The Confusion

My family have been Samurai for as long as we choose to remember.

Never fear, I shall be joining you in moments…my knees being older work slower…er…ah!…owf. There. Now, let us pray.”

“You always say a prayer after you piss?”

“Only after a really first-rate one, or when communing with a fellow sufferer, as now. Lord of the Universe, Your humble servants Samuel Pepys and Daniel Waterhouse pray that You shall bless and keep the soul of the late Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, who, wanting no further purification in the Kidney of the World, went to Your keeping twenty years since. And we give praise and thanks to You for having given us the rational faculties by which the procedure of lithotomy was invented, enabling us, who are further from perfection, to endure longer in this world, urinating freely as the occasion warrants. Let our urine-streams, gleaming and scintillating in the sun’s radiance as they pursue their parabolic trajectories earthward, be as an outward and visible sign of Your Grace, even as the knobby stones hidden in our coat-pockets remind us that we are all earth, and that we are sinners. Do you have anything to add, Mr. Waterhouse?”

“Only, Amen!”

“MR. WATERHOUSE, MY SCHEDULE IS a monolith, seamless and unbroken. Except for piss-breaks. Shall we?”

“As I need hardly explain to you of all men, Mr. Pepys, nothing now gives me greater satisfaction than pissing-but to piss with you, sir, would be to compound honor with pleasure.”