Bathroom Monologue: If you could go back in time and kill the child Hitler, preventing his rise to power, would you?

"No. No, and it's nothing to do with abhorring child death. Children are selfish, whining, smelling, self-soiling, infinitely needy little shells of humanity. I guarantee the child Adolf Hitler would not woo me with his cuteness or tiny mustache. I'd leave Hitler alive because I know we can beat him. He takes his advantages and commits his atrocities, but eventually he mismanages his militaries, undervalues the Americas, and shoots himself in despair. It is only briefly tempting to throttle the infant Hitler and prevent a Third Reich, a second World War, and the invention of the word "genocide." But the Europe you leave without Hitler is still a Europe bitterly anti-Semitic, economically ravaged, and endlessly bellicose. Looking at the child playing and finger-painting, you are forced to realize he does not take advantage of history. He was an agent. World War I hasn't even happened yet and you think you'll leave the world a sunnier place. I fear that a more cunning person or politic will fill the Adolf Hitler-shaped void in history. The replacement will come from the same underground discontent, and the same well of hatemongering crackpots who would slaughter and unify.  What you're gambling upon isn't even that they'd seize power. It's that they won't have more progressive military plans, that they won't capitalize on the nuclear bomb before the U.S., and that they won't start the Final Solution earlier. You are gambling that what replaces this child will be something we defeat. As much as I grieve for what he grows up to set in motion, I can't trust the motion to tend itself."

True Stories of John 19: John's Memory Mocks Him, OR, Returning from the Grocery Monologue

Lita: What was that comedian’s name? On the radio before?

John: Was he a comedian? I thought he was just a storyteller with a nice audience.

Lita: Okay, but what was his name? I want to look him up when we get home.

John: I don’t know. Fredrikson?

Lita: It was not even close to ‘Fredrikson.’

John: Fred, maybe? I don’t know; I suck at names. Okay? Fredrikson? Flintstone? He grew up Catholic.

Lita: Was it Catholic?

John: He said he’d been one for twenty-seven years and… eleven months, maybe. Contrasted that with being a Buddhist for three weeks. He kept making those tired jokes about Catholicism making his personality fear- and anger-based. He converted because he… Don’t look at me like that.

Lita: Don’t look at me looking at you. Keep driving, and keep doing that. Keep emptying your mental pockets. I’m testing something. Why did he convert?

John: He met a Llama who held his hands and touched foreheads with him, and he only articulated that it made him feel good. Blessed his rosaries for him. He needed it because his dad was dying, I think from cancer, and his wife was dying from some lingering injuries following a car accident they were in on I-95 where their car flipped five times.

Lita: You’re sure it was five times?

John: I remember. And he was really angry that both of these deaths were coming up at the same time, and full of dread, and he considered suicide for a minute, and I got pissed at him for looking at life and God like the only meaning was in everyone living forever and never getting sick, which stands as the most willfully naïve bullshit of all time. And his wife had to go to a hospice three times.

Lita: Three times?

John: She was in one for four months, he said, though I got confused since he said you were only allowed there for a few weeks, since they expect you to die. So maybe the four months was actually adding up all her time there, or it was that this case was really that extreme and she kept surviving. And I liked the story where she was high on morphine, and sitting up in bed, and wanted to “surprise” him, but could barely speak, and that this did surprise him. Very funny, though probably only works out loud. I was trying to work out if you could pull that off on the page.

Lita: You remember trying to translate a joke about his wife’s morphine haze from stand-up comedy into writing?

John: Well, yes.

Lita: And what’s his name?

John: Burke? Something longer. Burketson?

Lita: This is eerie. You’re a writer.

John: So what?

Lita: That novel you just finished isn’t five hundred pages of calling everyone “the guy in a car accident” or “the wife on morphine.” You use names to mark and remember everyone in every situation.

John: …But it’s the only thing I don’t remember about him. You’re making fun of me.

Lita: Some days I want to climb inside your head and pedal.

John: This is abstract mockery. This is the Cubist version of hazing.

Lita: You don’t even know what Cubism is.

John: But I know the name!

Bathroom Monologue: Alternative Ending to Little Red Riding Hood

One upon a time there was a little girl named Little Red Riding Hood whose grandmother was kind of sick. Her mother sent the girl to her grandmother’s house with a basket of food and medicine. Wanting to be over with it as soon as possible, and so took a shortcut through a woods that was clearly marked as a wildlife preserve.

