Yesterday I posted another maudlin doomsday post. I probably gave you the opinion that all I do with my time is mope around and think about death. And maybe write a little creepy black Gothic poetry. But that’s not me. I am a lover of the humor in stories by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Kurt Vonnegut. I am a former teacher that managed to teach the entire zoological range of possible middle school and high school students in Texas and did it without being convinced to hate them rather than love them. Yes, my heart is full of mirth and love and memories of weird kids and troubled kids and kids that could melt the meanest of hearts.
My passion is writing fictional stories about the kids I have taught, including my own three, and setting it in a fictionalized version of my little town, the place in Iowa where I grew up. And I put them in plots of impossible fantasy and science fiction in a way that can only be explained as surrealism.
Nobody reads my books. So far, at any rate.
But that isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that, despite my illness and deteriorating quality of life, my books now actually exist. I put off being a full-time writer for 33 years as I finished my teaching career. A writer has to have something to write about. So, teaching came first.
Writing novels was always the ultimate goal, however. I am a story-teller. The story itself is in the very center of my heart.
It has been more than a semester now that I have not been a teacher. I am missing it mightily. I even miss the yelling and screaming, the name-calling and the crazy-eyed threats against life and limb. And that’s just me. I miss what the kids always did too. This was driven home to me as I tried to move my middle child from one school to another. We were hoping to get a bit of a break on his placement. He is a gifted child with a penchant for bizarre and long-lasting obsessions. He has a talent for building huge, monumental structures in Minecraft. He is very computer-nerd and history-wonk. (Yes, I know those are not pure predicate adjectives, but I am a retired English teacher and just don’t care any more.) I was hoping they could overlook his burnout/blowout eighth-grade brain meltdown from the previous year and give him the chance to be a ninth grader for at least half a year. No. Arbitrary rules must be obeyed. (That isn’t even how she said it. More like, arbitrary rules MUST be obeyed). That meant of course that he has to continue to repeat the mindless indoctrination of year number 9, (eight numbered grades plus K), (And Pre-K, come to think of it.) Make that year number 10. No high school yet, though he is more than mature enough, intelligent enough, motivated enough, and sweet-natured enough. We are not loving and forgiving people. We are strict and by-the-book people! Forgive me, Lord. I am writing my own book. (In more ways than one.)
This is what we are doing wrong in Education;
1. We are putting people in boxes. (Little people. Kids mostly. We are calling those boxes things like ADHD, Special Education, trouble-maker, learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, disobedient, truant, and “in need of alternative education”… here meaning kid-prison.)
2. We are sealing those boxes with heavy-duty red tape. (Read special or remedial classes as waste-baskets for keeping the rabble and the riff-raff out of the good teachers’ hair.)
3. We are routinely handing those boxes to the box-bangers and package manglers. (The semi-incompetent teachers who have discipline problems because in teacher college nobody tells you what to do with the kid who sits in the corner and sings to himself instead of paying attention, or the girl who gets out of her seat every time the teacher turns his back to go flitting around the room like a bumble bee going flower to flower (except that it is a more hormonal attraction and goes boy to boy); or the competent teacher like me who incurs the principal’s disfavor for having classes that always make noise and are given such classes in boxes as a punishment because that kind of principal is too limited in intelligence to understand that those kinds of boxes are not really a punishment if you merely take a moment to examine the treasures they contain.)
4. We keep the boxes air-tight so that no oxygen or light gets in. (To suffocate learners under piles of worksheets and endless drill and practice is murder. We are killing the precious learners with boring stuff and teaching them to be zombies who all act alike and hate learning because their brains are rotted masses of goo.)
This is what we must do instead;
1. Open the boxes up again and thoroughly mix the contents. (The rich suburban parents will resent the heck out of having their precious honors student sitting in class next to the poor black kid from the projects, but studies show that both kinds of learners do better when they are mixed together.)
2. Notice, we don’t need two any more, because learners are already distributed to different and diverse boxes based on what they individually need and want to learn about and have talent for. Groups should be more like the Shakespeare-loving group or the talkative-socializing group or the Tinker-toy builders group or the vampire-literature-writing group and less like groups of kids all the same color or all the same culture or all the same age.
