Reply #46: "Welcome to the Monkey House" -- Kurt Vonnegut

[Tesha]

In this short story, a father invents "Ethical Birth Control"
after taking his kids on a Sunday outing to the Zoo, where
they encounter the monkeys doin' what comes naturally.

Ethical Birth Control has no effect on your ability to procreate
(so it's ethical for use by, e.g., Catholics), it just makes you
completely numb from the waist down. And, oh yeah, it makes
you pee turqoise.

"Most men said their bottom halves felt like cold iron
or balsa-wood. Most women said their bottom halves felt
like wet cotton or stale ginger ale. The pills were so
effective that you cold blindfold a man who had taken
one, tell him to recite the Gettysburg Address, kick him
in the balls while he was doing it, and he wouldn't miss
a syllable."

The is also the short story where Vonnegut introduced the
concept of Ethical Suicide Parlors, run in converted ex-
Howard Johnson restaurants which now had their famous
orange roofs repainted purple and were now populated by
sex-bomb Ethical Suicide Parlor hostesses, also clad in
purple. (These parlors may have been some of the inspir-
ation for one of the plotlines in "Soylent Green".)

"I did not sow, I did not spin,
And thanks to pills I did not sin.
I loved the crowds, the stink, the noise.
And when I peed, I peed turquoise.

I ate beneath a roof of orange;
Swung with progress like a door hinge.
'Neath purple roof I've come today
To piss my azure life away.

Virgin hostess, death's recruiter,
Life is cute, but you are cuter.
Mourn my pecker, purple daughter -
All it passed was sky-blue water.

Tesha