Bathroom Monologue: Thanks Anyway

They were pale and pink and puffy people. They wore too much and it did not keep them warm. Though they arrived on large boats, they did not return to them or sale away to wherever they were meant to live. Instead they dug at frozen ground, hunted drunkenly and starved sober. The Woman of Myth hollowed out a gourd and stuffed it with crops. She held it aloft, commanding, "Give us your poor and your tired."

Inspired by Yoko Kanno’s “Call Me” and a Childhood with Elizabeth Wright

Listen to it streaming or download it here.
Dear Elizabeth,

I was three, you were six, and you were my first older woman.

Remember when you packed two suitcases and threatened your mom that you were moving to my house? I had to help you carry them over, though it was your dad that carried them back that night.

Remember excavating for dinosaur bones in my sandbox, you manning the wheelbarrow since I was too small?

Remember sitting at the bottom of the stairs, tying my shoes when I couldn’t figure out how? You must have felt some love to put up with all that, and though it’s been a long time since I’ve been in love with you, you defined what I feel for others today.

Thank you,
John

Bathroom Monologue: Challenge to Write Six Sentences like an Author you Love – I’m not saying who this is

It's well known to those who know it that every six sentence story has seven sentences. How it got there, what it is about and if it made her point clear are matters entirely unknowable to the artist. Contemplating it is like contemplating God insofar as, as one micro-philosopher put it, "You can't do it." Not contemplating it is also ill-advised, though, as it leads to an excess of semi-colons. The Intergalactic Semantic Exchange recommends to those who cannot stop contemplating the seventh sentence that they write very brief six sentence stories in order to get to the seventh as soon as possible, declaring that even if the invisible sentence is unreadable, one ought to "just get to it already." To those who cannot stop not contemplating it, the Exchange recommends alcohol in excess.

Bathroom Monologue: Beats a Neon Sign

What punk it was that set the cross ablaze in their yard, none of them knew. There were guesses, with only so many people so low in Fleetwater, and fewer spotted fleeing neighborhood as the Cartwrights desperately tried to beat out the burning symbol of salvation. The old Cartwrights were studied Methodists, but the young were new to the game and didn’t quite grasp symbolism. The young Cartwrights went about with oil and wood, and that next morning every potential offender awoke to burning letters in his yard. A fiery ‘HE’ stood in Fords’ yard, and a minute later another ‘HE’ lit up in Kip Gotch’s. They all got at least one letter, and none of the Klan understood the message, but if you tried to read it, starting with the burning cross in the Cartwrights’ yard as a ‘t,’ you could read the message across the street: “tHE HEll Is WRoNG WITH YoU.”

Bathroom Monologue: The Feeling of Bobby James

He was looking on the floor of the Saab for his cigarettes when the front left of the car jerked up about a foot. It dropped back down with a crunch, like ice giving way. The car kept rolling forward and he felt the second decline, just an inch, as the wheel rolled off of what it'd caught. Even after the trial, that feeling was all he'd remember from when he killed Bobby James. It followed him longer than any scream could.

Bathroom Monologue: This Was How He Said Goodbye

Grandfather wanted him to be a Baptist, but the boy was one of experiences and emotions, not study, and certainly not pews. Grandfather threw the book at him, he ran from reading, and the two didn’t speak until the old man only had a few months left.

Their only conversation ran short, even though the boy said he’d recently started reading and liked Huck Finn. The dying old man barked that he needed a Bible, and Shakespeare, and Hemingway, and more and more until the boy simply walked out in tears.

Upon returning home, Grandfather disappeared into his basement, hunched over in pain, hunched over a plane, to produce an inheritance. It arrived at the boy’s apartment without explanation, a bookshelf with no books on it.

Bathroom Monologue: Six Sentence Haiku

She flees. He follows.
Hook swings, snags her neck. He yanks.
She falls. Roll credits.

Bathroom Monologue: Earth Squared

Planets are square. Spaceships take photos of them with round lenses, so of course they look spherical, but if you notice there's black space around the edges of any picture, forming a square, or at least a rectangle. Even the round lens can't suppress angular planets. It's black there because that's where it's night on Mars. Even the sun is a cube. Our circular pupils can’t handle it, and deceive us to compensate.

Handy eyes-free MP3 edition: http://www.sendspace.com/file/6e5651

Bathroom Monologue: 6 Questions Again (challenge to write six cohesive questions)

Why?

Why not?

Wait, what were we talking about?

Are you trying to change the subject?

Are we the same speaker?

Why not?

Bathroom Monologue: Edward Brownie

Edward had earned many brownie points in his life, but never learned where to exchange them. Inquiring about prizes or monetary equivalence earned him nothing more than quizzical stares. When he attempted to redeem them at the school cafeteria he was sent to the dean’s office for “shoplifting.” As though redeeming three brownie points for three brownies were theft! But by fifth grade he learned about exchange rates, and came to understand that perhaps many brownie points were necessary for one brownie. That had to be the way of it, because applying for honorary merit badges from his sister’s Brownies troop certainly wasn’t working.

Bathroom Monologue: WILL SHOOT YOU IN THE HEAD, 2 FOR $1

I took a year off from college to open a business. It was a social experiment in capitalism with no actual store name, just a sign reading: “WILL SHOOT YOU IN THE HEAD, 2 FOR $1.”

The whole point was to see who would walk in. Didn’t matter if they needed the bathroom or wanted to know if we were open on Sundays, because that’s usually a front for curiosity.

