So, my second essay written for the Monty Python Society under an assumed name. I’ve never been completely satisfied with that name or the name of the column, “Trousers Talk”, but it seemed silly enough at the time. I do think it’s considerably better than my initial choice, “Off My Medication”, which I changed after just a couple of weeks when I realized that some readers might rightly take offense to it. Anyway, as I keep saying, I welcome feedback on these things, although it’s altogether possible I’m just posting them because I can’t think of anything else to write and I’m looking for easy filler. Whatever the case, here it is:

Thomas Mann, the Nobel prize-winning novelist who, through no fault of his own, was German, once wrote: “A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”

I tried to tell my wife this the other night when she discovered me having sex with our neighbor, Maureen, whose husband has apparently been out of town. I was, I said, unconciously living his life — although Maureen seized upon this as an opportunity to make a rather crude joke about comparative genital size, which I thought was as unfair as it was unflattering.

But, in truth, who hasn’t yearned to be someone else? At one point or another, I’m sure we’ve all imagined different lives for ourselves, envisioned new names and exotic locales, siphoned funds from that corporate account to pay for forged passports, travel expenses, and the inevitable hush money when the police discover you didn’t really die in that warehouse fire back in ‘87.

It’s a natural and healthy curiosity. One could, I suppose, take that curiosity too far and forget where one personality ends and the next one begins — which is also what I tried to tell my wife the other night (once Maureen had finished doing that special trick she does with her tongue), but I think I had already upset her too much by mentioning Thomas Mann.

My wife, to be fair, is not terrifically fond of Thomas Mann. She says that I use my knowledge of history and literature simply as an excuse to do whatever it is that I want at any given time. This, I try to tell her, is what history and literature are for, and there’s little point in studying them if they won’t get you laid, but she usually just storms off angrily and leaves me with my books.

Maureen says that we should try to find some common interest, an author whose body of work we both can appreciate. “That’s easy for you to say,” I tell her, but of course it isn’t with her tongue occupied elsewhere, and I have to admit that she’s right. But that would mean talking to my wife about her interests, and I’m not sure I’m ready to do that.

I have about ten more of these. I’m really not convinced yet that posting each of them, one a day, is the best way to go. Any thoughts?