Bathroom Monologue: My Last Three Nights

Update: I’ll break at Charlie Rose. I should probably check the blogs then anyway. Writing a novel is making me a bad internet buddy.

Update: I'll break at midnight. It’s too late to drop into a Rose interview anyway.

Update: 12:30? How can it be 12:30 when I'm behind? I'll just go to bed at 1:00. Let’s see how much I can get done.

Update: How have I only finished five pages? Jesus. I'll go to bed at 2:00. Just an hour. And hour of solid effort and this chapter will be perfect.

Update: 2:10 is pretty much 2:00.

Update: I can do 2:30.

Update: My eyes are now too bleary to read a clock.

#National Novel Reading Month Ends

Today ends the first #NaNoReMo. This month we congregated on Twitter and blogs to read those classic books we’ve been putting off. If you’re like me then you’re perpetually discovering additional vacancies in your canon. My entry was the suitably famous Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice.

My reading is a tale of hubris. It began with me asking a ladyfriend if I should, and her saying I’d hate it, and me saying I was more open-minded than that. So I asked my readers if I should read this or Mikhael Bulgakov’s Master & Margarita. They responded, generally, that Pride & Prejudice was great but that I’d hate it, and I responded that I was more open-minded than that.

Three hundred pages of telling an English classic to “Shut up” later, I’m still trying to blame others. I’ve been told that this is great literature and that I’m crass; that this is ChickLit and I’m unfair; that Austen was a rebel and that I’m a chauvinist; and that I can sleep on the sofa. If you’re clever enough, you can still troll me on Twitter about this book. Theresa Sanchez, I’m looking at you.

In part I read it to prove that I can enjoy Romances. There are even photos somewhere of me getting very emotional at the end of a movie that I’m not going to publicly admit I watched. Mark Twain’s Adam and Eve, Jonathan Swift’s Celia, and my disturbing soft spot for Joker and Harley. The point is, I’m not made of stone. Jane Austen’s narrative progress was. I even made up for the incident by jumping through Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea last week, which is an utter delight.

So what did you learn from your classic? Did you finish it? You’ve still got a few hours.

Edit: and fine, if you guess the movie in the Comments, I’ll admit it.

Bathroom Monologue: Mummy Elaborated

The agent adjusted his cufflinks and looked the mummy over again.

“You won’t do anything about the bandages? Not even around the face? People connect more when they see faces.”

The mummy loosened his head wrappings. They unraveled and revealed strands of dry flesh, which constricted into a frown.

“I don’t have much of a face as it is. Without these wrappings I’m… just a zombie.”

The agent tilted his head.

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m royalty,” replied the mummy, wrapping his head back up.

“That is a problem.”

“You’re not kidding. I didn’t stuff a pyramid with jewels and scented oils to go shambling with a gas jockey who got bit on the neck.”

“No, I mean democracy is in fashion today. Royalty is going out of style where it isn’t photogenic. Have you considered running for office instead of holding onto your kinghood?”

“Nobody would vote for me. My religious values are thousand years out of touch and I’m not even a naturalized citizen of any of the easily scared countries.”

The agent looked out the window. If he squinted, the casino across the street could be a pyramid.

“And you don’t want to go back home?”

“I think being a monster in a country where blood pressure and playing too many videogames are serious problems will be easier on me, at least as I start back up again.”

“There are terrible things to be scared of in this country, you know.”

“Every country has things to be scared of, but I’m a luxury fear. I need a luxury market.”

The agent sighed.

“I just don’t think we can re-launch you this year as an undead product. Vampires are sexy. Pretty faces, no bandages, and they move faster. And you don’t want to get into the shambling market. Zombies have overflowed so badly that some of them are running now. It is not the same world it used to be.”

The mummy tugged at his bandages.

“Democracy changes things. That’s why I hoped it would die in Athens.”

“It’s a tough business.”

The mummy looked out the window for a while, staring at the casino. Then he perked.

“All those zombies? Do they have a president yet?”

Bathroom Monologue: Americans Hate Science

Americans hate science. This is why there are mandatory Science classes in public school. This is why Mythbusters attracts so many viewers. This is why Scientific American has lasted decades. This is why millions of hours are spent on American computers editing Wikipedia entries on Biology and Physics.

This is why the 'M' in 'M.I.T.' stands for “Massachusetts.” This is why Harvard, Berkley and Yale yield so many keen minds. This is why millions of people watch the TED Talks and the lectures of Walter Lewin. This is why President Obama does photo ops with Francis Collins. This is why Stephen Hawking is a rockstar and Albert Einstein is on motivational posters.

