An Irate Piece of Parchment Recently Discovered in the Crypt of Brother Bartholomew

Translated from 15^th Century German

Johan Gutenberg, you insufferable prick.

I never met you, but if I had I would have punched you in the face until it stopped being funny.  You ruined my life, such as it was.  I don’t know how much of a life you can have with your ass stuck to a wooden stool for twenty-five years, hunched over a desk in a freezing cold room. 

Yeah, that’s right.  Twenty-five years, asshole.  And you want to know what I did in all that time?  I made one copy of the Bible.  ONE!  I’m sorry, I meant to say “illuminated manuscript,” which is what the abbot wanted us to call it.  Man, that portly son of a bitch got on my last nerve.  Evidently that vow of poverty didn’t cover sneaking extra portions of mutton stew when no one was looking.  And don’t think I didn’t notice the steady stream of farmer’s daughters decked out in brown robes heading down the hallway to his room.

But I never complained about any of that.  I didn’t complain about having to draw fancy little designs around the border of each and every page.  Nor did I complain about the time I worked on one page for an entire week, only to have a small spasm in my hand on the very last word.  I had to take that page, burn it and bury it in the garden.  I can’t even remember what page that was anymore – I’m pretty sure somebody begat someone.

Let’s bring it back to you, Gutenberg.  I endured the bad boss, the horrible working conditions and the required anal retentive attention to detail, finish up my copy and find out that you built a machine that makes everything I’ve done with my life utterly pointless.  Do you have any idea how many months I had to train to draw the big-ass letters at the beginning of a chapter?  You know, the giant, audacious ones that serve no purpose but to screw up the spacing on the next four lines?  But now none of that matters.  All of that time could have been put to use in a much more worthwhile pursuit – like touching a woman.  Any woman.  I know they exist, and, more importantly, I know what they can do (after hearing the descriptive language screamed out by one or two of the more chatty ladies in the abbot’s quarters).  I thought I was giving up all of that for an important task.  Instead, the end result was a lifetime of sexual frustration.  I got so pissed off the day I heard about your invention that I went out into the stable and punched a donkey.

I have no purpose left – everything I trained for is now obsolete.  Given that, I have taken it upon myself to steal a barrel of ale from the kitchen.  I plan on drinking all of it and then taking a dump in the abbot’s hat.  

Thanks so much for all of this, Gutenberg.

B

A Mildly Annoyed Correspondence from Thomas Middleton

To whom it may concern,

Hello, terribly sorry to bother you.  It’s just that a few of us were gathered around here in the hereafter feeling a bit neglected, really.  Ben Jonson and I were trying to decide on the best way to go about airing our grievances.  Ben wanted to “haunt the holy fuck out of those illiterate, shit-brained knuckle draggers,” by which I believe he means you.  I felt that we could be far more constructive by writing them out and hoping there are still a few people out there capable of reading something more complicated than a Wikipedia entry on Scooby Doo.

Basically, our grievances all boil down to one over-riding theme: why does no one care about the Jacobean playwrights?  And already, I’m feeling I’ll need to explain myself – by Jacobean, I mean “during the time while James I was king.”  If I find out that does not sufficiently inform you, then I’m going to let Ben do things his way.  At the moment he’s claiming that he knows how to make everyone’s dead grandmother rise out of the grave and perform lewd sexual gestures at the nearest child care facility, but I hope he is bluffing.

Obviously we have to compete for attention with our colleague, Mr. Shakespeare – a man who couldn’t even decide how to spell his last name.  Ben is especially touchy about it; he’s spent the last couple of centuries amassing an expansive vocabulary of offensive words in several languages to best convey his emotions on the topic.  I don’t rightly know how you people are able to sit through Romeo and Juliet so many times.  For God’s sake, how many people today even know that “wherefore” means “why?”  It might help your comprehension of the play to know that Juliet is a philosophical, whiny, teenage half-wit and not a near-sighted, whiny, teenage half-wit.  It’s not even that good a play.  Will locked himself in a shed with eight barrels of beer for three days and that piece of shit was the end product.

Ben and I deserve more attention these days.  Hell, our plays are all about sex and violence.  You people eat that stuff up, right?  We have dick jokes, too!  Anyway, I better leave it here.  Ben is feeling a bit maudlin now, and he tends to lick things he shouldn’t when he gets like that.

Sincerely,

T.M.

An Angry Missive from Suleiman the Magnificient

(translated from 16th century Turkish)

Dear jackasses,

600 years.  We were around for 600 years.  We spanned three continents.  We made the Holy Roman Empire collectively shit its pants.  I personally kicked Hungary's ass so hard that 500 years later the country still isn't relevant.  It took a freaking world war to finally take us down.  But does the Ottoman Empire get remembered for any of that in the west?  No.  Say the name of it and most of you just think of a piece of furniture.  And it's a fucking footstool at that.  It's just embarrassing, really.

I don't mean to sound petty, but I've been looking up a lot of the other empires that have come and gone since and I've noticed a distinct lack of furniture-centered memes to remember their exploits.  Queen Victoria took over a decent chunk of the world and got a damned century named after her.  There isn't a Great Britain  coffee table or a Victoria hat stand.  Think of Napoleon and the image of a particular style of bidet does not spring to mind.

Maybe I wouldn't be so pissy if it was at least a decent type of furniture.  But it's a footstool, the least essential piece of furniture a house can have.  No one has ever been in a panic because they didn't have one.  If you have more than one, people starting thinking you're a bit touched in the head.  Couldn't we have gotten a couch named after us?  There were a lot of those in the empire.  Or a desk?  Hell, a pantry would have been a step up.  But we didn't get one of those.  And now, when people talk about an ottoman, the next thing in their head is IKEA.

Look, I know we weren't exactly on the same page as you guys - different beliefs, different customs, etc.  But the Mongols were about as alien as a prom queen at a comic book convention and you don't associate them with a household oddity.

We gave you ungrateful bastards coffee.  Could you at least have the decency to remember us for more than an outdated piece of furniture?

Piss off,

S