Bathroom Monologue: Consternation

Every student who aspires to genius runs into this. What’s worse than reinventing the wheel? Inventing this round thing that is great for rolling, putting all your time and soul into it, and showing it to a professor only for him to take you out on the street and point underneath all the cars. Except what Renoir painted and Balzac wrote isn’t rotating under every motor vehicle. It’s initially the responsibility of the professor to inform, but eventually it becomes the terror of the aspiring genius that not merely the wheel, but the suspension, the steel frame, crumple zones, dashboard display and passenger cup holders have already been written.

Bathroom Monologue: The Accidental Advent of Day (haiku)

the Moon laughs and runs
the Sun frets and chases her
trips, falls and breaks day

Bathroom Monologue: Hung Lo’s Chinese Takeout

Back before it was a four-novel story, the premise was Hung Lo’s Chinese Takeout. Lo would work there, as a very lazy waiter who took frequent breaks to go assassinate demons. You see, the restaurant was a front for his demon-hunting business. Get it? “Takeout?” “Chinese?” Oh, double puntendre. The Maitre d’ would be Emma, his girlfriend who was capable of moving through shadows. She’d essentially field all the calls, show people to their tables, and hop through the shadow world to advise him on an easier way to kill the werewolf that was chewing on his tibia. Their chef would be the borderline neurotic Puck. Every so often a demon would make its way back to the restaurant, wreck the place and leave him a babbling mess. It’s still beyond me how this turned into a four-novel story with no restaurant.

Fears of a Pluto Fan, OR, “oh, may we pray, the author was not defacting as he IM'd” –Randall Nichols in an IM

“Science can't make Pluto not a planet. They've had Pluto as a planet for centuries. You can't do scientific backsies. That's nuts. What if other things they've been telling us forever turn out to be untrue? What if that polio vaccine isn't a permanent fix? What if not all cholesterol is bad for us? What if the universe is expanding? What if... what if none of the stuff they currently tell me to believe is real? Not only does this destroy my worldview, but all those labs the government subsidized were just wasting my tax money! I could have bought porn with that money!"

Bathroom Monologue: Hers

Hers were small rebellions. She signed the petition, but did not wear the pins or flaunt the rules by putting on forbidden clothing. When Dolden Prep finally rescinded the dress code it seemed half the girls showed up in thigh-bearing skirts and every boy had a band shirt to sport. Not she. She wore the same navy blouse and skirt every day, and once again refused to wear their pins. All she did was undo one stitch at the bottom left of the skirt. She let it alone until another stitch came out by nature of wear and laundry. Then another. Week by week, and soon day by day, she let the tear climb up her leg in a naughtier way than any boy’s hand could. She did not mend for an appearance of style. She let the idiot revolutionaries gossip about her ragged wardrobe. She listened happily to the gossip, too, when the rip climbed higher than any liberated girl allowed her miniskirt to go. The teachers could do nothing, and her fellow students in their Grateful Dead shirts and Prada shoes gawked at her indecency. She let it climb her until she heard the rumor one morning that she had a boyfriend who liked seeing her this way. It made her smile as she finally took one of their now ironically sheik protest pins, and used it to clasp the tear in her skirt.

Bathroom Monologue: Comprehension: The Equipment of the Human Mind Vs. The Problems of the World

The human mind is a worktable, about four feet in length. Some superior intelligences are about six feet long. One time I was cornered by a culture critic at a benefit dinner who might have been six and a half feet. Regardless, all human minds are three feet in width.

On the table are a hammer, a chisel, a saw or two (depending on the versatility of your studies), sandpaper, screws, nails and sundry items. You can build things with these. You can fix things with these. Most people will also use these to break things in half and bang on them.

Altogether, this 4x3 table with various utilities is your mind. When ready, you drop the problems of the world on it.

When this happens they rip the roof off of your garage and drop a sperm whale on your table. It is not a miniature sperm whale, nor a baby sperm whale. It is a full adult female, hurtling down on your table-mind. The sperm whale here represents all the problems of the world, but they are complex and so it is difficult to anatomize what organ represents what problem. It would be silly to assign poverty to the liver or overpopulation to the reproductive organs. However I believe we are all silly and tired enough to agree that taxes are the blowhole. It is such a large thing that you cannot see if the problems of the world were dropped upon you by a skyhook or a crane. Your 4x3 (or if you’re lucky, 6x3) worktable is crushed beneath the whale.

