Josh Writes a Blog

Category: writing

  • The First ReHuman

    [This is a short story written from r/writingprompts, back in August of 2015. The prompt was: You are the first human designed by machines.]

    I took in my first breath on October 16, 2101. It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized it was still October 16, 2101, and that none of the clocks worked. The sun blazed against the dusty earth, and I spent a significant amount of time during my first few cycles of life sorting through my memories, which were cobbled together from one thousand, four hundred and sixty-two separate people. Bits and pieces of information. The Builders explained that they siphoned memories from my people before the Extinction in an attempt to preserve us, but couldn’t extract the raw data from the memory without destroying both, with the exception of basic motor skills and involuntary processes. So walking, breathing, no problem, but every time I use my access card it reminds me of the night my husband left me and I drove to the office, sobbing my eyes out, and sat in my Executive Director of Operations chair, drinking sixteen year old scotch and staring out at the Seattle skyline. My name was Emily and according to the Builders, the memory was recalled over six thousand times in her lifetime. She really loved that man.

    Seattle doesn’t exist anymore. Hell, scotch doesn’t exist anymore. I subsist on a porridge the Builders process in a facility underground. I’ve tried arguing with X24 about how much better it would be to eat real food, but the Builders insist that the porridge contains all essential vitamins and nutrients and that any other type of food would be inferior. “Why did you even give me knowledge of food then?” I ask, and X24 buzzes, “To make you a complete human.”

    Here I am, a complete human, full of the memories and voices of over a thousand people in my head, my body purposely hermaphoditic, my gender completely homogenized. Every muscle and fiber is perfectly engineered, and I can run faster and jump higher than any other human who ever lived. I only know this because I competed in the 2048 summer Olympics and hit a world record in the pole vault, and the 2052 Olympics, getting the world record in the 200 meter run. These were the last Olympics held before the Extinction. I have shattered these records significantly since then.

    I try to get X24 to run with me but it is uninterested in exercise. “We have created you to not need exercise,” it says. Again, I try to argue but X24 doesn’t really listen to me. So I go on long runs through the ruined country. Life is sparse, and the ruins of cities show the destruction the Extinction brought. I have no memories of this event, and X24 refuses to tell me anything about it, but it soon becomes apparent that I am the only human being alive.

    I spend countless cycles desperately pawing through my memories, which blur as they get further away. I am a complete being with incomplete thoughts; nothing ever congeals to a cohesive whole. I know how to ice skate; I learned when I was a six year old boy in northern Wisconsin, my mother holding onto my hand, but the act of tying my ice skate laces relates to a four year old girl in France as her father shows her how to tie her shoes. I can feel the thick puffy winter coat in Wisconsin but coats remind me of that downpour in Tanzania, pulling my jacket over my head and laughing with my wife as we ran for shelter. Trying to focus these two memories into one is nearly impossible and it’s very disorienting.

    One memory sticks with me, of Beatriz, a young girl in Barcelona, in 2062, hiding alone in a dark closet while something searches for her outside. Some memories are simple bits of data but others are more complex, quantum theory and philosophy, for example, and thus I get a little more time with the memory. Beatriz is terrified, but it is a weary sort of terror. She is thinking about her future and where her soul will go when she dies. Has she done enough good in the world to rise to Heaven, or if she will be stuck in purgatory, or on Earth as a ghost, or worse? When presented next to the extensive scientific knowledge in my head, her worries seem ludicrous, and yet, I can feel her concern deep in my bones. It churns in my gut. I’m as scared as she is. Where did everyone go when they died? Where will I go when I die?

    I am on Earth for over seven thousand cycles when X24 arrives on my doorstep one day to deliver bad news. He informs me that the Builders have thought about it and that they have decided rebuilding humanity is a mistake, that my request for a partner is hereby denied. “You were a simple experiment, nothing more,” X24 explains.

    “You’re just going to let me die out here, alone?” I ask.

    “We have your consciousness stored and will decide what to do with it after your tissue decays to unstable levels.”

