This might be my favorite answer.
Be seeing you. Keep watching the skies.
Wonderful Labs was effectively closed between 2005 and 2012. This is the truth.
I realize now, today, that this is also me talking about my depression.
This is quite good up until the end, where I make a shocking statement for cheap laughs. I think I was just jealous of his relationship with Laurie Anderson.
This one is just goofy nonsense, but it’s stylish goofy nonsense. I still don’t understand the question, other than the Buckaroo Banzai bit. Still, any old excuse to talk about the Beatles.
You may have noticed, if you’re a detail-oriented obsessive that is likely to stalk and murder me, that some of these reprints are from the 2012-2013 period where we attempted to revive the Labs on Tumblr. Not many people bit, but it did yield a few gems.
Wordplay, innuendo, and no real advice. It’s another classic from the team that brought you nothing much of anything ever.
I’m still not sure the complicated clever gag works in this one, but I’m tickled by the attempts to avoid offending one of the crew, and the tag line is ace.
And as we wind things up in the “Wonderful Labs mythology” retrospective, I can now republish the ones that mention Mister Monkey. I really loved that little guy.
This one already exists as a static page on this site, but here it is in chronological context: I wrote the Potrzebie business, took a month to write half a novel, and then came back to the column with a flourish. It’s one of my favorite statements of purpose for the whole project.
As reigning king of the indulgent run-on sentence, I shared the opening blather from the first Wonder novel (July 2003) with the column’s readers, and now inflict the same upon you. It’s truly overdone and unnecessary.
But I mean, if you’re into wicked wordy homages to the opening of Homer’s Odyssey, this is just going to make your Christmas.
And here, I’m afraid, is where we start to get wordy.
The background is just that my computer died, and I had no access to my email. “F*%$ it,” I thought. “Let’s write anyway.”
So join us now, 16 years ago, when Mister Wonderful lost his computer and started a month-long journey that would lead to a mystical island paradise, an aviation mystery solved, and a new Mister in the house. So begins the Potrzebie Saga.
The difficult second essay.
Okay. I’ve put my characters out into the world, but I really don’t know what they’re going to do there. So I do a little character work with the Rolling Stones motif, then I free-associate some intrigue until giving up and restating the mission as I understood it then. That’s a choice. It’s the choice to keep typing.
Part 3, in which a character arrives.
This is my quick dive into a Hunter S. Thompson/William Burroughs/Grant Morrison pastiche. It’s surreal and political and very Me in 2003.