On her way through, a wolf stopped her. He complimented, “What a big basket of goodies you have.”

“I wish they were for me,” she said.

“Where are you taking them?”

“My grandma’s house.”

“That's nice of you. Is it far?”

“About half an hour. Why?”

And so he ate her right there. True story.

Moralists For Erotica; PayPal Vs. Smashwords

I don’t like Erotica. I spent zero dollars on it last year (last decade, too). The trends in cover art annoy me, the proclivity for boilerplate bothers me, and never in my life have I grasped the appeal of reading words about fucking. Fucking is quite possibly the most redundant and boring subject in all prose. I get more from reading tax law.

I told you all that to tell you that I support the sale of Erotica. Recently Paypal’s operators threatened to stop processing payments with Smashwords unless it stopped selling certain books. According to Smashwords-boss Mark Coker, the big ones were, “erotic fiction that contains bestiality, rape and incest.”

It’s not all Erotica. Bestiality, rape and incest, plus some pedophilia that Coker proudly declared his company already refuses to distribute. Pretty gross to the average person, and you can imagine that most Erotica writers trumpeting “rape” probably aren’t making artistic hay with it. The current trend of titillating Pseudo-Incest novels with “Daddy” in the title? Yeah. But it doesn’t matter.

Fellow readers and writers, don’t argue that it’s Erotica Vs. Moralists. It is a moral issue that people be allowed to write fiction about sex as they desire, and when not infringing upon the rights of others, that they be allowed to share, publish and charge for it. I am morally for freedom in fiction.

It is PayPal’s right not to facilitate sale of these products; it would be dangerous to legislate otherwise. Yet it’s bigger than this. We are treading on principles. Works classified as “Literary Fiction” have already been flagged for Terms of Service violation. One week in and we’re not in the realm of hypotheticals anymore, Toto. Readers and writers remember Amazon de-listing LGBT books in2009, and we are still living in a period when libraries ban classic books. This is more disturbing to me than Vladimir Nabokov getting banned; I fear for an aspiring no-name Vladimir Nabokov Jr. out there, whose career has yet to begin, trying to build a platform, who got told to click UNPUBLISH today.

But even if no Vladimir Nabokov Jr. got that message today, it doesn’t matter. This is not about a stranger deciding what is and isn’t titillating writing, and thus banning the next Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer. This isn’t about such pressures expanding to some day to suppress LGBT fiction, though it is easier to imagine than I’d like. And this is not about a corporation coming after me some day. If biases go unchecked then there’s a good chance someone will hate my transgender character, or that a snake has a crush on her, or that I depict succubae doing what they do and still place them on the “good guys” side. My novel is a safe distance from PayPal striking against rape-porn, but even if I was the next target on their list, it wouldn’t make a difference. This is unacceptable no matter where you are. That is morality.

Bathroom Monologue: It’s Going to be a Long Night

Lo takes the steps down two at a time. He’s nearly skipping at he reaches the platform; it’s only one stop away, and then he’s a smash and grab away from being rich. The Firebreathers don’t even know about the stones yet. Nobody does.

He’s so excited that he almost runs face-first into a yeti. One of many yetis, the hair of their backs dyed silver and blue. Gang colors. He whips his head to the left, pretending to be interested in ads for musicals and vodka as he skirts away from them. They can’t know. Nobody could be dumb enough to clue in the yetis.

The fattest of the yetis stares at Lo. He swallows, and arches his posture, and intensifies that sudden and acute interest in garish posters promoting musicals. He sticks his hands in his pockets, fingering smoke bombs and shaking his head. A musical set in a slum. Man oh man, what will they think of next?

Except the fattest yeti isn’t staring at him. He’s relieved for exactly two thirds of a second. On the third third of that second, he notices scaly bodies of lizards in trench coats descending the stairs. Smoke billows from their mouths and only two have cigars. God-damned Firebreathers.

As he shifts like he suddenly needs to pee, Lo is uncertain. Is he most anxious that someone tipped off the Firebreathers? Or most anxious that he’s stuck on the platform between glowering gang-yetis and Firebreathers? He flinches around too quickly and errantly catches the gaze of the fattest yeti. In the moment, he certainly needs to pee.

