After a relaxing holiday at the Forest-side Nature Hotel, shopkeeper Gengis Khan feels his personality has expanded so substantially that he decides to write a self-help manual. If only he could find a shop that will sell him a biro...But he soon discovers that the road to publication and posterity is littered with potholes in the modern world: Gengis narrowly avoids being replaced by a clone of himself after spending a year on a life-support machine, and is forced to fake his own death to escape life imprisonment for calling a cheerleader 'Popsickle'. He encounters an entrepreneur who seems literally to have crawled through excrement to reach the top, and fights in vain against the destruction of the rain forest to supply wood for the world's toilet seats.