Bathroom Monologue: Electroedipal

"Cloning will unite our Freudian impulses. Currently you want to have sex with your mother and kill your father. Once we start cloning there will only be one parent, who you'll both want to fuck and kill. It'll be like a real girlfriend."

Bathroom Monologue: Small Talk, Volume 6 (Trialogues)

[Three men sit in a booth: SAMID, in a pinstripe suit; GARY, in a pinstripe suit; and SPIDER, in a spandex superhero costume]
Spider: How can you be Muslim anyway, Samid? I thought Islam hated sodomites.
Samid: I am Muslim. I am gay. I do not hate myself. So I challenge your terms, Spider.
Spider: I don’t see how it works. Doesn’t the Qu’ran forbid that kind of lifestyle?
Samid: Well, let me ask you: are you human?
Spider: Of course.
Samid: Can humans dodge bullets and hoist cars overhead?
Spider: That’s different!
Gary: Different from human.
Spider: Oh, sure. Let the normies gang up on the superman.

Bathroom Monologue: Real Realism

I'm not a big supporter of realism, because we don’t live in a realistic world. A good story only needs to be interesting and compelling; it can be the most absurd nonsense in the history of publication and still be completely worthwhile. Meanwhile, there is a glut of unreadable “realism,” the literature that pays homage to our common illusion of how the world works. The world really works in a very different manner. In the real world, lightning kills more people than sharks, and toasters kill more people than lightning. Science has done an admirable job trying to make our universe seem plausible, but think about it. Think about gravity: ultimately, things fall down because we’re standing on something really big. It’s not a terribly realistic world, and we’ve had to stretch the definition of “realistic” to fit it. But nobody’s fooling gravity.

Bathroom Monologue: Why do the news channels have tickers?

...hophiles Rights Bill passes through Senate with overwhelming majority - 3 Afghani civilians, 2 Swiss tourists claim they saw an angel at a strip club, Pope skeptical - Gravity, inertia disproved. "It was so obvious," say Cambridge scientists - Secretary General says Lincoln Logs (TM) may be poisonous - Orange County Track and Field Team accused of wearing lifts - Jessica Alba, Jessica Simpson reveal they were men all along - 3 Afghani civilians, 2 Swiss tourists claim Pope “was there, too,” have photos to back up claim - Lime JELL-O may reduce risk of colon cancer, new report claims - America declares war on rest of wo...

Bathroom Monologue: Rule #1 to Great Storytelling

I've never really written by rules, outside of a loose sense of grammar and syntax I picked up from audiobooks. However, I think this will be my first rule: all characters that interact must love, hate or be totally indifferent towards each other. Love comes in many shapes and packages; it can be friendly love, romantic love, lust, or whatever. Similarly, hate can be a psychotic minor nuisance, like obsessing over the obnoxious way she keeps squeaking her sneakers on the bus, or some dire, roiling rage at the six-fingered man who killed your father and who now must prepare to die. The indifference will come in one shade: total apathy. Two people who simply cannot be bothered to care are a great source for comedy. I understand we have a hundred such characters in the Senate right now. One hundred and one when the Vice President visits.

Bathroom Monologue: Oven of Danger

Whenever mom wasn’t around, Claire experimented with the oven. 300 degrees. 400 degrees. She could make it so hot that it hurt just to touch the glass window. But Claire was more interested with the oven always starting by displaying the temperature at 100 degrees. That seemed strange to her, for it to instantly go from room temperature to the temperature under her tongue. In her ensuing experiments, Claire set the oven under 100, to see what would happen. What happened was an angry beep and flashing letters. It wanted to stay above 100. Well she’d have it know that it was an appliance and she was the world’s smartest 9-year-old. When mom went out to the spa for a day, Claire rewired the damned thing to let her punch in lower numbers. 90. 80. 60 – at which point she left the oven door open for a nice Fall-like breeze. 25, in the hopes of being able to get it to snow in her kitchen. That failed, but the descent led her to the final number: 0. And no lousy zero degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit, but what the oven called “absolute zero.” She pushed the buttons eagerly. Unfortunately for the world’s smartest nine-year-old, absolute zero had more consequences than ice cube maker, and the oven suddenly swallowed all the heat on the planet. In the instant before the world vanished Claire didn’t worry about Armageddon, but how many weeks of allowance she’d be out to replace the oven.

Bathroom Monologue: "Girls get the arms, but not the swords. Bastards gets the swords, but not the arms." -George Martin, A Game of Thrones

"Some, uhm," the bastard said, sideling up on the girl, "You want to share? We'll have equal equipment to the princes, and between my shitty life and your monthly period, the rage alone will crush them."

He thought the girl was going to shove him, but instead she snatched the sword from his belt.

"Fine," she said. "But I'm going first."

She tied back her hair, hiked up her skirts, and charged the captain of the guard's blind spot.