BRAIN: I need to open a breatharean restaurant
JYU: you’re going to sell 5-dimensional Diet Coke?
BRAIN: yes, that is why it costs more than regular Diet Coke
JYU: You’d probably do better by selling oxygen-enhanced air at a markup
BRAIN: “that too has already happened” –Number_2 from Austin Powers
WRITERMATT: Do breathareans still exist? It seems like they’d die within 3 days of adopting that diet.
BRAIN: there’s a lot of people who claim to be breathareans
BRAIN: for some reason when they have a lot of observers something goes wrong
JYU: I’m only a partial practioner, because I only practice breatharianism between breakfast and lunch.
BRAIN: Jasmuheen is probably the most obvious breatharean hoaxster
JYU: people are capable of surviving an amazing amount of time on small amounts of food, though. I had a friend tell me about an ascetic monk he knew in India, who was skinny as fuck and survived for only two cups of milk a day for a years-long fasting period
WRITERMATT: There’s a Franz Kafka story called “The Hunger Artist” about a guy who would fast for weeks at a time, and kind of became a celebrity for doing it. At the end of his life, someone asks him why he had chosen that profession, and he answers, “I couldn’t find anything that I liked.”
BRAIN: I think Crumb illustrated that
WRITERMATT: That does seem like something he’d dig.
WRITERMATT: Also, retroactive “spoiler warning”
WRITERMATT: But I suppose nobody cares if I spoil the ending of a 90-year old Franz Kafka short story.