Comic 858: Whole Milk

[TITLE: Milk; ALT TEXT: It's not hard when you have the same thought like 40 or 50 percent of the time.]

Randall Munroe is a troubled man. His mind is filled with thoughts of nipples, all the time (let's not kid ourselves; the alt text is lowballing it). He wants to put them in his mouth. And when he does, he wants them to provide him with sweet, milky sustenance. Mostly the nipples he thinks of are Megan's, of course, but even Randy's obsession with Megan pales compared to the thoughts that course through his mind, unbidden and unwelcome. And everyone around him knows. They must, or why would the world be so full of reminders? "Villains!" he shrieked. "Dissemble no more! Tear off the shirt. Here! Here! It is the oozing of her delicious milky breasts!"

At first he tried to dismiss these thoughts as other and strange, as evidenced in comic 275, where he worries about telling the parents of his completely fictional girlfriend (perhaps the comic predates Megan, who can say?) that he lives only to put his mouth on her sensitive pink milk buttons. These thoughts were "the weirdest thoughts." They were to be suppressed, shunned, kept silent. And for a long time, he succeeded. He shifted his fixation onto Megan, and with a forced laugh and a grin that lingered just a moment too long, he told nerdy jokes. Only the pained look in his eye when he saw a breast, the way his gaze would follow the jiggly milk-potentials, betrayed his inner thoughts.

But eventually the strain was too much for his psyche. Perhaps it was the realization that he could lust for the life-giving fluid that came from Megan's breasts that did it. he could suppress it no longer--God (or, rather, the uncaring universe that only dumb dumbheads think has a god in it--this is still Randall Munroe we're talking about) made him with these crippling neuroses and sexual fixations for a reason! and he would not be ashamed of who he is!

But to be Randall Munroe is to be ashamed. all his life he has been at conflict with himself--the part with an oral fixation that only wants to lap up milk and vaginal fluids, and the white knight who thinks that sexual desire is inherently wrong and finds that imagining women sexually damages his image of them as perfect and pure--and that conflict continues. What was meant as a loving paean to milk-slurping turned on itself, became a twisted mirror of itself. In it, Megan shatters his dreams, as she shatters them so often before, and, as always, he can find nothing but praise for her in so doing. but it's the alt text where Randall truly subverts himself: here he reveals, with the terrifying self-awareness that only those wallowing deep in the pits of denial can exhibit, that this is his only thought. She is not amazing for guessing it. she is only cynically exploiting his fragile, pathetic mind. And it is fragile, and it is pathetic. He knows this, he affirms this, even as he attempts to affirm himself:

I am Randall Munroe, and I just want to lick milk from your boobies! I will not be ashamed!

But he is ashamed. He is so very ashamed.