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

by O'Brien, Cory

You can wrestle a thousand bears

  and chew on a billion knives

  but in the end, you are only as good

  as the dude who stops you from dying of a gunshot while fucking a coyote.

  DAVY CROCKETT TALKS A BIG GAME

  DAVY

  DAAAAVY CROCKETT

  HE’S GOT A DONG THAT’S EIGHT MILES LONG

  HE KILLED LIKE A MIIIILLION BEARS

  AND HE’S SUCH A BIG PIMP THAT HE GOT HIS OWN SONG.

  Yes, ladies and gentlemen

  you are about to hear about the rootinest, tootinest

  alligator-shootinest son of a gun

  ever to be a United States Congressman?

  Yep, I’m talking about Davy Crockett, apparently.

  It’s okay, I didn’t know he was a congressman either

  but I guess it’s not particularly surprising

  given our history, re: guns.

  We’ll get to the politics part later, though.

  Right now, let’s talk about this guy’s childhood.

  So first of all, it is a well-established, canonical fact

  that Davy Crockett killed his first bear when he was THREE YEARS OLD.

  Then they tried to put him in school

  but he ran away

  because he was afraid that he might mistake his fellow students for bears

  and then MURDER THEM.

  Just kidding

  Davy Crockett was never afraid of anything

  he just had trouble fitting his massive balls through the schoolhouse door.

  Anyway, his dad gets pretty mad at him after that

  mainly because he’s jealous of his son’s megaballs

  so Davy Crockett runs away and kills more bears

  maybe he gets raised by wolves

  or maybe he raises some wolves himself and that is why wolves are so hard-core now

  but either way he eventually comes back home

  just in time to handle his dad’s shit for him because his dad sucks at business.

  Then he runs for Congress and WINS

  (on his second try).

  He remains a congressman for several terms, on and off

  during which time he does nothing but make threats and animal noises.

  Seriously, here’s a quote:

  “Who-Who-Whoop—Bow-Wow-Wow-Yough.”

  This is the kind of stunning oratory Davy Crockett’s constituents come to expect.

  And eventually people get tired of this, and Davy fails to get reelected

  so he tells everyone to go to hell

  (including his wife and kids)

  and then HE goes to the next best place:

  Texas.

  Now at this time, Texas was kind of a fiasco.

  It was this great big swath of furious gunfire trying real hard to be its own country

  and Mexico was making this real hard by supplying a large amount of the gunfire.

  Remember I told you about the gunfire before?

  Yeah, this is one of the places where the gunfire is happening.

  So Davy Crockett shows up with thirty well-armed bad boys ready to take on the world

  or at least Mexico, which is really what they need in Texas at that moment

  and he makes some speeches to his adoring public

  like about how he can “walk like an ox

  run like a fox

  swim like an eel

  yell like an Indian

  fight like a devil

  spout like a geyser

  make love like a mad bull

  and swallow a Mexican whole without choking

  if you butter his head and pin his ears back.”

  Wait, never mind. That’s just another one of his speeches from Congress.

  Speeches or no speeches, it’s not too long before Davy Crockett ends up at the ALAMO

  and we all know what happens at the Alamo, don’t we?

  Wait, you don’t?

  Are you telling me YOU DON’T REMEMBER THE ALAMO?

  Well basically, there’s this bad, bad dude called General Santa Ana

  and he is romping and stomping his way from Mexico into Texas

  to make Texas into Mexico

  and right smack-dab in the path of Santa Ana’s army is this old church called the Alamo

  which has been turned into a fortress and filled with Texan dudes.

  The Texan dudes aren’t doing too well, though because there aren’t that many of them

  so Davy Crockett sees this as a perfect opportunity

  to back up some of that ridiculous game he’s been talking

  and he brings his thirty guys to the Alamo

  and they put up a good fight but they still all get killed

  including Davy Crockett, who dies surrounded by SIXTEEN DEAD MEXICANS

  only one of which he appears to have stabbed

  so I imagine he just stared all those other dudes down.

  Then Santa Ana’s troops keep on marching

  but they are so demoralized by having removed such a legit badass from the world

  that they are pretty easy to kill after that.

  Later, Disney makes a movie out of Davy Crockett’s life!

  So the moral of the story

  is by all means, talk the talk

  but think twice before you walk the walk

  because you might get shot.

  THIS IS WHAT TOM CRUISE BELIEVES IN

  So there’s this guy Xenu, right? He is this seriously bad dude

  who also happens to be the emperor of a MASSIVE GALACTIC EMPIRE.

  The empire is made up of like twenty-six stars and seventy-six planets

  one of which is Earth

  except we can’t call it Earth because that doesn’t sound dumb enough.

