Bathroom Monologue:“The question for Democrats in 2008 is whether we want the first woman president or the first black president.” –Some pundit on CNN

First female president. First black president. First Latino president. First Asian-American president. First gay president. First transgender president. First incestual president. First hermaphroditic president. First cloned president (eight more years of Reagan?). First Native American president. First shaman president. First Mormon president. First Hindu president. First Scientologist president. First druidic president. First president who didn’t really exist, but was invented as part of a gag by some publicity agents that didn’t clue in the nation until the inauguration. First immigrant president. First extraterrestrial president. First robot president (Vote Dell – He’s Got Intel Inside). First president voted in purely because of her plans to help the country rather than her looks, sex, race, ethnicity or religion.

Bathroom Monologue: Call of the Child

I was 22 the last time I felt the urge. I looked out my dorm window, at the empty soccer field, and immediately checked around my room for a makeshift sword. A cardboard tube or a stick would do. I'd just edited a hundred pages of my thesis in a four-hour marathon session, so my lucidity was certainly suspect. I caught myself as I checked behind my desk for a cable that might double as a whip, and realized how absurd I was being. It was a familiar urge, but one I hadn't felt in years. Probably not since I'd graduated highschool had I heard the call of the child, the strong desire to go outside and play. This urge to stomp around near the woods and slay imaginary dragons was at least as strong as any urge to get laid that I'd ever experienced. It was just different, associated with a far lower level of maturity in my brain - an embarrassing level of immaturity that today I'm willing to say also should be associated with all urges to get laid. The call of the child was something I'd heard and answered almost every day in my childhood, up until my friends and classmates hit the plane of amateur cynicism that made them try to act older than they were at the expense of everything they actually enjoyed. From that age on, I barely ever patrolled my backyard for monsters or supervillains. Like others, I sublimated the urge with sports, videogames, movies and books, which might have been supposed to wean me from the desire, but mostly starved it. Softball isn't an adequate replacement for high fantasy in the county woods, no more than the keyboard I used at 22 was a replacement for a marble composition spellbook. I think I heard the call again today. A shame it was cold outside.

Coming this... Huh?

You've probably been to metacritic, the website that quantifies movie reviews, then tabulates the numbers to score each movie. I like to skim the paragraph-long excerpts from a dozen professional reviews every so often, to get a taste for how critics feel. Yesterday morning I checked out Cloverfield, the "love-child of Godzilla and the Blair Witch," as metacritic put it. Was there ever a description more geared to my taste?

I clicked on the image beside the title on the main page for the Featured Review ( check it out - http://www.metacritic.com/ hasn't the link in the image as of January 19th) and was shocked to find a string of perfect 100 scores, and compliments like, "Gorgeous cinematography," "A singular achievement -- romantic, sensuous, intelligent and finally shattering," and, "This is one of the few adaptations that gives a splendid novel the film it deserves."

I didn't know Cloverfield was a novel.

I scrolled back up the page and let it finish loading. My connection is sluggish sometimes. It was then I noticed that I was reading reviews for The Atonement, the romantic critical darling of 2007. I'd bypassed the title and image and went straight to opinions, only to find them so vague that I didn't realize they were about a love story instead of a giant monster movie.

This is an anecdote of my incompetence, but not of mine alone. I like to think we all failed a little.

Fifth Straight Night of Shredded Wheat for Dinner Monologue

I've got a new diet idea. It's a little drastic, but this just isn't cutting it. I'm going to go buy a gun. Then I'm going to use my remaining money to eat extra cheese pizza and huge hamburgers for every meal until I run out of money. Then I'm going to have one more meal, and when the check comes, I'll shoot myself. I expect I'll gain weight the first few days, but by the end, I'll probably drop pounds rapidly. Embalming fluid isn't very fattening, you know.

Bathroom Monologue: November 1st: The Worst Day of the Year

Well for starters, October ends. Halloween is dead. Horror movies disappear from TV and drip out of theatres. I love horror movies, but even if you can't stand them, you must have a candy cane lodged in your brain to think the holiday movies that shortly replace them are better. You have to get rid of the jack o'lantern, the stores take down the cool displays and candy gets more expensive. Then the Christmas B.S. pours in, as though it isn't 55 days away. In the U.S., November 1st is inexplicably closer to elections, accelerating the amount of political nonsense spinning in media, quickly reducing politics to a subject you can't possibly discuss with civility until long, long after November 1st gets the **** out of town.

Bathroom Monologue: Why is World Trade Center a Flop?

Even though this one has a better soundtrack and more star-power, we've all seen this movie before. It's rare that a film hits theatres years after it's been on TV, but most everybody saw this one years ago, on a Tuesday morning in September. Even if you missed the premiere, it was rerun so much that month that most of us got our fill. The president of the United States even visited the set. The novelization (written by Congressmen, of all people) sold pretty well. If it wasn't weird enough that the book came out after the movie, we got hundreds of them, with every bias you could imagine, which slaked the thirsts of most of the remaining curious people. And then there was the t-shirt, the interviews with the characters, the slogans, and soon, by God, if we saw one more commercial with so much as a clip of this movie in it, we'd scream. Then this movie came along. Nobody likes a remake. You see, the story was gripping, the strife was greater than any cinematic experience before it, and while I'm sure Hollywood could have deployed shinier special effects at the time, the original had a better director than Oliver Stone.

Milestones, Gravestones and Ninety-Nine Somethings

You might ask why I'd celebrate the ninety-ninth Bathroom Monologue instead of the hundredth. It's for the same reason I say kind things to people on unimportant days. People say all those nice things about other people right after they die. No one so admires a man as when he is dead, and never is he so popular as at his funeral. It's kind of disgusting, all those people voicing fond memories just when she can no longer hear them, those obituaries in the paper remembering her. Wouldn't one of those celebratory editorials have been put to better use when she was alive and could read it? Could have sent it to her parents? Could have clipped it and put it up on her 'fridge, and passed it every time she wanted to snag a soda, smiling a private smile, knowing someone would put such time and effort into something so nice for her? But no, they only print it for you once you can't read it, after she's collapsed at the last milestone. Milestones are fine, they remind us to check if you're there, they tell you how far you've come, but it's the miles they mark that matter.

You also might ask why I'm celebrating my ninety-ninth Bathroom Monologue when I'm not even at seventy-five yet. Well that's... stop judging me!

Bathroom Monologue: I'm gonna get kicked off the internet for this tribute to Punch Magazine

Iran recently began several long-range weapons projects that can evade radar detection and split a warship in half. The government even provided video of the weapons to any interested media outlets. Amongst the missiles was one capable of reaching beyond Israel or Europe, that Iran caled, "The Great Prophet" Project. Over the weeks they failed to explain exactly what this Great Prophet missile was supposed to foresee with its unnecessary destructive force. They were happy, though, to say it could hit anywhere in the U.S.. Seeing it, I had the urge to dust off our old Neutron Bomb project, that one that eradicates all life in a city but leaves their infrastructure and possessions intact, and re-label it the "Don't Make Me Come Over There, Bitch" Project.