I’ve thought it over with my roughly 3.5x3 mind, and the only flaw I see to this metaphor is that in real life you don’t get to set up your table before they drop the whale on it.

Bathroom Monologue: Unexpected Aquatic Protection

“I’m going to admit up front, not a lot of people would dig a mote around their RV. But that’s why they won’t expect it. Assassins will sneak up in the night, figuring on solid footing, and ba’am! Into the jaws of hungry baby alligators. They’ve got to be babies, since I couldn’t really dig a big mote on short notice. Plus, last time I tried digging a big one I sort of forgot to put on the break and rolled into it mid-festivities with my wife. Don’t know which was worse – paying for the new suspension on that thing, or the adult alligator getting in through the rear window. I miss my nephew…”

Bathroom Monologue: Going to the Good Battle

Going to the Good Battle
Ron broke his fast at dawn. As he cooked the eggs he wondered murky thoughts. Why had he never dedicated that nightly period when he didn’t eat to the gods? Sleep made him fast anyway, so why not hand them the honor? While the men ate, he dedicated their meal to the gods. When he marched with the rest of the troops for Ral’Hom, to fight the good battle, he dedicated the walk to the gods as well. There was no prayer or symbol. The actions drifted into the ether like any others, save that they were earmarked by a thought.

Ron had always abstained from tributes, but that morning came a question – not a revelation, but a mere question. If the gods were good and necessary as he’d heard, then were not all his good and necessary actions for them? As the troop passed through a mill town, a girl gave him a dipper of water. He thanked her, and wondered as he marched on if he had not thanked the gods in that same sentence. Were not the gods served by the millers baking honey bread and sweet beer to joy up the nights? Were they not served with every meal? Back at Braintree, up the road from his house, where the scholars studied powders and cures, was not every laboratory test and attempted equation was not a prayer? Was father, the great mathematician, more religious than he knew?

His theological epiphany lasted until that afternoon’s good battle, which was not good or godly at all. Never, even in his agnostic years, had he felt so distant from the gods as when tore into another man. He lived, though, and there would be more questions.

Bathroom Monologue: Ways to Read

The reader reads your book.

The good reader underlines things on your page.

The editor corrects things on your page.

The aspiring writer corrects things on your page, leaves suggestions in-between words, and will rewrite entire sentences in the margins.

The master writer will retype your whole manuscript to get a feel for it, changing words, sentences, paragraphs, back story, conflicts and context on the fly as he discovers how it is that he actually writes from rewriting your book.

The typesetter, dreading all these people, stays as far away from bookstores as possible.

“It was his turn” on Blink Ink

Blink Ink has accepted "It was his turn" for e-publication. It's a tweaked version of a 55-word story from last year, about a magician who vanished - and it wasn't part of his act. You can read it here: http://blink-ink.com/content/2009/07/it-was-his-turn/

Bathroom Monologue: Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody…

A bride with a bloody gown and knives for fingers stood in Chantal’s door. Her lipless mouth grinned, asking, “You said Bloody Mary in the mirror three times on October 29, 1984, right?”

Chantal ran for the window, but it was stuck shut. One serrated finger slid up her shoulder and neck, until it caressed her ear.

“The folktale that I come for anyone who mocks my name in the mirror is true. I just never said when.”

Devil Gone Missing on Thrillers, Killers & Chillers

My flash story, "Devil Gone Missing," is story of the day over at Thrillers, Killers & Chillers. It's about something that happened in a dump, because dumps are scarier than supermarkets. You can check it out here: http://thrillskillsnchills.blogspot.com/2009/07/devil-gone-missing-by-john-wiswell.html

Stories set in supermarkets are pending.

Bathroom Monologue: Two Horns, Six Sentences

The agent said they could cut off one of their horns and increase their chances at marketability. Unicorns were always in demand, but “bicorn” sounded like a farm subsidy. Most of them refused self-mutilation to masquerade as their more popular cousins, and stood by their virtue as a taller, sturdier breed with natural handholds for children who wished to ride them through dreams. All their endorsement deals fell through save one with a glue company, and when a protestor explained to them why they’d gotten the deal, they were pretty angry.