  No

  let’s call it Teegeeack.

  So this galactic civilization is pretty much like Earth from the ’50s and ’60s

  in fact, it is basically exactly the same.

  Everyone wears the same clothes and they have cars and buses and stuff.

  Not a very advanced galactic civilization, actually.

  BUT WAIT:

  Xenu is about to get deposed

  for being a seriously bad dude all the time

  but then he realizes

  that if he just kills all the dudes who want to depose him, he can’t get deposed!

  Here is the problem with that plan, though:

  EVERYONE WANTS TO DEPOSE XENU.

  So he’s like “Well, I guess I’d better kill everyone.

  But I’m going to need some help.

  HEY, PSYCHIATRISTS?

  I need you to trick all these people

  or rather, all these THETANS

  (because that is what these guys are called)

  into showing up to my place for a tax audit or something.”

  And the psychiatrists are like “We have no problem with this, because we are evil.”

  So all the Thetans show up to get their taxes audited . . .

  Actually, hold on.

  Why is it

  that everyone in the galaxy shows up

  for an INCOME TAX AUDIT?

  Especially if we are postulating that these guys have the technology of the 1950s

  which did not include faster-than-light travel as far as I can tell

  so people are traveling HUNDREDS OF YEARS

  in their shitty, explosion-prone spacecraft

  for an INCOME TAX AUDIT.

  Now if it had been a free-puppies-and-cotton-candy audit, maybe I could see this working

  but if you want to depose a guy

  and then he is suddenl
y like “HEY HOW ’BOUT THOSE INCOME TAXES.”

  Your response should not be “RIGHT AWAY, SIR, CAN I CRADLE YOUR BALLS AS WELL?”

  Where were we?

  Oh yeah.

  As might be expected, this whole thing turns out really badly for the Thetans.

  I mean, as soon as they show up

  Xenu freezes them in alcohol and takes their souls

  and then he puts them in some spaceships and takes them to Earth

  wait, wait, no . . . sorry . . .

  TEEGEEACK

  and he stacks them around active volcanoes.

  But active volcanoes are not naturally dangerous enough for Xenu.

  so he drops HYDROGEN BOMBS in all of the volcanoes

  vaporizing all these Thetans but . . . keeping their souls intact?

  Then Xenu forces all these Thetan souls into a massive 3-D movie theater

  where they watch a thirty-six-hour movie encompassing all future religious symbolism.

  And where is this movie theater located exactly?

  Hawaii.

  OBVIOUSLY.

  Only a true evil mastermind would stage a massive campaign of subliminal mind torture

  in the future birthplace of PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA.

  All right, you with me so far?

  Good.

  So when the Thetans get let out of the movie theater they are so crazy disoriented

  that they just start grab-assing at any body they can find

  turning perfectly functional human beings

  into worthless sadness engines bent on self-destruction

  and THAT’S why we all suck so bad, see?

  It is because a supervillain put bombs in volcanoes and then evil spirits laid eggs in our minds.

  This is an actual religion, guys

  made up by an actual dude.

  His name is L. Ron Hubbard and he is actually a science-fiction writer

  and he calls this religion SCIENTOLOGY

  and this religion makes something like five hundred million dollars a year.

  But the worst part is that if you try and learn all this stuff

  without first preparing yourself to learn it by paying a lot of money again and again

  the shock will be so great that you will get pneumonia.

  So the moral is

  don’t read this myth unless you want to get pneumonia.

  CONCLUSION

  The Prevailing Creation Myth

  Here’s one more to go out on:

  So back in the back in the back in the back in the back in the day

  there was this tiiiiny ball of all the matter in the universe, and that’s ALL there was.

  But don’t be fooled by its size, my friends.

  This matter

  was DENSE.

  Denser than the beats issuing from the most legitimate of subwoofers.

  Denser than the skull of world headbutt champion Maxx “The Russian Concussion” Headbutts

  Denser than the cream of a coconut banana cream pie

  on the face of a clown who is going for the world record for most pies to the face.

  This matter was DENSE.

  Where did it come from?

  Who knows!

  That’s not important right now.

  What’s important is that at some point

  all this matter gets REALLY sick of hanging out with the same matter all the time

  so it does what matter does best

  or at least, most awesomely:

  IT EXPLOOOODES.

  Now, friends

  I have seen some explosions in my life.

  All of them were sweet.

  Some of them I might even call DOUBLE SWEET

  but nothing can top an explosion SO INTENSE

  that it is still going on ALMOST FOURTEEN BILLION YEARS LATER.

  That is why, to this day, if you look through a telescope

  you are going to see the rest of the universe hauling ass away from you.

