Bathroom Monologue: I need to lay off the M*A*S*H marathons

“Hey there. You’re my last patient for the day. How’s it feel to be the healthiest man to lay on my table today? You see, by triage the most gravely injured patients come in first. My first was a kid missing his legs. Stepped on a land mine. The second was his sister. Shouldn’t have tagged along so close behind him. Your bullet wound in the shoulder looks pretty nice in comparison, and by virtue of being the last patient you’re the luckiest unlucky man in the war. How does that feel? I mean the needle, not the emotion. I have enough of the latter to last me until my next Amazon order arrives. I’m getting some new psycho-theory stuff. Do-it-yourself psychology. They say the easiest way to go nuts is… and we’re done.”

Bathroom Monologue: The Wine

One of the Golden Emperor’s displays of his own grandeur was the annual court wine ceremony. A bottle of the empire’s best was carted from lordship to lordship, left in the charge of one of his fifty lords for a week each. For the last two weeks of the year the bottle was left with his wife, the Jade Empress, and his oldest son, a man of little reputation. Any of the fifty-two culprits could have poisoned the bottle in any number of ways without the chance of being caught; with each lord in the position to grab more land and his family was in line to grab the throne. Then at the ceremony the emperor would take the bottle from his son and drink the entire thing, without a food tester. It displayed the amity of his reign.

Cynics say the bottle is switched the day before the ceremony. Cynics, as the Jade Empress is immortally quoted, “are short-sighted and will be tried in a court of law.” The bottle is actually switched several hundred times. If the Golden Emperor only switched it once someone, quite probably his wife, would pay off the single switcher and he’d die disgracing his throne. No, a staff larger than that which runs most of his wars is in charge of replacing, destroying, disinfecting, sanitizing, unpoisoning, fact-finding, blackmailing, threatening, extorting and kidnapping until every possible conspirator had either given up his plot or executed it thinking he’d finally shown that blasted Golden Emperor. His highness would never allow all plots to simply be pre-empted; in fact, he wished as many to be implemented as possible, and then quietly thwarted. He was a ruler who understood the virtue of embarrassment. It was why he always has his loving wife uncork the bottle at the ceremony.

Bathroom Monologue: Where it comes from

"You see, grandma, when a typewriter loves a TV very much, they elope to the back of the electronics section. They wait until everyone has gone home. That’s why when you drive past them at night the lights are still on. It’s electricity of their sin. Some months later the stork brings their horrible bastard child, which has the face of its father and the keyboard of its mother. Due to its show-business face it would go into the television’s line of work, but the typewriter was very free-spirited. It had once belonged to Norman Mailer, and needless to say, was kind of full of itself. So the typewriter raised the bastard creature to have its own original ideas, creating a great rift of enmity between the little beast and its HD paternal figure. But out of that enmity came new job opportunities for the child: word processing, spreadsheets, copious streaming stupid videos, new forms of political propaganda, and porn. Oh, the rolling hills of porn their bastard child would facilitate. Straddling that mountain of obscenity, the bastard child’s kind rose to prominence. And that’s where your computer came from."

Bathroom Monologue: God’s Iron Jack O’Lantern Brigade

They never rot. They never rust. They always march towards what’s right. They’re a magnetized moral compass, unreliable and unstoppable, mechanized and grinning. Cannons for arms, treads for legs. Silicon replaces synapses, fuel replaces fatigue, and their only shellshock is crushing a tortoise. The fire that illuminates their teeth and eyes is nuclear. They leave no weeping widows, for no matter how trying or bitter the war, they’re always back on the porch by the 31st.

Bathroom Monologue: Phobias and Irrational Fears

-Neurobiology scares me because some day somebody’s going to say she got 3.7 units of enjoyment from the newest James Bond movie.
-Poetry scares me because it’s the height of expression in the English language and yet follows almost none of the rules or conventions.
-Astronomy scares me because one day we’ll have colonies on the moon and Mars, and I get lost on the way to Target. GPS doesn’t work when you’re not on the G anymore.
-Blue jeans scare me because they have tiny white spots everywhere that aren’t advertised in the name, and if they’re willing to deceive in colors, who knows what other secrets they may be hiding?
-Nonsense scares me because I can understand it.
-Reason scares me because people so often mistake theirs for the true one.
-Tomorrow scares me because it’s coming but I can’t see it from here.
-Telepathy scares me because my friends may secretly have it and eavesdrop on my brain, and discover all of the totally inane things that occupy my silent periods when I’m looking serious.
-Fear itself scares me because it scared the generation that beat up Nazis, Fascists, suicide pilots and the sun god’s empire.

Bathroom Monologue: Yes. A perverted waterslide.

The publishers wanted the photo on Mr. Condry’s dust jacket to look dignified, but he refused to even take off the clown hat. “The shit comes out three feet away from where the food goes in, Mr. Photographer,” he said to the photographer’s female assistant, “and there’s a perverted waterslide connecting them. Nothing is going to make me look dignified. Man is built to look humble.”

Bathroom Monologue: Less Than Three

Part of the doctor’s written instructions was to, “ WALK – 3 MILES PER DAY.” Now how the Hell was Karl supposed to walk negative three miles? That had to violate some law of nature. Like all serious questions, Karl turned to Michael Jackson for answers. That crazy black/white boy had wisdom for any occasion, and this was no different. Karl has been moon walking three miles a day for the last two months. His wife really wishes the doctor would return her calls and clarify the instructions.