Bathroom Monologues: Enjoy the Festivities

“Festivals are about the people. Get out and celebrate them if you’ve got them. They aren’t about sitting inside and watching the TV special, unless you’re watching it with other people. They aren’t about the discounts at the store, unless you’re buying it for somebody else (or somebody else is buying it for you). Festivals can’t be about the harvest. The harvest is food, and it’s stupid to throw a party for something you’ll be shitting out tomorrow. Festivals can’t be about events; events are things people do, or things that happen to people; and in either case, events remain about people. Festivals can’t be about the gods. Festivals are about the people. Gods are about the people. “About” can mean “around” or “for.” If the gods aren’t for the people or around the people, they don’t deserve a festival, and if the festival is around for the people, it serves the gods. Festivals can be inspired by food, fortune, and gods, but they are here for you. Always bring it back to the people in your life, to loved ones and strangers, and enjoy.”

Bathroom Monologue: Meteors, Asteroids, Comets – You Have Them? We’ll Buy Them.

It's been brought to my attention that the KT impact, which wiped out the dinosaurs and destroyed the environment some 65,000,000 years ago, was caused by a single three-mile-wide asteroid. When I heard this, it hit me – we need to stop putting all our money into nuclear weapons, and start funding huge rocks. We’ve got miles and miles of stone that’s currently only serving as boring scenery next to highways, but if this goes right, soon we’ll have a giant slab of asphalt hanging from a satellite directly above the U.N. Let’s see them kick us off the Security Council when we’re dangling a man-made meteor over their toupees. And why stop at three miles wide? We’re not using Montana for anything, and I’m sure Alaska will part with a couple of the Aleutian Islands. Why build a missile silo on an island when you can turn the island into a projectile? This level of destructive force wiped out all dominant life forms on the planet last time, and in our hands? I don’t see how it can go wrong.

Bathroom Monologue: It’s “MP3 Player of Middle Eastern Descent,” thank you very much

Gary and Samid came up with the plan. They called everyone they knew, including everyone at Samid’s mosque. Most of them weren’t impressed, but thankfully a lot of the younger guys were into it. Come Monday morning they would re-brand “iPod” as a dirty word. You see, Gary and Samid had realized the nature of profane words while playing pokler on Friday. Specifically as they used them to jab at each other. “Fuck” was just one of many words for procreation. “Shit” was just one of many words for fecal matter. Why were they bad? Because angry people said so for a long enough time. And people were particularly sensitive to racially sensitive words. Since Islam was still hazy to most politically correct Americans there was the opporunity to introduce new forbidden words from that culture and insist no one say them anywhere. New forbidden words like the ancient Arabic word for an unwashed, uneducated heathen, used for centuries as the most caustic slur against Muslim slaves – “Ay Pahd.” According to Gary and Samid it was a millennia old, even if it really dated back to a drunken conversation in a New Jersey suburb. But if they showed enough outrage, and got enough brown-skinned people to play along, they might have an anti-hate speech suit against Apple by August.

Bathroom Monologue: What do you say when someone coughs?

“Bless you” is an interesting little saying. It’s replaced, “God bless you,” making it almost as secular as a toothbrush or signaling to change lanes. People don’t even pay attention when they say the “blessing” part. This phrase was originally contrived as a spell against the heart attack thought to follow a sneeze (or so numerous people have told me, all singularly proud in their knowledge). The intent has fallen out of the public mind. Today saying, “Bless you,” after a sneeze has everything to do with a momentary extension of good will that is not particularly connoted by its words and not necessitated by its situation. It is a peculiar wonder in our increasingly insular and seemingly selfish society; it is an example of needless kindness. We need a great deal more kindness in the world, and this rare example of needlessly contributing may just help solve our deficit. The saying doesn’t force you to convert, defend your belief structure or scoff. And really, you shouldn’t do anything so caustic – you owe the speaker a debt of gratitude, if not for the momentary verbal kindness, then because he didn’t clock you for sneezing on him.

Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Sentences

-Vampires invented “Welcome” mats as a trick not just getting you to unwittingly invite them in, but to pay them for the opportunity.
-To conserve resources, sensory deprivation chambers will now be two people to a unit.
-Most things charged to Logic's account are fraudulent claims made by Sweeping Generalizations, who stole her pin number.
-“In this painting he appears to be force-feeding her a banana—OH GOD!”
-He had the expression of a physicist who has just accidentally disproved gravity.
-Stephen King is rolling over in his grave, largely because he's not dead and struggling to escape.
-“Funnier than a paraplegic grinning around a condom.”
-He who knows no bounds falls off a cliff.
-“How pretentious of a minister to tell us how to live our lives,” we say, pretending we don’t think we know how he should live his.
-Mr. Guillotine was ejected from the carnival after he got too into Whack-A-Mole and tried to pull one of them out of its hole for saying something disparaging about his mother.
-When you consider my misanthropy under the light that I am human, you’ll understand that my humility isn’t false at all.
-Falling is like flying until you hit the ground.
-Hiphop is not only dead, but vivified as a zombie that feasts on the flesh of living culture.
-The agnostic is a heretic to Islam, the anarchist is a heretic to democracy, but the individual is a heretic to everyone.
-Science is a bitch to Religion, but to be fair, Religion did beat her when they were married.
-“If you’re bipolar, please switch to the other pole.”
-Minimalism.
- He got the abridged audiobook, but it felt too much like cheating, so he listened to it twice to even things out.
-Octology: A new belief system positing that sports are actually defense mechanisms.
-Life is a series of “but,” “and,” the occasional “therefore,” and every so often, a “now.”
-“You seem to be arguing that the holes disprove the existence of the Swiss cheese.”
-"The orthodox believed the world would end in the year 1,000 or 2,000 because, apparently, God really fucking hated round numbers."
-The most painful part of scholarly studies is learning that people far smarter than you disagree with you.
-The most relieving part of scholarly studies is discovering that people far smarter than you disagree with each other.
-Real maturity is recognizing the overwhelming majority of what culture defines as maturity is conformist idiocy with which only the immature would comply.
-We knew the end was nigh when Richardson reached for the power switch and the supercomputer asked, “WHERE DO I GO WHEN YOU TURN ME OFF?”

Bathroom Monologue: Methods of Transport

Horses were the cars of the 18th century. People switched from horses to cars because when a car has to stop for gas, the passengers don’t throw up. People also jumped to cars because they had multiple “horsepower.” Every attempt to increase the horsepower of a horse, by grafting additional legs onto it or feeding it caffeine, tended to fail and kill and the mode of transportation. So the horse was left behind for the automobile, and years passed. The car was intelligently designed, growing bigger and faster. The horse evolved, growing smarter. Horses attained speech in time to ask humans what they were thinking in sticking to the combustion engine, just before the environment collapsed and killed them both. Fortunately the car was advanced enough by this point to run things without them. Unfortunately, it was not advanced enough to appreciate the irony of the earth’s new dominant species being the Ford Mustang.

“Mowing the Lawn” Monologue

Karma is Communist, not Capitalist. Christianity is Capitalist, which explains why Europe and North America exploited the world economy so well. In Christianity you get the Heaven you want if you earn it – you’ve got to do good works, think good thoughts, and most of all, save. Those are your assets in this economy.

Karma does not work that way. It is not designed to give you what you want; it gives you what the system has. What you get in return for good work is positive, like a tractor or a leggy blonde. Unfortunately the gift isn't always useful for your particular circumstance. So Communist Karma may yield a tractor to an accountant rather than to a farmer. You cannot alter or direct Karma with prayer; the only thing prayer ever got anyone in Communism is shot. You can hope, though, that you get the leggy blonde instead of the tractor. According my bi-curious Buddhist buddies, the leggy blonde is a universal positive.

