Bathroom Monologue: Re: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPIkYbVEH0E

Do you ever get the feeling that directors of TV commercials are actually short film directors that have fooled companies into financing, producing and distributing their short films? How is a riot connected to vodka? Stargazing to an SUV? These commercials tell a story or do something amusing in visual theatre for fifteen or thirty seconds, then throw a product logo up at the end. It's less a commercial, and more a miniature movie sponsored by Hershey's or Scion. I wonder how many of these product companies have caught on and are just looking for short film directors to sponsor.

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPIkYbVEH0E )

Bathroom Monologue: Small Town Telekinetic

On weekdays he is a mechanic, and a darned impressive one considering he doesn't need a hydraulic lift. There isn't a lug nut he can't unscrew. Still, he's always falling behind schedule, so he unwinds by bowling every Friday and Saturday night. His game is never very good, but anybody in the alley who looks miserable has an exceptional game. These mystery champions are the people who complain to their friends or family that they didn't want to come anyway, or who get hissy after a few gutterballs. For these people, our weekday mechanic wiggles his telekinetic fingers, keeping their balls on track. He's learned how to play this game; no perfect scores, more spares than strikes, and there's nothing to make a wispy girl's night like a seven-ten split in the last frame. To him this amusing job is like putting training wheels on bikes, or throwing underhand at softball. It may be playing God, but he thinks it's more of a school play than Broadway.

Cult of ROH at insidepulse.com

Pulse Wrestling of insidepulse.com has brought me on to write Cult of ROH, a weekly column about the Ring of Honor pro wrestling promotion. It's no secret that watching pro wrestling is a hobby of mine, and ROH is one of my favorite parts in that hobby. My column will focus mostly on current events, reacting to the most recent stories in ROH, with some historical perspective (and probably a weekly request that people not go insane just because their favorite guy lost).

Thanks to Aaron Glazer and Matthew Michaels for bringing me on. Technically my first piece is up on the website already, as part of the parade of people supporting Ring of Honor as the best pro wrestling company of 2007. My first regular column should go live on Tuesday, with a new one every week thereafter. I should also have some DVD reviews up in the near future.

This will not interfere with the Bathroom Monologues. This is exactly the kind of situation that creates them; remember these babies began when I got up from work and immediately improvised a change of subject from whatever I had been working on. And according to Microsoft Word, I have about thirty more pages of Bathroom Monologues archived to post - and most of them have never been published online before.

Bathroom Monologue: Title: Leap Year

Pitch: February 29th. Every four years the ghost of Black History Month rises from the grave to kill 29 rich white kids. Paris Hilton will be advertised as the star, but will die in the opening credits. Possibly killed when her hair is caught in a cotton gin.

Running gag: pale Latino tries to convince the killer that he isn't white.

Bathroom Monologue: A Sentence is Never a Story

-No one ever thought that werewolves would make good skiers, but what other explanation was there for the missing pies?
-The medics laughed as they ran over the girl they were supposed to save.
-Thirteen people were trampled when the millionaire threw his diamonds into the fountain.
-Jimmy climbed through the window every time he came to see his brother at the hospital.
-What if God accidentally shed His grace on a pinecone instead of us?
-DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN
-The protestors broke his arm for tearing down their "VIOLENCE IS NEVER THE ANSWER" banner.
-In the end, it turned out the zombies just really, really missed us.
-Two jumpers climbed the same ledge on the same day, and were so embarrassed that they almost talked each other down, though when the cops approached them, the two asked for sandwiches instead of a ladder.

