Bathroom Monologue: Wrath of the Writer

Shirley Porter was an obsessive writer, and her worst tick was a psychotic inability to handle anyone reading anything she’d written until it was done. The characters needed to be developed and the dialogue polished, the prose made immaculate before it could be understood. If she printed something out in the library she would hover over the tray to block errant glances from critically observing a stray sentence. She password protected her PC, bolted the tower to the desk and locked all her papers in the drawers of her desk.

When Shirley suspected a houseguest of sneaking a look at her new manuscript she fretted, and when she reviewed the manuscript and found a typo he might have read, she went berserk. She cornered him in the kitchen and interrogated him with a butter knife.

His promises of not seeing it didn’t relieve her. They merely made her suspicious of all her friends.

Really, she had no idea who was trustworthy. How many had actually seen early drafts of her work without admitting it? How many would silently judge her in the future?

So Shirley tested them.

She placed copies of her latest short story in every room of her house and left them untended. She didn’t mention them. She left them unattended and often walked out of a room, leaving a friend or two alone with those perfectly normal copies.

Perfectly normal copies laced with perfectly normal cyanide.

"Theorobotics" in Alien Skin this April

The Bathroom Monologue, "Theorobotics," was accepted for publication in the April/May issue of Alien Skin Magazine. This is a new version of the monologue. And yes, "Alien Skin" is the most porn-sounding group I've been accepted by yet, but they've published the likes of Orson Scott Card, so they're also the biggest. The biggest and most porn-sounding.

You can check out Alien Skin here. I will be happy to autograph it if you mail it to me, as I maintain the policy that anyone sweet and demented enough to pursue getting my autograph ought to have it.

The sick, sad world of Wile E. Coyote, OR, In the car with a friend monologue

Coyotes thrive in many environments, including in the reservation near the house I grew up in. There they attacked and ate wild turkeys, any birds of flight that stayed near the ground, house cats, and even each other’s young. That potential for cannibalism suggests why Wile E. is alone in the desert. But coyotes being able to live in ecosystems other than the desert suggest he could eat creatures other than that roadrunner. Furthermore, Acme is not only a mail-order hardware store. There was an Acme supermarket near my grandparents’ when I was a kid, which always left me feeling he could order some cereal or beef jerky in bulk if he wanted. No friends, we are left with the portrait of a coyote that doesn’t need to eat the roadrunner for his survival – he needs it. Perhaps the roadrunner is the begotten child of Jezebel, and will bring upon us the darkest of times. Perhaps Wile E.’s sister, Shirl E. Coyote, is suffering from a rare disease that can only be cured by an extract of the roadrunner’s bones. Of course he fantasizes about eating the roadrunner from time to time. He’s a natural carnivore. It’s like me not having a certain occasional fantasy if I keep chasing a pop starlet around. But did you ever stop and think for a moment why such a genius so desperately employs one single plan after one single plan, never saving them up to create an inescapable obstacle course? It’s not for a one-course meal of stringy roadrunner meat. It’s for his sister’s well being. Wile E. Coyote is an altruist.

Bathroom Monologue: Don’t Take the Lord’s Name Intravenously, OR, Did you catch the pun in my timestamp?

Toby slammed on the breaks and gritted his teeth at the jackass in front of him.

“Jesus!” he hissed. What was that idiot thinking, stopping short on a freeway?

“Yes?” asked someone in Toby’s passenger seat. That was odd, since he was commuting alone.

He looked over and saw a bearded man in a blue robe. He was already buckled in.

They stared at each other for a moment before the bearded man repeated, sounding a little annoyed, “Yes?”

“I… uh…” Toby stammered. He suddenly wished he hadn’t taken his mother’s rosary off the rearview mirror. “I didn’t mean…”

“Of course you didn’t.”

The bearded man rolled his eyes. Then he disappeared.

As Toby tried to fathom what had just happened, he noticed the car in front of him had also vanished.

