Bathroom Monologue: Cashiers Have Their Ways

“Hey, did I leave my keys in here?”
“Someone did leave a set of keys at checkout, but how do I know they were yours?”
“I just left here. I was just here! Talking to you!”
“So you say. What kind of car do you drive?”
“Hybrid.”
“I’ve wanted a Hybrid…”
“Give me my keys!”
“Your ownership is still unestablished, sir. What items did you buy at my register, supposing you did buy any at all?”
“These Snickers. You know that.”
“I know that Snickers are delicious.”
“Are you… are you trying to extort my candy?”
“I could leave these keys here and look the other way, if something preoccupied me. Like caramel and peanuts, mixed in silky chocolate.”
“You… diabolical bastard.”
“We cashiers have our ways.”

Bathroom Monologue: How It Sounds

“There is no other country that is diverting 15% of tin and salts to aether research. There is no other industrialized country still bent on developing the Death Ray. And yet the chairman persists in pretending it is the conservatives that are out of touch. We cannot close the oceans with taxes upon our most prosperous citizens just because they are the wealthiest. They did not make the oceans vast, did not make them rise such that we need aether ships. It is not the corporate world that filled our skies with pirates necessitating advanced disintegrator canons in every floating city we set up. Indeed, it is the corporations that build the canons! And so what if they malfunction a mere one fifth of the time? That is still four-fifths of the floating population that lives, dry and unharassed by sky-hooligans!”

Bathroom Monologue: Dead Wrong

So while the notion that the dead ascend and become an army of guardian angels who watch over and shine upon the living is still popular, there are dissenting views. For instance there is the theory that the ascended dead continue to be the petty, bigoted assholes they were in life.

The living make very quick judgments on others.

“That slut is wearing way too tight a skirt.”

“You can tell he’s lying. Look at that suit.”

“That fat ass doesn’t even try to lose weight, even though he’s jogging.”

Natural disasters have occurred since time immemorial, as have erroneous and negative snap judgments. Under this theory, the two are linked, but given immortality and heavenly power, the dead can do more than just glare. The judgmental dead are passing judgments on we slutty, lying and fat living through earthquakes and avalanches. A volcano erupting is your great grandma’s way of telling you to change your top.

Bathroom Monologue: Beta Testing for Go Outside

His last web video was the supposed gameplay footage for a PC-exclusive called “Go Outside.” It averaged 1.2 stars on youtube and the Comments section was overrun with complaints for his lame gag. From the start it was obvious he had just brought a webcam outdoors and filmed himself walking around, sometimes admiring his hand in front of the lens and complimenting the “graphics.” Those viewers who finished the video were horrified, however, when after finishing the tutorial for “jumping” and “tying your shoelaces,” the host walked his camera out into the middle of the road and demonstrated the “combat gameplay,” by refusing to step out of the way of oncoming traffic. He charged at a Hummer, which threw on its breaks but still struck him. A small spray of blood could be seen flying past the lens. The view of the camera flew up and collapsed to the concrete, where it lay still for ten seconds. Then the cameraman, presumably the same one who had been struck, picked up the camera and announced the demo for Go Outside was over.

That’s the worst April Fool’s joke the Highlander ever played.

Bathroom Monologue: Contextualization: A Picaresque

The main theme of my new picaresque is context, or my theory that readers must know as much about the author, his intents, his culture and world as possible to be able to have event a decent understanding of his work. I went through eleven drafts, though the first ten were destroyed so that people don’t find and try to study them later. Their interpretations could be disastrous. They were mere print drafts, you see. The eleventh draft is a perfect edition, released exclusively to internet-capable e-readers that enable every word in the book to be hyperlinked to an article explaining it. The footnotes of the ninth edition were exhaustive, with only one word of the work per page and the rest of the space devoted to explanation of how this one word altered the sound of how the sentence should be pronounced, how its course was forever altered, and the possible medieval allusions of its etymology, but they were still too limited. No, my genius could only be comprehended with thorough usage of certain websites, diagrams, paintings and youtube videos. That is why the eleventh edition indirectly connects to roughly 23% of the content linked to on Google. By following every link you can properly begin to understand what I intended by such classic word choices as “Cervantic,” “Dionysus” and “the.” My publisher expects it to replace Strunk and White as the seminal text on composition and literary theory by next February.

Bathroom Monologue: Decontextualization: A Novel

The main theme of my new novel is decontextualization, the theory that readers don’t need any context of the author, history or culture of a work of art to understand a good book. I’m not going to tell you the title because giving you the thought that there is a title is context, and God knows how much accidental suggestive context the title (if there is one) might give you. The book isn’t restrained by the normal conventions like “characters,” or having them “have relationships,” or following “a plot” and “doing things” – unless that’s what you read into it, because that’s all there is. In fact, I don’t want to give the suggestion that the book is a book at all. That is why all first-edition copies have been released as stainless steel spheres with no apparent mechanism to open them. After all, the traditional notion of opening a book from the right side is culturally biased. Similarly, I will not give the normal context of “pages,” having replaced them with aluminum ribbons upon which various words have been printed. There aren’t sentences, per se, but something more free form such that you can make of them what you will (and only at the request of my publisher have I elected to indent them). The language of these sentences is foreign to anything with which humans have come into contact, for if there is any overbearing context in literature it is a language readers have encountered before. You won’t need to know my politics, American history or the English language to get everything there is in this book. All you’ll need is an open mind and a pair of pliers.

Bathroom Monologue: A Clue

And in Human Rights news, the ACLU had a snafu this morning. It appears a fundamentalist anti-gay group was protesting the funerals of gay soldiers at Arlington National Cemetary, and the ACLU dispatched a standard lawyer to defend their right to free expression. However they also dispatched a lawyer to shut the protest down for religious expression on government property. The lawyers could barely converse over the chants of, “Thank God for 9/11,” and the somewhat suggestive 21-gun salute that was fired over their heads. Neither party has claimed responsibility, but both lawyers were released from the hospital this afternoon with abdominal contusions from “moderate to severe stomach punches.”