“Uh. Ha, man, right?” He gestures forward, to the adverts. “Musicals. Best thing about the city.”

The yeti produces a pair of brass knuckles, which is ridiculous since his paws have no use for them. They are for show. Lo thanks all available gods when it becomes evident the fattest yeti is showing them off to the cigar-chopping lizards.

“A love story. In a slum. That’s so… groundbreaking.” He realizes his position and immediately dreads. He is half a car-length between the Firebreathers and gang-yetis. He will have to enter through one of their cars when the train arrives, if they’re all alive by the time it rings in.

He casts his eyes down, briefly entertaining throwing himself onto the rails. He casts them down in time to see a black-clad hand clutch the concrete. Five more do the same, and six black-cowled ninjas climb onto the platform before him. He backs away until nearly falling onto the adjacent tracks.

The ninjas rise. They eye him. They turn around, awaiting the train and checking their iPhones. One of the Firebreathers murmurs a curse in liz-speak, and Lo doesn’t have to turn around to recognize the sound of a yeti cocking a shotgun. He doesn’t have to turn around to recognize the sound of the train pulling into station, either. It is going to be a long night. As yetis jostle him forward, a furry torrent carelessly herding him toward the train, he realizes it is going to be a very long night. He wonders if the conductor will let him ride on the roof.

"The Body Count of Monte Cristo" -Jake Rodkin, Idle Thumbs

-Miguel Cervantes's Bomb Quixote

-Richard Adams's Watership Shot Down

-Ken Kesey's One Blew Up the Cuckoo's Nest

-Emily Bronte's Smoldering Heights,

and her sister's smash hit, 

-Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyreforce

-Ernest Hemingway presents: The Gun Also Rises

-Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Skinned

-Henry Miller's Topic of Cancer

-George Orwell presents: Cannibal Farm

-Daniel Defoe's Robbing Crusoe's Son,

and the serial tie-in,

-Johann David Wyss's Switchblade Family, Robbing Sons

-Roald Dahl presents: Charlie and the Chaingun Factory

-Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Vorpal Bow

-Toni Morrison presents: Beheaded

Bathroom Monologue: Leap Day

I propose that on every 29th of February that the SyFy Channel, or whatever it shall rename itself to, shall run a marathon of Quantum Leap. I further propose it not advertise this marathon, nor recognize it as an unusual event, nor even name it to the public. Rather, let anyone who happens upon this marathon every four years and happens to notice the date and title simply get what would be one of life's greatest puns.

God bless America.

Bathroom Monologue: Gay Divorce

My gay friends: be wary.

“Gay marriage!”

“It’s a right!”

“All love is equal!” You keep saying that, getting yourselves so excited that you won’t read the fine print. Soon you’ll get your Gay Marriage without the far more important right of Gay Divorce.

You know many centuries it took to get Straight Divorce? Don’t take it on faith that you can just break up with your significant other, especially not when a bunch of legislators hate you. Lobby for it now. In fact, it’s more important you get the right to Gay Divorce before Gay Marriage, because if Gay Marriage is anything like Straight Marriage, then it’ll be populated with shortsighted experiments that need our truly most sacred institution: telling him to get out and give you half his stuff.

Divorce is an institution that’s created more millionaires than the liquor industry, and it’s significantly helped that industry too. It’s your right, and by telling Conservatives that you’re more interested in splitting up with your spouse than marrying him, you’ll show them you have common ground. Hell, get divorced a few times and they might even nominate you for president.

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards

It's almost March 2011, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2011. If all the complaining on Twitter is any indication, I'm once again happy to have skipped the Academy Awards. Naturally I disagree with some of the winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a sizable democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go.