Bathroom Monologue: Genre

To many people, “genre” just means one kind of story that can be told in a medium. Comedy, Drama and Romance are genres. But there is also a malign use of the word, often with a capital letter. This is Genre, which is singular but somehow connotes three things: Science Fiction and Fantasy, even though they’re constantly at odds, and Horror, even though many scary things are not the least bit fantastic or reliant on science. They form an ugly lump. Sometimes speculative fiction and alternative histories are part of the lump, as they are merely fantasies set here instead of a made-up world, but sometimes a few are excluded from the lump. Philip Roth does not write Genre, even when he makes a celebrity pilot beat FDR for the presidency. Why? This is where the membrane of segregation bursts, poked and punctured by the people who erected it. When Michael Chabon or Cormac McCarthy write something that belongs in Genre but hemorrhages out, you begin to realize it’s a silly and insulting creation. And when you realize just how many things hemorrhaged out of there, or have somehow never been put in there in your lifetime despite belonging, or are in there and don’t belong, you may come to think like me. You may come to think that my make-believe is not worse than yours.

Was there a bitterer passing of an author this decade than Kurt Vonnegut, famed for smart Science Fiction? Perhaps the greatest living poet in our language, Seamus Heaney, spent years translating Beowulf and Philoctetes– one the original classic of our tongue about a dragonslaying hero, and the other a play about improbable survival, magical occurrences and a cameo by Hercules. They are not exempt from Fantasy just because they’re old, especially not after a fresh re-write. Fast forward centuries and you’ll find that perhaps the most commonly referenced piece of politically critical fiction of the 20th century was George Orwell’s 1984, the quintessential speculative SciFi jaunt?

When you look at the BBC’s list of the hundred most beloved novels from 2007, what do you find at the top? Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials and The Chronicles of Narnia. And who were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis but professors of Literature and Philosophy at Oxford, who decided to spend their time in Fantasy steeped in mythology? And what is mythology, but that substance Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell observed was essential to the healthy mind? If it is that, then mythology is at least the fundamental make-believe, upon which you will find nearly all old-world classic literature stands. If you would like to take the conceit out of English, I’ll let you take it up with Homer and Virgil before the gates of Hell.

And don’t say, “That’s Europe.” In this hemisphere, Time Magazine put a comic book as one of the hundred greatest novels of the 20th century. Our literature grew out of fertile imagination and folklore. We needed giants and their blue oxen buddies for a new oral tradition before we could have a new print tradition. Perhaps you will say Washington Irving was our first author in that print tradition, he who told stories about time travel, ghosts and talking books. Or perhaps you will say Mr. Irving was too European in his prose and instead elect Mark Twain as our first – but if so, please regard his tales about talking birds, an engineer traveling back to Camelot, and a vengeful corpse in search of its golden arm.

And if Mr. Irving is indeed too European for you, please pay mind to the Europeans and their historically inaccurate classics about King Arthur, Jeff Chaucer’s opus of impossible and obscene anecdotes, and Bill Shakespeare’s Macbeth chatting up witches. We look to that continent and see the abyss peer hatefully into us, and yet we can still make a man dressed as a bat the number one movie in the world, if we’re smart enough to have him fight a clown.

Even without its roots running quite as deep as Fantasy, Science Fiction is no ignoble playground. Otherwise Michio Kaku wouldn’t have written a book explaining what of their elements might be plausible, and Stephen Hawking certainly wouldn’t have played poker on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Brilliant scientists have come to terms with our modern make-believe, so why can’t the psyche of the English language?

It is in the psyche of our letters, and largely thanks to an A-B argument. Opinions have been polarized, such that it must be A or B. These arguments are usually at (or near) the center of frustrating conflicts.

Here, A is stories for story sake, characters you want to follow, interesting action, rising interest and climax. A is real narrative that captivates someone who has seldom visited the art form before.

Here, B is stories for art sake, with themes that transcend action, tangents from what is necessary to develop the story, unanswered questions and ephemeral wisps of words that leave the audience thinking instead of following.

A is putting what makes fiction meaningful for its characters first. B is putting what makes fiction meaningful for its readers first. A asks. B challenges.

