Bathroom Monologue: Fleets of Fleeting Moments

"The best moment in a teacher's life is being surpassed by her students. This is preceded shortly by the worst moment in her life: realizing they're getting this stuff faster than she did. God willing, she resigns herself to this reality before the best moment in her life gets there."

Bathroom Monologue: Four Invisible Feminists Walk Behind a Bar…

There were a lot of things they could have done with this invisibility. They could have worked for the Pentagon. They could have made millions in corporate espionage. The pranks they could have pulled in this small town would have been legendary.

But they got their higher calling from a CNN story out of Afghanistan – a place two of them hadn’t even heard of them before. A place where a raped girl needed four witnesses to prosecute, and if she failed to produce them, she’d wind up in jail for fornication. The four could pass through any border or checkpoint and walk into any back alley, any hut long after dark, any dirt road just out of earshot of town. Or, they could say they did. In a court of law. In many courts. In every court. As many times as it took.

A ‘While Walking Addendum’ to "Do you believe in ghosts?" asked by Carlos in Devil's Backbone

I don't normally publish follow-ups to my own monologues, even though they happen startlingly often. They seem too indulgent. But when you're out in the middle of the woods like I am right now, with a weak flashlight beam like I have, you're likely to get attached to what you feel. The "believe in ghosts" problem is such a neat one because it taps on how many kinds of belief there are. Belief, non-belief and disbelief barely all make it into a reputable dictionary. But how many phases of matter are there?

Most would answer three: solid, liquid and gas.

(Okay, most would answer, "Huh?")

A slightly snarkier demographic would answer four, and add plasma to the list.

But there are more than four. Vapor is the phase state in-between liquid and gas. Fluid is a phase state in-between liquid and solid. There are states in-between the commonly recognized ones. These are much more amorphous states, as while it’s easy enough to call something solid, everything from molasses to the glass in your windows are fluids. And then there are plays on phases of matter, like smoke, a solid so tiny and fine it's lighter than gas. It baffles the pedestrian mind.

So when I look through this narrow flashlight beam in the woods at midnight, I think there may be fluid and vaporous belief. Maybe even smoke belief (or smoked belief – delicious). That agnostic leaning towards thinking there's nothing behind what he sees. And in most cases, I'm willing to bet there's a fluid belief that's agnostic leaning upon suspicion, with traits harder to observe and often denied. That’s how so many people are left thinking glass is a solid.

I invite anyone who reads this to go grab a weak flashlight and trot out half a mile from your car in the woods. Find a flat stretch of ground like I'm on right now, without too many bumps, so it's safe to turn off the light while you’re walking.

Then do it.

See how far you make it without turning it back on, and see what your instincts conjure up. We've hunted wolves and coyotes to the verge of extinction nearly anywhere you can drive a car, so don't pretend there's a rational threat out there. And don't blame it on movies. Yes, Hollywood has suggested some things that could go bump in your night, but making up a far smaller fraction of our storytelling consciousnesses than what the settlers had around campfires. If anything in our age of high skepticism you ought to be the most immune to worrying about werewolves or whatever.

Yet if I turn this thing off for two seconds I'm sure there's some hulking Grendel in front of me with teeth that have outgrown his lips and hair that's outgrown his hide, ready to leer in my face the instant I turn the light back on.

Me, who reads Scientific American and The Economist.

Then again, I do love the Blair Witch Project.

But it's a worthwhile experiment for the skeptical believer, or the believable skeptic. Get away from the labels, from the ideology of epistemology. Come out here at night with no one around and little light, and see what you really feel, not in hypothesis, but in events. Much as you take a man out of his environment and see how he behaves to see his real philosophy rather than what he put together in a term paper or a lecture, you can come out here any time. I know I have, because while I love my scary stories, I've spent a hundred times the hours sitting out here and hiking than I have watching Horror movies.

Right now I don't feel ghosts swirling overhead or Grendels in the bushes. Instead I’m feeling that people are going to say they felt nothing, or felt stupid, or felt like they were wasting their time. I know because I have that reflex, too. I could say that and cover for the other things I felt. Perhaps lying helps quicken you away from the transitional phases and back to the simple, safe big three of gases, liquids and solids.