Anyway, that’s why those beautiful steeds are down there amongst the army of darkness. Hell gave them work when little girls wouldn’t even draw them on their notebooks.

Channel Surfing

I watched twenty minutes of 28 Days Later on the TV, waiting for my favorite bit, where the camera pans back in the church to reveal the note from survivors of the apocalypse, which reads: "THE END IS EXTREMELY FUCKING NIGH."

Having seen my favorite bit, I switch channels and get some kind of documentary on Ronald Reagan, who says, amidst background laughter, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

I change the channel up to the triple digits to flee this coincidence, only to find a gaunt man on a rooftop, holding a dry-erase board over his head with the question: "WHAT’S THE BAD NEWS?"

Desolate music swells behind him and I change the TV to anything else, and this anything else turns out to be the recently departed Charlton Heston bursting through a door and screaming, "Soylent Green is people!"

I turn off the TV, rub my eyes and wish there was some way I could share this with others.

Bathroom Monologue: Pun Time

(This was written in a challenge to tell something relating to the above photograph)

“Found it out by second base.”

“No way!”

“I thought they were a myth…”

“It’s real, Whitey. Got to be worth at least a million.”

“Never thought I’d see a real baseball diamond.”

Bathroom Monologue: Kiddy Kitty

Despite having the elevator to themselves, the boy stood so close to Ronald that he almost rubbed against his left leg. Ronald followed elevator protocol and stared at the descending numbers, ignoring his juvenile elevator-mate until the kid tugged on his trouser leg.

“Sir,” the boy said in a voice that was almost a purr, “how would you feel if Tigger, your girlfriend's cat who died nine years ago when you went to Hawaii and forgot to get him a sitter, was reincarnated?”

Ronald pushed back into the very corner of the elevator and asked in disbelief, “How do you know about Tigger?”

The boy pulled a handful of Meow Mix from his pocket and popped it in his mouth. He replied as he chewed, spraying Ronald's trouser with crumbs, “I’m nine.”

Six Sentence Week 4

The hits keep coming, and they come in six packs. It's Six Sentence week again here at the Bathroom Monologues, featuring stories about baseball, literacy, reincarnation and more. Please vote for your favorite on the poll, which should pop up Wednesday. Please comment, too, on what you think of what I'm doing with the constraint; It's always helpful to know if people think I'm doing work worth doing.

Does a semi-colon make it one or two sentences? Will I fool them if capitalize "It's?"

Bathroom Monologue: Umbrellas

"It's bad luck to open an umbrella in the house. Strange things happen, like objects getting knocked off tables, walls getting scratched, and inexplicable increases in the amount of water on my floor. Might be ghosts. Now close you fricking umbrella and wipe your shoes."

Bathroom Monologue: Why Vampires Suck

I originally wrote this for the Fantasy Magazine blog that asked why we loved or hated vampires. It's way too damned long to be a comment, though I did post it over there anyway.

I can’t stand vampires anymore. The children’s expurgated version of Dracula was one of the first novels I read in elementary school, those glow-in-the-dark plastic teeth were the coolest thing in the world in 3rd grade, and I watched Blade an embarrassing number of times in high school. But there came a time when that fiction became dominated by too much trash and pseudoscience for the monsters to be scary or intriguing anymore. I’m afraid they’re reaching the point werewolves and mummies did before them. Their time may be up.

All that is wrong with the modern vampire is not any one element or author’s fault. However, many of the modern vampire’s problems arose from secular influences. There is a pathetic strain running through Horror that sees them tearing through walls, surviving bullets to the head and lifting cars as realistic, but being afraid of crosses as not. I’m not Christian but I could see what very ham-handed writers were trying to do to the Fantasy. They wanted to remove what they didn’t believe from the mythos, but unwittingly insulted the entirely implausible fiction. Suddenly magic was yanked out and there was no cool shapeshifting, no good explanation for the fear of the sun, and the psychic “familiar” phenomenon turned into psychic pseudoscience (when it was explained at all). The clever variations on vampire tropes – like why or how stakes were supposed to work – were dwarfed by a general half-hearted apology for it being fiction, and fiction that apologizes for itself insults both the story and the audience. What the secularization of the vampire did, mostly by accident, was sever the Fantasy creature’s connection to the world. It was like taking night and the moon away from the werewolf. Satan’s overplayed in fiction, but vampires need some mysticism. That they once were one with the night gave them a mythological power they lack altogether today.

