Inception's Secret

There has been considerable debate over Inception. Was Mal real? How many dreams were going on? How come I dream about Mom struggling to open peanut jars instead of skiing down sniper-infested mountains? I have a theory that can answer these questions and more.

At the outset Cobb is within Saito’s dream, which is secretly within another architect’s dream. If you follow Cobb carefully through this dream mansion you’ll notice something about the glass doors on the upper floor.



The molding is intricate and familiar. Upon review, it is almost identical to the Legendary Pictures logo. Legendary Pictures is a film company established in 2005.



We follow Cobb out this window and through the next two levels of dreams until Saito hires him to “incept” Robert Fischer. Fischer also seems familiar. At first I couldn’t place him– I don’t know many pretty boys who inherited billion-dollar companies. It only hit midway, when a bag is thrown over his head and chemicals dumped onto his face.



The head-bag is highly reminiscent of The Scarecrow in Batman Begins. The chemicals are a clue; Scarecrow used gases to induce mental states in his victims.



You’ll say these are coincidences. So a door in a dream looks like a symbol. So Fischer really reminds me of a supervillain. But before you close this article, ask yourself: have you really looked at Cobb?



That jawline. That face, desperately squinting to appear young and old at the same time. Haven’t you seen all his mannerisms somewhere before?

You have. According to its profits, you and everyone else on earth has seen Titanic, which features one “Jack Dawson.” The resemblance is uncanny, and becomes frightening if you watch Titanic all the way to the end and realize Dawson isn’t real.



This will seem insane to some, but I believe Cobb and Dawson are the same person. Further, I believe Fischer and Scarecrow are the same person, and that nearly everyone else in Inception is some kind of pretender. The reason you don’t understand Inception is not that it was all Mal’s dream, or five dreams within dreams, or psychic backwash from limbo. It is actually more bizarre than any existing explanation: some plotted concoction, complete with mass human conspiracy, dynamic lighting and artificial orchestra, the whole thing either given too little external construction such that elements fail to make sense, or given so much thought that we can’t grasp it. You might call it “a movie.”


All of the above images are the property of their related studios and filmmakers - if you believe they are from films.

Bathroom Monologue: Dialogue that sprang after hearing that Leo Tolstoy wished people only to write for posterity, never for their own times

The next guy in line was another overweight middle-aged man. Gloria checked her watch; only twenty minutes left until she could abandon this table and get drunk with the somebodies of this writer’s fair.

"I've got a crack of a deal for you," said the man, setting down a briefcase. He pulled out three reams of paper. Gloria tensed – another white guy with the next Fantasy epic, the seventh this morning.

She tried to sound professional when she asked, "What's the pitch?"

"Your company has printed more copies of Leo Tolstoy's books than any in history. The e-book releases have been brilliant."

At least he aimed higher than being the next Stephanie Meyer. That won him points.

"So you think you write like Tolstoy?"

"I wouldn't tell you if I did.” He patted his stack of papers. “You, and everybody in this building, is never to know what I write."

"Come again?"

"See, we must write for the future and only publish once we're dead. You must believe this because you've profited so much off of Tolstoy’s reprints. I embrace your ideology. For just $100,000 a year, I will hide all of my fiction. I won't even show it to my roommate. Upon my death, it'll be turned over to your publishing house. You'll have every word of it and can plan whatever release schedule you want, secure in the knowledge that no word of it was tainted with desire for fame in my own lifetime."

She leaned to the side. The next three people in line were teen girls dressed in black, who almost certainly thought they were the next Stephanie Meyer. Fine. Mr. Tolstoy had won himself an interview.

"Only one hundred thousand, you say?"

"Per year.” He smiled conciliatorily. “I eat a lot of fastfood, so it won't be that many years."

"So where did you get this idea?"

"For $250,000, I'll die tragically. Look at what posthumous buzz did for Sylvia Plath. It still works, too: The Dark Knight rode Heath Ledger’s corpse. You can paint me as severely tortured or cursed to live in a broken world. Whatever your house digs out of my manuscripts and thinks will sell."

Gloria tried to restrain her smile from leaving the polite zone. "It's against our policy to have writers kill themselves."

"Not a suicide!” he slapped his thigh like she was his best buddy. “I'm just saying I'll go places. Baltimore. Baghdad. Spraypaint in Singapore. If you've got a publicist I could even get into legal troubles, to set up a backstory. A couple of international incidents in China and I bet you'll recoup all your fees on me from the biopic."

"You think big."

"I've got to. I'm planning to write the great novels of the next generation, and they're not even here yet."

"And what do you predict is coming?"