And a thousand apologies to anyone actually mauled by a wolf in this experiment.

Bathroom Monologue: "Do you believe in ghosts?" -Carlos in Devil's Backbone

“You know, I'm not sure these things break down to belief, disbelief and non-belief. I've never seen a spectre and they haven't been isolated in scientific tests, so I don't believe in them the way I believe in electrical current and heartbeats. But could they be out there? Sure. Could they be on a whole plane of activity and existence that bares no logical resemblance to the motivations and means of ours? It would explain a lot. Fundamentally, though, it transcends traditional belief and disbelief. Those people running in the famous video clearly hadn't believed the World Trade Center would be attacked. They were confused and terrified, their comprehension challenged even as they were fleeing from a life-threatening explosion. I don't know if I would have believed it, and I don't know if I believe in ghosts, but I think if one showed up I'd be pretty casual. I believe enough that if it doesn't materialize swinging a meat cleaver I'll be able to adjust - and I may not have to adjust at all. Won't know until one shows up.”

Bathroom Monologue: Original Piracy

Wall Street was suddenly and unexpectedly attacked today by internet pirates. A galleon was somehow able to navigate out of the harbor and onto New York's busy streets. Authorities were perturbed but unsurprised to find the unusual ship was designed by Google. A spokesman from that company says it was still supposed to be in Beta Testing, and regrets having left it in open source. The pirates stole two twelve billion shares of miscellaneous stock that had previously not been issued ownership certificates but existed only as records in e-trading databases. Authorities say their lack of physical existence explains why three overweight pirates were able to carry so many of them in one trip.

Bathroom Monologue: The Monopoly of the Abyss

Humans and the other animals of earth are much more alike than they are different. No, I don't have fins or wings, but the bones in fins and wings are remarkably similar to those in the human hand. Certainly more similar than a planet or a chunk of ice. If you haven't noticed, that's what makes up most of the other matter in the universe. Comets, moons, asteroids, planets and stars are really dissimilar to a fish or a human. I am indisputably more similar to a carp than I am to a burning sphere of plasma. Furthermore, I'm more similar to a carp than I am similar to nothing. Nothing actually makes up the most of the universe. Emptiness. The void is the overwhelming majority of this universe. The earth is roughly 12,715 kilometers in diameter. That's taller than me, but we are 149,600,000 kilometers away from the sun. We are 41,000,000 kilometers away from the nearest planet, Venus, which is itself only 12,100 kilometers in diameter. Compare 12,100 of something to 41,000,000 of nothing. That's a lot of nothing at all. Nothing and nothing and nothing within a solar system, of all things. In comparison to that infinite emptiness, that simplicity that is too simple to be simple at all, I'm not like it at all. In comparison to a 1.7-meter gorilla, well, I see a lot more resemblance.

Bathroom Monologue: “Would you kill your son if God told you to?” –Penn Jillette on youtube

“Kill who…? But I don’t have a kid.”

Josh looked around to see where that voice had come from. Instead all he saw was his sofa and TV.

And a six-year-old boy now sitting on that sofa, playing videogames on that TV.

“What the Hell?!!”

“When’s dinner?” The boy asked without looking away from his game. “I want pizza rolls.”

Josh’s face contorted. Even as he was shocked by the appearance of a child in his living room, he was remembering why he hated children.

Then something else caught his eye. Sitting on the other end on the couch from the boy, his miraculous son, was a hacksaw.

“I’m hungry!” the boy stated like it was a demand.

Josh picked up the hacksaw and looked it over.

“Well he’s not actually mine, and I do hate kids.”

He carried the saw into the kitchen to think this one over. He was bad at theology.

“Bring me a soda!” came from the living room.

“And I would hate for God to be mad at me…”

Josh smirked.

Bathroom Monologue: Things to say right before laughing maniacally.

