Hi, I'm Josh Litton
My goal is to peddle funny stuff and satirical stuff, and purvey reams of sustainable bullshit, just for you.
On this page you’ll find mostly true information about me, plus hagiography.
Transforming the waste energy of the mind into pure gold
"Look, I run the gamut—from ill-advised to highly prized and everything in between, I’ve got you covered."
Fantastic Facts
About Josh Litton
Among other pursuits I am the chairman of and a former moderator for the International Federation of Chicken Disputation, encouraging barnyard fowl across the globe to live in harmony with their fellow feather.
In 2022, Literary Menagerie, America’s least-read, least-known, and least-respected literary journal, gave me its Delusions of Grandeur Lifetime Achievement Award, and ranked me as the world’s foremost ironic egoist. The award reads, “For lack of literary prowess denigrating claims of personal greatness.”
Josh Litton's Stupendous Quest and Brief Encounter With Zeus
SEVERAL YEARS AGO I traveled to Mount Olympus, in Greece, to trace the 1964 expedition of the French adventurer and explorer Johann Experiantu up the same mountain.
According to Experiantu’s book, Remarkable Journey Toward the Gods, an elegant and sometimes self-aggrandizing work, which recounted his seven week Mount Olympus exploration, he…
...reached the height of Mount Olympus and stood and gazed down upon the earth below. This was the realm of the gods, how they gaze upon the world. And behold, at once I was confronted with thunder and lightning. Giant clouds swirled overhead. A terrible and terrifying wind thrashed around me. And suddenly before me stood Zeus himself. “Send one who is worthy,” he cried. With lightning in his eyes, he repeated himself, saying he was hungry for virtuous mortal company. Then he vanished. And I was alone, contemplating the eventualities of all things.
IT WAS THIS PASSAGE, reread dozens of times, that convinced me that I alone was the worthy one, full of virtue.
A confused life arranged itself: hadn’t I dedicated my life to helping others float to the top of their own, while neglecting my own?
And, as recompense for great-hearted service to man, wouldn’t it be right to allow leeway for my shortcomings, failures, mistakes, and deviancies?
A child of prophesy, a love child of Zeus; long-abandoned at the foot of Olympus, perishing under a Grecian sun; reborn through worldly incarnations until, in the fullness of time, when all was ripe for my arrival, I should emerge one final time in human form to fulfill my ultimate destiny.
And so, bolstered by my sense of divine mission, I scaled Mount Olympus, arriving on the exact day and at the same hour when Experiantu, according to his journals, met Zeus upon Olympus.
Standing at about the same spot as Experiantu, I cried, “O Zeus! Behold, your son!”
For a moment the only thing I heard was a gentle breeze.
So I called out again, “O Zeus, behold…your son!”
Thunder and lightning exploded around me, the earthquake of divine power.
A thrashing wind beat upon me. I was thrown to the ground.
Suddenly a voice that shook the mountain and darkened the skies cried, “What mortal dares seek my visage in this sacred place?”
The mountain quaked beneath me. Thunder pealed. Lightning tore through the darkness above.
“Surely,” I said, lifting my voice above the great winds and shielding my face from the heat and brightness of the glowing eyes and the shrapnel pierce of the blowing sand, “surely you, O mighty Zeus, recognize your own offspring?”
“And who is that?” said Zeus.
Many rocks tumbled around me, so I thought I would be crushed.
“Many millennia ago,” I shouted, “unrecorded in the annals of the Greeks, I perished at the foot of the mountain, and after endless cycles of reincarnation have at last returned to see you, my father, almighty Zeus!”
At this the winds abated.
Zeus crouched down and got a good look at my face.
“Oh,” he said, “I recognize you now.”
“I’m so glad,” I said.
“Silence!” he said.
Then all the terror of the mountain began again.
And in a voice that ripped across the sky, Zeus said, “Return, O foolish mortal, and spew forth what is satirical, all that causes man mirth and laughter, and purvey all that is sustainable bullshit. Now, go!”
At this Zeus flung me from the mountain, which disappeared beneath me.
I flew for what seemed like an eternity, whereupon I splashed down into the sea near the island of Lemnos.
No sooner had I fallen into the sea, which was unseasonably calm and warm and pleasant, than a giant fish, who introduced itself in a squealing descant as Dag Gadol, swallowed me alive.
Tumbling into his belly, I thought I would die amid the refuse of half-eaten fish and the wafting odor of intestinal gas.
For three days and nights I lived in his stomach while he swam here and there telling me his life story, which, when I added it up, made him several thousand years old.
It was a boring story of swimming, eating, defecating, copulating, and sleeping, with one minor interruption of three days in which he swallowed a bizarre individual who called himself Jonah.
This man had a strong aversion to swimming, pigs, defecating, copulating, laughter, sex, and everyone not of his race.
“He was only with me for three days,” said Dag Gadol, “and I told him the same stories I’ve told you, about my life, and so forth. When I was finished, since we had nothing left to say to each other, I considered it lucky when I belched and vomited him onto the beach.”
This piqued my interest.
“If you are the Dag Gadol I have read about in the Bible,” I said, “then it was God who commanded you to vomit Jonah onto the beach.”
“The Bible is full of many inaccuracies and overstatements,” said Dag Gadol.
“As far as I can remember—and understand that I have a prodigious memory—I grew tired of Jonah’s ramblings.
“Endless discussions about the so-called desert god Yahweh and his superiority to all, Jonah’s endless hand-wringing over having offended this god, et cetera—all this grates one’s stomach.
“There was a lull in our conversation, I vomited, out he went. Am I to believe that Yahweh manipulated my gag reflex? Come to think of it—”
Deep down in Dag Gadol’s gut came a rumbling.
“I must surface,” he said, “something’s afoot.”
We shot upward then broke through the surface.
Dag Gadol’s belly heaved. It constricted, clenching around me so that I thought I would choke to death.
But just as suddenly, he relaxed, and a strong foul pestilential storm passed through his intestines.
“Goodbye,” cried Dag Gadol.
He had opened his mouth; the light of day crept in.
With his mouth open Dag Gadol belched with what must have been a hundred decibels of power.
He spewed me along his slimy tongue, then vomited me onto the Texas coastline at a point on Galveston Island just south of the Valero Corner Store from which I walked home vowing to Zeus to dedicate myself to his command to spew forth.
Portrait of the author as hapless adventurer being spewed forth from the mouth of the great whale Dag Gadol.