Americans hate science. That is why so many houses have electricity and so many kids whine for cell phones. This is why Apple products have created a glossy white cult. This is why Americans drive so many combustion engines and emit so many terabytes per second. This is why some kid somewhere can’t wait for her first campus visit, or her first experiment with live corrosives, or for the next Symphony of Science song to finish downloading. Because of science, she doesn’t have to wait long. She pays for that science. Her people pay billions per year for that science. Her people have been paying for a long time, for crushing Polio, and for putting boots on the moon, and for cartography of the human brain.

I don’t know when “Americans” became “other people.” As an American who was excited for the LHC, who would pay higher taxes to help NASA, who has many friends and a sister in the sciences, and who wonders at both inner and outer space, I don’t much appreciate it.

Bathroom Monologue: Ghost Rant

“What, you think I want you to be at peace? I want you to mourn. I want you to rake your skin, and thrash on the floor, and weep that I’m dead! Why in the hell would I want you to be okay with me dying? ‘Oh, his suffering is over.’ Bullshit. That’s my concern! You? I want you to miss me. I want you to selfishly desire that my chemo went on for eternity so I could still be around. I want you to want more me. Tons more me. You’re feeling closure? Then your ass is getting haunted.”

Bathroom Monologue: A Priest

To hear his parable, click here.

There’s one last lesson that every priest from my school must learn. We teach it through a parable because parables have been better to us than life.

Imagine: it’s the cusp of winter, when the grass can’t help but stiffen, and rivers don’t freeze enough. The priest knows not to test the ice and preaches thus, but not everyone goes to his services. A poor mother and son slide to the center of the river, trying to catch one more autumn trout. They fall in with their trout.

Now our priest happens along. He knows to lose his robes. He knows how to tie a rope between a tree and his waist. He knows how to swim. He knows what he’s supposed to do, and with a great deal of sputtering, he drags the mother and son to shore.

But it’s the cusp of winter. The boy is paler than the river. The priest knows how to check for fever and hypothermia. He knows how to first dry himself, then strip and cover them. He knows how to build a fire whose heat will assist here and attract attention from on far. The priest knows all this because he was a very good student. He’s read very many parables.

He doesn’t have to be learned, however, to know the mother’s gone blind. He knows how to stall her as he tries to keep her son breathing. When she asks him to pray for her boy rather than her own sight, he is burdened with knowing that the gods don’t work that way. Like all priests, he knows to pray anyway.

And she calls for her boy. She calls, and calls, and her voice is plainly getting weaker. Soon she sounds not ten feet away from her boy, but ten worlds away.

The priest looks up the road. No one is coming; no one has seen the smoke soon enough. Now the mother looks at him with useless eyes and a purposeful face. Now she calls to him, asking. Is he alright? Is he alright? Is he alright? Every time softer, farther toward the veil.

Put yourself in his moment, as this naked servant of the gods looking into a blind plea on the cusp of winter. You’ve learned the medicines, and the physics, and the scriptures, and very plainly the boy is dead and his mother is following. This is why every priest I teach must learn how to lie.

Bathroom Monologue: Best Car Ever

It’s got infinite-inch rims so perfect that if you calculate their metrics, pi comes out an even number. The black chrome exterior has a polish so fine it reflects even the lightless void, and makes distant stars weep little novas at the beauty of what they no longer are. Your spaceship may get light years to the gallon, but this puppy is the only ride in creation that gets gallons to the mile – it makes fuel from action. You bet your ass the windows are tinted, because inside is nothing. No atoms, no axes, not even time itself. Only one person can drive it. It’s been in the garage for eons, but you know whenever the plot necessitates He give it a spin, the Ex Machina will deliver.

Eating My Prejudices

One of the best things an artist can do is make me eat my prejudices. This doesn’t mean writing tolerance-propaganda; art designed to coerce usually puts me on guard and actually turns me against the thesis. Rather, I adore things of a type I usually dislike that are done so well that I am forced to concede. By rendering me a happy hypocrite, my whole stand softens.

I’ve never liked poetry. For the two halves of my life it’s either looked gimmicky or simply like poorly paragraphed prose. I lack the ability to scan, which deadens some of the effect, and even in Shakespeare’s sonnets I never saw much enviable application of language. Intellectually, striving for rhythm only gets in the way of clear description and establishing atmosphere. It forces patterns where my storytelling instincts never needed them. Where there were great storytellers, like Homer and Dante, I was mostly putting up with secondhand meters to get to the meaty stories – and most poetry was not trying to deliver a Homeric narrative. So much of what I consumed was vague and interpretable, hiding in the safety of audience projection. As Christopher Miller used to tell my classes, “Poetry is the only art form that muddies its waters for the illusion of depth.”

You can tell this guy loved what he did.