-“Oh, you were right! The button for the airlock isn’t over there. It’s right… here!”
-“A three-fingered gunslinger?”
-“Consider the European Union... annulled.”
-“I’m afraid the director’s cut was straight to the neck!”
-“You are Tyler Durden!”
-“It would be terrible if someone laced her M&M’s with cyanide. Yes… terrible.”
-“We have nothing to fear… but this grenade!”
-“They’ve pinned their last hopes on two hobbits?”

Bathroom Monologue: Hard on Herakles, Hard On Us All

“It’s hard on me too, Cal. I came back from Hades itself to do good in the world and all I get is smeared in the press. The Greek playwrights were far more flattering, and they never photographed me leaving a brothel. The nerve. They question my character, my powers, even my lineage! They say I’m not the son of Jupiter and how am I to say differently? They want a blood test for a transcendental being. Besides the point that if a drop of my blood got in their hands, ten years go by and you know we’ll be fighting clones. Made the mistake of bringing those arrows dipped in the Lernean hydra’s blood back with me. Military contractors tried to steal them while I was… otherwise engaged. What? I’m single now, and Europe has a much better club scene these days.”- Herakles

Bathroom Monologue: The Pirates Sailed Inland

Having heard some hurtful criticisms about their profession on CNN, the pirates sailed inland for more practical ventures. They scouted the homes of the wealthy, and when the occupants went to work, the pirates pillaged. But they just weren’t satisfied with stealing a home theatre or a sweet sound system. It was too small-scale.

First they tried to yank the whole house out of the ground, but the foundation was too strong and the hull was too small.

They tried sawing the floors apart to make them more maneuverable, but when the lumberjacks realized what the pirates were doing with their saws they took them back and broke the first mate’s arm.

Some of the deckhands had the idea to steal shacks and any other structures not attached to the actual houses. The crew had twenty Hummers (and twenty garages) when the captain returned from Starbuck’s. He was most displeased with the operation, but his first question wasn’t why they’d put a sliding electric door on his quarterdeck. His first question was, “How’d you get the ship on land?”

“What will the pirates do with this ransom money?” –Some anchor on CNN, OR, Leave your TV on and you’ll overhear some weird things in the bathroom

"Beer and whores mostly, Jared. Pirates aren’t a very bright group and lack long-term investment skills. That’s why they rob people on ships. Even a dumb ass would at least rob car-to-car, considering how many cars there are on a road as opposed to ships in an ocean. Decent criminals rob your home while you’re away. Meanwhile if you sail up to a freighter, chances are they’re home. Pirates lack fundamental understanding of how evil capitalism works."

Bathroom Monologue: Responding to a Long'n this Time

“Psych was the winner of an Independent Investigations Group Annual Award for Excellence in Entertainment for advancing the cause of science and exposing superstition” –Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psych

Other runner-ups include:

-Ghost Hunters, because sometimes they say there isn’t a ghost.

-Battlestar Galactica, for proving that the future won’t be fun. Screw you, Star Trek.

-Ultimate Fighter, for contribution to the debunking of professional wrestling.

-The Office, for debunking that communities of autistic people can’t prosper.

Announcement: 500

The King Means marks 500 bathroom monologues, folks. That's a lot. I'd like to ask what you all think of the site, its content, and if possible, your favorite bathroom monologue.

Also, you can now subscribe to the Bathroom Monologues. It's free, it's just one of those google features I didn't understand well enough to include until a couple of weeks ago.

Cheers,
John Wiswell

Bathroom Monologue: The King Means

When that impudent whelp completed all twelve trials, the King was forced to grant him the Princess's hand. His last trick was announcing, "By all means, marry my daughter."

No one knew it even was a trick until he objected at the ceremony.

"I object to these vows under the pretense that he has not married her by all means," said the King. “They can marry in the cloud castles, in the neighboring ruins and on my tropical islands. The setting is part of the means, and clearly they have not all been had. They can have the wedding she’s always wanted, the wedding I always wanted to see her have, and the wedding her dear departed mother would have wanted. Of course, we cannot know exactly what she would have wanted, so we will rely on the interpretations of all of her sisters, and her flower maidens, and her best friends, and her priest, and myself – individually. Perhaps at the pace of a wedding a day? By all these means, and by every other conceivable means of marriage, they must marry or never see their marital ceremony complete.”