In short, A is garbage and B is propaganda. They are worthless independent of each other, as one is base and the other is all ulterior motive. Just because one requires more critical thought does not make it virtuous. Action must be meaningful to be worthwhile, but meaning cannot attach itself to a void. The value and art lies in the balance of these forces. They are not the two strands in the helix of good fiction; they are what gravity and heat are to life, pulling it together and making it move, both indispensable to its existence, and not objectively comparable.

The “Genre” genres, even after selling much of their premiere real estate to B, have been the unabashed home to A for a century. Most good fiction, in and out of the Genre slums, reconciles these forces, but much as modern America is populated by moderates and run by extremist idiots, so are American letters. So Stephen King’s The Stand was written off as schlock by snobs and too “I don’t know” by fools. The make-believe force is the first put-off, but the desire to entertain as well as think is what fuels the stigma.

My first mentor at Bennington College, Max Gardner, put it best: “A woman fucking her cow is Literature. A woman fucking her cow on Mars is trash.”

Bathroom Monologue: Consumer’s Advocate

Doing market research can be important. Now, if the Titanic is going down you shouldn’t weigh your options, consider which companions will give you more elbowroom in the lifeboat and which looks the sturdiest. Just get on the frickin’ boat and lower it before the fat and hysterical people get here. But if you’re buying an X-Box 360, you don’t have to run above deck immediately. Let the market test quality for you. Here “market” is a euphemism for “morons.” Let the market test the materials for you. Let them buy the first wave of game consoles, and thus let them explain to their insurance agent how trying to play Halo 2 caused their living room to set on fire. Let them deal with the bogus motherboards and chipsets that haven’t been quality tested enough (actually, they have been – the company just doesn’t care). Let the market buy wave after wave of these things, dealing with customer service and shipping defective parts back until the producer has figured out how to mass produce something that won’t explode and be shipped back to them for work that’s covered under warranty. As economics teaches us, the market will correct everything by letting everything go wrong for someone else. Meanwhile all those developers that had never even seen this processing hardware before will have had a few years to take it apart, and figure out how to make strong games for it, because let’s face it – there’s never been a slew of good launch titles on a console I’ve bought. It's like a market force or something.

All I know is that following my plan I come late, know what all the good games are, pay less for the machine, and know it will work. Those guys who beat me by standing in line for eight hours on launch day can gloat about how they’re hardcore, and their doctors can gloat about all the extra visits their blood pressure has warranted. God bless the market.

(But seriously, where are all the fricking Wiis?)

“Give me a lever big enough and I’ll move the world.” –Possibly Archimedes, possibly a clever student of his that got screwed on bylines, 2

Archimedes’s Hell is stocked with various giant levers. Some are made out of wet cardboard. Some are made out of crazy straws, and one is a long slinky. All he has to do is move the world and he’ll free-fall back onto earth. The aim of Hell is to torture, but as the great lever made of balsa wood proves, taunting is a back-up plan.

“Give me a lever big enough and I’ll move the world.” –Possibly Archimedes, possibly a clever student of his that got screwed on bylines, 1

Up on Limbo, the top floor lobby before Dante’s Hell, stood a physically infeasible package. They paged Archimedes for a couple of celestial hours before he came and signed for it. Despite its shape, one had to wonder what in the Hell it was.

Once unwrapped, it proved to be a six-billion-mile-long piece of Styrofoam. At the very middle was an inscription, reading: “HERE’S THAT LEVER. MOVE THE WORLD AND YOU GET AN APARTMENT IN PURGATORY.”

Bathroom Monologue: Things I do not miss about the beard

-Blowing my nose and then having to check in the mirror
-Tangles refusing to be brushed out and requiring banzai-like pruning
-Soup in the moustache
-How it kept my face warm in the winter…
-Milkshakes in the moustache
-Lint getting stuck and cemented in
-Providing me with an artificial jawline
-Random patches of salad dressing
-Lamentably eventful cunnilingus
-The stubborn bald patches
-Looking in the mirror early in the morning and amidst my shaggy hair and mangy beard, feeling I was the last of a tribe of ogres, risen to destroy the bathroom… fuck it, I’m growing it back

Bathroom Monologue: Hot Chocolate Religion

It was tough on the priesthood when the new canon prohibited alcohol. It caused the biggest divide not related to a war in church history. Those who didn’t flee for moister pastures were tasked with devising a new recreation of equal pleasure and, according to an anonymous cardinal, “one that never makes a spiritual leader throw up on the governor again.”

