Bathroom Monologue: Warning: The Bathroom Monologues Are Not Child-Safe. Nor are they…

-Beaver Safe (humans build dams and until you face the fact that you are obsolete we will terminate you on sight)
-Duck Safe (even though it's rabbit season)
-Rabbit Safe (because Mr. Fudd put a lot of work into this and frankly you had it coming)
-Creationist Safe (because nothing that's fun is)
-Darwinist Safe (based on my calculations that 100% of all Charles Robert Darwins have been dead and remained dead since the opening of this site)
-Kryptonian Safe (see Darwinist Safe)
-Accountant Safe (there is no accounting for my thoughts in the bathroom)
-Whale Safe (the one who tried to read them suffocated when the laptop was lodged in its blow hole)
-Hooker Safe (see Whale Safe)
-Vestigial Male Nipple Safe (they're embarrassing)
-Quadrilateral Safe (shape up and straighten your sides you damned hippie rectangle)
-Triangle Safe (see Quadrilateral Safe – and don't pretend you only have three sides; we both know better)
-Work Safe (this ends the day it feels like work)

Bathroom Monologue: More Important Than Art Itself

Art began as an imitation of Life. A little simplified, a little streamlined, altering things to appeal to Life more than, say, going out and living. Paintings gave the illusion of depth, but remained two-dimensional. Statues gave the illusion of life, but remained static. Television gave the illusion of objectivity, but managed to be more subjective than Life itself.

Life saw merit in Art. It also saw the David’s amazing abs and all the clever, clipped dialogue on sitcoms, and began to lose track of itself. If Art was an imitation, then it was a representation. If it was a representation, then maybe it was accurate, or even ideal.

So then Life started imitating Art, wearing its logos on t-shirts, quoting from books and movies, dressing up as protagonists and the sexier antagonists at Halloween.

Art was scared shitless. Now Life was catching up to its creativity and sexiness. How was it supposed to maintain attention if Life was just as interesting, or worse, if people thought it was better?

So Art got a boob-job and a make-up girl. It got special effects teams and computer animation to make things way cooler than life ever did. It saw how living were scared of dying, and so it rubbed itself in impossible fight scenes that made death seem not just implausible but downright unlikely for whoever Life liked. And soundtracks. My God, the soundtracks.

But Life started carrying around those soundtracks on iPods and turned masterpieces into wallpaper. It was grabbing whatever Art it felt like and lining its birdcages with it. It was actually doing this because it now defined itself by Art and wanted it around all the time, but Art thought this meant it was being devalued. For fear of being tossed away, Art got another boob-job and began market testing its music.

Bathroom Monologue: My Avatar

My avatar will be a black hole. Light years away from any conflict, and if anyone else’s avatar is dumb enough to mess with mine, she’ll be sucked into a magical singularity. In fact, that whole avatar’s planet will be sucked in. I’ll obliterate the entire cultures and geological histories of those who displease me. Now that’s godly.

An infinitely small, infinitely dense sidekick is also very low maintenance. It will eat whatever I leave lying around. By virtue of its appetite and gravitational pull, it will have billions of miles of interspace property to itself – eventually. Since not even light can escape dark matter, I’ll take it to laser shows, then leave halfway through, just to watch the entire show follow us out the door.

What’s your avatar?

Bathroom Monologue: "Porn degrades everyone, Mark." -Douglas Coupland, JPod

It degrades the people depicted in it (in my experience, usually female), and it degrades everyone of their sex. It degrades everyone who looks at it (in my experience, usually male - and in my experience, usually me), and everyone of their sex. It therefore degrades the entire human race (except hermaphrodites - or it insults them twice as much, I'm not sure). However, the human race really needs to be knocked down a peg. Most of them either think the whole universe was invented for them, or it's meaningless so it's fine to do whatever they want to it anyway. They've killed off billions of species of life, billions of each other, punched a hole in their ozone layer and actually watch American Idol. They're incredibly full of themselves for people who are so insecure. They deserve some serious degradation. If wanking to a magazine from the top shelf insults them, then it's worth $3.95. It’s exactly the kind of degradation we have coming.