“And we might elope,” muttered the princess, who had waited too damned long for her dashing, strapping young groom as it was.

“Yes, eloping!” Her royal father exclaimed. “And eloping to the countryside, and eloping to the country in the north, and eloping to the chapel just outside Barrenhaven. But don’t get any ideas about consummating that elopation, children, for it won’t be official on just the first try, and the punishment for deflowering an unwed princess is capital.”

His highness’s shameless literalism was beyond reproach to his royal status and his support for capital punishment.

They went through the rigors. He had them wed by means of mailing in paperwork from various districts. He had them wed by reciting various vows, and when they thought they had completed them all, had them wed by means of those same vows in sign language. The groom peevishly asked if they would have to say their vows by smoke signals, and got his foot stomped on by the bride right before the king ordered kindling.

Day after day went by, but their love was annoyingly strong. They continued to wait and go through new means. In turn the king hired writers, philosophers and puzzle-makers to come up with new means. The young couple married on the night of the full moon and on the night of no moon. They married at sea and on every island in the kingdom. They were wed by every priest, lawyer and nutjob the king could persuade out of an alley. The best was an obscure regional ritual of mediation with the Quakers of the countryside, forcing the couple to convince them of their love, which the princess likened to, “the Chinese water torture of marriage.”

Their love remained annoyingly strong as the king descended into brothels to calculate a final desperate means. As usual with his great policies, a concubine inspired him.

And so at the first day of winter they were married in different regions with surrogate partners standing in for the real lover. The princess married a surrogate groom, and the whelp married a surrogate bride – who happened to be a model for those top-shelf magazines, and had a fondness for clever whelps. Apparently the princess and the whelp mixed their signals, for while she immediately hit the road home, he took his surrogate on a two-week surrogate honeymoon.

They decided to see other people while he was prying the princess’s stiletto out of his forehead.

Bathroom Monologue: Capitalism at its Finest

Then
“Why do I want a digital TV? I already have a nice big screen.”
“Well the ten channels that get the digital signal come in a little clearer. The audio is cleaner.”
“It’s not really $900 cleaner…”
“That’s fine.”

Two years later
“Why do I want a flat screen TV?”
“You see, there’s less glare on the surface. No so many reflections.”
“I don’t really notice the glare on my current TV, and I definitely wouldn’t enjoy a totally shineless television $1,100 more than my current one.”
“That’s fine.”

Three more years later
“What’s a high def TV?”
“High Definition television.”
“Why do I want that?”
“On the right channels the colors are much richer, especially the blacks. You get a much clearer picture. Here, check out this BluRay disc.”
“What is a BluRay?”
“The next generation of DVD’s. You’ll have to buy them, too. And a new player.”
“Will it at least play my old ones?”
“No, but that’s okay, because they’ll look ugly on the HD set. You want BluRay. See?”
“Oh, you’re kind of right. I can see more of Robert Downey Jr.’s moles and kind of make out where they put the make-up on him. Also the CGI is more obvious. Huh. … This is actually making television less fun. And you say it’s $1600?”
“Only this weekend. It’s a special.”

Two years even later
“Why am I buying this TV, again?”
“Well next year they’re going to start broadcasting only in digital format soon, so if you want to watch TV you’ll need a new one. And the only digitals we really sell now are high def flat screens.”
“I guess I’ll take it,” he said, pulling out his checkbook. “You don’t know if they make special definition checks that make the same money worth twice as much, do you?”
“Not yet.”

Bathroom Monologue: “There are two kinds of people in this world…” –Many annoying people throughout the decades

-Those who are on fire, and those who are laughing
-Those who don’t get It, and those who don’t know It’s a topic
-Those with healthcare, and those who shouldn’t get sick
-Those who are employed, and those lazy bastards who are lucky we let them stay in our country
-Those who are dumb, and those who are dumb with accessories
-Those who have read all the classics, and those with good eyesight
-Those, and these… wait, I’ve mixed them up
-Those who truly believe, and those who believe in something else
-Those who torture alligators, and pussies

Bathroom Monologue: Please, tell me why I think this is funny

She was a woman so polite that she took her shoes off before climbing the guardrail. She was a woman so polite that she saluted the military hummer that passed her. She was a woman so polite that she apologized to God on the way down. She was a woman so polite that she made no mess. They never found the body.