"I can't tell you.” He smoothed out the top sheet on his ouvre. “The only way you'll know is by outliving me and reading my books. Or, watching the news. But if you play it right, I’ll be the news by then."

Bathroom Monologue: A Biography Inaction

Only a couple of them could say they'd heard of Gerard Blune before his family came to close the estate. Black cars streamed away from dusky doors, and a non-entity of a neighbor was done. For his life on Cairo Lane, Mr. Blune was only one more ugly car driving by at 5:30 and a reliable spring of peanut butter cups on Halloween. The rest of his life there was to be defined in the months after it ended.

The first snow fell a week later. Nobody shoveled the sidewalk and most were disgruntled to find the massive drifts plows had left completely burying their walkways. Previously neighbors assumed that the town shoveled it all out.

When the Route C school bus broke down, the PTA was disgruntled to learn that their yard had no mechanic on payroll. Apparently there wasn't any mechanic in the district licensed to service for that class of vehicle. Previously a G.H. Blune had done maintenance for free, maintaining his license at his own expense. One bus driver claimed the Samaritan had worked big vehicle maintenance during The War.

At the school play, one voice was missing in the typical chorus of laughter. People felt it where they didn't recognize it.

When ice took out the power in December, the neighbors waited for it to return. It was a bitter cold night before they realized no one called the outage in.

Opening night of the biggest movie of the year, one voice was missing form the typical chorus of gasps. More people felt that.

Spring came and the new man in that house didn't mow as often, nor as evenly. The lawn had once looked as manicured as a football field at kickoff. Neighbors on either side of the house picked up their lawn care in Blune fashion. They spited him so much that they almost made the mistake of not introducing themselves.

Bathroom Monologue: Colored Language

“Most of this rainbow is occupied. Blue language is profane. Purple prose is overwritten. Clearly that end is a slum of bad writing. But on the other side? Yellow journalism is jingoistic and biased. The Little Red Book is even worse, as is Pinko literature. Towards the middle are all things Green, environmentally safe and positive, but we don’t run an environmental organization. It’s unaffiliated. Off the spectrum you’ve got black and white, but in a postmodern landscape you don’t want to be accused of seeing things in black and white. Only orange and brown have no particular affiliations, so I guess the blog will have to be in those colors. Maybe we can define them as ours.”

Bathroom Monologue: Consultation on the Mystery Thief

Wesley waited for the security officer to crack a smile and confess that this was a joke. When the man didn’t laugh, Wesley opened the folder and read the report himself.

“So your intruder only comes at night, even though security detail doubles after six PM?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve got surveillance tapes on the river bridge showing he never takes it, even though that’s the only way to the highway, and that means he’d have to go through the ravine?”

“Yes.”

“And the only footprints you can find are in a third floor air duct that is so high up and so tightly closed that only a bird or a bat could get up there? You don’t think your mystery thief rides a flock of parakeets in there, do you?”

“No sir.”

“You’re absolutely certain it’s not someone on staff? You do cavity searches before they go home?”

“Yes. We've doubled the amount since the robberies and haven't found an ounce of the goods. The men hate it.”

Wesley winced. “They should. Because you have a lot of recording equipment to not catch even one photo of your mystery thief. You’re sure you don’t have just one, that you’re not showing me?”

“I’ve seen him. So have three others But he evades the cameras somehow.”

Wesley rubbed his eyebrows with thumb and forefinger.

“You’re being robbed by somebody who won’t cross water and can’t be photographed. Fine. You’ve got a vampire.”

He got up, dropping the folder onto the desk. When he reached for his briefcase, the officer asked, “Are you sure that’s the only explanation?”

“No,” he said. He walked to the door. “Your superiors could be playing a prank on me. That’s what I believe, but I’m just a consultant.”

Bathroom Monologue: No Taxation

At age 11, John proposed a tax plan where you only paid for what services you wanted...

For a while they institutionalized a “get what you pay for” system. It was supreme democracy. On your taxes everything was itemized. Don’t want to support deadbeats? You don’t pay for welfare. Who wants to build schools in Afghanistan? Cut that.

There was a surprising number of people who thought they could get by without police. Naturally you had minorities who were historically abused by them anyway, but there were many middle class and upscale people who didn’t check the box. There wasn’t going to be a sign on your lawn that you didn’t get 9-1-1 service, so nobody would know your house was vulnerable to robbery. The appearance of protection should have remained the same.

Hacktivists made a list. The same kind of people who, in the name of privacy issues, published whenever somebody said they were leaving home via Facebook or Twitter, got ahold of tax lists. There was an app to modify Google Maps (called “CopMap”) so that you could see all the unpoliced homes colored in ironic blue.

