An Excuse with a Brain in a Jar

I missed putting up a review Friday. You, the loyal reader, deserve a better excuse than “my personal life was crazy” or “I was crushed by the amount of work I had to do this week.” Frankly, you can get those kind of excuses anywhere, and we all know they’re lies, just excuses for being too lazy to put in the kind of quality work an unpaid “labor of love” deserves. So you get a better excuse. Like this one:

This is getting ridiculous.

I had this friend, Sebastian, who was a brain in a jar. I know what you’re thinking, but he was a pretty good guy despite his lack of a hole to pour alcohol into. He had this bad habit of incinerating his mind-controlled minions, though, for no other reason than he could. I mean, if he zapped them with that funky brain electricity that comes out of the tubes on top of the jar because, I don’t know, they were embezzling from him or being cruel to his cat or because he thought it was just funny, I could have taken that, but no … Sebastian did it just because he wanted to. Seemed like a good idea at the time, I suppose.

And then he’d go on and on about how brains in jars are superior life forms, how they don’t have to crap and they don’t waste water and they don’t have a large carbon footprint, and man, I just got fed up with it. So I told him brains in jars were not superior in every way.

He didn’t believe me.

So I said brains in jars couldn’t taste a steak or chocolate cake or smell a rose.

And he said he could, though his minions, experience everything us mobile units did — and experience it more often, because he could take in the sensory inputs from several units at one time.

And he didn’t have to sleep.

“Aha!” I shouted. “You never know dreams!”

I can experience my units’ dreams whenever I want — even the ones they forget. I could hear the smugness in his telepathic projections, and it was driving me nuts. I wanted nothing more to wipe the smirk off his … sulci, I guess.

“You can never have children,” I said.

Children are exercises in vanity that contribute in the Earth’s destruction — part of the human plague that is laying waste to the Earth.

“You want to lay waste the Earth,” I said. “Isn’t that a little hypocritical?”

Yeah. But I want to do it in an ecologically responsible way.

So I said, “You’ll never know the love of a woman.”

Again, minions — and what’s so important about the love being from a woman? Why not a man? Or a cow? Or a —

I cut him off before he could go in a irretrievably creepy direction. “You can’t feel the joy of athletic competition, or of physically accomplishing something that you knew was impossible but you did it anyway even though it took all your strength — ”

And when he broadcasted Minions into my brain, I reached over and poured a bottle of Budweiser into his brain jar.

And then —

Well, I can’t remember anything that’s happened from between then and finding myself in the middle of Spartanburg, S.C., yesterday, wearing a pair of pink stretch pants and a t-shirt that has a picture of the Confederate flag next to an equal sign and the word “HATE.” I seem to have quite a few more bruises and broken bones than I used to. I wonder if it had anything to do with our argument?