Bathroom Monologue: Electroedipal

"Cloning will unite our Freudian impulses. Currently you want to have sex with your mother and kill your father. Once we start cloning there will only be one parent, who you'll both want to fuck and kill. It'll be like a real girlfriend."

Bathroom Monologue: Small Talk, Volume 6 (Trialogues)

[Three men sit in a booth: SAMID, in a pinstripe suit; GARY, in a pinstripe suit; and SPIDER, in a spandex superhero costume]
Spider: How can you be Muslim anyway, Samid? I thought Islam hated sodomites.
Samid: I am Muslim. I am gay. I do not hate myself. So I challenge your terms, Spider.
Spider: I don’t see how it works. Doesn’t the Qu’ran forbid that kind of lifestyle?
Samid: Well, let me ask you: are you human?
Spider: Of course.
Samid: Can humans dodge bullets and hoist cars overhead?
Spider: That’s different!
Gary: Different from human.
Spider: Oh, sure. Let the normies gang up on the superman.

Bathroom Monologue: Real Realism

I'm not a big supporter of realism, because we don’t live in a realistic world. A good story only needs to be interesting and compelling; it can be the most absurd nonsense in the history of publication and still be completely worthwhile. Meanwhile, there is a glut of unreadable “realism,” the literature that pays homage to our common illusion of how the world works. The world really works in a very different manner. In the real world, lightning kills more people than sharks, and toasters kill more people than lightning. Science has done an admirable job trying to make our universe seem plausible, but think about it. Think about gravity: ultimately, things fall down because we’re standing on something really big. It’s not a terribly realistic world, and we’ve had to stretch the definition of “realistic” to fit it. But nobody’s fooling gravity.

Bathroom Monologue: Why do the news channels have tickers?

...hophiles Rights Bill passes through Senate with overwhelming majority - 3 Afghani civilians, 2 Swiss tourists claim they saw an angel at a strip club, Pope skeptical - Gravity, inertia disproved. "It was so obvious," say Cambridge scientists - Secretary General says Lincoln Logs (TM) may be poisonous - Orange County Track and Field Team accused of wearing lifts - Jessica Alba, Jessica Simpson reveal they were men all along - 3 Afghani civilians, 2 Swiss tourists claim Pope “was there, too,” have photos to back up claim - Lime JELL-O may reduce risk of colon cancer, new report claims - America declares war on rest of wo...

Bathroom Monologue: Rule #1 to Great Storytelling

I've never really written by rules, outside of a loose sense of grammar and syntax I picked up from audiobooks. However, I think this will be my first rule: all characters that interact must love, hate or be totally indifferent towards each other. Love comes in many shapes and packages; it can be friendly love, romantic love, lust, or whatever. Similarly, hate can be a psychotic minor nuisance, like obsessing over the obnoxious way she keeps squeaking her sneakers on the bus, or some dire, roiling rage at the six-fingered man who killed your father and who now must prepare to die. The indifference will come in one shade: total apathy. Two people who simply cannot be bothered to care are a great source for comedy. I understand we have a hundred such characters in the Senate right now. One hundred and one when the Vice President visits.

Bathroom Monologue: Oven of Danger

Whenever mom wasn’t around, Claire experimented with the oven. 300 degrees. 400 degrees. She could make it so hot that it hurt just to touch the glass window. But Claire was more interested with the oven always starting by displaying the temperature at 100 degrees. That seemed strange to her, for it to instantly go from room temperature to the temperature under her tongue. In her ensuing experiments, Claire set the oven under 100, to see what would happen. What happened was an angry beep and flashing letters. It wanted to stay above 100. Well she’d have it know that it was an appliance and she was the world’s smartest 9-year-old. When mom went out to the spa for a day, Claire rewired the damned thing to let her punch in lower numbers. 90. 80. 60 – at which point she left the oven door open for a nice Fall-like breeze. 25, in the hopes of being able to get it to snow in her kitchen. That failed, but the descent led her to the final number: 0. And no lousy zero degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit, but what the oven called “absolute zero.” She pushed the buttons eagerly. Unfortunately for the world’s smartest nine-year-old, absolute zero had more consequences than ice cube maker, and the oven suddenly swallowed all the heat on the planet. In the instant before the world vanished Claire didn’t worry about Armageddon, but how many weeks of allowance she’d be out to replace the oven.