Robberies went up. They also went down. Statisticians still debate over the charts. Homes were more likely to be targeted for vandalism within 72 hours of a CopMap posting in most major east and west coast cities. Decreases in crime stats were pegged to all the people who realized nobody would come if they called for help; why report it when no one cared? And the complexity of the debate over drops in police misbehavior and brutality reports remains staggering.

It was worse for the people who paid. They expected all the same services. In fact, they expected better than the same, because a) they’d elected to pay, and b) people always over-expect from the government. But police departments tanked. They couldn’t fix vehicles or afford overtime. They couldn’t afford half-staff and there were major layoffs. Police Unions went on strike, but against who? Federal, state and city governments did not have the money they wanted.

Applications for security guards and security-related jobs shot up by 1,100% in the first year.

The people who paid actually didn’t get what they paid for, because they didn’t have enough money to support the system. Most systems had already malfunctioned on their meager fully-taxed budgets. On fraction-taxed budgets?

Gun sales went up, for personal and home defense. The profligation of firearms was not the deterrent the NRA wanted it to be. While there weren’t many police to take reports, people who arrived at ERs for “self-inflicted” or “accidental” gun wounds skyrocketed. They were furious to learn that funding for ERs had been consolidated under one of the boxes they hadn’t checked, and that most hospitals were no longer honoring uninsured emergency walk-ins.

The ER fiasco got a lot of attention. So did the collapse of the single-payer insurance system, which we’d only established recently. Only the military maintained operations, built on years of doing outrageous things with outrageously less money than you thought they were getting. So many things went awry that the police became a secondary issue, because they were who you called when something else broke.

The Weisman/Gladhart ticket rode to the presidency on the first-ever successful campaign of tax increases. They proposed them as small and strategic. They promised parts of tax forms would still be itemized. They lied. They had to.

Bathroom Monoloogue: ****ing Banshees

Tad licked his lips and looked across the dance floor. They could barely hear each other over the band, but Brian knew who his friend was talking about.

“She’s got a nice ass, man, but she’s a succubus. That’s ‘Do Not Enter’ territory. No way I’d hit that.”

“Hey.” Brian jabbed him in the side. “Firstly, you’re not going to approach Sheena because she’s my girl. Secondly, she’s not a succubus.”

“Whatever man. I’m just saying she’s killed her last three sack buddies. But if you say she ain’t a succubus…”

“She isn’t. She’s a banshee. And in the heat the passion she… screams.”

Tad clapped and bent over laughing, looking up at his friend.

“That it? For real?”

Brian shrugged. “Popped their ear drums and fried their brains. Three guys.”

“At once?” Tad hooted. “Girl’s wild.”

“You ass. No. Her first boyfriend, then the kind of guys who swoop in to pick off the girl in mourning. After her third time she took a vow of celibacy.”

“You ain’t hittin’ that?”

“You thought she was a succubus a minute ago!”

“Still. That’s mad crazy. Why even put up with that?”

“She’s got soul, dude. Like, traits. She’s funny. She’s taking an Italian cooking class. Stuff.”

“You’re lying. She got you under her song spell or something?”

“That’s sirens, you tool. She’s just… a change of pace.”

“You never do that?”

“I said! It’s not about that.”

“Fucking banshees.”

“I would but she’s got a vow of celibacy!”

As fortune would have it, the music ended in the middle of Brian’s sentence. So did his relationship to the banshee.

Bathroom Monologue: Are Videogames Art? Listing Curiosities

-The Mona Lisa never got a DLC Weapons Pack.

-A boy who spends all day reading literary fiction is attractive to girls. If he spends all day playing Braid, they wonder if he’s a hair stylist.

-Activision was making an action shooter game set in the infamous Fallujah conflict before public outcry made them cancel it. We have already seen several thriller movies set in the Iraq War.

-You can major in Southern Literature at college. You can talk about how JRPGs are too effeminate on a forum.

-Google “women authors” and there is only one picture of a naked lady. Google “women actors” and about half of the images show skin or are deliberately sexual in some way. Google “women videogames” and nearly every image is sexualized. There is also the image of a topless male action figure.

-There are hackneyed novelizations of movies. There are hackneyed videogame tie-ins of movies.

-Once I took a friend to see The Grudge. She curled into the fetal position in her chair and bravely watched the entire movie. Once I subjected the same friend to play Silent Hill 2. She made it across the introductory parking lot, where nothing happens, before throwing down the controller and screaming in fear that she could not do this anymore.

-There are a great number of metafictional novels. There are very few games about game theory.