Bathroom Monologue: Notes from a 27-Year-Old Political Vigilant

A painful truth has been revealed in this election cycle. Right-wingers have pointed out that we have only recently heard about Barack Obama. The best-informed of us only heard about him four years ago, and I only heard about him two years ago. That is scandalously little time to get to know a candidate. But when we look back on our national history we see a more insidious pattern emerging. I only heard about George W. Bush and Bill Clinton about a year before either man took office. And Ronald Reagan? I only heard about President Reagan three or four years into his term. More concerning, though, is that I only heard about Jimmy Carter after he left office. In fact, I only heard about every candidate for president before Carter after they lost elections or left the White House. I heard about Abraham Lincoln over a hundred years after he died. Maybe if he’d disclosed more about himself sooner he wouldn’t have been shot. George Washington? Andrew Jackson? Theodore Roosevelt? What did these men have to hide that made them remain silent, some for a full bicentennial before I even heard their names? It must have been insidious. That is why I am demanding every president be impeached immediately, until those not cowardly hiding behind the veil of their graves confess their conspiracy.

Bathroom Monologue: I don't want to be objectified...

Yes I do! I have spent my whole life wishing just one hot woman would treat me like an object! You think I do cardio four times a week for my health? I hate cardio! The crunches? Push-ups? Bench press? I want to be an object! Being a person is what makes me take the bus home alone and spend all weekend on X-Box Live. I don't want this! I want to be a Porsche, a stallion, or a foot-long hot dog. Objectify me already!

Ahem.

What I'm trying to say is that while your sex is objectified to excess, mine might be saner and happier if they received it a little more often. Things are different from our perspective. Done to you it's sexual harassment. Done to us it's confirmation that we aren't doing something horribly wrong. Don't go all phantom-feminist and deny it, either. I dare you to go smack ten men on the ass this morning and see how many sue.

Bathroom Monologue: OSC2

Shadow of the Giant Puppet Hegemon is an unconventional parody about giant puppets that don't care about the strings of other toys. They maneuver themselves unilaterally, not caring for the will of other game nations given their fast rate of growth. The puppets will continue to grow to the age of twenty-five, at which point they will pop in a bubble of angst and sawdust. One of the smaller puppets is fixed on becoming a real boy, only to hit the fourth wall and be told he will never pull that Pinocchio trick because child prodigies don't act like him in the slightest, and frankly his characterization would be annoying even if he was middle-aged.

Bathroom Monologue: OSC1

Speakers for the Dead is an unconventional parody wherein the protagonist, Beginner, hooks up stereophonic speakers to the graves of various aliens in order to interpret their culture and say lots of things that will sound profound to teenagers that think all Sci Fi is deep shit.

Bathroom Monologue: Enchanted Armor

But most of the meteorite metal was used to build a sacred suit of armor for Yas Hathan. It covered every joint, and though thin, no blade or arrow could pierce its breastplate. When he walked into battle it glowed with a pale silver light that tripled his strength. Yas Hathan felt so empowered that he would not remove the armor, even in bed – and there are numerous apocryphal stories suggesting what the armor tripled there. He wore it to court and weddings, to feasts and funerals. When the neighboring Kyle Empire finally relented and signed an armistice, Emperor Kyle demanded he remove the helm and look him in the eye, ‘lest they fight to the last man. Yas Hathan tried, but found the visor stuck to his cheeks. He struggled with his gauntlets, but felt no flesh beneath the metal plates. The city alchemist used a bent light to examine inside the grates of his helm and reported the armor had not only bonded with his body, but replaced his skin whole, and that there was no way of telling how deeply it had gone. Mortified, he wandered his halls aimlessly, scaring away his servants and family. They heard him cry that he felt his blood slowing, and his heart turning to iron. His oldest boy came down to check on him but could not find the old man – at first. That night they recognized the hall had an extra suit of armor, heavier than the rest. The conqueror has served as a great tourist attraction in the region for two hundred seasons since then.