3. All the teachers need to be trained to handle all the possible… no, make that probable problems that may come up in the classroom. Every classroom needs a proven veteran teacher and an enthusiastic young apprentice teacher. Neither one should have to face the evil hordes alone. And most important of all, any teacher who doesn’t love working with kids (and doesn’t love the kids in a way that will not lead to a prison term) needs be utilized in some way other than as a classroom teacher.
4. Every classroom is a laboratory and every teacher is a creative and daring mad-scientist-type intent on trying new things and only re-doing things that really work well. Forget this nonsense about standard curriculum goals and common core curriculum. Those are only buzz words for suffocating learners and being too lazy to think on your feet in the middle of the every-day classroom battle in the on-going War on Ignorance.
Now you see… I have all the answers and I know everything. The only mystery is… why don’t more people listen to me?
Maria came into the kitchen, finally home from the police station where she had spent the night and half of the next day. Her mother, Bonita, dragged herself into the kitchen after Maria, obviously, a wreck from the ordeal her daughter had put her through again.
“So, what did the criminal do this time?” asked Stanley. He had been sitting at the table reading the news from his phone.
“You coulda helped, you know,” said Bonita, firing off an angry glare in his direction.
“I told you I was on a case last night. My job pays for the bail money that got her out of the slammer.”
“Well, at least there is no money to pay. The store owner isn’t pressing charges. And he’s gonna let her make up for the mess she made by helping him clean the store.”
“And the murdered boy?”
“There is no murdered boy. They found bloody clothes in the alley again, just like in Yesenia’s case. But no body. And the store owner said Maria was in the store with him when the boy was taken.”
“Well, I guess we both knew she didn’t kill him,” said Stanley. “She’s in love with him or something.”
“Shut up, stupid,” Maria said to him with acid in the delivery.
“Don’t talk to your stepfather that way. He loves us both and takes care of us both.” Bonita’s eyes were filled with fatigue and pain. “I need sleep, Stan. You have to deal with her for a while, please.”
Stanley looked at his beautiful wife, his overweight, slightly defeated-by-life beautiful wife. “You get a good sleep in. Maria and I will talk this out.”
Bonita smiled at him and dragged herself towards the bedroom.
Maria looked grim. She pulled a chair out from the table, turned it backward, sat on it with her arms folded across the back of the chair, and laid her head on her arms.
She looked at Stanley with tears in her eyes. She didn’t pick her head up when she said, “You have to help me find Rogelio, Stan. I love him. If you can find him for me, I’ll have sex with you.”
“I told you before, it is not appropriate to try to bribe your stepfather with sex. I am not interested in underaged kids.”
“You know I don’t have any money. I can’t afford your detective skills.”
“This isn’t the same as when Yesenia disappeared. You didn’t really know the girl. It wasn’t something I was willing to interfere with when the police were investigating the disappearance of a girl from your school who wasn’t even your friend.”
“So, you’ll find Rogelio, and in return, I’ll sleep with you?”
“No, kid. I will investigate for free. Have you bargained sex for something with anybody else I should know about?”
“My answer is the same as last time.”
“But you know I didn’t believe you when you said it last time.”
“Why do you care?”
“I’m your stepfather. Protecting you is part of the job. And if you and I are going to find Rogelio, you are going to have to be more honest with me than you have been in the past.”
“Um, well… I may have used that instead of money for a couple of things. But I’m not telling you who.”
“Honesty at last. Well, I’m a detective. I already know who, and I already threatened both of them.”
I know that I am probably the last person you would think of to ask for advice on how to be happy. I am a crotchety old coot, a former middle-school English teacher, a grumpy old-enough-to-be-a-grandpa non-grandpa, an atheist, a nudist, and a conspiracy theorist. You would expect someone like me to be out in his yard in his underwear yelling at pigeons for pooping on his car more than they do his wife’s car. Be that as it may, I am also basically happy.
You know what happy looks like, surely. After Christmas day is over you see two kinds of kids. One kind is miserable and grumbling in his or her room about their Christmas gift that they didn’t get, in spite of the five expensive toys they did get. Yeah, that one’s never going to be happy. Then there’s the other kind, the one happily breaking or playing with the few cheap toys their parents could afford, using more of their own imagination than the imagination the toy companies pay someone to put into their TV or YouTube toy commercials. That one is going to be somebody you can rely on for years to come. That’s the kind of kid I like to think I was. Of course, I’m probably wrong about that too. Being a middle-school teacher gives you plenty of opportunity to learn the lesson that you are actually wrong about everything in life, and like Socrates, you know absolutely nothing for sure about anything.
