Bored Board Member
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."-Hunter S. Thompson
Board meetings?!? More like bored meetings!!! On a quarterly basis, publicly traded companies have a pow wow to go over financial reviews, brainstorm potential new growth strategies, and go over compliance updates. They may be important action items for an open discussion, but the conversational content is usually lame. With too much information being floated, distribution of boring pie charts, and Excel spreadsheets showing growth or decline, most people at these board meetings are there in person, but their spirit is elsewhere. Everybody is expected to be an active listener, with the board members getting selected and paid based on their engagement and recommendations. Most of these corporate conversations are conducted in MBA jargon and are painfully formal with not a lot of wild ideas being brainstormed. The long agenda meetings tend to drag ass and tend to follow a scripted narrative for they don’t alienate the shareholders. A few policy changes may take place but all in all it’s just more of the status quo.
Being on a board, thus being a bored member of a Fortune 500 company, is really the ultimate dream come true. You typically get paid $1-2 million per year to be flown in on a private jet and pretend to be engaged at the semi-annual meeting. You show up, spout out your bullshit narratives, make a suggestion or two and that’s about it. It’s the easiest job in the world. You now see why congressman and career bureaucrats support deregulatory business legislation and kiss the asses of CEOs since they all want one of those coveted seats. You get to fund a luxurious lifestyle by showing up and not doing much. It’s nothing more than a ceremony of pomp and circumstance to appease the overlords of Wall Street. Most of these people pretend to be interested but in reality, they’re bored out of their fucking mind.
With profit margins and growth statistics being analyzed within the plastics division of a chemical company, our protagonist of the story Larry finds himself deep in a daydream. Fantasizing about what he’s going to eat for dinner and what his weekend plans will entail Larry’s mind is thousands of miles away from the business at hand. He hates these things, but it’s easy money and he has paid his dues to get here. The supplemental income funds his kids’ college tuition and pays alimony to his ex-wife Esmeralda. Lately, when he’s in deep escape mode with his mind wandering to the outer edges of collective consciousness, Larry envisions himself as a Japanese school girl heading to the biker bar to find a man with a hog. Once this innocent skirt wearing Japanese woman materializes as Larry’s ultimate doppelganger, he fantasizes about waltzing into a rough backwoods bar and linking up with a Hells Angel with a Harley. Assuming the name Katsumi which translates to delicate flower from the East, this dimension of Larry’s personality is at the point in her life where motorcycles excite her and she’s eager to explore the open road along with her sexuality. It is the ultimate escape mechanism for this bored board member and in Larry’s mind he can already feel the wind from his motorcycle ride gently blowing up his schoolgirl dress.
With the CEO and the President of the Board giving each other ass kissing compliments, Larry already wants to vacate from the boardroom since he’s bored off his gourd. Closing his eyes he takes a trip to fantasyland taking on the form of Katsumi. Katsumi is indeed 21 but looks like she’s in high school with her schoolgirl attire. Sporting a blue and white plaid design dress with blazer, while rocking a tiny backpack and pink Care Bears for accessories, Katsumi finds herself in Sturgis, South Dakota for the annual biker rally. Witnessing bearded and tattooed men get in fights with knives and pool cues, Katsumi looks for the guy with the biggest bike. After a couple of beers and bowls of peanuts at the bar, Larry, I mean Katsumi, chooses a sweaty biker with chest hair spilling out of his leather vest named Son of a Bitch Mitch. Being asked if she wants to “get out of here,” Katsumi and Son of a Bitch Mitch hop on his Tri Glide Ultra and ride off into the sunset. Holding on for dear life, Katsumi holds onto SOB Mitch’s thick and dark chest hair for she doesn’t fall off the bike.