Reading Alexander Pope was an acrid pleasure. He used sonnets to turn phrases like wild. He made points far more concisely than any prose about his work did. And even if I couldn’t read the iambic pentameter like I was supposed to, a definite voice rose from the lines. Once I reached his Essay On Man, in which this crippled genius used beautiful language to tell the rest of the world to suck it up, I was entirely won over. His stiltedness was elegant, at once erudite and plain, quotable and reasonable. No Homeric narrative, total indulgence, and total quality. Stanza by stanza, he made me grateful to have my nose rubbed in the things I disliked.

I call this feeling “selfenfreude.” If schadenfreude is the joy at someone else’s failure, selfenfreude is the joy at my own. There’s a pinch in my diaphragm as I recognize I ought to resist, and summon dogmas to swat down what I’m feeling. Every other organ is hums with amusement. I’m uncertain exactly how to activate selfenfreude, but it encourages humility and correcting my errors. I’m trying to keep it around.

I'm just saying: this is a lot like The Panther and the Lash.

Alexander Pope, Langston Hughes and Samuel Coleridge’s poetry did it to me. F.E.A.R. was that first-person-shooter that made me think (and jump in my seat, tearing a surgical stitch). As someone who cannot stand musicals, it’s a particular pleasure that my favorite Futurama is “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings.” In all these cases my defenses were already down; these weren’t like arguments where I could dig in my heels. I’ve enjoyed your poem, your game, your increasingly ludicrous opera. You’ve convinced me, not through your demonstration, but by getting me to demonstrate it for you. You made me eat my own prejudices.

It’s difficult evidence to refute, and it’s why I keep going back to niches I’ve disliked. Whether it’s time travel fiction or vegan lasagna, if I can find something that works on me it, it enters the remix of possibilities. So what if I hated Pride & Prejudice? It’s a small fee to pay in order to discover new territory of feeling.

Bathroom Monologue: Childese

Patter. Patter, patter. Spatter.

He opens the door and darts inside before much rain gets inside, then closes the door as quietly as he can. He doesn’t want to wake her.

Squilp. Squilp. Squilp. Groan.

He takes off his shoes and hangs them to dry.

Shiver. Pad. Pad. Pad. Pad. Preek.

Oh, the darned stairs. How many times has he put off fixing those?

Preek. Preeeeeeeeek. Preeeek.

He waves a fist to threaten the steps.

Prek. Prek. Prek. Preeeeeeeek.

On the verge of swearing, he notices a light. The door’s ajar, and a lamp’s on in his room.

Preeeek. Creep, creep, creep.

“Maya?”

He pauses in the doorway. He smiles.

Snoooooore.

She’d fallen asleep waiting. There’s a Danielle Steel open across her chest.

Pad. Pad, pad pad. Click.

Out goes the light as he slides under the covers next to her.

“Good night, Maya.”

Snore.

And so he joins her snoring.

Spoiled #1 - David Fincher's The Game

A new Consumed has appeared, but it’s not what you expected.

Consumed: Spoiled #1 is an in-depth conversation about David Fincher’s The Game. Unlike normal Consumed Podcasts, there is only one topic and we spoil the heck out of it. In this case the movie is 15 years old and hinges on so many twists that it can only really be appreciated when speaking without holding back.

My favorite Fincher flick, The Game stars Michael Douglas as a tycoon who is targeted by CRS, an all-consuming corporation that manipulates his business, television, home, family and personal life until even his sanity is fleeting. Allegedly it’s a game, but he can’t get it to stop. It all leads to what is quite possibly my favorite twist ending of all time.

You can hear Spoiled #1 by clicking here.


Let us know if you enjoy it. All feedback is welcome.

Bathroom Monologue: Motion Control

See, the motion of his arm there is registered by everything. The X-Box 360 Kinect, which plays videogames, but is also his DVD player, but is also an internet streaming device, turns on at the same time as his Samsung television, which is also an internet streaming device. They both switch on at the same time.

There’s no audio on this, so you can’t tell, but he’s trying voice command here. The Kinect and the TV are both voice-commanded, though, so it switches… there. To a channel with nothing on it. His vacuum is also voice-commanded. You’ll see it coming into frame from the left in a minute.

Here he is trying to manually shut off the X-Box.

Here’s the disc tray opening and hitting him in the eye. And there! See, there’s the vacuum chugging into frame.

There’s him stepping onto the robot vacuum.

And there’s him falling into the TV. And through the TV. Did not know those shattered like that.

And there’s the vacuum cleaner trying to clean his blood off the carpet. Now I know it looks gross the first time, but eventually, everyone in this office finds it hilarious. You just have to see it enough times.

Bathroom Monologue: Unbeatable Government

“They built the first new homes after the last apocalypse. They built the first city and the first shipyard. They sorted out who was alive out on the islands, and connected them back to us. They don’t only print the money. They control the minerals, farming, and the pepper trade. They’re the only ones in the hemisphere constructing printing presses. Insulting as it is, they can get away with turning three islands into prison camps and jailing people without cause. They pretty much re-invented right and wrong. The Contiguities didn’t save our culture; they built it. We can’t just rebel, not against the institution that made everyone’s clothes and breakfast possible. We can’t just rebel. We have to compete.”

