accepts one out of every 200 people, the same rate as Colloquy, the group they splintered off from.

The Cerebrals Society
www.cerebrals.com
The Cerebrals won’t let you read or post to their online message boards unless you meet the 99.7 percentile membership requirement.

The International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE)
www.thethousand.com
Now we’re talking some serious brain power: Only one in 1000 applicants qualify. Score lower than the 99.9 percentile, and you’re out.

Triple Nine Society
www.triplenine.org
Also accepting the 99.9 percentile, the Triple Nines were formed as a more democratic alternative to the rigid ISPE.

The One-in-a-Thousand Society (OATHS)
www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/oath.html
When TOPS members complained that printing more than two monthly journals would be too expensive, OATHS was founded as a sister-club dedicated to more prolific newsletters.

The IQuadrivium Society
s-2000.com/iquadrivium
Another 99.9 percentile society, the IQuadrivium is one of the few genius groups that allows non-members to read their online forums.

The Prometheus Society
www.prometheussociety.org
The Promethues Society has members from 18 countries despite the fact that they only accept one out of every 30,000 applicants (99.997 percentile).

UltraNet
www.megafoundation.org/Ultranet
UltraNet also holds out for 99.997 percentile IQ scorers or higher and exists as an online-only resource.

The Mega Society
www.megasociety.org
The Mega Society was founded as an experiment: Could a group that only takes members with an IQ in the 99.99999 percentile (one in a million) survive? The answer: Yes, it can.

The Giga Society
www.gigasociety.org
The Giga Society only takes one in a billion, or those with a 99.9999999 percentile IQ score. This may sound like a joke, since only about a half-dozen members could qualify… but it isn’t.