As usual, it was the monks who got around inconvenient canon. This time they concocted milk and crushed cocoa beans. Unlike ale and spirits, it was served warm, sweet and did not intoxicate – at least not in the normal sense. Yet the monks became quite giggly over it all the same, for a property of “special sweetness that enters the tongue and rolls both down the throat and up the nostrils, filling the mind as well as the kidneys.” Friars of temperance happily exchanged the recipe, and soon the fragrance of steaming chocolate as synonymous with monasteries as the fragrance of old paper and eunuchs.

But the monks did not popularize the beverage abroad. That was done by the female priests, a class of priests created just that year to help fill out the ranks of those who had fled to deism and pubs. Women in general adored the beverage as a relaxant and bought it up by the ten-pound bag, for as the first candidate for female bishop put it, “It’s too good not to be made illegal in the next canon.” Female priests claimed it made Sunday meetings more congenial, attracted more children to services, and “lessens the burden of the monthly period.”

Male priests, who were not even certain they had a monthly period to lessen still took to it out of temptation and began private rituals of savoring and competitions of brewing. The addition of the little competition aspect to the drink dramatically increased its popularity amongst men. Even the grumpiest pastors came around, when they realized it was fragrant enough to hide a shot of rum.

Bathroom Monologue: Cobalt

"Spider-Man, meet your new nemesis: Cobalt! … Cobalt! … The menacing… Come on! I got a glider and a blue goblin costume, because cobalts were a kind of goblins, but the word is also a shade of blue. It’s cleverer than Green Goblin, Hobgoblin, Grey Goblin and Green Goblin II, isn’t it? I mean, the meaning of the name is all compacted into one catchy word. Oh, stop laughing! Stop laughing or I’ll throw an indigo pumpkin bomb at you! … No, it’s not full of food coloring and death… Jesus, I’m going back to flipping burgers.”

Bathroom Monologue: Chera and Thermos

Chera was a minor heat deity, relegated to reigning over lava in the domain of a mountain god. She wanted nothing to do with the business. She had it for cold – for sturdy ocean gods and their swim-tightened bodies, and for snow titans, and all their ancient extreme sports.

To be fair, there weren’t so many hot-blooded gods running around that northern archipelago. It was frigid and if she was going to fall in love with someone, he was probably going to have a beard of icicles. She became smitten with Thermos, god of waves that are almost cold enough to freeze. It was a low-paying job and Chera’s father forbid the relationship, which was a popular occupation for fathers in the age of myths.

Yet there came rumors that Chera and Thermos were getting on anyway. At first Chera’s father set people to watch her. She didn’t seem bothered, and like any competent mythological father, he figured if she wasn’t bothered he hadn’t done his job correctly.

So he confined her abstract to his island, figuring she was finagling through the lava. The great god spent many days watching his shore, seeing frigid waves lap coastal lava flows. Often he would order them frozen out of spite, uncertain if any of this counted as lascivious. Yet they always thawed, and he could prove nothing. Was his daughter up to nonsense?

Not according to her. When her sister, the goddess of expensive pumice people sail far too far to collect, asked, Chera said she and Thermos had already had millions of children.

Her father exhausted himself trying to find evidence of this, so that he could stop it. He put out challenges and offered impossible rewards that inspired travails for some of history’s great heroes. None of them actually succeeded, though, and became great heroes in more worthwhile endeavors.

What exactly she was bragging about went unknown for four hundred years. Even four hundred years later science was still slugging – its gods were lazy and enjoyed providing a slow trickle of miraculous discoveries. The one that revealed the secret of their romance came when a scientist identified a kind of water smoke. He called it “steam.”