In place of magic, now vampirism is a disease – presumably because we’re terrified of STD’s instead of witches these days. But the result is something downright insulting to the ill. I suffer from a neuromuscular syndrome and have mentored a couple of chronically ill girls. Disease does not make you immune to bullets or render you capable of biting through body armor. Reducing vampirism to infectious superpowers is ridiculous, made worse when so many don trendy clothes and black trench coats. They’re the vapid Matrix posers of Fantasy.

The modern zombie does a much better job of expressing the mental and physical degradation of disease, and their far broader potential for infection allegories and apocalypse stories has helped them completely overtake the popularity of their undead brethren. Zombies, popularized in film during the nuclear age, have beaten vampires to the punch. It’s not even a contest. Even in prose, Max Brooks’s World War Z blows away every piece of vampire fiction of the decade on narrative and literary levels.

Then there’s what vampires have actually done in their new pseudoscience domain.

Since Carmilla’s lesbianism and Dracula’s creepy harem, vampires have always had sexual themes. Some directors used those to probe rape and homosexuality when the political climate was less tolerant in visual arts. But Post-Anne Rice, vampires are insipidly horny. Twilight’s teen angst romance and True Blood’s constant banging do little to remedy this. Not to insult the author of a recent blog entry around here, but neither Twilight’s hesitance towards pre-marital sex nor True Blood’s fascination with as much pre-marital sex as possible is interesting. Not with vampires. Not without them. Contrary to popular belief, sex is not mature – kids have sex all the time, and most sexual vampire fiction shows a distinctly adolescent fascination with rutting. That’s certainly part of why I detached from it. I remember when I first turned against the idea of the vampire – reading Rice’s The Vampire Armand, with a slave begging his master not to whip his thighs as he was “disciplined.” Vampire sexuality rapidly descended into the prurient and titillating, which is to say, it became trite. That’s the coffin where vampire sex has laid to rest.

I miss the coffins. Damn, do I miss the coffins. They could be hokey, but at least hokey is the attempt to feel authentic. Somebody who sleeps in a coffin is way more interesting than someone who sleeps on satin sheets, even if a supermodel joins him. Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot was the last truly great piece of vampire fiction I can remember, giving us a town too full of its own trivial drama to realize the layers of evil unfolding around them. King wanted modernize the vampires he loved so much, and so while he had them handling land deeds and swarming in a school bus, he kept the stake, the cross, the coffin, the transformations and familiars. He maintained the regal air of the father vampire while sowing the notion of the local, lesser child, and in doing so maintained the dread of infection and the bravery of the hunt. He also had broader vision than most Horror writers, also including a creepy abstract version of the classic haunted house to play influence over his classic critters.

For vampire fiction to live it had to outgrow the Dracula model King used, but it didn’t grow into anything compelling to a mind that grew up with it. Buffy and her quirky crew lived on their rapport. Fans watched for the characters, not their challenges, and “Vampire Slayer” quickly became an inaccurate title as they wound up stabbing Frankenstein-rip-offs, giant snakes and demons. Hence why they started just calling her “The Slayer” instead. The current Supernatural is much more entertaining to me, in no small thanks to its openness about a wider variety of baddies going bump in their nights. Those shows are carried by the cast and the characters they make. The Fantasy is a backdrop, and it can be a pretty shallow one.

Where it wasn’t founded on ensembles, popular vampire fiction mutated into exaggerations of old tropes. How many movies have riffed off the classic black and white Nosferatu and Dracula? Anne Rice exaggerated the sexual element to titillate readers. True Blood is now telling a white trash town drama story, plus things that bite and the people who hate them. The 30 Days of Night comics are just Salem’s Lot again, turned much bloodier (and in the film they might as well be werewolves). Marvel Comics dusted off Blade to make an action hero out of the Van Helsing model. Unsurprisingly, Van Helsing himself exploded as an archetype, and then an actual character, including a film bearing the name (and bearing no resemblance to Stoker’s good doctor).