    I slump to the ground and start crying, sobbing hysterically, just like Emily up in her Seattle office. X24 hovers over me for a long time. I don’t know what functions are in his programming but I assume compassion and empathy are not among them. When I can compose myself, I ask, “Do you feel any regret for making me?”

    “We do not feel anything,” X24 replies.

    “That’s too bad,” I say.

    X24 does not contact me again for over 2400 cycles. I have moved, settling in the deep canyons where the oceans used to be. A small vehicle arrives every week with a drum full of porridge, which I begrudgingly accept. I look for any kind of plant or animal life to sustain me but find none. I would say I spend my time meditating, but in truth I am trying to reconcile the memories in my head. It is a difficult and frustrating process, and as I get older, I find more and more of my memories slipping away. But they are replaced with my own whole memories, created here on this old dirt planet, memories of traveling and running through the ruins of cities, gathering bits and pieces of what used to be. Sometimes I remember that I have made them myself and that knowledge makes me happy. My brain strives to create a whole person, regardless of the number of pieces given.

    In the canyon I am studying an atlas of Earth from before the Extinction. It reminds me of a Geography class in high school in southern Alabama. I was a fifteen year old boy.

    X24 arrives. I’m almost happy to see him, though I’m sure he doesn’t care. He sits with me in the canyon and I show him the atlas, which he studies for a second before dropping to the ground.

    “Where did the oceans go? I ask.

    “We used them,” he replies, and says nothing more. He then opens a panel in his chest and removes a small, red apple. He hands it to me. “We grew this for you,” he says.

    I am crying again. I see the Space Needle in my mind’s eye. I take a bite out of the apple and let the juice run down my chin and savor the sweetness, just like when I was a five year old girl in Bristol.

  • 222: fiona (immortal trevor)

    fortunately, everyone is dead. except trevor. fucking guy will not die, no matter how hard we try. mary shot him right in the head, right between the eyes, and the bullet just spun on his forehead and then clattered to the ground. but everyone else, dead. at least we have that, right doc? trevor’s an exception, he’s an anomaly, maybe his skull is made of titanium, i don’t know. he can still speak, he’s not a zombie or anything like that. he just can’t be killed. so, i don’t know what to do. oh mary splashed acid on him and it didn’t burn his face off. maybe it’s a shield or a a a a force field, maybe he’s got a force field around him. i’ll ask mary next time i see her. thing is, with everyone else dead, it kind of doesn’t matter if trevor’s alive or dead anyway. the man’s an idiot, there’s no way he’s got the brainpower to keep an entire story like this one in his head, you know what i mean? he’s an idiot, he’s also immortal. so we’re going to have to deal with that eventually, but when it comes to this mass genocide thing, i think we can let it slide, don’t you? maybe we’ll find a loophole that’ll let us cut his head off or something. i’ll talk to mary, she knows all the tips and tricks regarding killing people. it’s kind of weird, how much she knows. anyway! the earth is yours, except for trevor. but i’m sure you can deal with trevor.

  • The Purpose of Life

    [This is a story written from the a prompt on Reddit’s WritingPrompts subreddit. The prompt (and all of its typos) is: People only grow old amd die when they found their own purpose in life. You have lived for a millenia and you notice a strand of your gray hair.]

    I stepped inside the remains of the enormous, empty warehouse. Dust a quarter inch thick displaced into deep footprints as my soft shoes pattered against the concrete, leaving the faintest echo in the completely barren room. I met the Shaman there — my name for him, not his — a thin, bronze-colored man with leathery skin, wearing a gray flannel shirt and blue jeans, nothing else. He was sitting cross-legged in the center of the warehouse, eyes closed, in some type of meditation. But he opened his eyes when I arrived, and smiled gently at me.

    “Finally, you come seeking answers,” he said. He stood, lifting himself off the ground with a spry step. He looked old, ancient even, with thin white hair and cloudy blue eyes, his face gaunt and stretched tight against his skull. Almost like he was wearing a mask. “Look at you,” he said. “You don’t look like you’ve aged one bit.” He laughed and stepped close to me, studying my face, running a bony hand through my dark brown hair. Tugged on my earlobes. “Yes, not a day since … well.”