Bathroom Monologue: Born Too

“I wasn’t born too late. I wasn’t born too early. I’d have died of this condition in the time of the Stoics or Romantics. Hell, given the statistics I’d probably have died in childbirth and taken my mother with me. And I wasn’t born too early because the further we go the more close-minded we get. If I were born in a hundred years into some liberated world where you’re free to think anything and be demeaned for thinking anything else than the norms, I’d be as good as lobotomized. And if I was born in five hundred years it would be a miracle, and a short-lived one, as we’d have so ruined the planet by then that I’d be the second immaculate birth and the human only alive – a messiah who suffocated seconds later. Should I have survived in the past or future, I’d have different experiences, be conditioned different ways, and ultimately not become what I am. I couldn’t have been born any time but now, not too late or too early, because any other birth would have produced another person. I’m me and I’m now and I don’t fit and I’m fitting better than I ever could have.”

Bathroom Monologue: 200 Vs. 40 + 2

“What’s your favorite battle, Lo? You say you’ve served so many.”

“Oh, I have. My favorite would have to be this one on the coast. Joy and I built up a mean reputation on the coastline. Captains had nightmares about us. So when this standoff happened we traveled down together. One side had over two hundred troops, while the other barely had forty. We signed on with the forty.”

“How many made it? How bloody did it get?”

“It was bloodless. They gave up as soon as they heard both of us were on the side of the forty. We won without one head rolling. Innocents were saved.”

“And that’s your favorite memory of battle?”

“Oh yeah. I got paid in advance.”

55 Words is the Minimum and Limit for Pen Pricks Submissions

“55 words? 55 words?!!” John punched the keyboard. “That’s not even a round number! Not 50? Not 100? Not a range?”

He paced around his room.

“Intensely arbitrary! Ridiculous! It insults the author!”

John huffed. He went to the mailbox.

On the way back he had 49 words about a rabbit making her magician disappear.

Bathroom Monologue: Practical Werewolf Defense

The werewolves promised blood. Most townsfolk panicked and made silver bullets.

Dixie scoffed. “Melt down Nana’s silverware? For furries?”

Even skeptics rigged their yards with barbed wire.

“Not on my Kentucky blue,” she said, driving home from Target. “I can handle pups.”

When they howled at her door, Dixie switched on her new vacuum cleaner.

Bathroom Monologue: It was his turn

“Magician vanished in front of a full house. Been missing ever since,” Gordon explained, opening the interrogation room door.

“Only have one suspect. Got motive, but won’t say how she did it.”

On the stable was a white rabbit, sitting on a black top hat. When the detectives looked in she chewed her carrot sardonically.

Bathroom Monologue: To each his own triceratops

What do you do when you wake up and your street is overrun with dinosaurs?

Pedestrians crashed when the hadrasaurs herded. The cops tried shooting to scare off an allosaurus. It went so poorly it got on TV. Mom had a nervous breakdown, the most popular response.

To each his own. I got a saddle.

Pen Pricks Week

In 2008 a small site of microfiction rose and fell. It was Pen Pricks, devoted to stories of 55 words. Not one more, not one less. It drove me insane until I submitted to them. They promptly went out of business. I take full responsibility.

So for the rest of the week I'll post the three stories I'd intended to submit, and on Friday there will be a little bonus 55-worder that they probably wouldn't have appreciated.

This little form; what a sad little country, without territory or name.

I guess we’re still looking for a name for micro-fiction. Ignore that we can’t agree if it’s under a hundred words, exactly 150, a few hundred, or between 500 and 1000 words long – we don’t know what to call it. That’s a peculiar problem for a thing that can be identified by a word, like “micro-fiction.” Normally you consider that sort of thing named.

I like “micro-fiction,” but I guess the publishing industry is worried novels will be replaced by macro-fiction.

Super-short-stories reminds them of spandex.

Flash fiction makes me think of sticking a book in a photocopier.

I once had a professor walk into a classroom shaking his butt and singing, “Who writes short shorts?” Ironically, he went on to write Smart People.

