Bathroom Monologue: Nooks, Crannies and Hobgoblins

“Doesn't everyone have these thoughts? That queer things may lurk in the corners of our round world? There's a lot about the ocean we don't know. There's a lot of uninhabited forest, and there's always another range without cell phone reception. It seems to me that there's always more, somewhere in this world. Recently I've been wondering if some ethereal being might play a trick on the world one day. Everyone blinks, you know. Well what if, in the billions of blinks we make in our lives, everyone's eyes were synchronized in closing, just for a tenth of a second, and this Loki or Anansi flicked the lightswitch, turning out the sun and covering the world in deep darkness. It'd be back on by the time anyone saw it. You might say that it takes light several minutes to get from the sun to the earth, and that such timing would be impossible, and that all the cameras we have running would catch it - but by that point, haven't you already accepted a being so powerful he's built a lightswitch in a star?”

Bathroom Monologue: Tao Jones

The Tao Jones Industrial will be the first stock index to not only inspire understanding of market fluctuations, but also to inspire peace with the economy. No stocks will be admitted that are not the true stocks.

Bathroom Monologue: Laws of Ash

Weclij Erengeld was a stateman of the Dwarfish Contingency in Ash Gardens, and a vocal policy maker. From his days in the academy he espoused faith in the government and support Ash Gardens’ stand that philosophy be illegal. To him, as to the ancients, free thought only meant distraction from the engines of progress. He was one of four signers to a law permitting the execution of those who espoused anything but the state lines on morality.

He was executed under the first provision of that bill for giving his son an axe. Written in spiraling text around the handle, underneath the cloth wrapping, was written:

“You should never take without thanking. If you hesitate to thank because bringing attention will make them stop you from taking, you should not take. Gratitude is a virtue that will save families and culture itself.”

It was a lesson he apparently considered vital to his son. In public life he had always been gracious, but never espoused gratitude as a virtue, nor did he challenge that it should be among the Five Chief Virtues, those the only ones recognized in Ash Gardens. We do not know why the dwarf risked his life to express such a lesson. We do know that his son has his seat in Parliament, and is fast working on anti-propaganda laws that would make him forfeit the axe for destruction. Currently the weapon rests on his mantle, its handle firmly wrapped.

Bathroom Monologue: bathroom monoLOgue

“In just five minutes, one hundred thousand orcs will come smashing through this barricade. They will stop at nothing to kill us all and destroy this country. We are the only ones who can stop them. To those of you who stay, you will have my respect, and I will fight to the last drop of my blood at your side. To those who stay, there will be heroism, and the violent knowledge that you have defended a way of life. To those who flee, they will find you if we fail here. To those who leave, if you are not tracked down by orcs then we will have succeeded here, and I'll find you someday, and I'm going to be unbearably annoying. You are so going to owe me.” -Hung Lo

Bathroom Monologue: I'd really like an answer to this one

Amnesia doesn't happen as often as we see it in movies and sitcoms, but it is real. There have been books and documentaries about it. One question I've had since childhood and never heard answered satisfactorily, though, is how they remember to speak. If you forget everyone and everything, how do you remember words? And why do you remember that “rust" is the oxidation of metals, but not that "Jane McCalsky" is your wife of six years? In semiotics, you remember that the word "rock" corresponds with this image, but not that "dad" corresponds with him. How do you retain the definitions of stock language words, but not specialized words, like names? You learned to speak during your life, yet you've just forgotten your life. How can your forget all your English teachers and all the writers they loved, but not the words they used? Didn't you learn your teacher's name the same year you learned those words? Why is that one word off the record? What does this say about the human mind?

Bathroom Monologue: Designer Genes

Muscle is hard to build and easy to lose. Meanwhile fat is easy to build, and while it is supposed to turn into energy, is hard to get rid of. But one pair of Tyrex's designer genes will switch this inefficient paradigm in time for bikini season.

Tired of your appendix rupturing when it's never done anything to help? Tired of testicles being so sensitive that one whack prevents you from being able to flee a threat to your masculinity? Or maybe you've always wanted magenta skin. When you look at all the stupidities of the human body, it's hard to believe in evolution at all, let alone an intelligent designer. Fortunately, Tyrex is here to help.

