What Writing Means to Me

Writing?

Never heard of it. Sorry.

Bathroom Monologue: Reaching For

This story has been redacted pending possible publication!

Can a Chart Tell a Story?

Click to Enlarge My Shame.

Bathroom Monologue: Add Minister

“Believe it or not, Tadd didn’t even used to go to church. Three years straight without even a Christmas mass. The pedophile scandal, you know.”

“But that’s still going on. Why’d he come back?”

“I think it was his brother passing.”

“His deathbed wish was for Tadd make amends with The Lord?”

“I think his deathbed with was for a glass of water. Kidney problems took him, you know. But he did give Tadd his Bible.”

“So reading it turned him around? Catholics don’t even read the Bible.”

“I guess Tadd was a good Catholic. I never saw him open the thing. He just carried it around in his breast pocket. Only time I ever saw him take it out was to sign his lease against.”

“That’s not very spiritual.”

“I don’t think he was, either. Until he got shot.”

“Tadd Stephenson got shot? I’ve never heard this.”

“It was up in Michigan. He was mugged during a food drive, if you’ll believe it. Shot right in the chest. Right there.”

“And he always kept the Bible there! So it stopped the bullet and saved his life?”

“The bullet went right through. It was a very thin Bible.”

“It’s a miracle he didn’t die.”

“Not much of a miracle. He was in the hospital parking lot when he was shot.”

“Irony is a form of God’s miracles.”

“That’s not how he saw it. See, his friends kept his clothes. He gathered up all the shredded bits of scripture and realized how much was missing. He said all the missing bits had been carried by the bullet into his body, and were now in his bloodstream.”

“…What?”

“There were three months when he called his biceps Kings I and Kings II. Joined the seminary months later.”

“That is the dumbest. That can’t be what happened. If his brother gave him the dialogues of Schopenhauer, would his bloodstream have turned him into a raving atheist?”

“I don’t know how well Schopenhauer circulates. It might have to be taken orally.”

Bathroom Monologue: Ever-Loving Shit

"People always complain about getting the ever-loving shit scared out of them. Sometimes, about having the ever-loving shit kicked out of them. Regardless as to the genesis of excretion, this ever-loving shit is always internal. But to the best of my knowledge and extensive MRI scanning, I don't have any ever-loving shit, or feces of any potent emotion. All stool samples register solely as repugnant on smell alone. So how does one get such shit? Is it ingested? Gestated? I feel my diet is average for an American, so if these were the cases I'd have gotten some ever-loving shit into me. This leaves me believing such excrement must be surgically implanted. My primary care physician refuses such an operation. I'm left with no recourse but to ask the public: which surgeons do you recommend for a everloving shitectomy? Do you require a donor for transplant, or is it cultured in highly romantic septic tanks?"

Be Three Times as Versatile!

Helen Howell recently received the Versatile Writer blog award for the second time, and celebrated by giving it to me for the third. It's pretty flattering. I'm determined to list seven new facts about myself, preferably some weird and embarrassing ones.

1. A cop car once stopped me for trespassing and suspicious behavior in front of my own house.

2. I've never imbibed alcohol.

3. At least twice a woman has had to tell me she loved me for me to realize we were in a romantic relationship.

4. I am naturally buoyant in water. Consequently, as a kid I did not understand what the big deal was about sailors getting knocked overboard.

5. I tried to smuggle a twelve-pack of Pepsi into a midnight screening of The Phantom Menace. When approached, I said I was morbidly obese and preferred they not bring it up. Rectangular obesity did not work out as cover.

6. I was once mistaken for staff at a convention. This was possibly because I was clean shaven, wearing khakis and a button down. My mistake wearing adult clothing to these things. I went through the program to give the visitors all the same, though.

7. I met the famous Dr. Atkins when I was a child. My parents were trying to figure out a diet to counter all my allergies. We didn't like each other. He called me hyperactive. I called him fat. We were both right.

One of the above is going to be a True Story post on the blog sooner or later. Feel free to guess or to vote. Thanks Helen!

Bathroom Monologue: A Maze Inescapable

Want to listen? Click the triangle on the left, or click this text.

This is a castle others call The World. There is one window inside every wall, but there is a wall outside every window. Look through and you look upon the next wall. Climb through, look through that next window, and you will see another wall.

Spend days upon weeks upon months climbing through them, scaling down them, traversing across a thousand mossy courtyards. You will only look out upon yet another wall. Scale the battlements to see another, higher one. Be vigilant enough to scale the tallest tower imaginable, and you will see over many, but they will topple into the horizon.

There is no way out, only an infinite way in. All this stone, all this architecture, to protect something. What? No one can say, because how does one traverse to the center of a thing that is only wall after window after wall? Perhaps you're headed towards the treasure while you think you're on your way out. Or perhaps, after twenty years of squeezing through narrow windowsills, you'll circle the globe and find the first wall you ever passed. Will you recognize it if you do? Perhaps the castle defends itself, not by force of arms, but by becoming a maze inescapable.