Years upon years of being a public school teacher, the butt of comedians’ best school-memory jokes, the target of Republican spending cuts for saving enough money to give massive tax cuts to billionaires, and having to be every kind of professional for every kind of kid, no matter how ugly and unlovable they are, teaches you where true happiness comes from.
A. You have to learn to love the job you are trying to do. And…
B. You need to do the job you love with every resource you can squeeze out of your poor, battery-powered soul.
I did that. I did the job all the way from deluded and idealistic days of youth to cynical and caustic old age hanging onto your job by the fingernails until you have to choose between dying in front of the whole classroom of horrified kiddos you have learned to love, or going kicking and screaming into retirement to maybe live a bit longer than you would have if you had stayed at your work station in the idiot-to-income-earner factory for young minds.
Being satisfied with the career you chose and the success or failure you made of it is not the only factor in being happy. Teachers don’t earn much compared to corporate informational presenters who do the same job for a lot more money in front of a lot less hostile audiences far fewer times a day. So, it helps if you can manage to need less stuff in life. After all, stuff costs lots of money. Especially stuff you don’t really need.
That is why being a nudist and not having to worry about how much you spend on clothes helps a lot with your basic level of happiness and peace of mind. Also, lots of vitamin D soaked up through your nude all-togetherness produces happy-hormones in the brain.
Being an avowed pessimist is good for being happier in life as well. After all, the pessimist is always prepared for the worst to happen. And since the worst rarely is what actually happens, the pessimist is never shocked and dismayed and is frequently pleasantly surprised.
And so, here is Mr. Happy’s secret to a long and happy life;
Tell yourself that the job you have to do is the job you love to do often enough that you actually begin to believe it.
Do that job you love as hard and as well as it is possible for you to do.
Love the people you work for and the people you work with, even if you have to pretend really hard until it becomes real to you too.
Be satisfied with the stuff you need, and try to need as little as possible. The man whose paycheck is bigger than his bills is happier than the man whose paycheck only pays for a portion of the interest on his wife’s credit cards.
Wear fewer clothes. You don’t need them in a quickly warming world. And you should love the skin you’re in.
Expect the worst possible outcome from everything in life, and then there is nowhere to go but upwards.
The theorem goes, “If you sit an infinite number of monkeys behind an infinite number of typewriters and let them tap away at random for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually come up with all the works of Shakespeare, and in addition to that, all the works of literature that have ever been written and ever will be written.”
Now, that is a daunting theorem. All the great works of literature by Mickey will be recreated by monkeys? And even worse, they will probably produce much better versions of all of it. Plus versions of it written in German, Mandarin Chinese, Urdu, and Californian (a really difficult language to translate.) All languages ever created on all the planets of the universe, as a matter of fact. The proof is there. It hinges on the mathematically precise definition of “Infinite.”
But you have to remember, infinite is the biggest number there is.
So many variations will be there in the truthfully infinite amount of stuff that infinite monkeys will produce that one version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet will have a final act where, instead of everyone dying or accidentally killing themselves, Hamlet will talk them all into putting on yellow chicken costumes and dancing with hula hoops as a means of acquiring absolution for their sins.
And a version of it will also exist where all the letter “B’s” will be replaced by “P’s” and all the vowels will be doubled so that Hamlet’s famous soliloquy will begin, “Too pee oor noot too pee, thaat iis thee quueestiioon…”
Accurately imagining the conditions required to have infinite monkeys tapping out infinite works of literary art means that any ridiculous thing that Mickey thinks of will have to actually be typed out by one or more (or infinite) monkeys in all of that infinite monkey writing. Somewhere Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros will have nothing but characters who are rhinoceroses at the beginning of the play who turn into human beings by the end of the play. (That is the exact opposite of the real French absurdist’s play, for those of you who did not have to read such stuff in college literature courses.)
In fact, in order to think up all the ridiculous variations of every work of literature would take Mickey an infinite amount of time. Mickey probably doesn’t really want to live that long.