Bathroom Monologue: "Girls get the arms, but not the swords. Bastards gets the swords, but not the arms." -George Martin, A Game of Thrones

"Some, uhm," the bastard said, sideling up on the girl, "You want to share? We'll have equal equipment to the princes, and between my shitty life and your monthly period, the rage alone will crush them."

He thought the girl was going to shove him, but instead she snatched the sword from his belt.

"Fine," she said. "But I'm going first."

She tied back her hair, hiked up her skirts, and charged the captain of the guard's blind spot.

Bathroom Monologue: Themes

-The difficulty of creation, the ease of destruction, and the callowness of those that go the easy route (“Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I prefer long novels”)
-The importance of a group of individuals that choose each other, like friends, over groups made up of arbitrary boundaries, like countries and races (“The man who chooses to guard my back on his own is better than the three who do it out of family obligation, and if he stabs me, he’ll have a motive that’s at least three times more interesting”)
-The prime motivation of satisfaction (“Money, luxury, sex, love, all try to woo it into submission, but only it is itself”)
-The comforts of the existence of orthodoxy for heretics (“It’s an ugly tree, but something’s got to cast shade”)
-That you can make fun of anything if you do it right (“Some things are sacred, but the holy ones still know how to laugh”)
-Waterslides (“Weeeeeee!”)
-We don’t fucking know, and we don’t trust anyone that says they do (“If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, then it can illuminate my descent”)

Notice: Not Not Closing Down

I was moving on March 31st and April 1st, and so was too busy and tired to realize it was April Fool's Day. I deeply regret missing the opportunity to pretend this site was closing, that I had become a Televangelist, and/or perhaps that it would begin charging a membership fee (to finance my Evangelism? Hmm?). Out of my deep sorrow for this missed opportunity, I promise that the site will close and/or have a registration fee come April 1st of next year. If things work properly we will charge you for the closure of the site. Visa, Mastercard, Debit, Paypal, Rupees, Gil and items off my wishlist are acceptable forms of payment.

Bathroom Monologue: Cover, Bathroom Monologues Anthology, Vol. 1

Public restroom. Teal tiles, grey doors. Close-up on one stall. Door is wide open. Overweight man in blue jeans and a Hawaiian shirt is blocking the toilet, facing away from us. One hand is clearly taking care of business, while the other is gesturing. He appears to be addressing someone. There is no back wall to this stall. Instead, we see an amphitheatre from the conductor's point of view (toilet as podium?). The amphitheatre is packed with very well dressed couples of distinguished age, looking his way with hushed interest.

Bathroom Monologue: This Monologue Brought to You by: Food Poisoning

Everybody expected Yusef Amin Jr. to quit after a week. Half a month at the most. He was a spoiled teen riding a trust fund. He came from money, slept in money, and didn’t need to go to college or worry for his future. He was destined for luxury. That he wanted to work in a soup kitchen was just a phase. He’d signed up on a moral kick, for the emotional high of feeling good for doing good. He’d be back on X-Box Live as soon as he felt better about himself.

But he lasted a week. Then two. Then an entire month. His co-workers were shocked to see him return after the time a patron stabbed him in the kidney. The patron had waited outside, hearing about Yusef Jr.’s wealth. He carjacked him and left him with a flesh wound for his troubles. Police never found the assailant. Yet Yusef Jr. came back, and he came back to the same kitchen. He came back with a vengeance, doubling his hours at the local shelter (while wearing cheaper clothes to work). He came back maxing out credit cards to keep blankets in the shelter and chicken on the menu.