Non-Fiction: Where I was when Obama won

I took long, slow breaths and smiled at the TV. He walked up the blue runway and I feared the second I saw his back; it was cinematic, preparing for a rifleshot. It made me shiver. But no shot rang, and his concept of a lifetime of a 102 years in which cars became popular, fascism became unthinkable, a man walked on the moon and a black man could hold the most powerful office in the world gave me the chills. Or so I thought. But when President Elect Obama left the stage with his wife, I realized I'd actually left the window open.

Bathroom Monologue: My Liberal Biases

-There should be an independent commission dedicated to finding the engineers responsible for public restroom hand dryers, specifically to find out why they built them so that they never dry your hands on the first push. The second push always dries you off midway, wasting countless megawatts of electricity in gross usage per year. If a connection is found between these engineers and power companies, a second commission will be assembled to beat the offending parties with foam bats and Hulk hands. A third, more pragmatic commission will go around fixing the blow dryers.

-Not only should the internet remain free of government censorship, but the government should install point counters for interesting leaps of e-thought. For instance if you search for “horse porn,” then immediately go look up “Zell Miller's blog,” you get ten points. The more random your searching habits, the higher your score. The highest scores (along with the discordant web searches that earned them) will be posted on a government website, where Psychology Majors at all nationally credited colleges will be allowed to write a two-page essay figuring out what your train of thought must have been. Ten such essays will count as ten hours of community service.

-I’d like the government to pay a group of men to sit around a garage all day waiting for calls that anyone’s house is on fire. Should they receive such a call they will rush to rescue the inhabitants and put out the blaze. If the program is popular, perhaps we can give them their own trucks fitted with hoses.

-I really would like to institutionalize eating children. Jonathan Swift was a sissy. My modest proposal is put all orphans and unwanted children on a conveyor belt and start canning Bachelor Chow. It’ll solve the abortion problem, as once we start buying infants in bulk, we’ll be able to pay expecting mothers minimum wage, and maybe even a signing bonus. No time-and-a-half for twins. That counts as one, just like those conjoined “bonus” pretzels that are stuck together in the bag.

-That everyone doesn’t believe each other’s myths, but recognizes them as neat. Instead of burning witches at the stake we’ll have interesting stories at backyard barbecues.

-Gay marriage should be illegal. So should straight marriage. Marriage is a religious institution, and even at its most secular, it is a relationship between two people. Government has no place in marriage aside from notarizing the prenuptial agreement and keeping her from assaulting and battering you when she finds out you slept with her sister. And really, I’m 50/50 on that last part.

-The people who set speed limits on highways should have to explain themselves, publicly, while driving their five screaming children to school, when they’re already fifteen minutes late. A webcam on the dashboard will do nicely.

Bathroom Monologue: Appetite for Destruction

One of the all-time most common traits in heroes (slightly less common than cheating on their wives, slightly more common than dying as a result of getting caught) is the legendary appetite. Heroes are known for nigh-impossible feats

It seems every great war poem is laden with feasts, preparing for battle, celebrating battle, pausing for the night in the middle of a long battle. Is it that heroes of such great feats need the fuel?

The infamous wilderness fiend Keiji was known to eat two entire bulls before any given skirmish. Khetchewanpy, god of minor conflicts that are later embellished by a poet trying to make a name for himself, drank a river dry to restore himself amidst the Battle of Czenthry.

This is not always a helpful trait. Yellow Horn was known for putting ice cream parlors out of business before defending his home city, until the day he ate 480 consecutive banana parfaits and was slain by a sudden and massive cold headache.

Bathroom Monologue: Fleets of Fleeting Moments

"The best moment in a teacher's life is being surpassed by her students. This is preceded shortly by the worst moment in her life: realizing they're getting this stuff faster than she did. God willing, she resigns herself to this reality before the best moment in her life gets there."