-Director Guillermo Del Toro collaborated with Chuck Hogan to write The Strain, a trilogy of novels about vampires. Peter Jackson collaborated with Michel Ancel to make the King Kong videogame.

-With a pen and paper you can write a screenplay. With a digital camera you can shoot an indy film. With Sony’s Little Big Planet you can design your own levels. With Microsoft’s Kinect, you can paint on the television screen just by waving your hands.

Bathroom Monologue: Randy and His Maker

Randy and his maker rounded the furthest clouds. Cherubs jammed out on drums and acoustic guitars, and rivers ran among them to pour out as rain for the world below. It wasn’t exactly what Randy wanted from death, but it beat dying.

“So the one thing you can never forgive is denying you?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“Never? Even if they don’t mean it?”

Randy’s maker paused to tweak the third tuning peg on a cherub’s guitar.

“I don’t take it lightly.”

“What if it’s Opposite Day?”

Randy’s maker looked up. “What’s that?”

“You know. Opposite Day. You see a white cloud, you say it’s black. If it’s evening, you say it’s morning. What if somebody said you weren’t there on Opposite Day?”

“I’d forgive it.”

“But you never forgive it.”

“That’s right.”

“But you just said you would.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yeah you did.”

“No I didn’t.” Randy’s maker continued along the clouds. “It’s Opposite Day.”

“Oh, you’re good.”

"Headlights Go Out" at Thaumatrope

I had another super-short published at Thaumatrope recently. This one is about the old question: what happens when you turn the headlights on while traveling at light speed?

You can read it here.

Bathroom Monologue: Ranting Moon Hermit

“I should have seen it coming. You thought you were the center of the universe from birth. Humans said their hometown was at the middle of the planet. The sky was fixed over it your ground, or revolving around it. You had no evidence for it, but you were you and that’s all you needed. Evidence wound up saying you whirled around the sun and damned if it didn’t take an age for you to cave into it. But then? Why your sun was at the middle of the cosmos. You had God for a while and the first thing you did was put words in His mouth saying you were the owner of all the land, sea and other creations. He made everything, but you were His image, and His favorite, and His best. Eventually you cave into the evidence that you aren’t unique, that you’re one of a trillion results of the same evolutionary process, and that you evolved on a planet that wasn’t at the center of anything, and you still act like the whole universe is yours. Now you pretend that you invented meaning and right and wrong! That even if it isn’t about anything, it’s all about you. Yesterday you polluted your skies to yellow, and tomorrow you’ll strew trash all over Mars. This is why I’ve avoided you, and I’m not alone. What god, ghost or extraterrestrial wants to hear about “human rights?” You’re a fucking diva species. I’ve dealt with them before and won’t have them on my moon again.”

Bathroom Monologue: Finding Buddha in the Road, OR, “If you find Buddha in the road….” –Chinese Proverb

My teacher always said, “You’re not supposed to have teachers. The truth is already in you.”

But I kept visiting him, so he wound up saying other things. On that day, the thing that came to mind was, “If you find Buddha in the road, help dig him out.”

It came to mind because I saw a rotund man in an orange robe flailing his arms. He was buried up to his navel in gravel. I took him by the hands and jerked with all my might, but he would not budge. I thought him too hefty to pull free, but he explained.

“A nasty old philosopher stuck me in here. Said the only way out was the way that could not be known.”

“I didn’t think you were the sort to get into fights,” I said. “Or call people nasty.”

He folded his hands together. “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.”

“Oh, I don’t!” This was the first impression I wanted to make. “I mean, I think you are what you are, not what I think you are.”

“Then you think I am what I think I am. I am still bound within what you think of me.”

“But I only think you are what you think you are.”

“Do you think you know what I think I am?”

“No. That can’t be known.”

“Then why do you think I am whatever I think I am?”

“You shouldn’t be bound by other people’s conceptions. It’s your internal existence.”

I don’t think the Buddhism I’d picked up from a master who wanted me out of his house impressed this man very much. He started playing with rocks.

“What if I think I am whatever a third person thinks I am? If I then invest my identity in another, am I any longer what you think I am?”

“I swear, I don’t think I know who you are. You’re just the Buddha.”

“Now I believe you don’t know who I am, regardless of what you think. My name’s Qi Wei, not Buddha.” He scratched next to his eye, perhaps idle motion, perhaps drawing attention to his distinctly Asian features. “You know, he was Indian.”

It makes you feel very guilty, when you want to punch a man who is buried to his navel in gravel. I curled a fist, then released it and turned to walk away. Qi Wei let me get five paces before imparting something.