The Robbed Award

Going to the movie that got no play last year

and is still on my mind more than whatever won Best Picture

 I Saw the Devil

The Too Little/Too Late Award

Going to the movie I missed by several years,

but have now seen and wish I'd been on the bandwagon for at the time

 Ostrov/Octpob

The Embarrassment Award

Going to the thing that did everything film is supposed to do

better than pretty much all the films did that year

 Portal 2

The Raddest Scene Award

Going to the raddest scene in a motion picture

 

The Reveal and Follow-Up in Scream 4

The Dark Horse Award

Going to the movie that was way better than you all led me to believe it would be

 The Perfect Host

You're Actually All Great At This

Going to the best ensemble in a motion picture or TV show,

since one TV show smoked all the movies this year anyway

 Breaking Bad

The Frank/Nixon Memorial Award

Going to all actors who performed as well or better

than Frank Langella did in Frost/Nixon

 For the fourth year in a row, nobody

The "There's No Such Thing As The Best Movie of the Year" Award

Seeing as there is no such thing as a best movie amidst a field of comedies, dramas, musicals, period pieces, speculative fiction, animation, blockbusters and an international film market we're both not watching enough of as it is, the award that simply goes to whatever movie brought me the closes to both crying and laughing last year

 Paradise Lost 3

 Related: 2010 Awards.

Bathroom Monologue: Nothing Exits, Nothing Gained

Boy goes into the house.

Girl exits the house.

Cops enter the house.

Criminal exits the house.

Victim returns to the house.

Pitiful claims exit the house.

Therapist enters the house.

Corpse exits the house.

Exorcist enters the house.

Nothing exits the house ever again.

“For Sale” sign keeps the house company.

Bathroom Monologue: Godless Ghost

We first saw Dad's ghost the night of his funeral. He wandered the parlor, complaining about coloration and the tone of the priest and Mom's neckline. Mom took it the hardest, which is understandable. We had a priest over the next morning to commit an exorcism, but it didn't take. We had him come for repeats the next two days before it became evident that wasn't working. Mom got some gypsies to hold a seance to no avail. We got a Methodist, and a Unitarian, and even a Rabbi who seemed to think his cigar would help. None of it helped. We had doctor of dark arts flown in from South America, and all we got out of the deal was Dad stamping his feet upstairs, saying he'd never seen the appeal in hardwood. Eventually we ran out of options and resigned to doing nothing about him. Two days later, he'd vanished. No stamping, no ranting. We couldn't figure out why doing nothing had done the trick, until Mom remembered: Dad'd been an atheist.

Bathroom Monologue: On the Deathbed of Carl Rudolph

A man in a brown suit and burgundy tie appeared at the door. He held a tidy briefcase. Rudolph squinted at him from his tangle of plastic tubes and bed sheets.

Brown Suit asked, “Are you Carl Rudolph?”

“You’re late if you want to sue me.” He smiled crookedly. “I’m done with lawyers.”

“This isn’t litigation, Mr. Rudolph.” Brown Suit strode across the hospital room, retrieving a manila envelope from his briefcase. “I’m here on behalf of the estate of Neal Jennings. He left a proviso to deliver this letter on your... well.”

“Jennings did that? What did he want that he didn’t have thirty years ago?”

“I don’t know, sir. No one has read the contents. His will is quite specific.” Brown Suit handed over the envelope. It slid through Rudolph’s arthritic fingers and rested on his chest. He looked at it with half-lidded eyes.

“Did he specify you wear such hideous fashion?”

“In fact, he did.” Brown Suit snapped his briefcase closed. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Rudolph.”

He left Rudolph to watch the envelope rise and fall on his ribs, following his breathing. It was address-side up, made out to him in big, blocky letters.

“So I could read it if my eyes went, Jennings?”

He prodded the envelope. It was several pages thick inside. What on earth had Jennings written?

“The last word. You knew full well I couldn’t rebut you this way.”

What would that word be? More of Jennings’s theosophy? Pleading that it was actually God in the details and that holding hands would solve it all? Urging him to go dunk his head in an Indian river before he died? To donate to some charity that was probably corrupt?

“Or…”

Or they could be pages of remembrance. All the Trotskyist political arguments, and the absinthe that made them worthwhile. The continental train ride to a lecture they skipped out on halfway through. Walking into a London hotel room to ask if they could check out of this bore already, only to find Jennings checking into the maid who would become his second wife.

The women. Goodness, the women. Just thinking about all that collective suppleness stiffened parts of Rudolph that had been medicated numb for weeks.

He pressed the tip of his middle finger on the center of the envelope. It was damnably thick.

Would Jennings have sentimentalized so much about gilded times? What if he had confessions? The rotten investments he’d tried to hide. Rudolph had forgiven him decades ago, but how bitter would it taste to read Jennings apologizing for it now?

