Bathroom Monologue: This one’s almost done

“Almost” counts in way more than just horseshoes and hand grenades. A nearly perfect holiday dinner with both your relatives and hers is pretty damned miraculous. The bomb destroying almost the entire city darned sure means a lot to the people in the buildings that were only almost destroyed. And trust me, if a bunch of monkeys chained to typewriters wrote up to:

“How does my project gather to a head:
My charms crack not; my spirits obey; and time
Goes upright with his carriage. How's the d32g45a54”

before their manuscript disintegrated into random keystrokes, you’d be impressed.

But if you recognized those lines as the opening of the last act in the last play William Shakespeare wrote independently, and connected it to the popular theory that an infinite number of monkeys hitting keys at random could write the entire works of that playwright, well, that’s almost unbelievable.

Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Monologue Over the Phone

“You think being a psychic is all glamour and illusion? What do you know? You ever been up all night because of the chirping the birds are gonna make in the morning? You ever been on a date with a girl way out of your league but you rode into the spot on pity, only to have to blow it off because you foresee a murder and know being at the scene as a potential witness is the only way to stop it? Of course you haven’t. Keep your cynicism to yourself. It’s the only way you’ll ever get married. And if you want to know whether that’s a snap judgment or a prophecy, you’ll have to sign up for our Premium Service. It’s only 7.99 extra. Would you like it? Not that we both don’t already know the answer to that.”

Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Break from the John Adams Miniseries

Doreen stopped before the procession of soldiers. She stared not at their crude uniforms nor homemade rifles, but at the flag flapping at the head.

It was a flag of seven red stripes and six white, with the snake that represents the thirteen states running across it. On the bottom-most white stripe read the demand of each young man in the militia: “DONT TREAD ON ME”

Her sons stopped behind her, clutching at her skirt. A hitch went up her throat and she put a hand to her mouth to stifle sob.

“Those boys… in such a hurry …” she muttered. Another sob came.

Her sons looked up at her and frowned. Was it that the older boys would die in battle? Did she simply hate war? Was it too futile an effort? Did she think of how other mothers would feel when news came of the fallen? Or fear for them, when they grew of age to serve?

“Hurrying so …” she gasped, “that they hadn’t the time to put an apostrophe in ‘Don’t.’ Their poor, poor English teacher…”

Bathroom Monologue: “hannah montana” –6th fastest rising search term on google.com in the United Arab Emirates

The pop star glanced around the arena. Clearly wearing this sort of skirt here made her nervous.

“Don’t these people demand all women wear the veil?”

Her agent shook his head, as well as a fistful of dollars.

“Sixth fastest rising search term, Hannah!”

“I still think the outfit could get me stoned… And do these people even speak English?”

“Doesn’t matter if they get the lyrics. Probably better they don’t. If they’re offended, we can afford security.”

“Couldn’t we at least research this first?”

Her agent shoved her through the door to the stage, yelling, “But google!”

Bathroom Monologue: Physicians do no harm. What do you do?

“I lived in this beautiful glass ignorance, that allowed in the shining light of humor, but kept comedians out. It was a cathedral of not getting the point. I think I was reading Terry Pratchett when the first crack ran down the first wall, but realization made them spread quickly, and in poured a torrent of bile and cynicism. All those years I’d never known the glass walls sheltered an Atlantis under a sea of hate. I treaded in realizations that Mark Twain and Douglas Adams had really hated a great deal of the things they’d mocked, and that hateless writers had hate filled in by others. I remember one splash in the face from a journalist explaining Garrison Keilor’s ‘all the children are above average’ was a criticism of child self-esteem propaganda. And I earnestly mean I was drowning. I could feel my psyche lose its breath – lose the very ability to inspire, as Jonathan Swift once pointed out in one of the few times he wasn’t hating anybody. For all those years the glass cathedral had protected me under an ocean of nastiness, of hate for my fellow man and his every occupation, from prayer to napalm to car commercials, inculcating a belief that everyone should be at ease with everything and ought to express it through general humor. At the center, on the top floor of this glass palace was a cherished table where all friends would sit, true friends amongst whom no difference created spite, and all was mediated by tolerance and the love found in laughter. I’d never thought these satirists hated half of what they lampooned, and that they could never sit at this table. Beyond the walls of the cathedral, they merely looked like they were easing the world to place of amiable tolerance in which real scorn was unnecessary. To realize that so many things in books and stand-up albums weren’t jokes between friends I’d taken them as, but were supposed to be coercive… I could barely bring myself to joke anymore. It gave laughter a pathetic dimension that I’d never wish on anyone, let alone my favorite pastime. However, the belief was not drowned. It merely became a little soggy.”

Bathroom Monologue: “The South will rise again!” –Bumper sticker

It was the most interesting Tuesday in a while. Residents of Texas woke up to find they bordered Canada, turned on the news and found someone had flipped the entire country. The cause was uncertain, but had something to do with now-banned rubix cubes.

Some states handled it better. South Dakota liked being above “the other” for once, while North Dakotans enjoyed amazing returns on real estate investments, as what was once frosty wilderness became beach-front property along the Gulf of Mexico.

People were surprisingly nonplussed by their geographic catastrophe, feeling the move was odd, but livable so long as the local Wal-Mart had come with them. When approached by the National Weather Service to prepare for the upcoming Nor-Easter season, the citizens of Louisiana laughed hysterically.

Despite having swapped positions, New York City and Atlanta report having almost identical terrible airport service. Ticket holders for all international flights have been informed to arrive an hour early, but to expect, “to board about as delayed as usual.”

Names that spam bots have used to e-mail me, OR, Names that may soon be used to populate a novel

-Agamemnon Castro
-Banham Mi
-Merlin C. Hardy
-Aginualdo Dean
-Kym Latarsha
-Mr. Johnson Tsvangrai
-me
-Abel Bowman (awesome, awesome, awesome)
-Alfonso McManus
-Natalia Fountain
-Phebe Chau
-Albrecht Cunningham
-Berry Livingston
-Afton Lilla
-Interpol John Brown (they’re onto me!)
-Florene Shawanda
-Aguie Cobb
-Albatros Bowen
-Anisa Un
-Aleksandr Black (supervillain if I’ve ever heard of one)
-Concepcion Dalila (his sidekick?)
-Alva Slaughter (a team of supervillains?)
-me
-Orville Rossi
-Kristy Pike
-Alisander Day
-Sage Jesusa (sadly, not selling Bibles)
-Alisia Giuseppina
-Dawn Becki
-Efren Boone
-me (I don’t recall signing up as a spammer service, but darn I got busy)
-Addison Atkins
-Tessa Dye
-Lacy Wu
-Brooks Crow
-Horace Kramer
-Mitzi Meade (a superheroine alter ego if I’ve ever heard one – Black’s nemesis?)
-Christian Timothy (but no Zoroastrian Timothy)
-Ava Maldonado
-Brandi Kilgore
-Roscoe Schneider
-Augusta Berry
-Ace Banks
-Terra Ali
-Fern Sellers (not sure if this is a store name or a person)
-Alf Delgado
-Chieko Gisele
-Yvette C. Sawyer
-me (this time it’s a “Failure Of Delivery Notice,” meaning this time I managed to fail hanging myself a dubious advertisement)
-Aldrich Diaz
-Thad Bolden
-Ade Butler
-Devorah Willodean (I believe she’ll be teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts next year)
-Eve Cash