Even Greater Mistakes

by Charlie Jane Anders

prefer ‘wish facilitator.’ And for your information,

timey-wimey.

When I meet a particularly stout outringer, my ruhr feels a little itchy. I make a habit of wearing a scarf when I clean the outringers’

It would look cool, sort of like the final episode of The Prisoner.

This was sacred, this was stolen. Someone—probably Miranda—farted, and then we were all laughing, and the grown-up seriousness was gone. We were all busting up and falling over each other on the rocky ground, in a nude heap, scraping our knees and giggling into each other’s limbs. When we got our breath back and looked up, the candles were all gone.

“We are gods with anuses.” To Becker, who wrote The Denial of Death, this contradiction defined human nature: we are capable of such brilliance, such soaring imagination, but we still have to expel dead matter through our buttholes,

reminding us we are going to die.

until I thought about my deep and enduring love of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat books, which tell the story of “Slippery” Jim diGriz, interstellar rogue.

because nobody ever gets drunk on books and starts a brawl.