“But if I am the Buddha internally, and not Qi Wei as I espouse externally, then I am what you admire without you thinking it, and you would have met Buddha in the road and done nothing more than walk away. Can you live with that?”

“You said you weren’t him!”

“I also said not to believe in anything simply because you have heard it.” He picked a stone out of his belly button. “I’ve said that one more than once, over the years.”

A year later I read some Chinese philosopher commanding that if you found Buddha in the road, “kill him.” He must have met this guy, too.

Vote for A Necessary Getaway

While I've been away on vacation one of my stories was entered into a contest. A Necessary Getaway is about the secret origin of Santa Claus. Public voting for the contest is now open, so if you liked the story or would just like to support my writing, please pop over to The Other Side of Deanna and cast a vote.

Bathroom Monologue: What would you do if you could time travel?

John roamed around Super-Victorian London for a couple of hours, running on pure enthusiasm. Their force fields held back the putrid atmosphere and pumped refined oxygen into the streets.

But enthusiasm and raw oxygen can only keep a man high for so long. After the couple of hours his feet swelled up and his syndrome had him shaking. A visit to hospital was no good; language had so mutated that he couldn’t communicate, and as best he understood the nurses were unimpressed with his lack of an ID chip. Either that or they refused to service anyone who didn’t wear retro-Renaissance gear.

So he returned to the street with his faded Inu Yasha t-shirt and sat on the corner. He didn’t beg; it seemed these Super-Victorians pumped nutrients into their oxygen currents and he was left with a perpetually mildly sated belly. Less than a day with time travel, and John was doing what he would have done had he stayed in his present: sitting and thinking about weird things that would make no sense to anyone around him.

Bathroom Monologue: Feudal Zombies

Zombies have actually existed for centuries, they just weren’t famous because they were quelled so quickly. For instance, there were many cases of zombieism back in the European Feudal Era. The populace would freak out, but some knight would ride by in a few days and cleared out the pesky things. A knight, in chainmail or plate armor, is perfectly zombie-proofed. There’s nothing to bite on him. At worst the zombies would overwhelm him by numbers and knock him to the ground, but even then you had a dozen zombies milling around a tin with no can opener. So the knight would catch his wind in a few hours, and when it was opportune, skewer them in the head with his lance. The worst zombie-related losses in that age were some mediocre horses and the occasional man to heatstroke from waiting in a helmet too long. Even today it’s highly advisable, in case of a zombie epidemic, to contact your nearest Society of Creative Anachronism branch for help or job openings.

Bathroom Monologue: Hold Down the Fort, or, The Guardian’s David Mitchell hates the expression “Hold down the fort”

Recently David Mitchell of The Guardian asked foreigners to stop using the phrase “hold down the fort.” He did so at the behest of the Queen. Mitchell and the Queen don’t see the meaning in the phrase; “hold the fort” would mean keeping our location safe, but what was up with “hold down the fort?”

In the spirit of international brotherhood, I would like to explain the origin of this American phrase. I hope it suits newspapermen and royalty alike.

The 1800s were contentious times in the United States. You had the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and they even slipped a Spanish-American War right in before the century ended. There were numerous backwoods wars with Native Americans and lumberjacks, unofficial navel battles with France and the Mer-People, and a completely unsung war against sky hooligans.

Sky hooligans didn’t even have the decency to live on land. As such, they didn’t have a country that could be declared war upon like decent people. They stayed in their zeppelins, trolling over the great American frontier with anti-gravity cannons. One shot and whatever was struck floated heavenward. They stole Grover Cleveland’s one true love, our first two great national monuments, and the original biggest lake on the continent. That lake ascended, evaporated and became a monsoon on the far side of the world while we edited textbooks to say that Lake Superior had “always” been the largest body of water around. That was humiliating.

Davy Crockett was an avid anti-hooligan. He’d never encountered a thing he couldn’t grin out of the sky. Even eagles went bald from his grin, but these zeppelins would not pop. He refurbished Fort Ticonderoga as an anti-hooligan base, but they shot it and away it flew, with half of Crockett’s militia and most of the country’s primitive moonshine technology. Crockett was haunted for weeks afterward by the drunken singing of the sky hooligans, and it wasn’t just a mental thing. They actually followed him around the country singing bad bar tunes.

Crockett hatched a new plan when he refurbished Fort Sumter. There was still enough militia and booze to get a fight going, but he reached out for something more. Crockett invited Paul Bunyan, who was running for the Nevada State Senate at the time, uncontested in his race both because myths are very popular and Nevada wasn’t a state yet. Crockett offered him all the flapjacks he could eat in return for his services.