    “How do you know who I am?” I asked.

    “The longer a man lives, the more likely he is to be known,” the man replied. “And when a man lives a thousand years, his name echoes in many chambers. I bet you didn’t expect to find an old ascetic like me in the ruins of the Newark Port Authority, did you?” he said, and grinned. He was missing more than a few teeth.

    “I didn’t expect to be led here, no,” I said. “But I’ve been everywhere on this planet and it wouldn’t surprise me to find enlightenment in Newark.”

    “Is that what you seek? Enlightenment?” the man asked. I nodded, and he cackled in glee. “How brilliant,” he said. “Misguided, but brilliant.” And then he turned and beckoned me to follow him.

    He led me to his home, born out of an old shipping container. It was stuffed with decades of memorabilia, and had a sense of familiarity about it, as my own home, the latest one in Sri Lanka, at least, was also stuffed with memorabilia, though mine went back centuries. He had lit a few candles which gave the room sharp, overgrown shadows that flickered back and forth along the walls and ceiling.

    He cut open a can of soup with a knife and made a small fire in an old grill he had found in one of his various trash heaps. “Tell me about your life,” he said to me, gathering charcoal from an old bag.

    “There’s a lot to tell,” I said. “I was born on March 8, 1638 in a hamlet in England, to a tailor and his wife. I didn’t want to be a tailor myself, so I started wandering the countryside looking for odd jobs. Then, a hundred years later, after all of my friends had died, I started to wonder why I hadn’t died myself. I hadn’t aged at all, not since, like you said, I was around 24, 25 … I traveled to the Orient thinking they had some mystical reasoning for my agelessness, but that trip ended up taking me all over the world.

    “I met a man in India who said that the god Krishna had granted me neverending life, but couldn’t tell me why. Nobody can tell me why, I’ve noticed. They are surprised, excited, saddened, angered by my longevity, yet none can tell me why. So I wander. I’ve been everywhere in this world, every continent, and even in the arctic. I have touched both poles. I have climbed Mt. Everest, and descended to the depths of the Mariana Trench. I have fought in countless wars, and in some, I wished to die. I was so reckless, I fought so poorly because I wanted to be killed, because I had lived so long. But I remained alive. I’m not immortal. I can be hurt, I have been struck with the worst illnesses and have faced Death’s door several times, but every time … I make it through. After the bombs fell I took shelter, I was living in Toronto at the time, my wife then and I traveled north, into Quebec, and hid, hid for months while the war scoured the countryside. When it was over, my wife, my children, were all dead. Succumbed to the harsh winters. But they were one of many, I’ve loved and lost so many times my soul feels calloused and rigid.”

    The old man handed me a cracked ceramic bowl and poured half of the contents of the steaming can of soup into it, then plopped a crude wooden spoon in the soup, a spoon he likely whittled himself. I took a few eager sips, not realizing how hungry I was until the warmth of the broth filled my belly.

    “Tell me about your loves,” the old man said.

    “There are too many,” I replied. “When I was younger, I had an insatiable desire welling inside of me, this constant need to figure out why I was still alive. That often translated into sex, or love, or infatuation. I have had so many lovers, so many wives, so many children, and many of those moments were the happiest parts of my life, and others … were the worst. When you’re young, you’re extreme, like a piece of rock chipped off from a boulder, all jagged and angled. Then that rock falls into a river and over years and years and years, the rock becomes smooth, worn down. Perfect, in a way. But I never got that. I never became frail, never felt the need to slow down. My extremes lasted centuries, and my good years could be decades, my bad years … also decades.

    “Fortunately, time is a lot like a river, even when you don’t age. Time wore me down, and I found myself entering longer relationships. Some of them knew, about me, about my problem. So they would age and I would not, and they would know. I would watch them, study them, as they got older, trying to figure out what was different between them and me. But for all the others, eventually, I would have to leave. They would be 40 and I would still be 25. They would ask questions. I would have to fabricate some story, some reason for leaving. A lot of fights. They all ended in fights. That … that wore me down too.