Bathroom Monologue: Edgar Seterra

One of the unsung heroes of the day the Uranians came for us. He was at the crater on Third Street when it happened. Well, it wasn’t a crater at the time. It was a Recruitment Station, and he was getting his physical when the ship landed on all of them.

Now Edgar Seterra was not your new-fangled superhero with an I.Q. of one-point-five-billion or radioactive biceps. He had what you’d call a “less desirable power set,” and survived the UFO crash by turning into a pool of slightly tepid water.

By the time he gathered his pool-self up, the Uranians had disembarked from the craft with one of those hydrogen bombs that you really don’t want in a heartland city. All the greater heroes were skyward, preoccupied with the proper invasion force. Stopping these specific cosmic hooligans was up to him, but how was Edgar Seterra to know which way the Uranians had gone with their bomb? A feral sense of smell? A spiderific sense?

No, for you see those powers were taken, and Edgar Seterra did not possess any abilities patented to American icons. Instead he used the less-popular ability to recall what all the elderly women in the vicinity had smelled recently. You might call this a useless ability, and his fiancé had done just that on multiple occasions, yet Uranian B.O. is quite distinctive and led him to a warehouse on John Calvin Klein Drive.

Please mind that Edgar Seterra was not the sort of superhero who breaks the sound barrier on foot or could bean three Nazis with one bouncing shield. The dear boy arrived at the warehouse on John Calvin Klein Drive with little more than a rifle and some plus-sized fatigues, up against three suicidal extraterrestrials. People in the neighborhood called it quite a sight.

He managed to empty his entire rifle magazine into the brick wall to their left while they trained sights on his forehead. The anxiety simultaneously activated three useless superpowers: one that caused all dogwoods in the area to thicken their sap slightly, one causing all cesium to decay by drastically greater half-life, and the last causing him to sprout a second heart. This last would have come in very handy if they had not aimed for his head; each and all of these he would gladly have traded to turn laserproof for just a few seconds, as I reckon just about anyone would.

Well it turns out that a person’s powers do not only have to be of use to him. They can be of disuse to evildoers. For instance, did you know Uranian laser pistols use mildly depleted cesium cartridges? Well they didn’t either, which is why the Uranians were so confused with Edgar Seterra continuing to have a head. For a moment, he thought continuing to have that head was a superpower.

But that head was a good one. By the time the Uranians realized their cesium cartridges were duds, Edgar stormed their position and subdued them through some good old-fashion American pugilism.

Not five minutes later, his left hand turned into a psychic dove and he chased its intuition across town to stop another Uranian incursion – this one tampering with the water supply. He curtailed no less than seven heinous plots that day.

You still don’t hear much about him. U-Day was all about our burly men of steel, and our lightning lasses zapping rockets out of the sky. They deserve press for their heroism, yet Uranians did get by them, and when it came to chasing aliens across our sidewalks, through our warehouses and broadcast towers? That was Ed Seterra.

Bathroom Monologue: On Writer’s Block

It besets a perfectly well-meaning, perfectly well-read, perfectly talented and motivated writer, who had no intention of dicking around on Twitter and Reddit for hours. As soon as this bold thinker’s hands approach the keyboard, it strikes. For one out of every three cases, the writer’s fingers are broken by the strike, but regardless the writer’s block remains hovering in the air, obstructing the keyboard. Its onset is harrowing. No wedging or cajoling of the keyboard will loose it from beneath a writer’s block; the block will simply move to continue interference regardless of position. It haunted typewriters, and before it, blocked inkwells and Greek slates. Anthropologists posit that it is what necessitated oral storytelling among otherwise literate tribes. It is a persistent issue of the human condition. Those Great American Novelists among us will take drills, hammers and chisels to the block, to liberate their means of expression. Let it be known that writer’s block can be broken, but beware its insidious side-effect: for the writer is left so agitated by the inexplicable black blockage, and so exhausted from the labor of destroying it, that he or she is typically left without the energy to write afterward. In at least a third of cases, the keyboard is also destroyed.

Bathroom Haiku: Richard Simmons, for Mike Houlding

beast of energy

will explode if smiling stops;

he sups on your sweat

Bathroom Dialogue: Orange Juice and House Fires, OR, How John Talks to a Girlfriend

“Fresh squeezed orange juice! That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“It only took us… thirty-three minutes? To fill two glasses? Yeah, this is fulfilling work."

“Do you have a problem with my juicer?”

“No, I love it. I’m a novelist. I’m used to things taking longer to make than they do to consume.”

“What? Doesn’t it take you a weekend to write a novel? I know Amanda Hocking does, like, four in a year.”