Now if you know anything about Paul Bunyan, you know the giant had an endless appetite. He ate breakfast for three days before going out to work in the morning. The entire militia had to give up their guns and pitch in on cooking his eternal breakfast.

The sky hooligans inevitably showed up and fired on Fort Sumter. To their shock, it wouldn’t leave the ground. At first they thought they were just wasted – but no, under Bunyan’s reality-bending mass, the fort simply would not leave the ground. It struck doubt into the hearts of their scientists.

While they struggled with the American giant, Crockett climbed the nearest structure and lassoed the zeppelin. A squad of privateers (legalese of the period for “licensed pirates”) scurried up the rope and brought the zeppelin down. The sky hooligans were arrested in short order, with a few getting parole in exchange for working with the space program.

Ever since, “hold down the fort” has been a saying in the U.S. I hope this clears up any confusion.

Bathroom Monologue: The God of Amusement

Normally a god patronizes his subject. Dionysus keeps men opening breweries. Ares seeds the world with wars. Cupid flutters around shooting hormonal girls with pink arrows. But the god of muses, usually called “A.,” is a rare sort of slacker god. His muses do all the work for him, sprinkling the world with sitcoms and big budget battle movies. Unlike the skyfathers and earthshakers, A. only gives his subjects suggestions and leaves it to them to get it done. In turn, the muses refuse to write or perform much of their own material, passing the buck on to humans. A. sets the example, and so can’t complain. What he wishes his muses would do is made pretty obvious, though, when you look at trends in teen fashion and the rise of pornography.

Bathroom Monologue: The Empress Could Use New Clothes

Alfred waved Mahmoud in. When his friend entered, Alfred looked around the streets, and sure that no one had seen, closed the door.

“What is this newest amazing invention?” Mahmoud asked sardonically, looking around the apartment. There were drop cloths and electrodes everywhere. On the left wall were a series of shower curtains and aluminum plates. “You’ve been up to something peculiar, I’m sure, but I can’t be away from Adeela long. The new ban talk has stirred up the old bigots.”

“This invention is precisely for the ban! I’ve been thinking about it on the weekends for months. You know I do my best work on the weekends. I want to support the Muslim community, though I myself am a pantheist.”

Unable to figure out all the materials in the apartment, Mahmoud shrugged. “Is your support a shower curtain that can wrap leftovers?”

“No, no.” Alfred waved for Mahmoud to follow. “Let me display it for you.”

The two walked into the vacant center of the apartment until Mahmoud brushed into something. He instinctively pulled back and looked for what he’d struck; it felt like stiff cotton, but there was nothing there. He reached out and fondled the air, following what felt like a sheet of fabric all the way to the floor.

“What is this?”

“It is a full body covering.” Alfred rocked on his heels, the same way he’d shown pride since childhood. “Better than the traditional burqa, it even covers the eyes.”

Mahmoud bunched it up in his hands. It felt like cotton, but difficult to bend. Struggling to bend air was very emasculating.

“Why can’t I see it?”

“That’s because it’s made of invisible material. Hence why the eye covering is not a problem, and why it won’t be a problem for bigoted police. They’ll think she’s not wearing the cover, when actually her skin will be entirely hidden.”

Mahmoud scoffed and dropped the ‘garment.’

“Hidden by something anyone can see through. Who would want this? This protects no modesty.”

“There are other ways to dress that protect modesty. This ensures they can continue to wear the veil without being harassed, and even if they are, it’s bulletproof. I wore it myself for tests yesterday. A woman would not feel so much as a bruise even if she was, say, stoned by an angry crowd.”

“That’s…”

“I think it’ll be just as big a hit in Iran as in Belgium. Don’t you?”

Bathroom Monologue: Telepaths Don’t Exist

“He's erased himself. All these years of tampering with our minds, possessing our bodies and turning us against each other – all of it nothing compared to this. Everyone in the world has forgotten who he is. He thinks this is a vacation. Now he can tinker with minds and no one will notice, first because telepathy is hard to detect, and second because they don't know he's out there. His powers are fiction to them, which makes the world his empire. But there's something he didn't count on. Everyone forgetting him also means that if we can find him, nobody will remember what we do to him.”

Bathroom Monologue: Spill Into Oil

It was like an expressionist painting rolling into the shore. Rusty and black blotches roiling in yellowed water. He couldn’t just sit in his car and watch it. He had to leap out and race across the beach, to stand where powder white sand was stained all those new spill colors.

People honked at him for leaving his car in traffic. It didn’t matter that things were so backed up nobody was moving anywhere – he was somebody to be mad at.