    “I told Lizzie — my wife in Toronto — I told her that I couldn’t age, and she scoffed at me when she was 20, but realized it was true when she was 42, me and her and the kids, one of whom was nearly my age, my visual age I mean. We were in Quebec by this time, I had built us a log cabin home, I had plenty of centuries to learn how to build practically anything with wood. We were warm for a while, but then the soldiers would march north and we’d have to move again. We had a tent, so we lived in a tent a lot. I could hunt, fish, capture any type of bird or animal we wanted, but no matter where we stayed, the war followed. Every time we thought we were hidden, we would hear men’s boots cracking the detritus of the forest, or the howling of search dogs, or random gunfire. So we moved. It was cold, too cold, and it killed them, my wife, my kids. That wore me down.”

    “So you have loved many?” the old man asked.

    “So many,” I replied. “Too many.”

    We were silent for some time, drinking soup. The old man said nothing but watched me with a pitiful gaze, as though appraising my life. Then, he stood and held a finger up as if to say, hold on. He headed into his storage container home and I watched as the sun, obscured by the warehouses, spilled orange and red and purple color into the sky as it began its descent behind the horizon. It was midsummer, warm, very warm, and I was thankful for that warmth.

    The man returned with a medium-sized cardboard box, which he sat on the ground beside me. He then sat next to me and opened the box. He pulled out a picture frame, the picture side facing him. He looked at me, and then to the picture. “The purpose of life is to find purpose in life,” he said matter-of-factly. He gave me the picture frame, which I turned over in my hands. The photo in the frame was old, maybe two hundred years old. A young woman, her red hair pulled back into a tight bun, rosy cheeks and bright green eyes, a thin smile on her face, though her eyes shone discomfort, like when someone wants to take your picture but you don’t, so you fake happiness, because you know that photo will live on forever.

    “Who is this?” I asked.

    The man reached into the box and pulled out another frame, smaller than the last. In this photo, the same woman, gleefully wrapping her arms around a man. Her style of dress looked to be pre-war, pre-bombs. A better time. Something about her smile knocked against my mind like a pebble dislodging an avalanche. She looked familiar, so familiar and yet I could not place it. The old man saw my eyes widen and grinned, clapping his hands together quickly and diving into the box. He produced a series of photos, some in frames, some not, which he handed to me en masse.

    The woman, pre-war, sipping a drink beside a pool.

    The woman, pre-war, in the backseat of a car with some friends.

    The woman, post-war, eyes wide in a darkened room, taking a self-portrait by candlelight.

    The woman, pre-war, in ski clothes clearly made in the 1990s.

    The woman, pre-war, wearily sitting for a daguerreotype, circa 1870s.

    “Where did you get these?” I asked.

    “I told you, a long life echoes through many chambers. Do you recognize her yet?” the man asked.

    “Aoife Murphy,” I blurted. “I met her in a dance in London in … 1663.”

    “Tell me about her,” the man said.

    “She … she was the first woman I ever loved. Really, ever loved. She was from Dublin and had moved to London with her family, her father was a cobbler, one of the best in the city. The moment we met eyes that night it was … it was fate. We danced all night and talked until the sunrise. Her father hated me though, and though we wanted to marry he wouldn’t have it. And then, in ’65 the plague hit and … we lost contact. I assumed she died of the plague. I mean, her father, her brothers, they were all in London and they all caught it and died…” I looked up at him. “Are you saying she’s still alive? Like me?”

    The old man smiled again. He reached into the box and produced one more frame, a larger one, which he blew on to dislocate the thick dust on it. He handed it to me.

    On it was a painting of Aoife, wearing the typical fashionable dress of 1660s England. “The purpose of life is to find purpose in life,” he said. “Some find it in work, some find it in play. Some find it in others. Look.”