There is a mild-to-moderate risk of sprouting additional appendixes when using Tyrex. Women who are pregnant or who may become pregnant should not use Tyrex (seriously, we're tired of fertile women suing us). Normal side effects include liver failure, morbid obesity, spontaneous belief in backwards reincarnation and magenta skin. Talk to your physician if you have asthma, heart conditions or swelling of the ankles. Otherwise, just get this stuff already. Ask your pediatrician about Tyrex Chewables (patent pending), because let's be honest, trying his best is not enough. You want a winner, and we will give him to you.

Bathroom Monologue: The Little Ice Age

I know what you're asking yourself.

"Ice Age? He displays superhuman strength and reflexes, heals with amazing speed, patches his mind into computer networks with a thought and can banter better than Robin Williams. Why is he named Ice Age? He has no ice powers."

The reason is to get heroes like you to come after me with flamethrowers and thermal clothing. I'm the Trojan Horse of supervillains. True, when my secret gets out I'll look really lame, but by then I'll have collected enough giant bags with dollar signs on them to retire to a tropical island. Or maybe the North Pole. And that's not meant to be ironic – when Dr. Global Warming gets through with it, it'll be beach-front property...

No, I know there's no sand at the North Pole! Dr. Global Warming is an earth elemental. Listen, we all have duplicitous names. Will you shut up and get on the Needlessly Slow And Easily Escapable Execution Device already?

Bathroom Monologue: Good Gloves, OR, A Limit of Comparisons

Which of these two boxers is more dangerous: a one-time gold medalist, or a three-time silver medalist? The gold medalist was the best in the world, at least for one night. The silver-medalist was the second best in the world at least three times as often. Also consider that a medalist tournament isn't just one match; it's five matches. On all three nights across the twelve years, the silver-medalist won his first, second, third and fourth fights. And if you fight him tonight, you'll be his first. Meanwhile, the gold medalist hasn't won anything lately. So who's more dangerous? The answer is obvious: you’re screwed either way.

Bathroom Monologue: Same story, different monologue (part Finale)

“There.”

Mr. Osbourne dug the tip of Gungnir into the earth before the gods.

“I slew a demon, something no mere mortal could do. I even forged its broken spirit into a spear as a trophy. Evidence.”

The gods muttered to each other. No, they hadn’t considered stipulating that several hundred other mere mortals might help the one mere mortal in question. The God of Accounting made a note to fire whichever one was in charge of stipulations. He thought that was Apollo.

Mr. Osbourne stared at the gods.

The gods stared back at him.

“Well? Pay up.”

The gods grumbled. Then they checked their pockets. Each kicked in a twenty. Eventually the plate rounded over to Rufus, who smoothed out the bills, put them in his money clip and stowed them in his jacket.

“Pleasure betting with you, pantheon. But I didn’t go through all that for money. I remember something about Helios’s chariot?”

The gods looked at each other. Sleep toed the sand, chewing on his bottom lip. Death shied away from him.

"Dude. Helios is going to be so mad at us."

Mr. Osbourne raised his voice. "Didn't we have a bet? Or should I take it up with Zeus?"

Sleep muttered, “It's parked next to Mercury. You have it for the weekend. But please don't ding it up!”

The mortal thought for a moment.

"What'll you give me if I don't?"

Bathroom Monologue: Same story, different monologue (part I)

The Bloody Blades. The Million Man Army. The Road Hard Men. Frankly, they drank a lot and fought for a living, so they earned many nicknames. None were particularly accurate. They wielded more bludgeons than blades and at their peak their membership was around six hundred and something, nowhere near a million.

They did most any work, and often made up work for themselves when work was thin, to keep the gruesome reputation strong. This sometimes meant razing a village. They killed every man, defiled every woman, and let the children watch.

The children didn’t take kindly to this. Raising an army of vengeance didn’t work well; there were so many of the Bloody Blades, and so few resources with which to pay help. Some tried to hunt down the mercenaries themselves, but they met grim ends.

One, an orphan named Rufus, took an economic root to revenge. He lived well. He started as a merchant’s assistant at twelve and founded his own business as soon as possible. He worked in ports and got things to places faster than others. Expedited delivery made him a small fortune quickly. Investments made him another small fortune. He rubbed the two small fortunes together until they made him a nice big one.

He scouted the countryside for perilous men and perilous tasks, but even when his former townsfolk demanded he raise an army to avenge their parents, he declined.

Instead he found the mercenaries who had wronged him, tracked them to their door and tossed a sack of silver on the stoop. He hired them to kill off the nastiest demon in this trade route – a twenty-five foot storm beast. It sounded challenging but helpful to their reputations, so all six-hundred-and-something of the Million Man Army marched to its mountain lair.