‘
And then there is also the question of the physics of infinity. Is the universe itself, I mean, the one we all live in presently, actually infinite? Astrophysicists don’t think so according to current observable data on the astronomical model of this universe. And then you have the problem of infinite monkeys made of infinite matter. The universe would be filled to overflowing with infinite monkey-matter. And that leaves no matter or space to be used for infinite typewriters. The whole universe would be monkey-matter. And that would also mean no room for bananas, or, in fact, any monkey food of any kind. What is going to motivate the infinite monkeys to work for an infinite amount of time on their monkey literature which they won’t have typewriters to write on anyway?
And then there is another horrible thought that occurs to me. In this picture to the left, do you see the evil monkey? Believe me, if you have an infinite amount of monkeys, one or two (or possibly an infinite number of them) will definitely be evil geniuses.
And evil monkeys do evil monkey-business.
At least one or two (or possibly… you know…) evil monkey geniuses will disassemble infinite typewriters to make infinite doomsday devices. Typewriters will be re-engineered into computers and will become filled with monkey-viruses that will rewrite the operating software of the universe. And then, everything becomes an infinite monkey-villain paradise where the evil geniuses among the monkeys will live the perfect life for monkey criminals full of monkey crimes and monkey debauchery and the kind of infinite chaos that infinite monkey-villains enjoy.
This thinking about infinite monkeys leads to one very definite infinite-monkey conclusion; WE DO NOT WANT TO MESS WITH GIVING INFINITE TYPEWRITERS TO INFINITE MONKEYS!!!
Lately I have been having memory troubles. You know what I mean, when you walk through a doorway with a definite purpose in mind.and then, on reaching the other room, you have no earthly idea what that purpose was. It happens to me regularly. In fact, I can even start writing a sentences, and then I… What was I talking about? Oh, yes. I need to practice writing some more spectacularly bad poetry, before I forget how to do it.
Why did I use this picture? I don’t know. I have forgotten.
Re-minders
Sometimes…
My mind slips out of my left ear…
And I can’t remember things.
So, I have to search under the table…
To find my mind…
And then I remember that that’s not how a mind works.
Yep, I still obviously remember how to write spectacularly bad poetry. It is my contribution to literature. Virtually all poets will be able to say, “At the very least, I am a better poet than Beyer.”
Rogelio met Maria at the bus stop on the corner of Mockingbird Lane and Brookriver Drive just as they had planned in Mrs. Broadbent’s English class at the end of a long high-school day.
“You see it?” Rogelio asked, pointing across the street. “The toy store is right there, just like Fernando said.”
“Yeah, but nobody proved that it was the place where Yesenia disappeared.”
“They found her bloody clothes in the alley behind it. What more proof do you need?”
“Well, I’m going in to look around. Are you brave enough to go with me, Roge?”
“Anything you can do, I can do.”
The two high school freshmen walked across the street at the stoplight. The building was spookily in shadow in spite of the gray-white sunlight trying to penetrate an overcast sky.
As they entered the shop together, the old storekeeper looked up from his old, leather-bound ledger at the front checkout counter.
“Little old for toys, aren’t we?” the white-haired loser asked. It made Rogelio a bit angry.
“We came because of the disappearance of Yesenia Montemayor a month ago. We need to look around. They found her clothes behind this place.”
“So, here to solve a Hardy Boys’ Mystery, are we?”
“Do I look like a boy?” Maria said, now angry too.
“Hard to tell nowadays. Nancy Drew, then?”
“You are just so old and out of date!” said Rogelio.
“Why do you really want to look for clues in my store then?”
“Yesenia was his former girlfriend.” Maria’s glare was defiant.
“And you’re his new girlfriend?”
“Well… yeah, I kinda hope so.”
“Then you probably don’t want to go digging up his old girlfriend, eh? Not in your best self-interest, I’d say.”
“We need to find out what happened to her,” Maria said matter-of-factly. “…So people don’t keep saying one of us had something to do with it.”
“Hated her that much, did you?”
“No! I didn’t kill her and eat her or anything! And I intend to prove that.”
The old man looked at Maria with eyes magnified by his thick glasses. He looked like a Lechuza, a soul-stealing barn owl, that one. Rogelio gritted his teeth.
“Can we look around your store, or what?” he said.