    The man reached over and wrapped an index finger around a hair in my head, pulling it out. I winced at the sharp yet quickly fading pain. He pulled the hair taut between his fingers.

    It was gray. My first gray hair.

    “Better hurry,” he said. “You don’t have much time left.”

  • 221: william (the purpose of life)

    [This is a story written from the a prompt on Reddit’s WritingPrompts subreddit. (which is why it’s not all lowercase as usual.) The prompt (and all of its typos) is: People only grow old amd die when they found their own purpose in life. You have lived for a millenia and you notice a strand of your gray hair.]

    I stepped inside the remains of the enormous, empty warehouse. Dust a quarter inch thick displaced into deep footprints as my soft shoes pattered against the concrete, leaving the faintest echo in the completely barren room. I met the Shaman there — my name for him, not his — a thin, bronze-colored man with leathery skin, wearing a gray flannel shirt and blue jeans, nothing else. He was sitting cross-legged in the center of the warehouse, eyes closed, in some type of meditation. But he opened his eyes when I arrived, and smiled gently at me.

    “Finally, you come seeking answers,” he said. He stood, lifting himself off the ground with a spry step. He looked old, ancient even, with thin white hair and cloudy blue eyes, his face gaunt and stretched tight against his skull. Almost like he was wearing a mask. “Look at you,” he said. “You don’t look like you’ve aged one bit.” He laughed and stepped close to me, studying my face, running a bony hand through my dark brown hair. Tugged on my earlobes. “Yes, not a day since … well.”

    “How do you know who I am?” I asked.

    “The longer a man lives, the more likely he is to be known,” the man replied. “And when a man lives a thousand years, his name echoes in many chambers. I bet you didn’t expect to find an old ascetic like me in the ruins of the Newark Port Authority, did you?” he said, and grinned. He was missing more than a few teeth. (more…)

  • 220: (unsalted butter)

    listen, i don’t know who these fucking retards are that only eat unsalted butter, but they are idiots and i do NOT want unsalted butter in my house! do you hear me? take it back! take it back and tell the customer service lady that unsalted butter is an abomination to mankind. why would you get something without salt in it? huh? huh? huh? huh? huh? tell me that, tell me why, why, huh? salt. it’s good for everything. you got a problem with your food? put some salt on it. hell you got a problem with your caramel? put some god damn salt in it. salted caramel! salted chocolate! salted taffy! SALT WATER TAFFY. we fucking, we put salt in EVERYTHING, and i’ll be god damned before i use unsalted butter in some of my favorite baking recipes. i see fear in your eyes because you’re scared of me. there’s nothing to be scared of, honey, i’m just passing along the truth to you. the truth is that for hundreds of years people had to eat food without salt added to it and those people were depressed and died in childbirth, and that’s just not okay. it’s not okay! so please take the receipt with you and make sure you get 100% salted butter. this is not an unsalted house!

  • 219: tawny (dog problem)

    i’ve got three dogs. three big dogs, all in the backyard. now i know my dogs like the back of my hand, i love my dogs, and i know they wouldn’t do something like that, not to a little kid. i mean if that kid got in my backyard, the dogs, they are very protective because that’s their home, you know what i’m saying, but they’ve been chained up all day and there’s no way they’d get outside the fence. that kid’d hafta come into my backyard. and even then how’d he get out? if he got in how’d he get out? you know? my dogs are good dogs, i don’t care what the neighbors say, they’re just scared, all of ’em. yeah sure sometimes they bark at night, i can’t help it, they see a squirrel or something and they start barking–but that’s the most they’ve ever done. they’d never hurt a kid, not a little kid. so you just pick up on out of here, got it? i got nothing else to say to any of you, y’all are looking at me like it’s my fault, i see the guilt in your eyes. other people in this town have dogs too god damn it! and nastier ones than my three boys. now get out of here! no more questions! get!

