Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology

by O'Brien, Cory

  Then they’ve still got a lot of bullets left over so they have to keep finding more people to shoot.

  Also, I think someone writes a constitution?

  Anyway, that’s where America comes from.

  So the moral of the story

  is that the primary ingredient for a successful nation

  is guns.

  JOHN HENRY WAS A STEEL-DRIVIN’ MAN

  I SAID, JOHN HENRY WAS A STEEL-DRIVIN’ MAN.

  Do you guys know what that means?

  That means that he was a dude who worked on a railroad

  and his job

  was to KILL MOUNTAINS.

  Now, the way he did this

  was that some poor sonofabitch named Little Bill

  would hold a steel drill in place against the rock

  while John Henry BEAT ON IT AS HARD AS HE COULD

  WITH A TWENTY-POUND HAMMER

  and Bill had to keep turning the drill after every strike

  and eventually the drill would get dull

  so he had to swap it out

  for another drill

  that someone would hopefully hand to him at about that time

  WITHOUT MISSING A BEAT

  and then they would bring the old drill to a blacksmith

  so the blacksmith could fix it

  and then bring it back to Bill so he could switch it out AGAIN

  and meanwhile John Henry’s hammer is just whistling right past Bill’s junk

  or face, or ribs, or wherever he has to hold the drill

  in order to make sure the rock is getting brutalized in the right direction.

  Meanwhile, John Henry has it easy.

  All HE has to do is heft a TWENTY-POUND HAMMER

  over and over again

  with perfect accuracy

  all day

  through solid rock

  never stopping, never getting tired

  under constant threat of rockslides and disfigurement.

  So this is this guy’s job.

  Now John Henry works for a pack of rat bastards called the C&O Railroad Company.

  I know they are rat bastards because one day John Henry’s railroad team

  rolls up on this big, big mountain

  and the railroad crew is all like “Oh wow, bummer.

  Guess we better start going around this mountain, huh?”

  And aforementioned rat bastards from C&O

  are like “NOPE.

  GOIN’ STRAIGHT THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN.

  IT IS ONLY LIKE A MILE AND A HALF THICK.

  YOU GUYS LIKE HAVING JOBS, RIGHT?

  SO DO IT.”

  So they do it

  most of these guys are freed slaves

  so they don’t exactly have their pick of the crop as far as employment opportunities go.

  This goes double for John Henry

  who is not only a freed slave

  but also an UNSTOPPABLE BADASS WHO NEVER QUITS.

  So every day all the steel drivers go to work

  and they fling themselves mercilessly at this mountain

  and like twenty people die

  but John Henry just keeps abusing that stone

  making a solid ten-foot tunnel every day, at LEAST.

  So, you know, great for him

  but all his friends are still dead

  and the dicks at C&O are getting impatient

  so when this traveling salesman shows up with a steam-powered drill machine

  they are like “SIGN US UP.

  P.S.: Everyone who works for us is fired now.

  ESPECIALLY JOHN HENRY.”

  Now John Henry is the kind of man who takes absolutely no guff from anybody.

  It is unreal how little guff this man takes.

  Like, if there were a great big pile of guff by the side of the road

  and John Henry walked by

  that pile would remain completely undisturbed

  because he would take none of it.

  So when he sees this guff coming his way he just sidesteps the lot of it

  and then he turns around like “Hey, traveling salesman

  I bet I can drill harder, better, faster, AND stronger than your candyassed machine.”

  And the traveling salesman is like “YOU’RE ON.”

  So the next day John Henry lines up next to this machine

  along with his trusty shaker Little Bill

  and TWO twenty-pound hammers

  and they get. to. work.

  So John and the drill are staying pretty much neck and neck

  even though the drill doesn’t have a neck.

  Maybe the drill is even doing a little better

  but then it gets STUCK in a hole in the rock

  and John Henry just goes grunting and flailing and sweating

  FOURTEEN FEET INTO THE HEART OF THAT MOUNTAIN.

  BAM CLINK CACHANG POW BOOM PEW PEW PEW.

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT SOUND A HAMMER MAKES.

  So, final score:

  Newfangled steam drill: nine feet.

  One man armed with nothing but sweat and hammers: fourteen feet.

  Oh wait.

  Did I forget to mention

  that since John Henry is using two hammers, he drilled TWO HOLES

  while the steam drill only made ONE??

  So really, the score was nine to TWENTY-EIGHT.

  Yeah.

  But there’s some bad news too.

  See, as soon as he finds out his score

  John Henry puts down his hammers and dies

  because he just hammered that rock so hard

  he gave himself a stroke.

  It doesn’t say in the ballad

  but I like to think that his last words were something like

  “. . . Damn right.”