“You know, a house fire would only take me seconds to start.”

“Not funny! That’s not funny!”

“Odd. It took so little time to think up.”

“Give me your juice. I don’t trust you with this.”

Checking in for #NaNoReMo

We're halfway through January. How is everyone doing with their classics? I figured at least few folks would have torn through theirs already. Mine's about 3/4's done. My reading was a little delayed by cracking through the beta critiques on my own novel last week, which turned into a series of ten-hour days that left little energy for Ms. Austen.

My book wound up being Pride and Prejudice. I was dumb enough to take everyone telling me I'd hate it as a dare, and my attempt at open-mindedness has been grating so far. There are spurts of quotability, and I was pretty fond of her notion that women have to express more love for men than they feel in order for men to know they have feelings at all. At Chapter 50 we've seen a few true perils of this time period, and I felt the littlest bit for Lydia's family when she runs off with Mr. Whomever.

They're all Mr. Whomever to me. I've got a sheet with names and reference points to help me, because little in action or dialogue lends them individuality. Mr. Collins I can identify since he's the male Mrs. Bennet, the self-unaware selfish character who won't shut up. But all the other guys have the same dialogue patterns and some amount of money. The women aren't much better.

I'm not a Romance genre reader, not of the old-age get-married variety or the modern smut variety. At my core, I think I enjoy my romances as part of a greater context, just like every great relationship I've ever experienced or encountered. Loves during war time, or at a videogame tournament, or between two people at the terminal ward, where one's too devoted to her brokerage firm, or where he keeps putting up with her infatuation for riding trains. The life which loves enters and springs from. The absence of almost any substance to Austen's world has put more onus on her cast, and there's not nearly enough internal life to make that an enviable task. Much less enviable when internal life keeps getting turned into canned monologues and dialogues.

There are at least three people who've witnessed me getting suckered by pure sap and a hail-mary of a romantic ending. I'm holding out hope that I get suckered by the final stretch of Pride and Prejudice. I believe it to still be possible. And if I hate it, then her fans can comfort themselves that Mr. Wiswell lacks breeding and prospects. After all, his favorite fictional couple is The Joker and Harley Quinn.

There's one thing that will make me glad to have read this regardless of how the ending pans out, though I'll save that for another day. How are your classics treating you?

Bathroom Monologue: The Senator’s Daughter

To hear this short, simply click here.

"That’s worse. If they wanted to kill me? Okay. That happens to senators, especially ones who do things in office. I knew it when I ran, and I certainly knew it the first time I hired someone to open my mail. But my daughter? Guys, I know where I am. That’s comforting, comforting even when I’m afraid for my life. I can decide where I’ll go hide when a gunman arrives, and I’ll see the bodyguards, and I’ll do the running. I don’t know where my daughter is at any given time because we senators made the terrible error to let them have rights. When the gunman comes, I don’t know where she is, or if she’s hiding, or if anyone’s around to help. There is no comfort in her having a number to dial or a routine to follow. All I know is at fourteen she used to steal my cigarettes and smoke them behind the house, and no matter how much I told her not to she’d keep doing it, and I’ll know it incessantly loud the second you tell me she’s been compromised. If I don’t do what you tell me? At least I know I did that. She’s my daughter. I can only worry about her. I’d rather have two people pointing guns at me than one in the same state as her."

"Shameless" at Karen Berner's Blog

Today I'm lending one of my darlings from 2011 to Karen Berner's Bibliophilic blog. "Shameless" was one of my favorite things to write all last year for Cheryl and her outlook on apartment life. She gets some unwanted neighbors, who are either newlyweds or axe murderers. I'll leave it up to you to decide.

You can read the story by clicking here.

Bathroom Monologue: Renegade Sons and Gatorade Moms, Redux Drabble

Dear Son,

Firstly, the state of West Virginia abolished the death penalty decades ago. No hangman is coming for you.

You’ve been like this ever since I was elected. You’re in your twenties now! I'll never forget the August you attacked that nice police officer for pulling you over.

Were you speeding again? Lord, if your grandfather could see you.

By the time you read this you’ll be a free man. Please remember, little renegade, that I worked very hard so you could have it made. I'd appreciate some gratitude. At least stop getting arrested in verse.

Love,
Mama

Alpha Reactions to Beta Readers

Four of my six beta readers have turned in their notes on The House That Nobody Built. A fifth also had, but withdrew hers to do a more detailed reading. The sixth is by far the busiest of an already busy group, and for at least two weeks of the reading period I was hanging out with him, so really I have to shoulder some of the delay. He intends to deliver his by mid-January.

This week I began earnestly analyzing my critiqued copies. I’ve managed to pound one 470-page manuscript per day, which feels mildly satisfying. Despite taking two solid months away from the manuscript, anything they ask causes some paternal part of me to sit up and answer. I know my baby’s cry.