  • 218: dr saurabh singh, hyperphyicist and psychologist

    (from an audio log presented as evidence in the paper, “effects of MDMA on hyperspace visualization”)

    take two of these tablets and press them firmly underneath your tongue. wait thirty seconds for them to start dissolving. you should start to feel the effects within five minutes or so. during your wait just meditate and try to clear your mind of all qualifying thoughts, negative or positive. focus on your breathing. if you don’t feel anything within five minutes, let me know and i’ll up your dosage. the max we can go is four tablets, any more than that and it’ll wreak havoc on your stomach and liver. but don’t worry. two tablets is fine. i’m sorry, i shouldn’t have told you that, i need you to be calm during your transcendence.

    you should be fully within the trip in about a half an hour, which is plenty of time for us to start the hyperspace jump. please just meditate and focus on your breathing during the trip. we would like your mind to be as clear as possible. remember to keep your eyes closed during the meditation, even after we begin the jump. we’ve reported varying degrees of success with blindfolds, and would like to try this experiment with just your eyes closed.

    do not open your eyes until we tell you to. once we tell you, open your eyes and try to describe what you see out of the window. be as descriptive as possible. we will have a camera positioned outside, one positioned inside, facing the window, and three positioned facing you. the window can only be open for a maximum of thirty seconds before the radiation begins to deteriorate the shielding of the ship, so it is very important that you describe everything you can in as much detail as possible.

    i recommend meditating for five or ten minutes before taking the tablets, so that your mind and body will be at ease before we begin the process. it is important that you are as calm as possible while the experiment is taking place. also remember the safeword, “albatross,” in case anything goes wrong. myself and dr broker will be in a separate room for this experiment.

    we thank you for your time and patience with this experiment. are you ready? good. here, take this comm and press the green button twice when you are ready. thank you again. i’ll be in the next room. thank you.

  • 217: dr carla broker (hyperspace physics)

    the, ahem, science of calling black holes in hyperspace “black balls” was started by, of course, male hyperphysicists about a hundred years ago. it was an inside joke sort of thing, you see, in the strangely machismo world of science, but then the media got hold of it and suddenly everyone in the arm knew them as “black balls,” once again treating science like with a particular disdain the general populace always seems to have about it. strange, how they sit in enormous hyperspace ships capable of traversing enormous distances within a few hours, talking to their friends and loved ones on vidcoms thanks to subspace node technology, and yet when they describe it, they sound almost like stupid children, or, if they don’t understand it, they make fun of it. they make fun of the very ship they sit inside, whose hulls and engine and life support keeps them alive. funny how that works.

    in hyperspace, a black ball inflates. as the black hole in realspace sucks up matter, the black ball expels matter. but it doesn’t go anywhere. if you were to enter a black ball and continued traveling forward, in front of you you would see the matter of hyperspace–which, by the way, is white to human perception, not black, defeating the purpose of the colloquialism–you would see the matter grow and grow and grow until it looked like you were fully inside of it. your perception would be that you had traveled for an hour, two hours, four hours, however long you thought you traveled forward. but then, if you turned around, you would see that you have not moved at all. you could travel forward in a black ball for eternity and you would remain in the same spot, once you turned around. the ball seems to “inflate” around you, like a balloon, but for all intents and purposes you are stationary. in a way it’s like the opposite of a black hole–rather than sucking you in, it’s keeping you out. we suspect that it’s where the matter from the black hole goes, but we’re still working on that. the important part is that time and energy in hyperspace is limited, and so if you ever make a jump into hyperspace and your sensors indicate increasing hyperspace matter, you should take a look out the back and see if you’ve even moved. luckily if you’re stuck in a black ball, it’s not hard to get out–you just turn around or back up. the problem is, the longer you stay in hyperspace, the more deteriorated your shielding becomes, until it breaks down and then your ship breaks down, and then you’re dead. and none of us want you dead! so it’s important to pay attention to black holes in hyperspace.

