WHAT A TWIST.

But no, this has been a long time coming. You may be wondering what the fuck is going on. You'll get an explanation soon enough, so don't worry. ...An explanation, more or less, I should say. Not a complete explanation. I should fit the word "explanation" into this paragraph one more time. Explanation.

Okay, I'm done.

This comic and Monday's were both authored by our esteemed artist, so I am typing this newspost as something of a glorified herald--a harbinger of hilarity, if you will, who had no actual participation in the forging of that golden comedy in the fires of Mount Doom. My fount of personal literary weirdness will bubble back up into the strip come next Wednesday, but (for now) enjoy something fresh and new and not leveraged from the sticky, abyssal crevasses that spiderweb throughout my brainpan.

I seem to have developed a sudden taste for theological and philosophical texts, especially of the Asiatic variety. I have my copies of the Dao de Jing and The Art of War, and I've been struggling my way through the Bible, which is proving to be more of an effort than the other texts combined. See, the Chinese had a fantastic technique for imparting their wisdom, one that seems to have been lost wholly in the course of Western civilization: brevity. Lao Zi and Sun Tzu basically got in, said, "Here're my ideas, take 'em or leave 'em", and got the fuck out. The Bible seems to me to be an example of raw overkill. I understand that I'm comparing a religious text with two philosophical texts, but I've always held both forms to approximately the same standards. It is impossible to have religion without philosophy. It is perfectly possible to have philosophy without religion. Which I suppose in practice means religion can be defined as "philosophy with a big invisible dude in the sky". And with that, my view stands justified.

In any case, all three books are commentaries on how to live, to some degree, and in terms of how that commentary is expressed--well, the two Chinese texts simply do it better. I've been working for, like, two weeks and I'm barely at Mount Sinai in Exodus. Biblical writing is some of the densest shit I've ever read in my life, and I'm even reading the mostly prosaic New International Version. On the other hand, the Dao de Jing and The Art of War are light, straightforward, and easy to pick up, making them much more accessible. They present digestible bits of wisdom with a minimum of parable-telling, which is what makes the Bible so incredibly bulky and difficult. Everything is told in parable, so one must actively cull out the threads of useful, practical thought from the morass of poetical phrasing--and some stories don't seem to have any wisdom behind them at all, making the mess even worse.

I mean, what am I supposed to learn from Lot getting date-raped by his own daughters, anyway? That's a question for the ages.