Unfortunately it was not a twenty-five foot storm beast. At fifty-five feet and quite hungry, it was more than they had armed themselves for. It loomed and laughed.

Behind them, Rufus yelled, “Charge!”

Before they could retreat, their prey descended on them.

To their merit they fought the demon to the last man. As wave upon wave of brutal warriors crashed on it, it weakened. Soft spots opened up. Wounds deepened. And soon it was so preoccupied with maiming and digesting the great mercenaries that Rufus was able to walk up its back and drive a stake through its neck.

He took the glory for the kill out of spite, underplaying how many of them there had been. But that was not his revenge. That, according to what he told one fellow orphan, “was hiring them to go kill themselves.”

Bathroom Monologue: Same story, different monologue (part Alpha)

I know what you're asking yourselves.

“How did that scrawny, six-foot pretty boy subjugate a giant storm demon?”

I’ll tell you how. He hired six hundred and sixty six mercenaries from the darkest holes in the region to charge at it.

Now, it killed them. Boy, did it ever kill them. It killed them and killed them and killed them.

In doing so, it grew tired. Near the end it was too tired to stop the pretty-boy from jumping on its back and driving a stake through its neck.

It was a wise investment, for not only did he subjugate the demon, but he didn't have to pay a single man his wages.

Bathroom Monologue: Same story, different monologue (part A)

Gungnir was this great demon who sat atop the mountain with claws like arrows and of lightning. He challenged anyone to duel him in single combat. Many aspiring knights tried and fell. He was ferocious and wielded an element. It also helped that these duels always happened at the top of his mountain and his adversary was generally exhausted from the climb when Gungnir the duel was on.

Rufus Osbourne didn’t take kindly to this demon that often interrupted his cross-mountain caravans of goods. So he hired the biggest, rudest band of mercenaries on the continent and had them climb up the mountain ahead of him.

He ordered his men to charge immediately, and one-by-one Gungnir dueled them to death. As battles passed, the men caught their breath. By evening Gungnir was fighting well-rested barbarians. Still, the demon slew them, but it wore itself to the bone doing so. With the infernal creature so tired its sparking head now barely glowed, Rufus strode up and announced more duel.

And that is why Gungnir is not at the top of the mountain anymore.

Three Bathroom Monologues to Flashshot

Three currently unpublished Bathroom Monologues have been accepted for e-publication by Flashshot and should appear later this year or in early 2009. The stories are "There's No War Like Snow War," about an insurrection of snow men, "Bathroom in the Mall of America," an over-literal reimagining of the Mall of America in Washington D.C., and "Here Lies John Wiswell," about the demise of yours truly.

You can visit Flashshot every day for fresh micro-fiction from one author or another. The URL is: http://www.gwthomas.org/flashshotindex.htm.

Cheers,
John Wiswell

Bathroom Monologue: Same story, different monologue (part 1)

Everyone on the battlefield hated Rufus. He was a pretty boy, unscarred, often showing up with no armor. He today he fought in a pinstripe suit, his spear in one hand, the other holding a cell phone to his ear –and he paid more attention to the cell.

That would have been fine if Rufus would have had the decency to die and make a good example of people who took warfare seriously, but instead he was good. Great. Dispiritingly great, in that cinematic way where his would opponents would look around for a camera and wire crew, figuring he couldn’t really be doing this.

He would bound over a man, kick his lord from his horse, skewer his henchmen, then poll-vault off of them and to the next horse – all while texting with one thumb.

He was an acrobat who never exercised, a warrior who never sparred. When he met a challenging opponent they would cross weapons and his spear would spark with lightning, frying the other man.

They said all his gifts of combat came through his weapon, that it was the broken spirit of a demon and that it guided his body in battle. Though how the heck he’d come by it was a mystery to anyone, including his squad. There were rumors he sold his soul for it on eBay.

Bathroom Monologue: Hash It Out

This would cast off the misconceptions about marijuana in modern society. They would publish the Great American Novel, fueled by kind bud. It would be printed on hemp paper with adhesive extracts from the herb. And the novel wouldn’t just be about intelligent people on pot – it would be written by one. Tyrese would smoke a bowl for every writing session, every night until the rough draft was done. Every word would come out of the ether of smoke. The editors would likewise mark up the manuscript in altered states.

The obvious ending is that they didn’t write the book. They scribbled on a couple of pages and got the munchies.

But that’s not true. Tyrese kept Doritos in his desk drawer to ensure devotion to the typewriter. The manuscript was finished on time.