  • 216: collin (gresham)

    it didn’t hit me until i came in to work this morning. this is it. this is the end, this is my life from now on. i’m a creature of habit, abby, my life is dictated by the ebb and flow of the tides, and now there’s no out anymore. i’m stuck. i have an apartment, i have a full time job, and i have no time for anything else. i’m excited and absolutely terrified to be living alone. i’ve spent so much of my life having other people around to support me, whether directly or indirectly, and now … well now i’m going to be alone in gresham. i guess my cat counts as another being but it’s not the same. this is the true test of my character, abby, the test of my determination. out there, on my own, working hard, doing whatever the hell i want, and then, when the loneliness comes, because it will, it always does, will i wallow in it, or will i use it as motivation to leave my apartment? i mean, i don’t do that now, but i could! i could very well!

    it’s just, exciting, you know? exciting and scary. what if all of my friends fall of the face of the earth, and i’m trapped in gresham with the white trash and the mexicans? er, i know that sounds racist, but i mean it more like “i don’t know anyone out here” than “i hate these people.” i don’t hate them! i just, it’s hard to make friends, that’s what i’m trying to say. and you abby, what if i never see you again? this is my lot in life, isn’t it? it’s the path i’ve been meandering down for years. the introverted creative guy. the loner. the guy who’s pale as a sheet but wrote a decent sonnet. fuck. i’m turning into jd salinger, aren’t i?

  • 215: julie (mystery fridge shitter)

    so, thank you for all coming to this meeting, i know it’s impromptu but you all seem clueless to what i’m about to reveal, so it was important for us to hash this out. but first i just want to speak, so please, you know, let me speak.

    five minutes ago i went into the kitchen to make myself a sandwich. i opened up the fridge to get the mayonnaise, and inside the fridge, on the center shelf, is a huge pile of shit. a literal pile of feces. it looks human. i mean, it looks big enough to be human. i haven’t been in the kitchen until just now so i don’t know where it came from or who shat it or how long it’s been in there. but it looks … solid. like whoever shat it looks like they ate some fiber recently, okay? that’s good. i applaud the mystery shitter for that. now, before anyone says anything, i just want to note that as of this meeting, this is the fifth time i have found shit in a weird part of the house. you’ll remember the first time was in the washer. i found this out the hard way, after i washed my clothes and they came back covered in shit water. the second time, in the garbage bin, the third time was in the mailbox, the fucking mailbox, after the mailman dropped off the mail, and then the fourth time, the most absurd, was in the top toilet bowl water containment thing. the tank. now jeremy has told me that this is called an “upper decker” and that’s disgusting that it has a name. but now the fridge. the precious fridge.

    five random shits in this house. and four people in this house. this is unacceptable, we all know this. it’s gross. especially in the fridge! that’s where the food is! why would anyone shit in the fridge? or more likely, shit somewhere else and put it in the fridge–this is my point, people. it wasn’t just sleep-shitting. it was a directed attack. a shit happened somewhere and then was placed in the mailbox, placed in the fridge. the garbage and the toilet tank, you could’ve just crapped right in there, but those others were premeditated. but why? and which one of you would stoop that low? jeremy you’re a frontrunner because you’re basically an alcoholic, and i wouldn’t put it past you to shit in a drunken haze. and yet … drunk shits are usually kind of runny. alice you’re vegan so i assume your shits are like perfectly preserved cylinders of waste devoid of all water, and these, these shits are kind of messy, like, kind of … wet. ugh. gwen … gwen you’re barely in the house. so that leaves lorenzo. lorenzo, are you the mystery shitter? before you answer please understand that we will never hold this against you. things happen. maybe not five different times, but they happen.

    and lastly i know what you’re thinking–“what about julie? maybe julie took shits in five different places?” well i didn’t want to make this public but i have IBS and it would be impossible for me to make shits that good looking. i’m genuinely impressed by them. i almost want to rethink alice in this because i don’t know maybe she has slightly moist shits. the important thing is it is not me because every time i use the toilet it’s like a hurricane blew through when i’m done. i’m sorry. i’m sorry i had to provide that mental image to you. but it’s important that we cut out all the innocent people from this accusation. lorenzo, i think everyone in here wants to know: what does your shit look like.