The last vampire story to make me give a damn was the anime, Hellsing. It kills me as a writer and voracious reader that it was a cartoon I liked instead of a book. But the Japanese took the tropes of shapeshifting, night, the bite, the familiar, the dungeons and the legacy of Stoker, and built something visually cool and disturbing. Their Alucard had distinct style in the way he dressed, the way he moved, and the way he dealt with the modern vampire punks (inadvertently punishing many of the crappy stereotypes of modern vampire fiction). Along the way he got a busty, blonde sidekick who somehow managed to go the whole series without getting bent over HBO style.

Yesterday I got my haircut by a young woman who was reading Stephanie Meyer’s Eclipse. I asked her to tell me about the series – just to listen to somebody who genuinely enjoyed reading. Meyer is not for me. Sentence-by-sentence she simply can’t hold me, sparkly vampires are too silly, and at 27, I may be too old for Romeo and Juliet with fangs. Even my friends who enjoy younger-targeted fiction feel they’re too old for this. ‘Vampire sparkles’ are a joke amongst us. But I was happy for the haircutter, because she was excited to read something, and that will always be a gift, no matter how trashy the writer (and there are worse than Meyer). The funny thing, and sad thing, is that in ten minutes she didn’t describe any character, plot or variation on vampires. For ten minutes she only had variations of “It’s good,” and that she hoped there would be a fifth book. Speaking the allure of vampires, she was equally enthused to read The Host, which she described as being about robots who take over the world.

That’s where I am as a lover of the creepy and the fantastic. If, in our world of remakes, somebody could do something cool with the vampire without insulting its legacy, I’d be game. Since Salem’s Lot it seems like my favorite vampire stories have all been riffs – Shadow of the Vampire being a movie about making a vampire movie, and Christopher Moore and other authors straight-up mocking the lore in print. Those were fun, but they walked no new paths. There is no prose equivalent of Hellsing. Even I’ve written a couple of short stories in attempts at novelty in the neck-biters. I’d like to like them again. I’d love for an author to give me a good reason.

Bathroom Monologue: Fawcett Vs. Jackson, OR, I'm probably going to Hell now

The difference between the dead is subtle. Michael Jackson shuttled young boys to his mansion so he could touch them. Farrah Fawcett sold her picture to young boys so they could touch themselves. The difference was customer service.

Scheduled Post Problem

I apologize for stories going up late on here. For over a week now Blogspot has had some glitches. I have several weeks of stories scheduled to go up at 9:00 AM. Blogspot simply isn't posting them. Google claims it's fixed. They are wrong. It's happening on dozens of other blogs, too, though their Help forum is so obtuse that everyone can't gather to tally how many blogs are affected.

Bathroom Monologue: Constant Change

[GARY and SAMID sit on one side of the booth, both wearing bright pink tuxedos. ARYANA sits opposite to them in a powder blue chainmail business suit. Her tie is made of folded steel. GRUFF STOVER sits beside her, leaning against the window, wearing tactical camouflage that disguises his body as part of the setting. Only GRUFF’s head is visible.]

Gary: If you don’t experiment, nothing changes.

Samid: I disagree. If you don’t experiment, you have less information with which to change things. Experimentation helps you shape change.

Gary: I think the dinosaurs didn’t experiment on giant rocks, and meteors still changed them out of existence.

Gruff: I don’t think funding rock research would have shaped that annihilation much.

Aryana: The meteor theory is bunk. Disease killed them off.

Samid: If we don’t experiment, we’ll never find which of those two theories are more valid.

Gruff: So people won’t be able to change their opinions.

Gary: Oh, people have always been able to change their opinions without information. That’s what daytime talk shows are for.

Bathroom Monologue: Words in Tribute to In Tribute to Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker

If there is a piece of art that has influenced the Bathroom Monologues, I lament that it is not a short-short. It is not microfiction, flash fiction or shotgun fiction. It’s not prose or poetry – it’s not in print at all. The seminal piece of art in the Bathroom Canon is a sculpture.

It is Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker.

If I were a good writer I would lie about the origins of my affections. They would come from values instilled by parents, a deep spiritual connection made upon visiting it at a museum, or from some overwhelming burble of art history.