Well then conservative publishers denied their work and blocked the book.

Untrue. A California publisher actually gave them a sizable advance, and the editors of High Times promised at least a semi-favorable review sight-unseen.

Were they busted?

No. The cop was selling to them under the counter.

So what did happen?

The book sucked. The writing was of poor quality and the plot didn’t develop. It had pacing issues and the themes didn’t catch.

It happens to tens of thousands of novels without mind-altering substances every year. Did you think pot would change it?

Bathroom Monologue: Warning: The Bathroom Monologues Are Not Child-Safe. Nor are they…

-Beaver Safe (humans build dams and until you face the fact that you are obsolete we will terminate you on sight)
-Duck Safe (even though it's rabbit season)
-Rabbit Safe (because Mr. Fudd put a lot of work into this and frankly you had it coming)
-Creationist Safe (because nothing that's fun is)
-Darwinist Safe (based on my calculations that 100% of all Charles Robert Darwins have been dead and remained dead since the opening of this site)
-Kryptonian Safe (see Darwinist Safe)
-Accountant Safe (there is no accounting for my thoughts in the bathroom)
-Whale Safe (the one who tried to read them suffocated when the laptop was lodged in its blow hole)
-Hooker Safe (see Whale Safe)
-Vestigial Male Nipple Safe (they're embarrassing)
-Quadrilateral Safe (shape up and straighten your sides you damned hippie rectangle)
-Triangle Safe (see Quadrilateral Safe – and don't pretend you only have three sides; we both know better)
-Work Safe (this ends the day it feels like work)

Bathroom Monologue: More Important Than Art Itself

Art began as an imitation of Life. A little simplified, a little streamlined, altering things to appeal to Life more than, say, going out and living. Paintings gave the illusion of depth, but remained two-dimensional. Statues gave the illusion of life, but remained static. Television gave the illusion of objectivity, but managed to be more subjective than Life itself.

Life saw merit in Art. It also saw the David’s amazing abs and all the clever, clipped dialogue on sitcoms, and began to lose track of itself. If Art was an imitation, then it was a representation. If it was a representation, then maybe it was accurate, or even ideal.

So then Life started imitating Art, wearing its logos on t-shirts, quoting from books and movies, dressing up as protagonists and the sexier antagonists at Halloween.

Art was scared shitless. Now Life was catching up to its creativity and sexiness. How was it supposed to maintain attention if Life was just as interesting, or worse, if people thought it was better?

So Art got a boob-job and a make-up girl. It got special effects teams and computer animation to make things way cooler than life ever did. It saw how living were scared of dying, and so it rubbed itself in impossible fight scenes that made death seem not just implausible but downright unlikely for whoever Life liked. And soundtracks. My God, the soundtracks.

But Life started carrying around those soundtracks on iPods and turned masterpieces into wallpaper. It was grabbing whatever Art it felt like and lining its birdcages with it. It was actually doing this because it now defined itself by Art and wanted it around all the time, but Art thought this meant it was being devalued. For fear of being tossed away, Art got another boob-job and began market testing its music.

Bathroom Monologue: My Avatar

My avatar will be a black hole. Light years away from any conflict, and if anyone else’s avatar is dumb enough to mess with mine, she’ll be sucked into a magical singularity. In fact, that whole avatar’s planet will be sucked in. I’ll obliterate the entire cultures and geological histories of those who displease me. Now that’s godly.

An infinitely small, infinitely dense sidekick is also very low maintenance. It will eat whatever I leave lying around. By virtue of its appetite and gravitational pull, it will have billions of miles of interspace property to itself – eventually. Since not even light can escape dark matter, I’ll take it to laser shows, then leave halfway through, just to watch the entire show follow us out the door.

What’s your avatar?

Bathroom Monologue: "Porn degrades everyone, Mark." -Douglas Coupland, JPod

It degrades the people depicted in it (in my experience, usually female), and it degrades everyone of their sex. It degrades everyone who looks at it (in my experience, usually male - and in my experience, usually me), and everyone of their sex. It therefore degrades the entire human race (except hermaphrodites - or it insults them twice as much, I'm not sure). However, the human race really needs to be knocked down a peg. Most of them either think the whole universe was invented for them, or it's meaningless so it's fine to do whatever they want to it anyway. They've killed off billions of species of life, billions of each other, punched a hole in their ozone layer and actually watch American Idol. They're incredibly full of themselves for people who are so insecure. They deserve some serious degradation. If wanking to a magazine from the top shelf insults them, then it's worth $3.95. It’s exactly the kind of degradation we have coming.

