Bathroom Monologues: Enjoy the Festivities

“Festivals are about the people. Get out and celebrate them if you’ve got them. They aren’t about sitting inside and watching the TV special, unless you’re watching it with other people. They aren’t about the discounts at the store, unless you’re buying it for somebody else (or somebody else is buying it for you). Festivals can’t be about the harvest. The harvest is food, and it’s stupid to throw a party for something you’ll be shitting out tomorrow. Festivals can’t be about events; events are things people do, or things that happen to people; and in either case, events remain about people. Festivals can’t be about the gods. Festivals are about the people. Gods are about the people. “About” can mean “around” or “for.” If the gods aren’t for the people or around the people, they don’t deserve a festival, and if the festival is around for the people, it serves the gods. Festivals can be inspired by food, fortune, and gods, but they are here for you. Always bring it back to the people in your life, to loved ones and strangers, and enjoy.”

Bathroom Monologue: Meteors, Asteroids, Comets – You Have Them? We’ll Buy Them.

It's been brought to my attention that the KT impact, which wiped out the dinosaurs and destroyed the environment some 65,000,000 years ago, was caused by a single three-mile-wide asteroid. When I heard this, it hit me – we need to stop putting all our money into nuclear weapons, and start funding huge rocks. We’ve got miles and miles of stone that’s currently only serving as boring scenery next to highways, but if this goes right, soon we’ll have a giant slab of asphalt hanging from a satellite directly above the U.N. Let’s see them kick us off the Security Council when we’re dangling a man-made meteor over their toupees. And why stop at three miles wide? We’re not using Montana for anything, and I’m sure Alaska will part with a couple of the Aleutian Islands. Why build a missile silo on an island when you can turn the island into a projectile? This level of destructive force wiped out all dominant life forms on the planet last time, and in our hands? I don’t see how it can go wrong.

Bathroom Monologue: It’s “MP3 Player of Middle Eastern Descent,” thank you very much

Gary and Samid came up with the plan. They called everyone they knew, including everyone at Samid’s mosque. Most of them weren’t impressed, but thankfully a lot of the younger guys were into it. Come Monday morning they would re-brand “iPod” as a dirty word. You see, Gary and Samid had realized the nature of profane words while playing pokler on Friday. Specifically as they used them to jab at each other. “Fuck” was just one of many words for procreation. “Shit” was just one of many words for fecal matter. Why were they bad? Because angry people said so for a long enough time. And people were particularly sensitive to racially sensitive words. Since Islam was still hazy to most politically correct Americans there was the opporunity to introduce new forbidden words from that culture and insist no one say them anywhere. New forbidden words like the ancient Arabic word for an unwashed, uneducated heathen, used for centuries as the most caustic slur against Muslim slaves – “Ay Pahd.” According to Gary and Samid it was a millennia old, even if it really dated back to a drunken conversation in a New Jersey suburb. But if they showed enough outrage, and got enough brown-skinned people to play along, they might have an anti-hate speech suit against Apple by August.

Bathroom Monologue: What do you say when someone coughs?

“Bless you” is an interesting little saying. It’s replaced, “God bless you,” making it almost as secular as a toothbrush or signaling to change lanes. People don’t even pay attention when they say the “blessing” part. This phrase was originally contrived as a spell against the heart attack thought to follow a sneeze (or so numerous people have told me, all singularly proud in their knowledge). The intent has fallen out of the public mind. Today saying, “Bless you,” after a sneeze has everything to do with a momentary extension of good will that is not particularly connoted by its words and not necessitated by its situation. It is a peculiar wonder in our increasingly insular and seemingly selfish society; it is an example of needless kindness. We need a great deal more kindness in the world, and this rare example of needlessly contributing may just help solve our deficit. The saying doesn’t force you to convert, defend your belief structure or scoff. And really, you shouldn’t do anything so caustic – you owe the speaker a debt of gratitude, if not for the momentary verbal kindness, then because he didn’t clock you for sneezing on him.

Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Sentences

-Vampires invented “Welcome” mats as a trick not just getting you to unwittingly invite them in, but to pay them for the opportunity.
-To conserve resources, sensory deprivation chambers will now be two people to a unit.
-Most things charged to Logic's account are fraudulent claims made by Sweeping Generalizations, who stole her pin number.
-“In this painting he appears to be force-feeding her a banana—OH GOD!”
-He had the expression of a physicist who has just accidentally disproved gravity.
-Stephen King is rolling over in his grave, largely because he's not dead and struggling to escape.
-“Funnier than a paraplegic grinning around a condom.”
-He who knows no bounds falls off a cliff.
-“How pretentious of a minister to tell us how to live our lives,” we say, pretending we don’t think we know how he should live his.
-Mr. Guillotine was ejected from the carnival after he got too into Whack-A-Mole and tried to pull one of them out of its hole for saying something disparaging about his mother.
-When you consider my misanthropy under the light that I am human, you’ll understand that my humility isn’t false at all.
-Falling is like flying until you hit the ground.
-Hiphop is not only dead, but vivified as a zombie that feasts on the flesh of living culture.
-The agnostic is a heretic to Islam, the anarchist is a heretic to democracy, but the individual is a heretic to everyone.
-Science is a bitch to Religion, but to be fair, Religion did beat her when they were married.
-“If you’re bipolar, please switch to the other pole.”
-Minimalism.
- He got the abridged audiobook, but it felt too much like cheating, so he listened to it twice to even things out.
-Octology: A new belief system positing that sports are actually defense mechanisms.
-Life is a series of “but,” “and,” the occasional “therefore,” and every so often, a “now.”
-“You seem to be arguing that the holes disprove the existence of the Swiss cheese.”
-"The orthodox believed the world would end in the year 1,000 or 2,000 because, apparently, God really fucking hated round numbers."
-The most painful part of scholarly studies is learning that people far smarter than you disagree with you.
-The most relieving part of scholarly studies is discovering that people far smarter than you disagree with each other.
-Real maturity is recognizing the overwhelming majority of what culture defines as maturity is conformist idiocy with which only the immature would comply.
-We knew the end was nigh when Richardson reached for the power switch and the supercomputer asked, “WHERE DO I GO WHEN YOU TURN ME OFF?”

Bathroom Monologue: Methods of Transport

Horses were the cars of the 18th century. People switched from horses to cars because when a car has to stop for gas, the passengers don’t throw up. People also jumped to cars because they had multiple “horsepower.” Every attempt to increase the horsepower of a horse, by grafting additional legs onto it or feeding it caffeine, tended to fail and kill and the mode of transportation. So the horse was left behind for the automobile, and years passed. The car was intelligently designed, growing bigger and faster. The horse evolved, growing smarter. Horses attained speech in time to ask humans what they were thinking in sticking to the combustion engine, just before the environment collapsed and killed them both. Fortunately the car was advanced enough by this point to run things without them. Unfortunately, it was not advanced enough to appreciate the irony of the earth’s new dominant species being the Ford Mustang.

“Mowing the Lawn” Monologue

Karma is Communist, not Capitalist. Christianity is Capitalist, which explains why Europe and North America exploited the world economy so well. In Christianity you get the Heaven you want if you earn it – you’ve got to do good works, think good thoughts, and most of all, save. Those are your assets in this economy.

Karma does not work that way. It is not designed to give you what you want; it gives you what the system has. What you get in return for good work is positive, like a tractor or a leggy blonde. Unfortunately the gift isn't always useful for your particular circumstance. So Communist Karma may yield a tractor to an accountant rather than to a farmer. You cannot alter or direct Karma with prayer; the only thing prayer ever got anyone in Communism is shot. You can hope, though, that you get the leggy blonde instead of the tractor. According my bi-curious Buddhist buddies, the leggy blonde is a universal positive.