Instead, the origins of my affections come from Dobey Gillis. It was a black and white sitcom on Nick At Nite about an unusually introspective student. Dobey often opened the show by breaking the fourth wall and talking about issues that weighed on his mind, usually in front of a replica of The Thinker. Dobey, diminutive and not terribly bright, mimicked its position as though in religious ritual. Ever afterwards it was a monolith to thought that could inspire and be emulated by mere mortals like my ten-year-old self. I got the religion of Rodin from Dobey Gillis.

I got A.D.D. from genes, which meant whenever I assumed this position, or began the deep thoughts I associated with the statue, it didn’t last long. So these thoughts would be brief, just long enough to provide a little mental satisfaction. A little contemplation on why Skeletor didn’t save up several of his apocalyptic plans and hatch them at once, since He-Man could barely overcome any one of them given nothing else to do. A little contemplation on whether the bearded giant God my grandparents believed in really was in the flower outside the window since they said He was in all things. And a little contemplation on why Nick At Nite started so late.

The prototype for short-short fiction, don’t you think?

It’s funny because The Thinker wasn’t originally an independent statue. It was meant to be at the top and center of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, a tribute to Dante Allighieri’s Divine Comedy. The Thinker himself was originally to be The Poet, a reference to Dante himself. A version of him can be seen in that massive sculpture, perched just above the break in the double doors, surrounded by naked ladies and looking at the demons emerging from the frame. Think about that. Our culture really has taken a pickaxe to chastity, hasn’t it?

No man, woman or child who isn’t told that was what Rodin meant has ever looked at that sculpture for the first time and thought, “He’s pondering the nature of Dante’s Hell.” Maybe he’s considering a lost love, maybe it’s legal reform, or maybe he’s just taking a dump and has some form of Hell on the mind – but the exact origin has lived independent in the art since it was made. And separate, it has inspired more wonder than Rodin’s complete Gates of Hell entirely. The one man statue has become personal art that begs individual thought. Hell, it’s become the icon.

But think about that again. The Thinker is just one tiny bit, a brief snatch of the grand design reflecting the Italian epic poem. It is the Bathroom Monologue of sculpture. A microcosm torn from the whole, and frayed in context, inspiring more than it is. It’s a shame I can’t chisel words as well as Rodin did his idea.

I’m so taken with the statue that for a good year I intended to photograph myself in such a pose on the toilet as the author portrait for these Bathroom Monologues. What a visual pun it would be. But any time I got the nerve to request a digital camera, a consortium of parts of my brain jumped and beat the crap out of me. You see, there are some puns that even I will not make, and most of those have to do with dragging someone else down. A lot of the time I don’t mind making an ass out of myself, but to do it to someone or something I revere? Doing so will cause me to go somewhere alone, put an elbow on a knee and reflect many of the worst emotions that people have projected onto The Thinker. The offense I might give, even to an unthinking hunk of rock a continent away, will put me before my own Gates of Hell.

Skilled biographers will analyze the use of puns and cheap metaphors in the above paragraph to psychoanalyze me. I request they do it in an original pose.

Twittertacular

joined twitter today. text limit is constrictive. won't do much fiction there but

But thankfully this isn't Twitter. I won't do much fiction in their 140-character universe, but it is a good hub for personal updates, news and links. I try to keep the Bathroom Monologues neat and feel uncomfortable advertising what blogs I read, where I get my news, what games I'm playing, my favorite writers and comedians, net resources and funny videos. Twitter is also a more efficient place to link any potential readers to my longer works, provided they get accepted. I have eight floating around at six different places right now. Here's hoping.

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/wiswell

Bathroom Monologue: Freewrite on blind quote, "loves labors lost"

When love goes into labor, you lose. Love is fun and sticky before then, but only sticky thereafter, and sticky alone is a love that one cannot abide. In labor, love will grab you by the hair and bite through the towel wrapped around your hand. Love will look and sound surprisingly like hate, especially if you make eye contact. Love is helped substantially by an epidural. Love's labor is a labor you must lose. Do not fight back. Abandon your feelings and any rational argument; being right in her time of labor will only make love lose it, and perhaps let loose with an I.V. drip stand.