So, I soon concluded, are protests, and we got a lot of those, even after we let them inside to show we didn’t have any guns. I swore I’d close if anyone ever came in actually demanding our services, and that’s why I’m back at CalTech now, with two photographs, a Better Business Bureau complaint, and a dollar to put towards my student loans.

Handy eyes-free audio edition on free MP3: http://www.sendspace.com/file/mpbith

Bathroom Monologue: Ways to Read

The reader reads your book.

The good reader underlines things on your page.

The editor corrects things on your page.

The aspiring writer corrects things on your page, leaves suggestions in-between words, and will rewrite entire sentences in the margins.

The master writer will retype your whole manuscript to get a feel for it, changing words, sentences, paragraphs, back story, conflicts and context on the fly as he discovers how it is that he actually writes from rewriting your book.

The typesetter, dreading all these people, stays as far away from bookstores as possible.

Bathroom Monologue: Two Horns, Six Sentences

The agent said they could cut off one of their horns and increase their chances at marketability. Unicorns were always in demand, but “bicorn” sounded like a farm subsidy. Most of them refused self-mutilation to masquerade as their more popular cousins, and stood by their virtue as a taller, sturdier breed with natural handholds for children who wished to ride them through dreams. All their endorsement deals fell through save one with a glue company, and when a protestor explained to them why they’d gotten the deal, they were pretty angry.

Anyway, that’s why those beautiful steeds are down there amongst the army of darkness. Hell gave them work when little girls wouldn’t even draw them on their notebooks.

Channel Surfing

I watched twenty minutes of 28 Days Later on the TV, waiting for my favorite bit, where the camera pans back in the church to reveal the note from survivors of the apocalypse, which reads: "THE END IS EXTREMELY FUCKING NIGH."

Having seen my favorite bit, I switch channels and get some kind of documentary on Ronald Reagan, who says, amidst background laughter, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

I change the channel up to the triple digits to flee this coincidence, only to find a gaunt man on a rooftop, holding a dry-erase board over his head with the question: "WHAT’S THE BAD NEWS?"

Desolate music swells behind him and I change the TV to anything else, and this anything else turns out to be the recently departed Charlton Heston bursting through a door and screaming, "Soylent Green is people!"

I turn off the TV, rub my eyes and wish there was some way I could share this with others.

Bathroom Monologue: Pun Time

(This was written in a challenge to tell something relating to the above photograph)

“Found it out by second base.”

“No way!”

“I thought they were a myth…”

“It’s real, Whitey. Got to be worth at least a million.”

“Never thought I’d see a real baseball diamond.”

Bathroom Monologue: Kiddy Kitty

Despite having the elevator to themselves, the boy stood so close to Ronald that he almost rubbed against his left leg. Ronald followed elevator protocol and stared at the descending numbers, ignoring his juvenile elevator-mate until the kid tugged on his trouser leg.

“Sir,” the boy said in a voice that was almost a purr, “how would you feel if Tigger, your girlfriend's cat who died nine years ago when you went to Hawaii and forgot to get him a sitter, was reincarnated?”

Ronald pushed back into the very corner of the elevator and asked in disbelief, “How do you know about Tigger?”

The boy pulled a handful of Meow Mix from his pocket and popped it in his mouth. He replied as he chewed, spraying Ronald's trouser with crumbs, “I’m nine.”

Bathroom Monologue: Bolshevik Swine

(This was written in response to a challenge to do a six-sentence piece relating to the above picture)


The hogs hit the switch and those miserable cheerleading oppressors were yanked skyward. A baton clattered before them, and Louis-14 caught it in his snout.

He squealed, "With this baton, we seize the reigns of cheerleading.”

His second in command snorted, "The revolutionary pigs on that farm will probably lead more productive lives."

Louis-14 twirled the baton about his snout and declared, "But one only half as fabulous."

Bathroom Monologue: Gradients of Goodbye

There are gradients of goodbye. The goodbye one morning as you rushed to the school bus was nothing like the goodbye before you got into the car so mom could drive you to college. Certainly neither was like the goodbye when I stayed with mom after the stroke, while you had to get back to campus. There were those four goodbyes that one day, when we hugged and cried in the morning, then ran into each other outside the bathroom, then you got delayed packing and we had to say some sort of goodbye after lunch, only for you to forget your alarm clock, drive back half an hour later, and impart one last and most embarrassing goodbye. If only I’d known that what was wrong with mom was wrong with you, I wouldn’t have had to say the last goodbye, the one to which you couldn’t respond. And because your life with us was so punctuated by “goodbye,” I wonder why you chose for your headstone to read: “HELLO.”

Bathroom Monologue: Earl and the Muslim

Earl blew his nose and looked up to find they were the only two left in the weight room. He, an American-looking American with an American beard and an American Nickelback t-shirt, and this enormous Muslim on the chest press, Arabic tattooed across straining biceps, glowering at Earl in-between reps and making weird gestures at his face.

Earl checked himself to see if he’d done something wrong, but all he was doing was rubbing his nose and lounging with a foot up. Oh crap, wasn’t showing your soles to a Muslim a death-worry offense? He quickly pushed both feet to the floor, but the guy was already coming. The guy pushed a box of tissues at him and muttered, “Dude, snot in the beard.”

Bathroom Monologue: Astral Plane or Astral Plain?

It's kind of both. It's a plane of existence if it’s anything, but there are also rolling hills. The souls of buffalo roam, and long-extinct races of antelope play. They do not, however, play harps. It’s lovely at night as instead of daisies, stars bloom in the grass of these fields, and twinkle a far sweeter music than man has ever known. He has felt it in a fashion, though, and expressed it by accident in every song that bring to mind places without using words.