With his expertise on mergers and acquisitions and a deep rolodex of contacts, many business professionals come to Larry for his advice and if he’ll be on their board. Hesitating to do it, he can never say no. Being semi-retired and wanting to be somewhat active to keep his mind sharp, Larry continually gets dragged into quarterly board meetings. With an attention span lasting only 2-3 minutes, Larry shifts gears and instantly metamorphosizes into Katsumi. In this multi-hour adventure Katsumi finds herself as a groupie within the Bandido Biker Gang. Having a reputation for being some tough hombres, the Bandidos are an outlaw biker club that dominate American highways. Currently hooking up with some guy named Spike, cute and innocent Katsumi is expected to cater to his sexual appetites and smuggle high grade methamphetamine across state lines. After getting stabbed in a drug deal gone wrong, our heroine Katsumi decides to get Spike’s initials tatted on her scar tissue incurred from the illegal transaction. After the dust settles from the rough and tumble world of being the girlfriend of a commander in a motorcycle club, Katsumi and Spike hit the road on his Pan America 1250 Special. Riding down Route 66 in Northern New Mexico, Larry/Katsumi hold on to Spike’s glistening chest hair as they take in the desert features.
With Larry now finding himself on the board of Starbucks, he’s can’t hardly wait for the annual shareholder meeting to get over with. Sales are down with costs going up, and all Larry hears is blah-blah-blah. When he comes to, he’s once again assuming his alter ego character. Katsumi finds herself walking up a dirt road in attendance at Montana’s annual Testicle Festival. With 20000 people gathering for the weekend in Rock Creek, the Testy Festy serves up Rocky Mountain oysters which are really deep-fried bull testicles. Tastes like chicken. Far from a food festival, this annual meetup is nothing more than a bunch of nasty bikers riding around naked on their hogs. After rejecting the advances from multiple gruff bikers, Katsumi finally decides on a rough looking dude nicknamed Silverback. Silverback is the alpha male of his bike club, with a shaggy Fu Manchu facial hair style while having a bear rug for chest hair. After a couple of Jack and Cokes and taking a couple of puffs off a PCP-laced cigar, Katsumi agrees to follow Silverback wherever he goes. With her little hands firmly grasping Silverback’s chest hair by the handful, the newly minted couple heads down I-90 westbound to the next biker rally in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Present in the metaphysical form in his chair, Larry has completely tuned out from all the frequencies coming from the presenters at the board meeting. Something about a 2028 groundbreaking of a new corporate HQ for the Trump Group in Florida. With the static and fuzz hissing as background noise, Larry is readying himself to take another trip to the unknown. Snapping out of his boring reality he finds himself in a kimono dress, once again taking shape as Katsumi. Finding herself entering a po-dunk biker bar somewhere in the Mojave Desert in California, she gets acquainted with a Hells Angels leader nicknamed Hardcore Harry. As a tunnel rat back in Nam, it was rumored that he once killed a man with his bare hands by crushing his trachea in a hand-to-hand battle to the death. Ever since he got back some fifty years ago Hardcore Harry has lived as an outlaw and by the Hells Angels code. In and out of prison for several offenses, Harry is now an elder biker and doesn’t initiate criminal conduct as much. Being the aging bad boy that he is, he emits a magnetism which has draws Katsumi towards him. Admiring his 3 tear drops tattoo on his face, Katsumi is in love and wants to have HH’s baby. After a quick courtship the two decide to hop on the bike and head to Vegas to get married at a drive thru wedding chapel. Deciding that they’ll honeymoon in Oakland, the birthplace of the Hell’s Angels, Katsumi grabs on to Hardcore Harry’s gray chest hairs as they ride through the empty quarter of Nevada.
Riding on the open road in America is the ultimate testament to freedom and is every Japanese school girl’s dream come true. Shacking up with a rough dude nicknamed Mongoose and peddling narcotics across state lines has been Larry’s daydream fantasy for 30 years. Getting lost in corporate reports as talking heads drone on about key data trends and implementing a designated day to recognize all of the woke blokes in the organization, Larry’s mind starts to wander, always ending up in his happy place. Instead of digesting and regurgitating corporate jargon, our hero escapes to the deep recesses of his mind where he’s a 21-year-old Japanese school girl. Sporting a skimpy plaid skirt that barely covers his/her naughty parts, Larry/Katsumi is on the prowl for the guy with the biggest bike that will take her for the ultimate ride. The biker groupie lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but for Katsumi it’s an even bigger thrill than going on a kamikaze mission with some Japanese bad boys from the Yakuza.
Brian Ss