The knowledge feels mildly satisfying, but also a little freakish. They question the spelling of a name, or an awkward sentence, or what constitutes personhood to an astral being, and I know exactly what they mean. Dozens of times I’ve seen the merit and changed it immediately; dozens more I’ve made a note to examine specific context after I finish aggregating the responses. Even when the beta readers dislike something, I enjoy it.

Their dislikes can still be kicks in the gut. I take them personally. I don’t pretend otherwise; I’m a marshmallow, of course I take this personally. But in addition to pangs of personal pride, I’m personally grateful that they called me out on vague plot points and failed jokes. They strove to make this a better novel. My goal is to make this the best thing I’ve ever written. They are helping me toward that which I worked the hardest in 2011. This is personal.

Sitting down to pizza with one beta reader, he recounted how I underdescribed settings for his taste. After three minutes, he broke off to say how unnerving it was that I’d been smiling through all his criticism. I wondered if I hadn’t offended him by not appearing offended. Maybe for him the critique felt like delivering a beating, but I was in a frame of mind to reflect and reform. This made me eager.

It may just be that I’m weird. I know I vary in some ways. I’m at peace with this god. Frankly, if I succeed as a novelist, my work is only going to get weirder. The House That Nobody Built is as conventional as I get; I am not coming any further along the bridge to my culture. I don’t get anymore comprehensible than my sentient ball of snakes, my unconfident confidence man, and my Succubae Hit Squad.

That’s why I’m so grateful to these beta readers, some anonymous and some public, some personal friends and some professional acquaintances. They put unreckoned amounts of time into honing what is essentially me.

Bathroom Math: Where Opinions Come From

I'm typically an opponent of oversimplification, but I kept doodling this during a recent literary debate. Eventually it made me wonder about some of my own opinions.

'Gates of Eden' Review up at A Reader's Heaven

Today one of my book reviews is appearing in two ways over at A Reader's Heaven. It's on Ethan Coen's Gates of Eden, a short story collection and one of my favorite things I read all last year. It royally roasts many pulp conventions through humiliation and humility. I couldn't recommend it more unless you clicked the link over to the review.

I said "two ways." The site corresponds to a book store in Australia. In addition to e-publication, a physical copy is on display in their storefront as a recommendation to buyers. Yeah. One of my reviews is hanging in a book store in Australia. That's humbling.

One of the store's proprietors is Paul Phillips, an old internet acquaintance of mine from back in the days when I was addicted 6S. He was also one of the first people to stump for my fundraiser when I couldn’t afford surgery. I’m pretty darned happy to have a review hanging in his store.

Bathroom Monologue: The Ascent of Man, Over Trashcan

Man starts out disliking the automatic trashcan. The sensor seems unreliable, and the lid closes too soon. On Uses 1-5, he waves his hand like an impotent magician, and for both Uses 3 and 5, the automatic lid closes while he’s still spooning expired pasta into it. On Use 5, the dangling strings of pasta form a distinct and mocking tongue sticking out of the can.

Uses 6-15 are largely resigned. He can’t argue his roommates into returning the thing, and he can’t can it to recognize a wave of his hand. Uses 7-9 and 12 require him to pry the lid open manually. Use 14 is accidental, as his hip brushes too close as he passes the can and it opens for no greater reason than to share its odors.

For uses 16-18, he makes the sign of the cross over the lid. The trashcan is stolidly secular and refuses to open. It does not laugh at his exorcism jokes.

Uses 19-23 are all accidental openings when he walks to close to it. Use 24-26 feature him trying to dangle his arm over the sensor in the lid as he would while walking, hoping this will open it. This never works.

Use 27 is when he walks too close to it and, again, it opens for no reason other than to taunt him.

During Use 28, it closes on his fingers. He is chastised for punching the automatic trash can “in its smug face.”

Uses 29-31 are the worst, as his roommates explicitly show him how to move your hand to make it open. Use 32 takes him ten minutes of hand-waving. He is not catching on.

Use 33 features him walking too close and it opening automatically. He tosses in a half-eaten banana on principle. Herein, he derives an idea.

Uses 34-400 feature him walking with his hip jutting out near the trashcan. The stupid thing opens every time.

Consumed 3, Featuring SciFi TV and Zombies

This Sunday I'm proud to present to you Consumed Episode 3. It features what I'd conservatively peg as one of the top five worst intros of all time. We spent most of the episode discussing Science Fiction television with a focus on Eureka, Futurama and Steins;Gate. Then we swapped over to zombie media with the recent PC game Dead Island, and Max Brooks's follow-up to World War Z, Recorded Attacks. At a certain point I rattle of my wishlist of unused premises for zombie stories.