  Anyway, then he’s dead

  so I think they end up using the steam drill anyway

  although they have to cancel work for like a week

  because everyone is convinced that John Henry’s ghost lives in the tunnel

  also later on it turns out that the tunnel is notoriously unstable

  because it is a bad idea to use contests to construct structurally delicate railway tunnels.

  But none of that matters

  because the real hero of this story

  is Little Bill

  who held two drills

  right next to all the tenderest parts of his body

  against a solid stone wall

  while an absurdly muscular dude repeatedly charged toward him

  flailing two twenty-pound hammers.

  And he kept holding those drills

  and turning them

  and shaking out the stone debris

  and switching out the drills when they got dull

  FOR THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES

  AND TWENTY-EIGHT FEET

  and he didn’t have a stroke

  or even poop himself a little.

  So let’s hear it for Little Bill

  the real American hero.

  PAUL BUNYAN WAS A LOG-DRIVIN’ MAN

  We all know that lumberjacks are badasses.

  But have you ever stopped to wonder how we know that?

  I’LL TELL YOU HOW.

  PAUL BUNYAN IS HOW.

  Because that dude

  was big.

  HOW BIG WAS HE?

  He was SO BIG

  that it took three storks to deliver him to his parents.

  He was SO BIG

  that when he was old enough to laugh and clap his hands

  he DESTROYED HIS HOUSE.

  He was SO BIG

&
nbsp; that one time he dragged his ax behind him when he was walking

  and made the Grand Canyon.

  This guy was BIG.

  But all of that is baby stuff, compared with the time he tamed the Whistling River.

  So the Whistling River

  is a river that has somehow come into possession of some rudimentary intelligence

  and a WHOLE LOT OF GUFF which it hands out to all comers

  because as you may have noticed

  guff is America’s chief natural resource.

  See, this river likes to rear up at random times throughout the day

  and let out a piercing whistle that annoys the crap out of everyone for MILES AROUND.

  This river is also a total dick.

  It breaks up log rafts

  it drowns loggers

  it does everything a river is not supposed to do and laughs about it

  or whistles about it, I guess.

  But then the river makes a crucial mistake

  because one day Paul Bunyan is sitting by the river, eating some flapjacks

  when the river rears up

  and chucks FOUR HUNDRED AND NINETEEN GALLONS OF MUDDY WATER

  INTO HIS BEARD.

  Now I’m sure I don’t have to tell you

  that a lumberjack’s beard is NOT TO BE TRIFLED WITH

  but Paul Bunyan gives the river a pass.

  He just goes back to his pancakes and figures the river will behave itself.

  But that river rears up

  and chucks FIVE THOUSAND AND NINETEEN MORE GALLONS

  AND SOME TURTLES AND SOME FISH AND SOME MUSKRAT

  DIRECTLY INTO PAUL BUNYAN’S ALREADY SOAKING WET BEARD

  plus his flapjacks are pretty wet.

  This is the kind of thing any self-respecting lumberjack cannot ignore.

  So what does Paul Bunyan do?

  Does he get up and move someplace where the river can’t soak him?

  NO.

  Instead, he decides to TAME the river.

  But how?

  Well, Paul Bunyan settles down to do some serious thinking

  and the way lumberjacks think

  is they sit down and they eat popcorn

  for DAYS.

  Paul Bunyan eats so much popcorn

  that after a week, the ground is covered with eighteen inches of popcorn scraps

  for THREE MILES AROUND

  and animals that wander into the area immediately think it is winter

  and freeze to death before they have a chance to actually think about what they are doing.

  Anyway, finally Paul Bunyan leaps up like “AHA!

  I bet if I took all the bends out of the river it would straighten up and fly right.

  So I’ll just tie it to Babe, my massive blue ox and she’ll tow it straight.

  Oh wait, it’s made of water.

  How am I going to attach my ox to it?

  HMM.”

  So Paul Bunyan and his ox go to the North Pole

  and he makes a box trap baited with icicles

  and then goes and plays fetch with Babe for a while using GLACIERS

  but he has to stop because he floods Florida.

  Then he goes back to check on his trap

  and finds that he has caught SIX BLIZZARDS.

  Man, I wish I had a box big enough to catch six blizzards.

  I’d open up a blizzard stand

  and no one would buy any

  BECAUSE BLIZZARDS ARE A THING THAT NOBODY WANTS.

  But Paul Bunyan doesn’t see it that way.

  He grabs two of those blizzards and he takes them back to his logging camp

  and has his friend Ole—

  who is not a lumberjacking matador but rather a big Swede—

  make two huge logging chains to attach to the blizzards.

  Then he goes to the river and jams the blizzards into it

  which freezes it FOR SEVENTEEN MILES

  then he hooks the river up to Babe

  and it is GO TIME.

  But that river is TOOOO ornery

  it won’t budge

  even though Babe pulls those chains into solid iron bars

  and digs ruts into the solid rock she is running on.