  Anyway, lemme backtrack a little.

  So after exploding as hard as it can for a real long time

  all the matter turns into particles called electrons, protons, and neutrons

  and all these particles get a little lonely and start looking for other particles to hook up with.

  And when they get together

  they pull some Voltron shit and turn into ELEMENTS

  like hydrogen and helium and stuff.

  Then all the hydrogen gets together and is like “Hey

  I know we were all just exploding as hard as possible a minute ago

  but you know what would be cool?

  If we exploded EVEN HARDER.”

  So they turn into STARS

  and then their explosions produce a bunch of other elements, which form big clouds around them

  and then those clouds get hit by MORE explosions

  from when other stars became TOO EXTREME

  and they start spinning so fast

  that the elements get all frisky with each other and turn into less explode-y balls of stuff

  like planets, mainly

  and one of those planets is EARTH.

  But Earth was not always sweet beach parties and rock-and-roll music, my friends.

  No, Earth used to be 100 percent MAGMA

  with volcanoes going off ALL THE TIME

  AND THEN AN ASTEROID SLAMS INTO IT

  AND RIPS A BIG CHUNK OF IT OFF INTO SPACE

  AND THAT is where the moon comes from.

  But then Earth gets older and chills out a little

  and forms an atmosphere out of steam and volcano spit

  and it gets a bunch of water by being constantly bombarded by GIANT BALLS OF ICE

  and for some reason, all of this adds up to make it a hospitable place for things to live.

  So little things start living there

  they come from space, or from Earth depending on who you ask.

  They mainly start out in the big water parts

  (which cover most of everything

  just like in the Native American creation myths

  and the Egyptian creation myth

  and that part in the Bible where God gets real pissed)

  And these little things learn this really neat trick

  which is how to make more of themselves using CHEMICAL REACTIONS

  except . . . chemical reactions aren’t always accurate

  so sometimes they make really gross, messed-up versions of themselves

  and sometimes they make PROTOZOIC SUPERHEROES.

  So the messed-up versions die and the superheroes get to make more superheroes

  and eventually someone figures out how to have legs

  and then they get curious about this whole land thing and they crawl onto it

  and then there are DINOSAURS, but they die

  and then later, people!

  Now, I know what you’re probably thinking:

  You’re probably thinking “Wait a second, this isn’t a myth.

  This is science!”

  Well, yes and no.

  See, this

  is a story

  and like most stories, the most important thing isn’t whether it’s true or not

  the most important thing is whether it gives us a satisfying explanation of what we see in the world

  and maybe some rudimentary means of predicting what will happen next.

  That’s all any of these myths have been trying to do:

  to take a huge, terrifying phenomenon

  something you can only stare at and go “whoa”

  and turn it into something more our size

  some
thing we can fit inside our puny brains.

  Something really cool, even:

  a story.

  Me, I don’t see much of a difference between Science and Religion.

  First off, in order to successfully apply science

  there are always going to be certain things that you’re taking on faith

  like that the universe behaves rationally or that the accumulation of knowledge is a good thing.

  Without those assumptions you end up like that Descartes dude

  unable to prove anything except that you exist which is just boring.

  And I mean, the first natural philosophers

  (the Greek dudes who are widely credited with getting the whole science thing rolling)

  were offering theories that sounded a lot like myths.

  “The world is a bunch of islands floating on water!”

  “We live on the back of a space turtle, in space!”

  And those explanations were discarded as more satisfying ones came along

  just like how no one really worships Zeus anymore

  because they’ve found gods more compelling than a big adulterer who shoots lightning.

  Some people say that it’s that willingness to reject discredited views

  that willingness to change

  that makes science different from religion.

  I’d say that that willingness to change is just a tenet of the religion of science.

  Hell, voodoo’s gone through an awful lot of changes too

  and a Taoist monk systematically unlearns his world knowledge

  as fast as any scientist can learn it.

  Now, I’m not trying to undermine the importance of science

  personally, I’m all about it.

  And I’m not saying I think Creationism and Evolution should be taught side by side in schools.

  Largely because Creation Science is taught as an aggressive argument against evolution

  as opposed to something that stands on its own.

  Plus it misuses a lot of the methodology of science in a very misleading way

  without accepting most of the founding principles

  which would be a lot like coming up with a basic theory of Christianity

  based on the assumption that God doesn’t exist and that anyone who thinks he does is an asshole.

  No, see what I’m trying to say is that I watch people organizing themselves

  into these neat little conflicts:

  Atheists versus Christians

  Jews versus Muslims

  Fundamentalists versus basically everybody

  and I feel like a kid in a broken home who can’t get Mom and Dad to stop fighting.