Allegedly this episode will kick off regular bi-weekly recordings. It took far too long to produce, but with Garage Band and some regular work schedules, Max Cantor, Nat Sylva and I are pretty confident Episode 4 is coming sooner than 3 did.

You can listen to Consumed Episode 3 here.

And yes: "Steins;Gate" is spelled that way.

Bathroom Monologue: Dead Strangers

"It’s interesting that we view people snapping as revealing their true selves. A politician makes one racist comment, and especially if you’re opposite his party, you declare this is his true personality. It’s mostly interesting because it runs explicitly contrary to evidence. The majority of a person’s actions are apparently false; it’s only this outlier event that defines them. And who does it define them for? Not themselves. They can explain they’d just had back surgery and were on pills, or hadn’t slept in three days, or were quoted out of context, and strangers will judge them anyway as secretly base and awful. The cynic supports the hypothesis saying it’s impossible to be perpetually kind, but easy to be selfish and base. The notion of a basic human, stripped of civility and society, semantics and sympathy, exposing their private selves, the celebrity would be one long indiscretion all the time. That rancid self is allegedly sustainable. With minimal evidence for their case, the strangers judge the celebrity’s sustainable persona. That’s most interesting because there’s only one thing anybody can sustainably be forever: dead."

Bathroom Monologue: The Ring of the Lord

The Red King seemed permanent. He had so many waterways, and his army was so vast, so motivated by fear and malice. Some skirmishes, it seemed like the sky obeyed him, raining down hill on his foes. He was even gifted a ring by the very Devil himself that granted immortality, an everlasting contract to walk the earth and do his damnations.

It took all the High Houses, all the fleets of the world, and quite a few bribes just to turn it into a fair fight. All those war machines, and all those regimens, and the biggest port city in the world in flames. It’s funny, devilishly funny, that it only took one man to cut off the Red King’s hand. Brave Hixon, the foot soldier who would become a commander and a prime minister, lopped it off with a bayonet. I watched it fall into the surf. It looked like a diving blackbird and the ring was its eye.

His hand plummeted between sailors treading water and sharks tasting men. It made a gory morsel, and was swallowed by a thirteen-foot great white. All the maelstrom had attracted all manner of predators, and a giant squid soon snagged the shark. She remained on the upper levels of sea for all the fresh hunting, and so the squid was harpooned and netted by the victors of the Red War. In the belly of a shark, in the belly of a squid, in the hold of a privateer vessel, the ring came back to land.

The squid’s guts were sold to the High Houses that now ruled. It was part of a buffet celebrating great commanders, and one bit found its way to the plate of the most notorious defector. Without his opening the westerly gates, the High Houses never would have had their second front. He was gloating when the ring passed through his colon. It managed to pass through him entirely before he realized his bowels were not merely straining from the feast, but bleeding.

The ring travelled through the sewers as he travelled to his family crypt. There were state honors. There were rumors, too, that the Red King had cursed his betrayers. Silly talk. His remains were rotting in a second-grade tomb in a tourist backwater.

You may not know it, but sewer runoff was one of the sources of water used to mix cement for all the new High House buildings. By high misfortune, the ring was sucked into the foundations of the first free court house in the region. In its annals law was handed over to the juries, and populist justice would overturn all the evils of the Red King’s reign. For twenty-two years lawyers and summoned free peoples debated our rights, and signed quite a few dubious concessions.

Then, in the twenty-second year, anarchists bombed the city. They hit the magistrate’s mansion, two postal offices, and the court house. The memory is acrid, for that was the day Brave Hixon spoke on the steps. He was very inspirational until everything exploded. It was only part of a civil war.

Rescue workers shuttled in from around the region. Brave men and women were coughing up the dust for months afterward. Bits of the rubble got everywhere, including in-between the treads of boots. The ring travelled halfway across the continent before its shine was spotted on the bottom of one such boot. The rescue worker was trying to pry it out when his shuttle derailed. Awful mess. Probably the anarchists again.

The boot was pulled from the wreckage ten hours before its owner. Brigands showed up before aid, and they pillaged the luggage and bodies. One particular brigand absconded with four sets of boots and a designer rucksack. He didn’t even notice the embedded jewelry; he actually wore that pair of boots when he went grave robbing that night.

Grave robbing was endemic back then. With the High Houses building up the world, old and superstitious things like crypts went untended. And with all these attacks around the continent, the High Houses couldn’t be asked to care. They might even have been happy to see the Red King’s hole desecrated.

They might have been happy to see this grave robber prying open the lid of the largest sarcophagus. It was stacked on top of three other boxes. They jostled as he worried the lid. They creaked, and slumped, and one of his feet slipped. The sarcophagus came down on top of him. Crushed his skull just as the ring popped loose from his boot. It rolled up the slate floor, wobbled around his knee, then down through the broken lid. It came to rest in the Red King’s palm, for he still had one hand.