  But that’s when Paul Bunyan just cuts straight through the bullshit

  by grabbing the chains and pulling them so hard

  that he and Babe drag the river free of its banks and through the prairie.

  When finally they stop running and turn around

  they see that the river has become TOTALLY STRAIGHT

  but it is also somehow much shorter

  because all the elbow joints that made the bends are now scattered across the prairie.

  So Paul Bunyan packs up all the extra bends

  and uses them later, when he needs to float logs in the middle of the desert

  even though that’s not how that works and there aren’t even any logs in the desert

  because you get to ignore physics as long as you are really, really big.

  Anyway, then the river refuses to whistle

  because it has basically just undergone the river equivalent of traumatic castration

  and strangely enough, this makes everyone really pissed off at Paul Bunyan

  because it turns out that everyone was using the river as an alarm clock

  and they need to wake up early

  because trees are easier to cut down when you catch them snoozing.

  But luckily this dude comes along named Squeaky Swanson

  who has a speaking voice that is never above a whisper

  but a shriek that can physically LIFT THE BLANKETS off of everyone in camp.

  So every day, Squeaky Swanson wakes up at the crack of dawn

  and shrieks everyone awake

  thus solving every problem forever.

  So once again

  the real hero of the story is not Paul Bunyan

  who actually ruined the whistling river

  and broke physics

  and littered a lot of popcorn scraps all over

  and flooded Florida

  but rather an unassuming man

  with some kind of weird voice problem.

  So God bless America

  home of the little guy

  as long as the little guy can yell really loud.

  PECOS BILL WAS A CATTLE-DRIVIN’ MAN

  All right, my friends.

  It is time for you to hear about a man whose ass is SO BAD

  other asses cower at the mere mention of it.

  The owner of this ass is named PECOS BILL.

  But Pecos Bill was not always named that.

  For a while he was just named Bill.

  This dude was not alive more than, say, ten seconds

  before he started chewing knives and riding horses

  and then crawling out of his mom’s wagon when she wasn’t looking

  and wrestling BEAR CUBS

  and WINNING.

  But as if that wasn’t enough

  the way Pecos Bill gets the Pecos part of his name

  is that one day his family is crossing the Pecos River

  and Bill falls out of the wagon into the water

  probably because he was trying to bust out and wrestle bears at the wrong time

  and his family is like “DAMMIT.

  HE WAS GONNA BE SUCH A BADASS.”

  And then his mom dies of being sad.

  But it’s okay, guys

  because Pecos Bill gets fished out of the river BY COYOTES.

  THAT IS A REASSURING THING TO HAVE HAPPEN, RIGHT??

  Actually, yes

&
nbsp; because in this case, the coyotes make the incredibly un-coyote-like decision

  to raise this delicious human baby as one of their own for fifteen years.

  Yeah, that’s right. He’s one of THOSE kids.

  But then after fifteen years, Pecos Bill is drinking from the river that bears his name

  when his brother comes along

  punching cattle, like people do in Texas.

  (I think punching cattle is an expression meaning to herd cattle or something

  but I really prefer to imagine

  that Pecos Bill’s brother is just SOCKING COWS IN THE FOREHEAD

  ALL ACROSS THE PRAIRIE.)

  Anyway, he sees Pecos Bill squatting by the river

  and he’s like “HEY

  Aren’t you my long lost brother?”

  and Pecos Bill is like “NO.

  I AM A COYOTE.

  AWOOOO.”

  And his brother is like “Bullshit.

  If you are a coyote, then where’s your tail?”

  And Pecos Bill is like “Hmm, tough question.

  Well, I definitely have fleas, AND I howl at the moon.”

  And his brother is like “Son

  EVERYONE in Texas has fleas and howls at the moon.

  Also, you clearly speak English and walk on two legs

  both of which are suspiciously un-coyote-like even in Texas.

  Now cut the bullshit

  put on this hat

  and come be a cowboy like me.”

  And Pecos Bill is like “Okay, you talked me into it.”

  So he becomes the best cowboy ever.

  He invents branding cattle

  and also sitting on cattle until they behave

  and also the lasso

  and his brother is like “Not bad

  for some crazy asshole who thought he was a coyote for fifteen years.

  Keep practicing, kid. Some day you’ll be a great cowboy.”

  And he turns out to be TOTALLY RIGHT.

  Which just goes to reinforce the point I’ve been making

  which is that Pecos Bill is clearly not the hero of this story

  (just like Paul Bunyan was not the hero of his story

  and John Henry was not the hero of HIS story)

  because without his brother

  Pecos Bill would have farted around that river with a pack of rabid coyotes

  until some poacher found this naked dirt-streaked thing

  fucking a she-coyote in the underbrush

  and put an end to his special crazytime.

  See, this is what the United States of America is all about.