He was somebody who stripped off his shirt, revealing pale flab to the afternoon commuters. He kicked his shoes into the stained surf. When he pulled free from his pants, somebody turned a phone camera on him, betting this would get some hits on Youtube.

He held his arms out like he was Jesus about to be crucified on the Gulf of Mexico. Thinning hair fluttered in a reeking breeze. He sauntered into the inky water, letting it color him. It felt like thin plastic, wrapping him in intimate wetness.

People exited their cars to get a better look. Murmurs circled, asking if this was a protest.

He went knee deep. A new wave splashed oil dots across his belly. It obscured the moles and surgical scars. The smell was overpowering. He felt lightheaded and grateful for the fumes.

Another grotesque wave rolled in. He fell forward into it, faceplanting into the ruined tide. Another wave rolled over where he’d been. He didn’t surface.

Three more waves and somebody stepped onto the beach. Ten more waves and somebody dialed the cops. A thousand more waves and the cops showed, flashing red lights glinting off rainbow oil slicks. They never found the man who subsumed into his living oil painting. All that washed ashore were dead fish, mouths still open, as though caught in a gasp of relief.


John is out of town this week. Any comments, retweets or Facebook posts for the story would be appreciated. Please leave a link to your blog so he can read your material once he gets back. Happy summer, and be careful swimming!

Bathroom Monologue: Making Over Math

"Ask yourselves: what problem have you solved, ever, that was worth solving, where you knew all of the given information in advance?" -Dan Meyer's TED Talk, "Math class needs a makeover"
Denise watched the gum and milk roll down her black rubber conveyor belt. They were only two items, but the customer let them ride down to her. She picked them up, scanned them, then offered the gum back to the customer. He opened it and stuck a piece in his mouth.

She said, “That’s a dollar for the gum and three-thirty for the milk.”

“Whatever.”

“Seven dollars is your total.”

He pulled out a ten. “Can I get change?”

“Oh, we have a cash discount. Now it’s only eight dollars.”

He smiled and blew a proud bubble. She gave him his change. When he left, she pocketed the difference.

The next person came along, a mother with a screaming kid and a cart full of cleaning supplies, cookware and out middle-aged nightmares. She rang this one up honest, because she didn’t have the heart to rip off a mom who had to live with those decibels of crying.

But the next lady in line had Haggen Das and instant cappuccino. She wore narrow two-inch heels and a vermillion pantsuit that reeked of perfume Denise couldn’t afford.

“Three-eighty-three for the ice cream, eleven even for the cappuccino. That’s thirty-one dollars.”

The lady debited it, and didn’t even ask why the teller had her sign two different receipts. She left both behind.

Denise saw her manager coming towards her, trying to wipe his hands on his khakis when he thought nobody was looking.

“Denise, you haven’t been overcharging people have you?” he asked as he came down her aisle. “We got a couple of complaints, but the customers aren’t sure. You know they toss receipts.”

“It’s probably nothing,” she demurred. She popped her register open. “But I have copies of all my receipts. The information’s all here if you want to check.”

“No, I’ll trust you. If the information’s all there, it’s not worth it.”

Denise scrunched up her nose and nodded. “Yeah.”



(This was inspired by Dan Meyer’s TED talk. You can view that 11-minute lecture here. Despite my making fun of it, I think Meyer has a fine point. It’s well worth watching.)

Bathroom Monologue: The Box is Boss

“What if I tell you? If I tell you who our employer is, exactly who he is, will you promise never to ask me about him again? No more questions. No more cockamamie theories. I’ll tell you and then you can never ask anything about Yab again.”

“Okay.”

“He’s not the president. He’s no one in the government, ours or theirs. And, he’s not God. He’s not a man – not a whole man. He might have been a whole man at one time, but isn’t now and has never been during our lifetimes.

“He is a box. It’s about two feet by two feet, chromium steel. Inside is a brain and part of a skull, kept in some unique preservatives. There are wires leading to certain neural pathways that absolutely refuse to die. What the box does for three quarters of the year is anybody’s guess. But every Spring, it thinks very hard and sends us messages by telegraph. Every Spring that this agency has been around for, the box has been right. It nails the correct agents and sends them to the right hotspots every time. Nobody gives it an updated roster – how would you? But the box knows.”

“Hey—”

“Now you promised not to ask anymore. I know you’ll go right back to theorizing on how the boss is actually someone at Interpol or the Pentagon. Even if you could find the box, dig it up and crack it open, you wouldn’t believe it. You’ll sooner believe J. Edgar Hoover is still alive and running the show. I don’t care. The box doesn’t care, and I’ve long since stopped caring about the box. It works without questioning. I look forward to that without.”