Yusef Amin Jr. was stabbed three times over his entire career of hands-on philanthropy. The attacks were unrelated to each other, mere hazards of working in bad areas.

Exiting the hospital for the third time, he saw a guy playing his guitar with his case lying suggestively on the sidewalk. Yusef Jr. dropped his pocket change in. Yusef Sr. chastised that giving to the poor only encouraged them to remain as they were.

Jr. responded, “Yeah, dad, I’m sure this ninety cents will totally validate his life’s dream of wearing bags over his feet and not knowing if he’ll have a roof over his head tonight.”

Then Jr. dropped the contents of his wallet into the case.

Sr. cut Jr. off financially. It did not last, not with Mrs. Amin worrying about her son, but it sent a clear message.

So Yusef Jr. went to college, studying politics and social studies, while keeping up social work as an extracurricular. The story of his third attack circulated so much that he inevitably had to explain why he kept coming back to shelters. He said he was born with a deep-seated terror of poverty. He was not afraid that the guy lying on the pavement would mug him, or that the needy veteran on the steps would go crazy if he approached. If anything, Yusef Jr. was terrified of the notion of people being poor. It chilled him; just thinking about it made his hands cold. For him, helping out at a soup kitchen was entirely selfish, just as everyone said, except that the selfishness manifested in needing to feel he did something. That was his moral kick, and he would never stop kicking.

Bathroom Monologue: Racing to Enlightenment

“In my search for the divine I didn’t encounter the Creator, but I did encounter an allosaurus. I converted to athleticism – while running.”

Bathroom Monologue: For the sake of brevity

Something serious. A humorous twist on the serious statement. Something absurd. Something more absurd. Something absurd masquerading as something serious. Something that goes over your head. Something that goes over my head. Vaguely funny closer.

Bathroom Monologue: Sometimes life is like...

Always the sewer! Always the frickin' sewer! "Lo, there are mutant alligators in the sewer." "Lo, there are werewolves in the sewer. Better take your expensive silver weapons down there." "Lo, there's a Satanic cult plotting to overthrow the government. They're at that country club you like so much. Stop them and you’ll get free lunch." "Really?" "No, sewer." Why do I always have to fight things in the sewer? Why are they all down there? There's nothing there! It's the same thing; they go down there, I go down there, they die, I fall in a vat of unmentionables, and I spend the next week chewing antibacterial soap to get the taste out of my mouth. Well not this time! This time Hung Lo thought ahead! I wired the sewage treatment plant with enough TNT that if anything survives the blast, it deserves to overthrow humanity. It's the devil hunter equivalent of flushing a cherry bomb. It’ll knock out every pipe and support beam under the city. In a half hour, this city will be under water. Brown water. Let's see how you like having to shower in Listerine!

Bathroom Monologue: Justice, like lighting!

I've never understood doing what voices tell you. Most of the voices are children. If a live child tells me to go strangle the neighbor's dog, I tell it to get the heck off my lawn. The disembodied child voice isn't even on my lawn. I'll tell it the Easter Bunny isn't real and it'll run away crying.

If it's an adult voice, I'll reason with it.

“No, I won't strangle the neighbor's dog. It's cute and never craps on my part of the sidewalk."

Sometimes these voices claim authority. If it claims to be the voice of God demanding some violent sacrifice, well, that's the easiest case of all. I’ll tell it, “No. You do it.” I mean, it's God, right? “Heck, don't just strangle it. I want a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky to fry that frickin’ mongrel.”

Busted. It was one of those disembodied kid voices with a voice modulator. I taught those punks.

Bathroom Monologue: Jane Thoroughs

When Jane Thoroughs reached the level of literary fame that meant she didn’t have to pitch ideas, but just write stories and mail them to an editor, she whipped up “The Banquet of Crow, v.2.” And because she was at a level of literary fame that meant she had any literary fame at all, the editor of the small periodical rushed to make it his cover without asking what “v.2” meant. It was probably one of those many literary flourishes the greats liked so much.