Bathroom Monologue: Thinking over what to say when mom tells me she wants to date again

Date me? No? Then it sounds fine. It’s been years! And the woman next door was totally looking you over. If you go lesbian it’ll take care of any Daddy Issues I might have. I hear women are more sensitive than men anyway. Don’t have any empirical evidence of it, but it’s a rumor. You can date any woman you want, but leave the under-25’s for me. Men? Well, if he mows the lawn. And make sure he’s rich. And generous to his step-children.

Bathroom Monologue: “Politics is for the moment, but an equation is for eternity.” –Albert Einstein

OR, ‘Lest We Forget that NPR would be Knee-Deep in Crap Without a Plumber

I cannot appropriately express my disgust with this in a single visit to the bathroom. I think this is the third month this notion has followed me in here. I know that we’re all insecure in our occupations and pursuits, and that we’ll constantly try to build ours up at the expense of others. Perhaps I just didn’t notice it when I was young, but it appears that self-validation increasingly comes at the expense of others in our world culture. Wasn’t there an age when we fingerpainted just for the heck of it and not because it was more virtuous than playing on monkey bars?

Rebelling to prove yourself damages someone else. We beat you in that war. You beat us in that space race. Hoo and hah, it sucked to live in Strasbourg. Now yes, a really strong scientific theory will outlast this year’s farm subsidies. But seriously: the prevention of war? Ending poverty? Directing rescue workers in the middle of natural disasters? These things are inferior to your lab time?

I just read Stephen Hawking say the human spirit will shrivel if we find all the answers, but lucky us, we’ll probably never find all of them. I’m not Hawking. I’m a fan of Hawking, and a fan of science. But if you think you’ve found all the answers and feel your soul withering up, then Jesus, Mary and Darwin, go help people! Either use your amazing knowledge to design the next energy efficient building or weather-resistant crop, or get out of the library and carry medicine into war zones. You’re momentary too, and people are suffering this moment. There are myriad ways to help the human body and spirit – I had my will to live restored at 13 by novelists I’ll never meet, and there were other thirteen-year-olds rescued by school councilors, police officers and antibiotics. If directly helping ever appears meaningless to you, your world doesn’t deserve algorithms anymore.

This is big hurdle our generation has to get over, and one no generation has cleared to date. You do what you love and let others pursue what they love. If it’s a hobby and your job merely sustains it, then fine. But some people love pulling the numbers together in long equations. Some people want to build roads in broken nations. Some people tell stories. Importance in these matters is arbitrary, and arbitrary matters are downright painful to compare. Are we going to climb into an MRI, and whosever pleasure center glows the brightest wins? I refuse to put a decimal point on my soul. More, my novel does not need to be more important than your race for the Senate. We desperately need good storytellers, good journalists, good scientists, good politicians and a good many other people who are good at a good many other things. More, we need to stop measuring each other by paychecks, notoriety, and this idiotic idea that a pastor or philosopher is more important than a biology teacher or a branch manager. It’s not a matter of being more important. It’s a matter of importance.

“Utopian bullshit,” you say? I say the feces in Utopias smells sweeter than the flowers of a world of dueling roses and orchids.

Bathroom Monologue: Acronyms for “Acronym”

-Anonymous Carriers Resting Outside New York Motels
-All Credited Returns Of N Yugoslavian Medicine
-Always Creep ‘Round Our Neighbors’ Yard Moss
-Any Creature Resembling Our New Youth Marchers
-Assistant Corporal Requires Other Naked Yacht Monsters
-Assholes Cry Relentlessly Over… Never You Mind
-Alternating Current Resides On Network Y Motherboards
-Aggressive Criminals Rowing Onto Nefarious Yellow Moats
-Attention Collecting Robots Overtake Networks (and) Your Mind

Bathroom Monologue: Some Say It Was a Fig

There were a lot of gods in that Garden, though only one got much press. Admittedly the One was an impressive example, but there are rumors He had something to do with the writing of the ensuing book, so other gods get a little testy when you bring it up. There was, for instance, the god of apples. No, not Apollo – this god wasn’t a franchise whore. He only did apples. He imbued them with a sense of balance, the capacities for friendship and love, for reason and compassion, for sympathy and softness. All those miracles and more he put into the rind of that famous apple. And then those ungrateful kids didn’t even finish it. Pity for them, for if Eve had eaten just one seed, his spell would have cleared up that ill-evolved menstruation cycle of hers. Oh well. He could always try something on the herbivores.

