Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Monologue aboard Delta Flight 1972 from Cincinnati

“You know why I like you, John? Because I could smack this plane right out of the sky, sending you to certain death, powerless against it and without any contribution to it, smashing down on the highway beside the terminals and onto an S.U.V., and you’d feel guilty towards the driver. Somehow, somewhere in-between the miniscule amount of weight you added to the fall, your presence on the offending plane, and your proximity to someone else’s pain, you’d feel guilty right before you died. It’s adorable.”

Bathroom Monologue: Losing for Student Council Can Really Get to You

A man so ridiculously wealthy that he paid the wages of every government employee for one day, and did it every year on that day – his birthday. The terms were that they had to call in sick. After additional funds went to bribe officials until he shut down the government, just once a year, officially buying his own holiday: George Day. A wise man, he reallocated his birthday to permanently occur on the last Friday of the month, so that everyone would have a three-day weekend on George. He quickly became one of the most popular men on the planet, and while it eventually sent him into bankruptcy, he never had trouble paying for drinks. They were always on someone else.

Monday and Tuesday

Something a little different is happening around here on Monday and Tuesday. It may seem a little confusing at first, but I promise it will make less sense as it goes along. You may want to check back a couple of times over those days.

Bathroom Monologue: His Plates

The difference in the mindsets of husband and wife were best displayed in his choice of license plates. Bob lived in jubilation with his “EAT ME” plates, cackling any time someone drove by and looked offended. He was a profane man. Alice was a pious woman, and drove this thing to work every day in terror of stopping at a light and having a truck full of cannibals with an “OKAY” license plate pulling up next to her.

Bathroom Monologue: Blurbs for “Night of the Cobra”

“Never has a ten-storey python been so sympathetic.” –Scott Smith, author of The Ruins

“What every literary novel has tried to be since Godzilla.” –Publisher’s Weekly

“Big monster, small plot, medium thrills.” –New York Times Book Review

“The next great American family tragicomedy.” –The Economist

“You will walk away from this book forever asking yourself, ‘What is my Empire State Building?’” -Atlantic Monthly

“I wasn’t sure if the giant python would kill himself before I did. Mind-numbing.” –Onion A.V. Club

“A ballet of logic… a sleight of hand of language.” -Ruth Scurr, former Man Booker Prize judge

“At least it’s short.” –National Review

“That titanic python’s struggle to become a cobra will be the Ugly Duckling story for our millennia. Just watch.” –Mark Y., metacritic.com

“If nothing else, read it for the fight with the cruise liner.” –Pat Robertson, 700 Club

“You see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream things as they never were and ask, ‘Why are they not like Night of the Cobra?’” -George Bernard Shaw, via séance

(Cop-out: Only one of the above quotes is real, though the book each quote describes remains equally fanciful.)

Bathroom Monologue: I need that burn

Day 6 of the wisdom teeth adventure and I'm up to semi-soft foods like macaroni and cheese, which is more of a slurping adventure than real chewing. At present I am honestly more anticipating the day when I can brush my teeth than when I can chew. The looks on people's faces when they come in close has nothing to do with swelling. It's the smelling. Swishing salt solution won't kill the odor. And at two times a day, toothbrushing is a hard habit to break. I can feel the itch. My right hand reaches for the cupboard every time I enter the bathroom. Last night I snuck in here and cheated, brushing just the front four. Yet every little bit of grime, which I might as well pick off of my teeth, demands bristles. Do they put nicotine in toothpaste? Is it the same compulsion that makes a man reach for a bottle of Jim Beam and Listerine? I need that burn.

Bathroom Monologue: Diet by the Book, OR, I actually met Dr. Atkins when I was a kid, and he was fat

His diet book only has one page of entries, written in various colors for all the different years he’d updated it: blue pen, black ballpoint, black felt-tip, red editing pen, and several different thicknesses of pencils marked the updates in popular dietary science since his adolescence.

As a child fat had been dangerous. Fat, and oil. At school he learned these things were the same: they were lipids. So these were at the top of the page. Just below these is a note that saturated fat should be avoided even more than normal fat, though normal fat should also be minimized.

Near the top of the page is a very recent arrow and a new note mentioning something about transfats.

During the period of elegant black ballpoint comes cholesterol. He didn’t know what that was, but knew how to avoid it.

Sugar was out next. They made you crash, changed quickly into fat, and refined ones had extra chemicals. A more recent note adds that artificial sweeteners were also forbidden, since they could cause cancer and kidney trouble, as well as turning into the same harmful biological byproducts as sugar if you didn’t exercise them off.

Thus he wasn’t surprised a few years later when fad diets nixed carbohydrates. Sugars were carbohydrate chains. Glucose, sucrose, fructose, dextrose – all merely scientific jargon for the sweet stuff. But now he knew to avoid all carbohydrates: bread, pasta hamburger buns. A note in smaller letters than usual says that hamburger is okay, though, since it is protein. “It just had to be really lean.”

A table in the margin of the notebook showed the three existing kinds of foods:
-CARBOHYDRATE
-PROTEIN
-LIPID

“Carbohydrate” and “Lipid” are crossed out in red pen. Proteins became the only substance he could eat. Except some sources of protein were dangerous: fish might have mercury in it, beef might have mad cow disease, and all the vegetables with protein still had the deadly carbohydrates. It gave him quite a shock to learn that the crunch in his celery was a crunchy sugar chain. How sneaky of the sugar to not be sweet.

The bottom of the page had notes on protein shakes and some incomprehensible scribbles in red marker about preservatives. These notes go on, and rather than running onto the next page, curve upwards and into the margins and empty lines. Several are upside down. There is no telling what he might have done with the rest of the book as he died in the middle of this red marker period, starving to death reading labels.

Bathroom Monologue: How exactly are you different from a dentist?

$2,572 for wisdom teeth. I wonder if I have to put the check under the surgeon’s pillow. I wonder if they add a random two-digit number to keep you from realizing that thousands of dollars for something I could have done with pliers and a steak knife is way overpriced. Instead you just look at that awkward sum and figure it must have calculated it with a complicated oral surgery algorithm. Screw it. I’m doing this at home. I cut my toenails by myself. This can’t be much more complicated. What do you mean it isn’t sterile? I’m not planning on having kids anyway.

Bathroom Monologue: If I get to Heaven, the first thing I’ll ask is…

“Really, ‘monosyllabic?’ Five syllables comprising the word that means ‘one syllable?’ How did that get in there? It gave You away immediately. "

The second thing will be about the same guy inventing both the lie detector and Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth. There will also probably be a request for an address.