Or finally calling Rudolph for plagiarizing him in his second book. Jennings had never exposed him. Would he sue him from the grave and steal the inheritance of his grandchildren?

“They never visit anyway. Still…”

What else was there to reveal?

He squeezed his eyes shut.

“Goodness, I hope he doesn’t come out as gay. We were….”

An acrid pain between his ribs reminded him. Decades ago he could have worried about what was in envelopes, but not anymore. Be it a lawsuit, an answer or love letter, there wasn’t time.

His hands didn’t work like they used to. He peeled open the envelope’s seal with the first knuckles of his index fingers, then shook out the papers onto his chest.

There they were: five in all.

Rudolph lifted the first. He saw no words.

He held it closer to his face. No, nothing typed or in Jennings’s chicken scratches. It was blank.

He shuffled through the papers. Every one was blank, back and front. Had Jennings padded it to look ominous, then left no omens?

No. The last page wasn’t blank. There were two lines of text in the very middle. They read:

See you in a minute.

-Jennings

Five Questions About Writing

Some of the most encouraging mail I get is from readers and fellow writers asking about my process. If you’ve read the BM’s for long, you know I hang my writing process out there. I like to share my failures, successes and insights. If everyone was candid about their processes, the whole field would benefit. Recently an aspiring writer sent me five questions in researching artists for her own book. These are the answers I gave her. Please consider fielding these questions on your own blogs.

1. what inspired you to be a writer?

-I loved storytelling from my earliest years, so I was always open to it. The big shift came when I was bedridden with health problems at age 13. There were many long and excruciating nights when reading or listening to audiobooks literally gave me the will to live to morning. The desire to make it to the next page, and to find out what happened next, was vital. A sense of gratitude to the form definitely shaped my desire to become a writer.

2. what is love according to you?

-Love is a lasting condition in one person toward another person, creature or object, recognizable by frequent supportive concerns for their various well-beings, including but not limited to medical, financial, artistic and spiritual well-beings. These concerns can be positive, such as the joy that my sister just got a new job. These concerns must be strong enough to act upon; if you won't do things for others, then you don't love them. Love can be familial, romantic or friendly. Most of my passionate loves have not been erotic, but simply friendship.

3. what are your writings to you?

-They are my beloved creations, little different to me than the world would be to God. I must do right by them, be honest with them, let them play themselves out, and never interfere so much that their experience is compromised. While I write some veins of satire and social commentary, I never let such influences overtake the sanctity of the work itself.

4. how will you define yourself as an artist?

-Experientially. There is too much complexity and emergence in writing copious prose for me to prescribe a singular meaning to all my work, at least at this stage in my career. If there is a summary, it’s that I define myself as I ponder, compose and edit. The prescriptive definitions will always come in second, even when they’d be more convenient.

5. what do you think are the qualities in you which others do not have. and because of which you can write?

-There’s a temptation to say I’m crazy, or goofier than average, and so am more inclined to write jokes about Noah’s Ark and giant plants throwing rooms at people. But really? It’s a couple of decades of critical thinking about, and practice focusing on, how my prose works. Experience sets most forms of expertise apart from the hobbyists and layfolk; I think most people could become just as competent in their own ways if they wrote and read as much and with as much scrutiny. The love of language, of style and structure, and an appreciation for pleasing elements largely came through experience. Most of my other traits influence what and how I write more than that I can write at all. For instance, my neuromuscular syndrome saps my energy, puts me in constant pain, and has limited some of my social interactions, so I look at healthy people as pathetic or crazy. That’s spurred me to write, but is it why I write, or simply why I depict people certain ways? Perhaps my only other significant quality is that I know enough about the world as people see it, and enough about what’s occurred in fiction, to be able to freely express my thoughts in prose in ways that seem creative because I have a certain grip on those two things.

Bathroom Monologue: What God Gave for Lent

“No, that’s not for Me,” said Our Lord. “That’s My son’s gig. I leave it unto him.”

“But why? Everyone else does it.”

“I gave up something for forty days once, but it went so poorly I had to promise not to do it again. No sense in tempting fate.”

“What did you give up?”

The whole of Heaven shook with His chuckle. “Dry land.”