“Help yourself. If you want murder clues, there’s an old decorative Day of the Dead skull by the back door. Pick it up and ask about the missing girl.”
“Tell the cops to do that too, didja?”
“Yep. They didn’t take me seriously though.”
Rogelio simply turned and walked towards the back of the store.
“Do you believe that guy?” Maria mumbled as she followed him.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I believe you either.”
“What… what do you mean?”
“Well, that remark about digging her up and you talking about killing her and eating her.”
“I said I didn’t do that. You believe me, don’t you?”
“Let’s see what that skull has to say.”
Eerily, the skull was right in front of them as he said it. It was a sort of Halloween decoration for the Hispanic holiday of the Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos in Spanish. It was a white papier-mâché skull with brightly colored flower blossoms painted on it for eyes, and an intricate vine design all over it in bright pink and orange outlined with green and dark blue.
“Hola, mi sabio amigo, ¿qué me puede decir sobre el asesinato de Yesenia Montemayor?” He used the Spanish because he knew Maria didn’t understand very much of it. She was raised in an English-speaking house with an Anglo stepdad.
“Ella no está muerta. Ella un juguete con el que juega Imelda.” The skull seemed to be speaking with no moving mouth.
“What? She’s a toy?”
Maria looked horrified. “Who are you talking to? And what’s this all about?”
“I… I don’t know. The skull says she is not dead. She’s a toy, being played with by someone named Imelda.”
“Ahora, Steven jugará contigo,” said the skull.
“Roge, the skull didn’t say anything.” Maria was as white as a ghost.
Rogelio’s mind, however, was being invaded.
“I am Steven, Roger. I will be playing with you until we find out what Imelda’s game really is.”
“Get out of my head!” Rogelio shouted. But his lips didn’t move. And he couldn’t put the skull down either. Instead, he walked to the back door and opened it. It did not open into the alley as it was supposed to. There was a dark room there, with a staircase going upwards, and at the foot of the staircase was Yesenia, naked as the day she was born. And her dark-brown hair was all bleached white like snow.
“Steven! No! You cannot be here. Not now!” shouted Yesenia.
“Stay where you are, Imelda. I am coming to you!” Rogelio heard his own voice say.
“No, Roge! Don’t go out there!” cried Maria.
Rogelio shut the door behind him so Maria couldn’t follow.
I think the expression, Iowegian as it is, comes from the expression “doing squat” which means “doing nothing at all” combined with “diddling around”, the non-sexual meaning of which is “dithering or only working in an ineffective way.”
I humbly confess that I am not that great of a researcher when it comes to linguistic facts and word origins.
I am much better at making things up and creating my own portmanteau words.
But I do have a very good ear for how people actually talk. Especially when it comes to Iowegian, Texican, Spanglish, and Educational Jargon-Gibberish. Counting English and Tourist-German, I speak six languages.
I also humbly confess that I make big mistakes. I have been working hard for a week on editing published books because of how an overreaction to one small inappropriate detail nearly destroyed one of my best books and now I have to deal with the impression some readers have that I write inappropriate stuff all the time.
Yes, I definitely erred…
I also realized I assume everybody accepts nudity as easily as I do.
They definitely don’t.
But naked is funny. And that is not a point about my writing that I am willing to concede.
Doing diddly-squoot can also result in really weird stuff like this Christmas-card composite of my artwork and Vincent Price’s 1967 Christmas tree.
They came in the mail every November in the 1960’s. Particularly important was the Monkey Ward’s catalog because there was a Montgomery Ward Catalog Store in Belmond on Main Street. Mom and Dad could order, pay for, and pick up things there, particularly Christmas and birthday gifts. The four of us; my little brother, my two younger sisters, and I would argue about who would get to look at it next for hours at a time (the catalog, not the store… although the man who ran the store sold tropical fish in the back, so I could look at that for hours).
I, of course, dog-eared different pages than my sisters Nancy and Mary did. And David was eight years younger than me and was into baby toys, blocks, and books.
Nancy owned the three on the left.
I was nutty about model trains… and so was Dad.
I am amazed at how cheap things were back then compared to now. Of course, things were more easily destroyed because of the cheaper plastics and simpler ingredients and materials common in the 1960’s. So, it is truly amazing how many of those toys I still have. And how many survived me only to be destroyed by my own children.