Bathroom Monologue: Another Unapologetic Conversational Pun

“Can you hear me? Say something.”

“What ethnicity are people from the Bayou?”

“...What?”

“K, Jon.”

Bathroom Monologue: The Moon Landing Was Fake

The truth was only voiced once, on a local radio station in Montana. The next day G-men showed up and seized all tapes of the broadcast. But the host and staff remember the tale.

The guest had worked on the Apollo missions. He said they’d tried in earnest to land up there, and Apollo 11 had almost done it. Then, out of a clear void opened a wormhole, spitting the craft into a faraway planet. It wasn’t grey or airless, waterless or hopeless; it was actually lush with life.

Because the American people wouldn’t have understood what a wormhole was, and would have gone mad from footage of the intelligent and quite friendly extraterrestrial locals, Armstrong and Aldrin had to find the only desolate-looking spot on the otherwise verdant world. They had to re-shoot four times because jovial natives kept wandering in front of the camera to greet humans in peace and explain the meaning of life.

All these years since, NASA has had to maintain the lie that we landed on the moon. In actuality astronauts have been popping into space to hit the wormhole paradise every time. There are many things we could learn from our cosmic neighbors, but the government doesn’t feel it could live down the shame of exposing the fake moon landing.

Bathroom Monologue: Stones Get Things Done

I’m not saying glaciers didn’t do work. I’m just saying they didn’t do all of it. During the so-called “ice age” a lot of hard-working mountains were moving, and to more than just Muhammad. You think continents drift on their own? We’re talking tectonic plates, and that means serious bribery. You think an overgrown ice cube is going to pay those landmasses off? No. It was earth doing all the work. Soil going soft or brittle enough to break up easily, rocks getting aligned and pushing, and a heck of a lot of members of the Crust Layer Union. Back before we had reasonable golems, it was a wild planet where you walked uphill to school, then the electromagnetic poles flipped and you had to walk uphill back home. If it was snowing when you did it? That sucked, but that was icing on the difficulty cake. Stones, baby. They get things done.

Bathroom Monologue: "Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door" -Emily Dickinson, Part Two: Nature, XXXIX

The nightwatchman caught her by the shoulder and drew her away from the tiger cage.

"Ms. Dickinson," he said softly, as not to bruise her mind, "there's no clock in there either."

She turned to face him, her expression pregnant with pretension. The nightwatchman interrupted before she could continue in verse.

"The dawn will come around 6:30. You're probably just discombobulated by daylight savings time. Let me show you back to your suite."

Bathroom Monologue: TEMPORARILY REDACTED

This story has been taken down for the foreseeable future pending a potential sale.

Bathroom Monologue: Censoring the Internet with Piranhas

"People have said that trying to censor the internet would be like trying to take the pee out of a swimming pool. With high chlorination and water circulation, that isn't entirely necessary. What I want to do is prevent and penalize anymore pee getting into the swimming pool. I want to train piranha that will smell and taste only one thing: urine (or child pornography). They will enter a feeding frenzy and maul whatever person urinates in the pool (or uploads photos of middle school cheerleaders). The hope is that the pee-ranhas would kill off urinators. Their blood would then get in the internet, too, but we'd circulate that out with some anti-malware programs and lifeguards. After a few years internet pirates and people who create ghastly websites would stop out of fear of finding carnivorous fish swimming in their inboxes. If necessary, we would train the pee-ranhas to swim through air so that they could track down the net-urinators to their homes. A few mauling videos on Youtube and fear will spread. They won’t be able to overcome it. It’ll be like pee in a swimming pool."

Bathroom Monologue: Missing His Lamp

The rumors were true: a genie was wandering around behind the school. He left blue smoke trails as he floated around, checking behind every rock and bench for something. All the kids abandoned soccer practice, keeping pace behind him and yelling.

“I wish for a million bucks!”

“Two million!”

“I wish for all the money in the world!”

The genie shook his head. “I can’t do any wishes without my lamp. Find it and maybe we’ll talk.”

None of them broke away. Instead they followed and belted out desires.

“I wish for rocket boots!”

“I wish I could see through Stacy Keener’s bra!”

"I wish I was invisible!"

“I wish for an invisible plane!”

The genie rolled his puffy eyes and kept searching.

One kid, who was banking on that two million dollar wish, asked, “Well what can you do without your lamp?”

“I wish for a Helix Dragonoid!”

“I wish for a pet dragon! A pink one!”

The genie looked at the two-million-dollar wisher and answered, “I can wish you’d all shut up.”

Bathroom Monologue: How short can I make this story?

“You know he’s sleeping around, right?”

“I do now. Borrow your gun?”