BM: “"The Graysons" will follow the world of Dick "DJ" Grayson before he takes on the iconic Robin identity and aligns himself with Batman.” –Variety

Okay, fine. I’m doing a show about little Eddie Nygma, an aspiring crossword puzzle writer. Great grades in Math, so-so in English until he’s turned on to mystery novels. His younger brother is a stand-up comedian, and his older brother nobody talks about – lives in an insane asylum due to some kind of bipolar disorder. We’ll save the reveal for a season finale. The show will be chock full of unattainable romances. Essentially every episode or season should have Eddie falling in love with, being denied by, and vengefully discovering the hurtful secret of some other lady. Cast the females straight off of Suicide Girls. The more unattainable the better, especially as Eddie begins to unravel their personal mysteries, like Selina not really hitting a growth spurt over summer vacation, if you know what I mean. And oh, the ass-kickings. I’m figuring every girl who utterly denies him and is then dissected by his vengeful analysis (what’s better than outing the girl who scorned you as a bulimic?) will thoroughly wreck him. Eventually he starts falling in love just for the secrets he’ll attain. Instead of covering his notebook with hearts, he covers them with question marks, and then we can sell them on the site shop!

Bathroom Monologue: Mini-Respons-alogues, OR, I’m Serious, Five Minutes

Sometimes my response to a stray comment, line or road sign is very short. I’ll take it to the bathroom and finish my response in a sentence or two. Probably more than a thousand of these have been discarded over the years. George Carlin inspired me to write some of them down.

Position: “I like to play in other people’s danger zones.” –George Carlin, The Aristocrats
Response: That’s fine so long as you’re the one who gets hurt and you don’t sue.

Position: "What is a stranger doing in a strange land?" -Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Response: Being a stranger. It's the only place he can be such a thing. If he wasn't here, he might be familiar.

Position: “Ultimately, there may be a single equation (perhaps no more than an inch long) that will unify the entire theory.” -Michio Kaku, Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory
Response: How small a font can I get away with?

Position: “Ultimately, there may be a single equation (perhaps no more than an inch long) that will unify the entire theory.” -Michio Kaku, Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory
Response: Solved! What? You didn’t say anything about legible handwriting.

Position: “Ultimately, there may be a single equation (perhaps no more than an inch long) that will unify the entire theory.” -Michio Kaku, Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory
Response: 2 + 2 = ?, interpreted abstractly.

Position: "I hold truth like a torch." -Akira Yamaoka’s “Rain of Brass Petals” on the Silent Hill 2 Soundtrack
Response: On fire, held as far away from the face as possible.

Position: “Physicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter are to write a science book for children which will be "a bit like Harry Potter", but without the magic.” -BBC
Response: Oh, a soap opera?

Position: “I could care less about ____.” –Various
Response: If you could care less than you do right now, then you care. That’s the opposite of saying you don’t care. I could care less about people not paying attention to the words they use.

Position: “Abortion hurts women.” –Bumper sticker, Volkswagon
Response: Ow!

Position: “Germans are the laziest country.” –One of the thousands of bleeding idiots who just have to participate in debates via Youtube comments
Response: Any country that has so much as one person who will argue politics, religion or culture via Youtube comments is automatically disqualified from being the best country in the world. The bombing will begin in five minutes.