He’d wished he’d asked about that and several other things when some very angry people from Dorothy Parker’s estate wrote to remind him, if he’d ever had it in mind, that the late luminary had written something called “The Banquet of Crow” in 1957. They also wrote to ask if he’d noticed how similar the stories were, paragraph for paragraph. They’d said “word for word,” but Jane pointed out that not all the words were the same.

Glimpsing at them side-by-side, paragraph-to-paragraph made it seem like the stories were the same. But this was only because of careful word selection; the geography of the paragraphs looked identical because Jane had rewritten parts syllable-by-syllable, so that only by reading the actual words would you notice they were different. Read aloud, they even had the same tone.

“The Banquet of Crow” was about a whiny housewife who couldn’t get over the fact that her husband had abandoned their tedious, loveless marriage. “The Banquet of Crow v.2” also about an abandoned housewife who went through the same parties, got hooked up on the same failed date by her friends, and saw the same over-pampering psychologist as the madame of “The Banquet of Crow.”

But “v.2” was more sympathetic to the wife. It didn’t make her a heroine or anything, but it depicted her as the victim of broken habit and real shock rather than Parker’s bitch that all but willingly refused to get over things and face reality. When the scorn poured in Jane answered, “This isn’t plagiarism. It’s editing.”

Bathroom Monologues: Decorations

I was quite proud of my adorable scarecrows with their jack o'lantern heads, linked arm and arm on the porch. Yet the only person to compliment them was a politician going door to door for re-election, and I was fairly certain it was in her routine to compliment any decorations she saw. I could have had kittens dangling and strangling from my rafters and she would have been obliged to say, "I do so love your cats here."

Bathroom Monologue: Only publishing this one so I can claim the quote “sexual hot potato”

The Ekari have four genders, amongst which they pass seed, fertilized egg, and eventually developing life. It’s sort of a sexual hot potato. Coincidentally they don’t treat sex as very fun. It’s a lot like filing taxes for the Ekari. You might be similarly disinterested if every porno took 75 minutes to get to the good part.

Bathroom Monologue: Letter to the Editors

He wasn't sure he was God. He could manipulate reality so well that nobody noticed when he did it, and the side effects were minimal (some people saw UFO's and once or twice a virgin got impregnated, nothing big). And he sure didn't want to play God because that never worked out well for anyone, least of all for God, Whom, if He existed, wasn't answering His phone anymore. But darn it, he wanted to help. There were so many sick people. So many hungry people. So many unnecessary deaths. The suffering of humans was ridiculous, caused primarily by the selfishness and ignorance of their fellow men (and women). They needed instruction. So he crafted a message. Then removed the profane language. Then he edited it to include literary flourish. Then he re-edited it to modernize the language. Then re-edited to include that interpretability most humans needed in instruction, and seconds later scratched that out and made sure it was as obvious a command as possible. Finally, he slept on it. It seemed pretty good, and after softening his words a little (he could come off as harsh) and reading it out loud to hear how it sounded, he mailed it to reality. He hoped it worked. It read: "Love each other or I'll fucking kill you."

Bathroom Monologue: Who Was I in a Present Life?

In 2007 I dropped 64 pounds, cut my 18-inch brown hair and shaved my mangy red beard to discover that, underneath the mess, I was strikingly bland. Still a little puffy and moon-faced, still with moles in unflattering places – still too ugly to ever be handsome, still not messed up enough to be intriguingly hideous. It turned out that, under years of fast food fat and a refusal to cut my hair, I was a default model. I recognized myself, but not as the person I used to be so many pounds ago. I recognized myself from BBC sitcoms.

I looked very much like a drove of pudgy, unappealing BBC sitcom extras. We never get a meaningful role. Often we don’t even speak. We’re lucky to be reoccurring characters in the backgrounds of office or sidewalk scenes. The more I catch myself in the mirror (and the BBC online), the more I realize what a successful and overlooked phenomenon my body type is.

