THAT POOR GWYNETH PALTROW, and her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Only it’s more like months now, of Martha Stewart using code to trash her in editorials, and Chris Martin dating Jennifer Lawrence, and having her part in a movie taken by Nicole Kidman, and the Paltrow lifestyle business losing 1.6 million dollars. Or maybe that’s pounds, and not the kind Gwyneth is trying to lose on her kale juice, carrot soup and balsamic-miso-root-salad diet. Rumour is she’s either trying to get fit for a movie role, or she’s detoxing from a martini she had a couple weeks ago. I have a good martini detox, btw, and I call it another martini.

See how seamlessly I transitioned from Gwyneth Paltrow’s world to mine? I can do that because we have things in common. When you put aside her beauty, her movie deals, her records, her wealth, her fame, and her 150,000 subscribers, there it is—the blindingly obvious: we have both had an idea for a lifestyle empire.

Ms. Paltrow calls her lifestyle business Goop, which at first I thought had something to do with cleaning. Then I realized I was thinking of Goo Gone and that, no, Gwyneth Paltrow is not selling bottles of adhesive remover. That’s great for me, because Goo Gone is definitely going to figure heavily in my lifestyle empire, up there with duct tape and Chinese take-out boxes and these amazing vintage Scotch decanters that my dad finds at the flea market—

I know, eh. Ever fancy.

Sure there’s a lot of people jumping in on this game—like Blake Lively and Jessica Alba. But as far as I know there aren’t many guys doing it. So the genius of my business plan is that I’d be one of relatively few people running a lifestyle estore on the World Wide Intersite who also wears a penis. It’s all about positioning, and please note that I’m talking about the market and not my manbits.

You may have noticed that my website has changed in recent weeks. Here is the truth: I went away and did some very deep and difficult thinking about my life and what I wanted to accomplish with my writing. I was feeling like a loser and a failure, because I wasn’t making any money from the work I was doing, and worst of all I wasn’t picking up new readers. So I studied all the popular bloggers, like the Bloggess, and all the successful authors. I concluded that my problem was simply I wasn’t writing about things that were of interest and use to people, like how to remove the stuff off that there thing using Goo Gone, how to fix that whatchamacallit in your hand with duct tape, and how to do my patented Martini Detox.™

I also noticed many other revealing details, like for instance that Gwyneth Paltrow has one child named after the Bible and another after a fruit. So in October I went to Toronto City Hall and legally changed my fourteen-year-old son’s name to “The Book of Isaiah Blueberries.” I figure that alone will get me ten more hits a day, and despite whatever my son might tell you, it’s totally worth it.

Back to my lifestyle empire. This was one of those mighty ideas that I have in the shower. Here’s how it happened.

I was thinking about Gwyneth Paltrow’s hundred-dollar T-shirts and how amazing it would be if I could convince people to pay $25 for a roll of designer duct tape. And then I thought, “I would need a boutique lifestyle store to do that.” So I logicalled my way to the conclusion that really, isn’t It time I had a lifestyle empire? Now all I need is a name. I read somewhere that Goop is just the initials GP, so maybe I could call my empire Wooks, or Wuss. I also like Wookies, but I’m worried George Lucas will find out and sue me.

Thanks for visting and reading and helping me out with this empire thingy. It’s going to be great! Come back regularly, pick up a few of my retro Scotch decanters, and please follow me on Twitter. Cheers!