Bathroom Monologue: Next, Giant Scorpions

Stu: Get up.
Spider: I was just chased for twelve miles by giant wolves. I never want to get up again.
Stu: You have to. Giant snakes are attacking the house.
Spider: What are the odds?
Stu: It happened, so 100%.
Spider: Is that how it works?
Stu: Well, there are two ways of looking at probability. You could form an algorithm out of all the cases of people being chased by giant wolves and then by giant snakes, and take into account habitats and how the two problems might be linked such that you have a probability quotient of something like zero point one three to the negative thousandth power percent. Or you can take into account that something does or does not happen, and thus has a zero or one hundred percent chance of happening.
Spider: Interesting. But now my hair is on fire.
Stu: We should go.

Bathroom Monologue: A Satyr

“Satyr” is Redcliff’s most ham-handed and metafictional play, a satire of satirists. It follows four popular playwrights and authors in their stormy friendship, and exposes the unimpressive inspirations and petty observations that begat their great works. The more moral two of the writers, Tmir and Ymir, begin in the arts with great optimism, but see all their attempts at originality and hope dashed by the capitalist and soulless arts industry.

They meet their grade school friends, Satyr and Samid, for drinks one night. Satyr and Samid have also entered the arts and are experience great success in satire and polemics. The two are completely jaded against society and mock Tmir’s idealism.

“You can barely pay the rent with your ideas, while I could buy your entire building tearing them down,” laughs Satyr. Ymir stands up for him, but Tmir becomes despondent. That night, drunk and disillusioned, Tmir writes a furious play about the unfairness of society and mails it before he sobers up. He is stunned to find it is accepted for production.

The rest of the play follows Tmir, Satyr and Samid’s rise in popularity. Act 3 opens with Tmir and Samid receiving literary prizes, and we overhear the end of the host’s introduction, lauding them as the luminaries of their generation. Tmir is so wealthy that he supports Ymir, who has still yet to publish anything or compromise his ideals. Satyr frequently browbeats the idealist poet, and does it again at the celebration, saying, “Because the world is hard and a few good writers have already gone to the trouble of telling a few good stories, we can riff off of for the rest of our lives. The groundwork for complaining has already been done. We’ve only to drop some bricks.”

Unfortunately this is said within earshot of the press, and combined with some of Satyr’s other public indiscretions, damages his reputation. He is forced to move in with Tmir, with whom he has several arguments over over the purpose of social criticism: Tmir reveals that underneath everything, he still wants to reform the world (hence why he took Satyr in), but Satyr exposes that it doesn’t matter what lies beneath the critique because nothing has changed as a result of their work, other than “the clothes we can afford and the phrases some angry sheep use to disparage a thing – they never change the thing itself.” The argument goes from political to sociological to psychological, with the two increasingly suggesting (and later simply stating) that the other is bitter because of his own worthlessness, not the defects of the world. Tmir nearly jumps off the balcony, and minutes after Satyr talks him down, tries to throw Satyr off (since, “Saving me was the first selfless thing you’ve ever done, and if you’ll never do another, you may as well go now!”).

Ymir watches the entire exchange, drunk at his writing desk in the corner.

Tmir spends the rest of the night writing a scathing play that will roast all of Satyr’s values. He is going to mail it the next morning when he encounters Samid, who says Satyr spent the entire past evening writing the same thing about Tmir and has already mailed it. Tmir breaks into the post office at the lunch hour to find and destroy the manuscript, but is stopped by Satyr, who came to do the same thing to him. The two spar verbally one last time, quoting from their own one-night plays as they wrestle, until both realize their plays were quite bad. Each man takes his own manuscript back home, deflated and disheveled.

Tmir and Satyr return home to the surprise that Ymir has finally sold something – not a poem, but a play. The final act sees Satyr, Samid and Tmir attend the opening night, with Tmir and Satyr sitting on opposite sides of the room. The writers quietly watch the play, which sounds very familiar. It quickly turns out that Ymir adapted Tmir and Satyr’s argument on the balcony verbatim. Tmir and Satyr slowly realize this, perking up in their chairs, then sinking down to hide in them before the curtain comes down.

Critics were kind to the play largely out of respect for Redcliff’s reputation, but Bartholme Gorsky has asked, “If the point of the play is as straight-forward as we think, then why did Satyr have all the good lines?”