Non-Fiction: Where I was when Obama won

I took long, slow breaths and smiled at the TV. He walked up the blue runway and I feared the second I saw his back; it was cinematic, preparing for a rifleshot. It made me shiver. But no shot rang, and his concept of a lifetime of a 102 years in which cars became popular, fascism became unthinkable, a man walked on the moon and a black man could hold the most powerful office in the world gave me the chills. Or so I thought. But when President Elect Obama left the stage with his wife, I realized I'd actually left the window open.

Bathroom Monologue: My Liberal Biases

-There should be an independent commission dedicated to finding the engineers responsible for public restroom hand dryers, specifically to find out why they built them so that they never dry your hands on the first push. The second push always dries you off midway, wasting countless megawatts of electricity in gross usage per year. If a connection is found between these engineers and power companies, a second commission will be assembled to beat the offending parties with foam bats and Hulk hands. A third, more pragmatic commission will go around fixing the blow dryers.

-Not only should the internet remain free of government censorship, but the government should install point counters for interesting leaps of e-thought. For instance if you search for “horse porn,” then immediately go look up “Zell Miller's blog,” you get ten points. The more random your searching habits, the higher your score. The highest scores (along with the discordant web searches that earned them) will be posted on a government website, where Psychology Majors at all nationally credited colleges will be allowed to write a two-page essay figuring out what your train of thought must have been. Ten such essays will count as ten hours of community service.

-I’d like the government to pay a group of men to sit around a garage all day waiting for calls that anyone’s house is on fire. Should they receive such a call they will rush to rescue the inhabitants and put out the blaze. If the program is popular, perhaps we can give them their own trucks fitted with hoses.

-I really would like to institutionalize eating children. Jonathan Swift was a sissy. My modest proposal is put all orphans and unwanted children on a conveyor belt and start canning Bachelor Chow. It’ll solve the abortion problem, as once we start buying infants in bulk, we’ll be able to pay expecting mothers minimum wage, and maybe even a signing bonus. No time-and-a-half for twins. That counts as one, just like those conjoined “bonus” pretzels that are stuck together in the bag.

-That everyone doesn’t believe each other’s myths, but recognizes them as neat. Instead of burning witches at the stake we’ll have interesting stories at backyard barbecues.

-Gay marriage should be illegal. So should straight marriage. Marriage is a religious institution, and even at its most secular, it is a relationship between two people. Government has no place in marriage aside from notarizing the prenuptial agreement and keeping her from assaulting and battering you when she finds out you slept with her sister. And really, I’m 50/50 on that last part.

-The people who set speed limits on highways should have to explain themselves, publicly, while driving their five screaming children to school, when they’re already fifteen minutes late. A webcam on the dashboard will do nicely.

Bathroom Monologue: Appetite for Destruction

One of the all-time most common traits in heroes (slightly less common than cheating on their wives, slightly more common than dying as a result of getting caught) is the legendary appetite. Heroes are known for nigh-impossible feats

It seems every great war poem is laden with feasts, preparing for battle, celebrating battle, pausing for the night in the middle of a long battle. Is it that heroes of such great feats need the fuel?

The infamous wilderness fiend Keiji was known to eat two entire bulls before any given skirmish. Khetchewanpy, god of minor conflicts that are later embellished by a poet trying to make a name for himself, drank a river dry to restore himself amidst the Battle of Czenthry.

This is not always a helpful trait. Yellow Horn was known for putting ice cream parlors out of business before defending his home city, until the day he ate 480 consecutive banana parfaits and was slain by a sudden and massive cold headache.

Bathroom Monologue: Fleets of Fleeting Moments

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

Bathroom Monologue: Four Invisible Feminists Walk Behind a Bar…

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

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

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

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

Most would answer three: solid, liquid and gas.

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

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

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

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

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

Then do it.

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

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

Me, who reads Scientific American and The Economist.

Then again, I do love the Blair Witch Project.

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

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

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

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

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

Bathroom Monologue: Original Piracy

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

Bathroom Monologue: The Monopoly of the Abyss

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

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

“Kill who…? But I don’t have a kid.”

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

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

“What the Hell?!!”

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

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

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

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

Josh picked up the hacksaw and looked it over.

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

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

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

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

Josh smirked.

Bathroom Monologue: Things to say right before laughing maniacally.

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