If I can’t use “micro-fiction,” I guess I’ll go with shotgun fiction. I don’t know where it came from but I know that’s what I called narrative bathroom monologues when I started typing them out. It’s catchy, because anytime you’re in a room with a bunch of pent-up readers and somebody mentions any kind of gun, thoughts are going to happen. Attention is had. A shotgun has the one blast: stick in the shot, close the barrel, pull the trigger and bang. No extra rounds in the chamber, very few words, and the limit of only hitting whatever point and story you can hit with your rock salt prose. The worst drawback I can think of is somebody naming his micro-fiction sequel “double barrel shotgun fiction.”

Bathroom Monologue: Sandwich: Bread Vs. Meat

It’s true that if the bread is poor then you can pick out the meat and eat it, but seldom are a few slices of turkey satisfying, and eating straight sandwich meats does not a sandwich make. The bread is clearly superior because if it is good you can dump the meat in the garbage and rebuild a better sandwich with your remaining wonderful bread. But if the bread is poor? Then the whole sandwich adventure is doomed. No one wants to carry limp slices of processed turkey in search of new bread. The bread is the foundation of the sandwich, and hence the bread is more important than the meat when you embark in sandwichery.

Bob bless you.

Bathroom Monologue: There’s no war like

The snowmen crushed the wolfmen. It was barely even a battle, really. Have you ever hit a dog in the nose with a snowball? Well then you know why the snowmen won. It helped that everything except their coal eyes and carrot noses were covered under their version of Medicare; nearly every war wound was corrected by a national healthcare system of precipitation. It was a battle born out of centuries of their ancestors being peed on, something they could stand no longer. And when the militant snowmen were through the wolfmen, they set their sights on their vilest oppressors: ploughs. When the county officers reached the parking lot they’d find every last truck in smoking ruins, each with a corncob pipe stuck in its tail pipe.

Bathroom Monologue: So little time

Shrinking is one power I’d never tell anyone I had. Invulnerability or Hulk strength would be made public immediately as I abused the crap out of them, but shrinking? I’d just live a normal life, occasionally crawling into Swedish volleyball lockerrooms and appreciating the view. Every few weekends I’d rent a boxset of DVD’s, buy a tootsie roll, and just live off of the damned thing until Monday morning. The savings I’d have on consumption would be amazing, and do you know how good my surround sound would be at six inches tall? And sometimes I’d randomly abuse it to hide when my manager came through the office or someone was looking for a ride. Maybe even to screw with the secretary at the dentist’s.

Bathroom Monologue: Return of the King Jr.

"I had a dream. Then I had a funeral. Now I have a 2x4 and I’m here to kick some ass. One day white children and little Negro children will play together, but their parents’ asses are mine!"

Bathroom Monologue: She Danced

She danced like no one I’ve ever seen. She made me a fan of ballet inside of one minute. You ever stick your hand out the window of a car and wave it up and down in tune to the breeze? Like it’s a wing in the breeze, or part of an invisible current? You ever done that when you’re tired and your defenses are down, and you find that feeling becomes more important than steering the car? No, you’d never admit it, but I do that. And watching that princess bound and dip like she didn’t have a backbone, it was like watching another person perform the feeling I get in my hand. She wasn’t lithe, but the way she moved would have made a girl made out of wires jealous. It was the only real elegance I’ve ever seen, and so sensitive to the way the music was going that I never would have believed she was improvising, and I never could have believed anything else. I knew right then on the edge of my chair that this was the woman I was going to marry.

It’s a lucky thing I fell in love with her at first sight, too, because Goddamn, she was a bitch. Snuck into the reception early intending to gush at her and discovered the princess chewing out the horn section for being a quarter-beat off. Tried to bring her a glass of bubbly and she blew past me, bumped the glass and spilled it all down the side of my jacket. Didn’t even look back.

Few minutes later I sidled up next to her and she handed me a glass of bubbly. I thought it was an apology. Ten minutes later she turned, looked surprised I was still there and set to chewing me out. Thought I was staff and intended me to take her stale drink to the kitchen, not sip it and listen to the conversation.

