The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Tourist Trap Operator

Hi kid--Your family has that dollar store in the strip mall, right? Did you know your toothpaste tastes like soap? So what do you want to... Oh, hmm--well, I can see the connection I guess, since tourists are good at paying for absolute crap merchandise if you market it right. It will go something like this:

You'll move to some small town, preferably located near a beach, mountains or hot springs--or any other kind of natural phenomenon that can be marketed. Remember, that stink from the hot springs is "therapeutic" rather than toxic.

You'll buy or build a small retail outlet near the center of town. You won't rent because you don't want someone evicting you and stealing your idea if you become a success. Besides, with the ingenuity you and the other members of the local chamber of commerce will bring to the task of creating a tourism destination you figure the property will be a good investment.

It won't be easy at first--the locals are an odd bunch, probably due to the small gene pool created by years of inbreeding--but eventually you figure out the only way into their trust and you marry a local girl. Fortunately her six toes are from a recessive gene and your two girls seem comfortingly normal.

The hot springs aren't enough to make the town boom, you figure out, so you bring a brainstorm to the city council and convince them the town needs a mythological creature to pull in the crowds and market souvenir merchandise. You propose "Mort the Giant Rat", which seems original to anyone who doesn't know your kids' propensity for watching "The Princess Bride" five nights a week. The council agrees--although some wonder about the repulsiveness of the creature until you share a portfolio of Mort charicatures you had done by a local artist--he's almost cuddly in the poses with a variety of local merchanise and produce.

Still, the goal is to create interest, so while the marketing version of Mort is friendly, you simultaneously develop a ficticious folklore about giant rats who inhabited the murky past of your small community. Soon cryptozoologists are among the hundreds who flock to wander the back trails in search of the legendary "rodentia gigantisimus" as you and your colleagues dub it. The growth of the town continues, and although some items, like the local eatery's "ratburgers" don't sell well, most find the tourist trade increasingly lucrative.

Of course, there is still the offseason. The winter months are grey and depressing, and your girls join the local children who wander the empty streets seeking distraction. Since the local police maintain their manpower year-round, all they have to do in the offseason is hunt for drugs and confiscate alcohol from teens. In despair local youth turn to glue and gasoline for their highs, and soon you're among the many parents who ship their kids off to boarding school to save them from tragedy.

By the following season you've added a new attraction--a local craftsman, related like most to your wife, builds you a giant rat trap which you locate at the front of your property, even though you dipped into the town treasury to pay for it. Some other merchants are angry at first, but you assuage them by having giant yellow rat prints painted on the town boardwalk and have the tracks enter those businesses who contribute to your campaign to become mayor. When you win you get to sit in a convertible at the front of the "rat race", the annual parade which kicks off the weeklong "Plague Festival". It's going so well you buy up property outside town you can't really afford and begin building a resort which will stretch your budget to the breaking point.

Unfortunately, at about that time an unlucky tourist will trigger the rat trap in front of your store--you hadn't realized your dimwitted cousin-in-law would make it a functioning device--and the result is one man dead, a couple both paralyzed for life, and a busload of children in need of months of trauma counselling. The town becomes even more crowded with tabloid news crews for a few days, and then the downturn begins. Locals blame you for the destruction of the tourist trade, and soon only a few ghouls come to look at the site of the tragedy, and even the hot springs can't escape the malaise that hangs over the town.

You declare bankruptcy after first alienating your wife and all of her relatives by trying to sue her cousin for his deadly mousetrap construction. He has no assets and leaves town and you are financially destroyed by the first few lawsuits to get to court.

Your daughters are forced to return home and when your wife leaves you they join her. Her relatives give her a portion of the moonshine revenue to start a new life as a maid in a large Las Vegas hotel and casino. She and your daughters stop writing you after six months, and you hear nothing for two years from them as you drink most of the little money you are able to glean from the occasional visitor. You become more and more isolated from the villagers who hate you and have to pay a local ne'er do well to buy groceries for you so you needn't mix with people who'd rather spit on you than serve you.

After a lively night of heavy drinking, the patrons of a local pub head to your home with torches, while you read a letter you received from your ex-wife earlier in the day--apparently your daughters are ironically both serving the needs of tourists in ways that are only legal in Nevada. You don't notice the crowd outside until the molotov cocktails come crashing through your windows.

The next year the locals concoct a story about how you were in league with the devil and you and your home spontaneously combusted. They have their most profitable summer in a decade, and they become nostalgic enough about your good years that within a few months practically no one urinates on your grave any more.