And it often wasn’t enough to look at just the Monkey Ward’s catalog. (Grandpa Aldrich always called it “Monkey” instead of “Montgomery”, a pretty standard old-farmer joke in the 60’s). Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich always got a copy of the Sears catalog. And we would pour over that to find treasures that Monkey Ward’s didn’t have. That was inconvenient for Mom and Dad. The nearest Sears store was in Mason City, 50 miles northeast.
I was 10 years old in ’66.
Mary Poppins was a 60’s Disney hit.
Just the mention of Christmas catalogs of old when discussing with sisters flashes me back to the time when I was in grade school and Christmas time was all about being good for Santa because… well, toys.
And old Christmas catalogs still fascinate me. I love to look back through ten-year-old Mickey-eyes at a simpler, kinder time. Although, if I’m honest with myself, it probably wasn’t really any better than now. I just choose to believe that it was.
Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.
My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.
For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it out. There is no understanding what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.
So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.
We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.
But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.
Catch a Falling Star 
Infinite Monkeys
The theorem goes, “If you sit an infinite number of monkeys behind an infinite number of typewriters and let them tap away at random for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually come up with all the works of Shakespeare, and in addition to that, all the works of literature that have ever been written and ever will be written.”
Now, that is a daunting theorem. All the great works of literature by Mickey will be recreated by monkeys? And even worse, they will probably produce much better versions of all of it. Plus versions of it written in German, Mandarin Chinese, Urdu, and Californian (a really difficult language to translate.) All languages ever created on all the planets of the universe, as a matter of fact. The proof is there. It hinges on the mathematically precise definition of “Infinite.”
But you have to remember, infinite is the biggest number there is.
So many variations will be there in the truthfully infinite amount of stuff that infinite monkeys will produce that one version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet will have a final act where, instead of everyone dying or accidentally killing themselves, Hamlet will talk them all into putting on yellow chicken costumes and dancing with hula hoops as a means of acquiring absolution for their sins.
And a version of it will also exist where all the letter “B’s” will be replaced by “P’s” and all the vowels will be doubled so that Hamlet’s famous soliloquy will begin, “Too pee oor noot too pee, thaat iis thee quueestiioon…”
Accurately imagining the conditions required to have infinite monkeys tapping out infinite works of literary art means that any ridiculous thing that Mickey thinks of will have to actually be typed out by one or more (or infinite) monkeys in all of that infinite monkey writing. Somewhere Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros will have nothing but characters who are rhinoceroses at the beginning of the play who turn into human beings by the end of the play. (That is the exact opposite of the real French absurdist’s play, for those of you who did not have to read such stuff in college literature courses.)
In fact, in order to think up all the ridiculous variations of every work of literature would take Mickey an infinite amount of time. Mickey probably doesn’t really want to live that long.
‘
And then there is also the question of the physics of infinity. Is the universe itself, I mean, the one we all live in presently, actually infinite? Astrophysicists don’t think so according to current observable data on the astronomical model of this universe. And then you have the problem of infinite monkeys made of infinite matter. The universe would be filled to overflowing with infinite monkey-matter. And that leaves no matter or space to be used for infinite typewriters. The whole universe would be monkey-matter. And that would also mean no room for bananas, or, in fact, any monkey food of any kind. What is going to motivate the infinite monkeys to work for an infinite amount of time on their monkey literature which they won’t have typewriters to write on anyway?
And then there is another horrible thought that occurs to me. In this picture to the left, do you see the evil monkey? Believe me, if you have an infinite amount of monkeys, one or two (or possibly an infinite number of them) will definitely be evil geniuses.
And evil monkeys do evil monkey-business.
At least one or two (or possibly… you know…) evil monkey geniuses will disassemble infinite typewriters to make infinite doomsday devices. Typewriters will be re-engineered into computers and will become filled with monkey-viruses that will rewrite the operating software of the universe. And then, everything becomes an infinite monkey-villain paradise where the evil geniuses among the monkeys will live the perfect life for monkey criminals full of monkey crimes and monkey debauchery and the kind of infinite chaos that infinite monkey-villains enjoy.
This thinking about infinite monkeys leads to one very definite infinite-monkey conclusion; WE DO NOT WANT TO MESS WITH GIVING INFINITE TYPEWRITERS TO INFINITE MONKEYS!!!
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