That I didn’t smack her across the hall is evidence of love at first sight, or at least extremely patient lust. She was the kind of woman you had to hate, because even with her lips curled and her words condescending, she was beautiful. Normal woman, even a pageant queen, looks like a vulgar animal when pissed off. I guess she’d been in a tiff so often that beauty had settled down and conformed over her angry features as well as the serene ones. The ones she had when she danced.

I tried to weasel into her conversations, but my ignorance of the fine arts served me poorly. I was verbally spanked on the history of dance, and then on the history of sculpture. My attempt to make amends with another flute of bubbly was met with a tirade on the glass not being chilled enough. Overheard her saying she didn’t want to talk to any more of the girls, so when I saw a couple approaching I warned them – but warned them in earshot and was rebuffed and poked in the chest until I was pressed up against the wall. Banging into the wall did something in my head, though, and I ripped off my jacket, still wet with her stale drink, and tossed it in her face.

Even then, I wasn’t really mad. I just wanted to see how mad she’d get at a legitimate provocation. The reaction? Adorably furious. Chewed me out so harsh her flunkies retreated, and the rest of the night when she got tiffed over something she'd seek me out and blame it on me, or at least send me a glare across the floor, like I was an investor in everything that got under her skin. No doubt in my mind that’s how I landed the first date.

Bathroom Monologue: You had to be somewhere

"Did you know that before you were born your mother stood out in the freezing temperatures for sixteen hours just to stand and watch the first black president get inaugurated on a widescreen television next to the Mall of America? She wept with joy, and the tears froze on her cheeks."

"Were you there too, daddy?"

"Hell no. I watched it at home, then got drunk and played X-Box."

Bathroom Monologue: St. Peter, with a Brooklyn Accent, Explaining Gender to Unborn Souls

“The first package is a little more robust than the second. It comes with multiple orgasms, at the price of bleeding from the uterus monthly for a while. There’s a chance of self-esteem issues, weird body shapes, and, uhm… lemme se… ah, pregnancy, which will destroy your figure and hurt like a bitch, but creates the miracle of life and in many places comes with a paid maternity leave. It’s a balance thing. The second package lets you piss standing up. Pick a door and you’ll be conceived shortly.”

"Here Lies John Wiswell" on Flashshot

"Here Lies John Wiswell," about the demise and deceptions of yours truly, is featured on Flashshot today. You can take a read here: http://www.gwthomas.org/flashshotindex.htm

Bathroom Monologue: A Good War

The Owls didn’t see many good parts of the war, but they were there. Pietro and Ilyana attended one of these brightspots, a hotly contested zone of rocky hills and dense trees that no cavalry could successfully charge through, in either direction. Hundreds were dispatched to units on both the Ogrish and the Rin sides. They had entire depots of archers, more than in any other conflict of the war. It was all they trained, and any aspiring archers went to that front because in a giant woods they weren’t in much demand and took work where available.

But when those aspiring archers reached the front they found an unorthodox battle playing out at each skirmish. The Rin would line up on their ledges, and the Ogres would peak from behind the thickest trees. They would unleash three volleys arrows in each other’s direction.

Not at each other, no. The Ogres pelted the bottomsides of the cliffs, and the Rin released not just over the heads of the Ogres, but over their trees entirely. Then they went to supper.

They were missing on purpose, en mass, at every skirmish. At some time two squads had apparently realized they were missing badly and decided to keep doing it, and the deathless game spread to the whole front. Many times one side would shoot the arrows that had been launched at them the previous skirmish.

This lasted for two tours of duty, until a third Owl, Erik, arrived and reported his side. The Rin sent a new field commander, a real fascist whose first commands were to charge.

It had been a good war until then.

Bathroom Monologues: Some Anthropological Notes

You can lie on a mattress in a store to test it. It turns out, though, that you cannot lie down on one for nine hours without expecting disturbance, and the manager will take offense if you respond to his demands for you to leave the premises with a request for scrambled eggs.