Bathroom Monologue: I Am Not a Chauvinist

My career in politics began in ninth grade Health Class. Every Thursday we got a visitor, and our third visitor was very important to me. She was a specialist. This specialist asked our class a question to gauge how sexist we were. The premise alone had most of us stiff in our chairs.

I clutched my little fingers into a fist as she asked, “How do you prevent rape?”

The distressing answers, more from girls than boys, flew up with every hand.

“Stay away from alleys.”

“Don’t dress like a slut.”

“My mom keeps a knife in her purse.”

These answers disgusted me; how dare they put the onus on the victims? And these answers disgusted our specialist, who frowned with increasing severity. Hands fell pre-emptively, leaving me with hope that maybe I did have a good idea. It was the most reliable way to stop such crimes. I held up my arm at the same time as Ashley Harding. Ashley got called on first.

“Don’t rape anybody,” she said.

The specialist nodded a sanitary nod. This was what she wanted, and she launched into an explanation of why. As she began explaining the differences between a patriarchal and a feminist point of view, I sank in my chair. I was crushed. My idea didn’t fit either of these categories.

In retrospect, it was a blessing she didn't call on me. She would have quashed a revolution politics. If called upon, I'd have told the class: “Put cameras everywhere. Shoot people as necessary.”

Listening to her lecture, I realized while I wasn’t a feminist, I also wasn’t a chauvinist: I was a totalitarian.

John is a Versatile Blogger Once More

Marianne Su has become the most recent person to grant me The Versatile Blogger Award. This is still one of the most flattering things that happens to the Bathroom Monologues, since versatility is one of the things in prose that I value the most. Marianne also decided that her “seven admissions” would be seven wishes. For this edition of John Wiswell: Versatile Blogger, I’m following her variation. Time to rub the lamp.

1. I wish to write and edit faster. Right now at least eight of my professional friends are cursing me because they think I’m some paragon of productivity, but there wasn't a day writing my novel that I didn’t think this was taking me too long. This desire will never abate.

2. Neither will my wish to be able to simultaneously read and write at high volumes abate. At present I am a wretchedly close-minded writer, obsessing over my own manuscript for most of the waking hours of the day, and so am unable to enjoy almost anything with a cover while in such throes. This is an awful habit for a novelist. We need to consume lots of prose to keep our minds nimble and our attentions acute to what’s going on in the market.

3. I wish some of my readers would buy me stuff off my wish list linked to the right. Eh? No? Nobody? Yeah, that's probably fair.

4. I often wish I liked everything that was popular. Life would just be easier, and society significantly easier, if I could just enjoy the works of William Shakespeare, The Beatles, Radiohead, Watchmen, Mark Wahlberg, Rockstar Games, cell phones, and all the other overblown nonsense my fellow primates seem to gorge their life-hours upon. There’s an honest relief when I consume something hugely popular and find I actually like it, and it's not the relief of a satisfying work. At these times I feel like I've made a little in-road with my culture. And I do like some very popular works and artists (I adore Pixar, worship at the altar of Stephen King, and was as hooked on Lost as anybody); just not enough of them to feel like I'm doing it right.

5. Like every time I get the power of wishes, I wish to be able to solve all my problems with blunt, unthinking violence. I would gladly trade any intelligence I had for Hulk powers (not that Hulk’s powers ever solve his problems).

6. An equally neurotic and equally frequent wish is to be able to suffer for others. My syndrome has made me very accustomed to pain and strife, and often I see friends not handling their physical problems and earnestly desire that I could take it for them. It’s a sort of whipping-boy effect. Now, if I was smart I’d just wish to get rid of their suffering, but I traded my intelligence for Hulk powers in the previous wish.

7. This one is another everyday wish: that my works entertain people the way great writers entertained me when I needed them most. There were very dark nights in my bedridden teens when getting to the next page of a Mark Twain or Michael Crichton novel was as close as I got to the will to live. This is the sort of goal I think a person can work towards, and strive and struggle to be worthy of, but isn’t something you can actually achieve. The author wishes it. The reader achieves it.

Thanks to Marianne, and here's to another year of posting daily for everyone's amusement.

Bathroom Monologue: The Carnivore of Crime

One of the most dangerous masterminds in the world, with a rap sheet over sixty five million years long. The Carnivore’s villainy has withstood all of evolution’s attempts to wipe him out; though his fellow dinosaurs are fossils, this lizard is the tyrant of the underworld. His underlings, the Filet Minions, are as highly-trained a themed gang as could be found in the civilized world. He was the only major villain in America with no lasting arch-nemesis, on account of his penchant for devouring them. These days his prime targets are vegans, whom he calls the “modern day herbivores.” He has only one exploitable weakness: his peanut-sized brain cannot resist any form of word play.