Shove It Upwards! A Mr. Paul Maul Book

By James Napoli

An irreverent look at self-help, Mr. Paul Maul provides cheeky, unorthodox advice that is nonetheless strangely useful. A fun, accessible Q&A format is combined with comical allegories about historical figures from Genghis Khan to Jane Austen struggling with their own empowerment issues. Shove It Upwards! will have you rubbing up against your life to the point of chafing. Visit www.mrpaulmaul.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Napoli
• Release date: Dec 2, 2009
• ISBN: 9781458043986

James Napoli

Mr. Paul Maul, an irreverent look at self-help, is the latest creation of author and humorist James Napoli, whose previous works include the popular humor title The Official Dictionary of Sarcasm, The North Pole Employee Handbook, Violation: The Ultimate Ticket Book and

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Praise For Mr. Paul Maul and Shove It Upwards!

Shove It Upwards! is a poke in the ribs at self-help, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Paul Maul’s loopy approach is loaded with its own brand of off-the-wall wisdom." - Tom Stern, author of CEO DAD: How to Avoid Being Fired By Your Family.

Skewed affirmations, snarky Q & A and twisted allegories using historical figures. With Shove it Upwards! Mr. Paul Maul’s creator, James Napoli, has birthed something really fresh and hilarious here. – Lee Adams, author of the Julie Page Mystery Series.

"There are blatant, predictable parodies and then there is Paul Maul: a highly sophisticated character/concept that is actually both funny and motivational. Napoli may be our best living practitioner of Inspired Irony." – Robert Morgan Fisher, Award-Winning Short Fiction Writer.

SHOVE IT UPWARDS!

Cramming Success Into Your Pipeline

A Mr. Paul Maul Book

Copyright by James Napoli

Empow-WOW-erment Books

Smashwords Edition

More Paul Maul Comedy at http://www.mrpaulmaul.com

James Napoli is also the author of:

The North Pole Employee Handbook

Violation! The Ultimate Ticket Book

Christmas Letters Gone Wild!

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other readers. If you would like to share this book with another reader, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting this author's work.

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INTRODUCTION

We are all constipated. Constipated with a clog that cannot be fixed by a change in diet or by taking a stool softener. Because the back-up is not in our lower ends, but in our upper. Our brains are constipated. Stuck in a walled off canal of negative conditioning, old traumas and good old-fashioned crippling fear. This book is designed to be Drano® for the mind. Take in a little of it at a time, let it seep into your chemistry, your psychic plumbing, if you will. It won’t work overnight. After all, the Drano® has to flow upwards, hence this volume’s title. By absorbing the information in Shove It Upwards into your body, you will be helping to flush out the things that are holding you back, banish them from your grey matter entirely. Push them up and out, into the sweet, clean air where they will not survive. Unproductive thoughts cannot live outside the festering darkness of our troubled minds. Ugly thought patterns die once they are exposed to light, much like the life-draining vampires they are!

You have crammed many things into your pipeline over the years, so why not a little success? Just think of the unhealthy substances you’ve shoved inside you, from that toxic pizza and ice cream you gleefully scarfed down last night to those toxic behavioral patterns you happily swallowed during your formative years. Now, a lifetime of this crap has lodged in your body’s pipeline, resulting in a hardened chunk of emotional constipation. And that slab of your own waste product is blocking you from becoming the person you want to be. Well, now it’s time to shove it upwards! Let success be your battering ram! Let the conquering log of getting what you need in life hammer away at that barrier of impacted, detrimental crud that dwells inside your head pipe. Push it up, up and OUT! And once that noxious, foul-smelling effluvium blasts through your head like a turd-turned-geyser, you will be clean, hollow, open. You will be an empty vessel, ready and waiting for change in your life.

A few thoughts, then, concerning what you are about to experience. Each chapter is assigned a letter. Combined, those letters spell one of the most healing, empowering affirmations I have had the privilege to share with my seminar audiences. These audiences have made many requests for a more in-depth look at what each of the letters in my motto truly means, and this book is a response to those inquiries. Fittingly, then, each chapter features a question & answer format to help facilitate the reader’s efficient immersion into the concepts contained herein. The questions have been distilled from among the most common queries I have received from audience members over the years. Only fictional first names of seminar attendees have been used in order to preserve their anonymity.