Only one of us has tasted real success, as the guy who plays the “P.C.” on Mac commercials. Even he is a little too short and distinct-looking for our club, though, and we’re not noticeable enough people to be the butt of that many jokes. Bless that man. May he experience all the success that none of us have the look to achieve.

Bathroom Monologue: Hate Living by Catchphrases

"I never learned anything from people who agree with me."
"Do you believe the sky is blue?"
"Yes."
"I agree! Did you know that the 1876 U.S. Presidential election was so divisive and contentious that the outcome was negotiated in a hotel, and that Rutherford Hayes was granted the presidency from his opponents for agreeing to withdraw troops from the South and promising to have at least one Southerner in his cabinet?"
"No.…"
"Well there, you learned something. Excuse me. I’ve got a bus to catch."

Bathroom Monologue: "No Pets Allowed (except those assisting handicapped persons)" -Door at Roanoke Regional Airport, Virginia

It took time a long time to build the custom glass tank, and still longer to properly train the maco shark to operate it. His wife wasn’t happy to see her blind husband led around by a shark in a gas-powered tank, but Tim was insistent. Maco (Tim wasn’t creative with names) directed the device by swimming nearer towards one of eight directional zones in the tank, which worked in wide-open spaces, but still had some kinks with doorways. He rationalized that it did get through the door (even if it demolished it), and he hadn’t been mugged once since submitting himself to the guidance of the land shark. As a bonus, Tim didn’t have to walk around, dragged by some seeing-eye mutt, but could catch a ride on one of the tank’s bumpers, so long as he held onto the rail and not the edge of the tank. Maco was loyal, but she was also a nibbler.

Bathroom Monologue: If you edited a short story collection…

If I could have my own personal collection of great short stories, it would open with E.B. White’s short poem, “Critic.” That poem reads:

“The critic leaves at curtain fall,
to find, in starting to review it,
he scarcely saw the play at all,
for watching his reaction to it.”

Then the first three stories would be:

-Mark Twain’s “Cannibalism in the Cars”
-Eudora Welty’s “Where is That Voice Coming From?”
-Stephen King’s “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet”

The interesting hitch is that, besides them being three writers I love and three stories I can’t stop re-reading, Welty studied Twain and King studied Welty. In a very abstract way, you’d start the collection with a literary descent. It would also help that Twain’s story is delivered from a questionable narrator, whose questionability is strongest as it ends, Welty’s story was written by such a strong and inexplicable voice that she actually titled it to admit she didn’t know how she was coming up with all of it, and King’s story is literally about where inspiration comes from.

After that, we’d go to:

-Percival Everrett’s “The Fix”
-Gabriel Marquez’s “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”

I don’t know enough Gabriel Marquezes to use his middle name. You’re among friends here, Gabe.

-James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
-George Kaufman’s “Annoy Kaufman Inc.”
-Ray Bradbury’s “Zero Hour”
-Ron Carlson’s “The H Street Sledding Record”
-Steve Martin’s “Changes in the Mind After Fifty”
-Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
-Jonathan Swift’s “Battel of the Books”
-Philip Dick’s “The Eyes Have It”
-Roger Zelazny’s “The George Business”
-Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”
-Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question”

I would close it out with “The Things They Carried,” being such an amazing piece of voice, but Asimov’s story about reversing entropy is too fitting an end. As not to spite either modern American literary tradition or science fiction canon, though, I’d actually close the collection with Fredric Brown’s classic short short, “The Last Man.” That goes:

“The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”



I’m going on another trip, folks. I’ll be back on the 25th. I may post fresh Bathroom Monologues from the road if I get internet access, but I have no idea if that's feasible right now. If you would do me a small kindness, list some of the short stories that would be in your personal collection in the Comments section. With any luck I'll have a lovely little reading list when I get back. Themes are very welcome.