Excerpt from my biographical essay on Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison, you lump of dog shit left directly

under a rack of those free green courtesy poop

bags they leave in parks, you brazen mockery,

flaunting of social order, when you invented

electricity, or whatever it is you did,

(I only read the first paragraph on Wikipedia)

did you realize it would come to this?

Thomas Edison, you putrescent butt nugget!

Thanks to you I have to bite my tongue

while my male friends study up on current

post-feminist rhetoric so that they can post

it on Facebook and hopefully get laid

for their sensitivity and intellect.

The point is, you’re a damn enabler

of the basest aspects of human existence,

a vicious circle of ignorance born of you,

Thomas Edison, you fecal smear,

this is all your fault, we are blameless!

Thomas Edison, you bucket of urine balanced

on a door such that it crashes down to drench

whomsoever should enter said door with pee—

how could you? An Internet radio program

just told me Sublime sounds like The Beatles.

That’s wrong, Thomas Edison! Am I

going crazy over here, you electric prick?

Thomas Edison, there’s a reason Prometheus

stands chained to a rock getting his liver pecked at,

is all I’m saying. I don’t know what the reason

is, why don’t you look it up on Microsoft Encarta

or some other outcome of your vile handiwork?

Thomas Edison, you dropped out of school,

and I didn’t, I went to college for four whole

years, and I drank and drank and drank there,

and that’s called learning about life, Thomas

Edison, we call that letting our children make

their own mistakes, and waste time, money,

brain cells, potential, autonomy.

I’m smarter than you, is the point.

Fuck you, Thomas Edison.

The Meaning of Life

Based on a true story

Guy has a really incredible bowel movement, and when I say guy there, it’s just a guy, not the name, and definitely not the French name, like capital-hard-G “Gee”, what is he, a queer or something? So guy, whose name incidentally is actually Guy now that I think about it, but pronounced the English way and earlier clarification still stands, has the kind of magical shit where it’s firm but not to the point where you have to strain, and you basically don’t have to wipe like at all, and the experience of passing this lump of waste is so religious, so profoundly moving, that you practically get post-partum depression, but it gets the rest of your day in order, you know, like you think you’re going to go out and do something great, like you think if everybody could have pooped your poop this morning that maybe Israel and Palestine could even get along or something like that.

Anyway.

Guy (who’s an atheist, by the way, not that it’s particularly relevant to this situation) says: Thank you God for this really incredible bowel movement!

God says: My child, I am gladdened that you were able to enjoy that poop. I myself am too holy to have an asshole, which is a vaguely amusing audible pun, but anyway I’m glad I was able to devise that function in a way you could enjoy.

Guy says: So God, what brings you to my, like, humble commode?

God says: Well, I so enjoyed seeing the positive effects of my works that I’m going to give you the chance to ask me for any one thing you may desire.

So I can already practically hear you whining about how God doesn’t grant wishes, he’s not a genie or something, and I guess you have a point, but like I said, this is based on a true story, and that’s definitely what was said, and since this is like really a third or fourth-hand account at this point, as in guy tells a guy tells a guy tells a guy (oh, and those guys I just mentioned aren’t named Guy, and they’re not the earlier guy from the story either), so maybe it really was a genie and it just got changed along the way, like oral tradition or something. If you can’t get past it, fine, you can think of it as a genie if you want, but that’s exactly how these errors start to pop up in stories that keep getting passed down, you know.

So Guy says: You know what, God? I’m actually all right for the time being. That poop was wonderful, and to ask for anything else would be greedy.

I guess that might seem unrealistically unselfish, but it was a really great turd, see above florid description if you doubt the veracity of the claim. Anyway, I guess that’s the point, is that life really isn’t so bad if you, like, stop to smell the roses, which I realize is an unfortunate choice of sense-based moral given the somewhat malodorous implications of the above, but what can you do? That’s life, I guess.