Finally, each chapter begins with a historical anecdote designed to illustrate how each of our problems and roadblocks to success is not only experienced by almost every one of our peers, but also most likely plagued every one of our ancestors as well.

Do your best, be yourself, walk the talk and Shove it Upwards! Thank you. You’ve made me so proud.

Mr. Paul Maul

Los Angeles, CA

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

D

Is for Drop The Baggage

Ugh the Caveman couldn’t sleep. He had just spent all day rubbing a stick between his palms and using the friction to make the stick generate heat on a stone surface. In fact, he had been engaged in this new activity for two weeks running, and with each passing day the high temperature he created seemed to be changing more and more into an energy that was not only making heat, but making wisps of something he could not have known was called smoke. And now, today, that smoke had progressed into the beginnings of tiny orange embers that scalded the tips of his fingers. Great Tap-Dancing Jesus, thought Ugh, this could be huge. He lay on the floor of his cave, unable to get comfortable no matter how many times he repositioned the sedimentary boulder under his head. Beside him, his wife Scrrn slept soundly but noisily, her great crinkly snores drowning out the sounds of the crickets and prompting a few nearby heads of cave-holds to call across the plain in irritation, not only because the sound was depriving them of sleep, but because her nasal rattling sounded remarkably like the mating call of the saber tooth tiger. There was a certain amount of well-founded fear that one of the deadly predators might suddenly turn up in camp looking to score.

Ugh couldn’t say what got him going on the whole stick between the palms friction thing. As a boy, he had been awarded merit badges in grunting, hair pulling and raw meat, so perhaps it was his natural inquisitiveness that led him to seek another use for sticks besides doing drum solos on the igneous rock formations. No matter what the cause of his inspiration, the memory of his discovery and the feeling that it poised him on a threshold of greatness kept his mind racing, hence the insomnia.

As his descendants thousands of years down the road would attest, once the mind gets to chattering to itself in the middle of the night, there is virtually no stopping it. And so, Ugh’s synapses began to fire in more disparate directions. You know, maybe he was blowing this whole thing out of proportion. Maybe he hadn’t stumbled upon anything significant at all. And who was he to claim that he was so special, so uniquely qualified to introduce something new and revolutionary to his people? Ever since he was a boy, his father Klanng had shared his basic wisdom with him, communicated through an elaborate series of guttural sounds, yes, but the message was clear: life is about survival, and to want more or to think you are better than anyone else is a detriment to tribal harmony. And once, when Ugh had spent an entire day making a cave painting depicting his vision of the coming donut-shaped craft from the stars and the tiny green men that came out of its domed entry hatch, his wife Scrrn had merely sniffed. Why waste time on paintings when there is Wooly Mammoth to hunt? Now, Ugh reasoned in the midst of his sleeplessness, the truth of who he really was began to emerge. He was not a very extraordinary person and it was doubtful that his little experiment with the sticks would really amount to anything. Better to get on with the grind of daily life and accept his place in the community as an offbeat but well-liked fellow. Yes, tomorrow, he would go to the stream and stab a few coelacanths so that he and Scrrn could have a big fish fry. Enough with the scheming and the rubbing the sticks between his palms. What nonsense.

Ugh at last began to drift toward a peaceful slumber, when a fleeting thought entered his consciousness. He had rather excitedly told his best friend Urgh about his little trial run with the sticks and the stone surface, and Urgh had expressed interest. But Urgh was a good man. He would never steal his friend Ugh’s idea. No, the world need never know about what could have been. And Ugh dozed off, comforted by the notion that things are usually just fine the way they are.

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JIM: So D is for Drop The Baggage. That term ‘baggage’ gets tossed around a lot in self-help circles, but I’ve never really heard more than a vague definition of it. I get the sense that it’s about hanging onto old stuff, but that seems so open to interpretation. How would you define ‘baggage?’

PAUL MAUL: Let’s say you’re going on a trip. You don’t want to pack too much because the airline charges for checked luggage now. Which sucks, but that’s a whole other story. But, if you’ll permit me an aside, I travel quite a bit in my field and there’s always more than one schmuck who tries to sneak one of those big, wide rolling suitcases in as a carry-on. And you get to sit there waiting for the plane to take off while the flight attendants try in vain to squeeze these items that are the size of a small studio apartment into the overhead bins.

JIM: Yes.

PAUL MAUL: Plus, that’s their second carry-on, right? Which is supposed to be a computer or a purse or something in addition to their one ‘regulation’ sized