Bathroom Monologue: Sitting over an imaginary Ivan, who is in a permanent vegetative state in my tub

“I can’t pull the plug on Ivan. He used to be a dude. I can kind of dig abortion – that little thing was never a dude and isn’t a dude now. I can’t have a bratwurst with it. Ivan cooked me bratwurst. He made bratwurst on the weekends, pastime he picked up from his dad as a little kid. He was a dude, and his dudeness abides to the present. Having been a dude totally changes the equation.”

Bathroom Monologue: “I'd buy a hog and ride it to California.” –A random character in Kelly Link’s “Louise’s Ghost”

Clark Quelsy rides from coast to coast atop his massive pig. The hog drags a sack of tanned leather goods, which he distributes to any charitable children he can see from the road. His is a rare eye that can discern moral character for a mere glimpse at the back of a head. His is a rare hand that can hurl a homemade football to a second grader from eighty yards and through two panes of school glass window. His gifts will not be denied, nor will his passage. Tollbooth workers know the sound of his mighty pig’s hooves, and always leave their gates open out of fearful respect.

Bathroom Monologue: “What happens when an Orc goes underwear shopping?” –Me, trying to stump myself

Clear out Men’s Wear, because Orcs never go alone and they never give up the right of way to other shoppers (or drivers). Orcs never go alone in the way Valley Girls never go alone to the mall and American Football players never go alone out the tunnel of a stadium. Like Valley Girls they scorn all those in their path, and like American Football players their scorn probably means tackling. Remove any glassware or displays from the immediate area – destroying a store display is one of the few things Orcs can write off on their taxes. You are advised to get some young associates to the neighboring departments so that they may begin cleanup immediately, and to give them durable mops. For the actual shopping experience, only stock boxers, and only ones with skulls and crossbones, ironic phrases like, “If idiots could fly this would be an airport,” and anything with a sports logos on it. The helmet of a favorite team on the ass of his underwear will cause an Orc to spend his entire paycheck in your store.

Bathroom Monologue: Sitting over an imaginary court, OR, “You are as wise as you are gentle, my lord.” –A eunuch in George Martin’s Clash of Kings

"We are all only as wise as we are gentle. There is no intelligent violence. There is not a genius who cripples, no murderous brilliance. The strategy of war, planning to disable and maim, is only a compensation for failures of integrity. Wisdom comes in cooperation and compassion. The best indication of practical wisdom is how willing people are to do what you wish them to do; if they are willing without fear, then you are wise, and if they are willing without malice towards others, you are among the wisest. To be brash is to have not thought on something enough. To be harsh may be thought to set an example, but it is only thought so by the unwise – and that is why the death penalty has not outlived crime. All violence is some expression of ignorance or desperation. Sometimes these things extend into the supposedly higher faults, like greed. But greed is just ignorance of where resources will come from when you’ve used them all up, or harmed all the suppliers, or something of which I am ignorant."

Bathroom Monologue: Things for which a police officer has never pulled me over

-Speeding
-Slowing
-Driving under the influence of Methodism
-Breaking the speed of light
-Leaving my headlights on at the speed of light
-Being on fire
-Having my car flooded to the roof with water
-Punching an orangutan
-Underwear stuck in my butt (a seventh sense tells you everyone else knows it’s happened despite their inability to observe)
-Thwarting a snowplow
-Running over the last echidna
-Suspicion that my car is a robot in disguise (a lie – I would never fraternize with Bumblebee)
-Drving while wearing a zoot suit
-Pursuing Daffy Duck
-Pursuing Donald Duck
-Pursuing a flock of young mallards and screaming they lead me to their number one dime
-Driving while verbally composing a cogent and persuasive argument that Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow deserved the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (for which I deserved to be pulled over, as I hadn’t read it yet)
-Using a rainbow as an off-ramp
-Using the carpool lane with an imaginary stuffed tiger in the passenger seat
-Failing to deploy my air flaps
-Opening my doors, taking to the air and jetting over traffic to beat the yellow light

Bathroom Monologue: The Six

One of the popular religious groups in the jail worshipped entities called “the Six.” It was an ancient pantheon, one from the tribal regions. The worshippers didn’t even consider The Six to be gods until the imperial theologians explained the concept to them. To the tribes (and to the prisoners), The Six were merely thieves who carried off land, sea, sky and life from the oppressive creators of the universe. Two thieves carried off land, understandable as the religion was developed before sea-travel explained that oceans weren’t merely oblong lakes. A third thief carried off the sky (considered to be very light despite its size; hence why it floated up there), while a fourth carried all the water, and a fifth carried off life, which she then pumped into everything else. The imperial theologians were perplexed that the worshippers kept reverence for all six thieves despite none of them knowing what the sixth carried off. Theories that he stole the afterlife, stars or fire were all suggested by those same theologians; the tribes didn’t seem to bother about it. The shaman dismissed the sixth stolen item as something to be figured out later. It was only the prisoners who realized this was not a copout; the sixth stolen thing was actually what came later. It was the future. After centuries of scholarly tradition, it took people with nowhere to go and nothing to do to figure it out.

"Rorschark Attack" on Short Story Library

"Rorschark Attack," the monologue about a shark that no one sees as a shark, will be the story of the day on Short Story Library on April 5th. You can check out their site at the URL: http://shortstory.us.com/2009/04/rorschark-attack-by-john-wiswell/

If you like it, let them know with comments or e-mails!

Bathroom Monologue: “Ledger Oscar bittersweet” -Herald Sun headline

“We figured, why waste actual gold on a dead guy?” said Academy reprentative Ed Nygma. “Since his daughter was receiving it, we just made a chocolate mold and put a gold wrapper on it.”

The chocolate Oscar was supplied by the Kyle, Ivy & Quinzel Confectionary Agency. An anonymous confectioner within the group stated the Oscar was, “bittersweet, with a green mint undertone.”

Of course, Mr. Ledger will never know how the chocolate beneath the gold man-shaped wrapper will taste. He was posthumously awarded for his deeply affecting role as a green-haired sociopath that fights a man dressed up like a bat.

No nuts were included in the Oscar, but it was packaged in a production plant that also manufactures peanut goods.