Notice: Flashshot Takes Three Bathroom Monologues

Flashshot has accepted "Who's Her Baby's Daddy?" "Too Late, Bill," and "Delectable Dolphins" as micro-stories of the day for three days in 2008. While we don't know when each will appear, you can check their website every day for a new short:
http://www.gwthomas.org/flashshotindex.htm

A "while shoveling two feet of ice-snow off my deck at midnight" Monologue

There are people across the street. At least three of them are drunk off their asses, yelling and playing in the parking lot of the 24/7 deli. Their voices must be much more disturbing to any sleepers tonight than my shoveling and heavy breathing. My back is killing me and asthma is coming on, while they busy themselves jumping on each other. Yet as soon as I feel the twinge of dislike for them that I feel for all drunks, it passes of its own accord. You see, those guys making idiots of themselves are having a blast tonight. But sometime today they had to shovel something like this. If not, they'll have to tomorrow. Or they'll have to pay someone to do it, and to get that money they'll work jobs that they probably won't like. Each of them has probably experienced something worse than what I have to do right now. Can they pay their electricity bills? Has one had a bad breakup? Has one of them lost a mother yet? All three will, unless they die young. Right now, this is their release. Even if they are annoying, I can't hate them for that. I can't hate them because I don't want to be hated when it's my turn to release. Thinking on them takes my mind off the work, the next best thing to making it pass faster.

Bathroom Monologue: Come All Ye Faithful, to Tuesday Night Karate

At the turn of the 21st century, a surprising percentage of Americans believed the apocalypse was near. Well, surprising to people who didn't believe the world was ending - to those people who did, I guess it was surprising that the percentage wasn't 100%. But none of the faithful knew exactly what to do about it. If they figured out how the end of the world was coming and interfered, it could go against God's plan. If they increased Church-going and prayer, God would probably figure out that they were patronizing Him. It was quite the conundrum. The Stooksten Cult (as it came to be called by people from out of town) read Revelations very carefully over a booze-free weekend and came up with the only sensible answer. Since the end of times would begin the war between the Seed of Jezebel and the Host of Heaven, the citizens of Stooksten should probably learn how to throw down. The pastor's son had seen a couple of Jean Claude Van Damme movies and insisted karate was the way to go. So the Stooksten Cult congregation took karate lessons every Tuesday (and every other Thursday), to become blackbelts in time for the call of Archangel Gabriel's war horn. Everyone got into it such that even Ms. Brown, the 72-year-old piano teacher, could break a wooden board (if somebody held it for her). Satisfied that unless the demons knew kung fu that they would serve their lord and savior well, the Stooksten Cult returned to business as usual, with the odd Interdenominational Karate Tournament every seventh Saturday, in preparation for Sunday mass. They may be called illogical or blasphemous, but you have to concede that they were really good at coping.

Bathroom Monologue: Best Something in a Something Else

-Best disguise in a prime time drama
-Best creation of a disguise in a prime time comedy
-Least disappointing overhyped revelation in a prime time drama
-Least annoying pet in an overly rerun sitcom
-Best giant monster attack during an inappropriate situation (all)
-Most creative rip-off of Shakespeare in a daytime soap opera
-The Train Going into a Tunnel Award: Best visual euphemism for sex
-Nostradumbass Award: Pundit who is most frequently wrong in his/her predictions on a 24/7 news network
-The SNL Alum Award: Actor on a sitcom or skit show who is somewhat funny here, but will be intolerable when he/she makes the jump to movies

Bathroom Monologue: Guests at the Funeral for the Word "Good"

Great, grand, sensational, spectacular, astonishing, amazing, awesome, neat, solid, super, nice, fine, fabulous, fantastic, extreme and xtreme (everyone knows they're incestuous), positive, proactive, original, smooth, bold, deft, perfect, splendid, shining, glowing, peerless, marvelous, and cool (everyone's hoping she's the next to go). All attended, though none will miss Good. Like people, words hate being lesser synonyms.

Bathroom Monologue: Last Off Ramp with Gas

First we ceased to believe in anything we didn't see, and this was pragmatism. Then we didn't believe what we saw, and this was television. Then we didn't believe what we felt, and this was psychology. Then we didn't believe in anything, and this was nihilism. And there we were with no spirit, entertainment or hope, and someone had the nerve to ask why everyone was so angry. And everyone believed lynching that dumbass was justified, though they might not have said so, and this was society.

Bathroom Monologue: Red, White and Blue Sushi

“Well fine, I don't want no chichimangas anyway. Stupid Mexican food is trying to steal American jobs from American food. Food invented right here in America, like hamburger and low mein. Pizza Hut will be our Alamo. It's what George Washington would have wanted.”

Bathroom Monologue: The Efishany

Down in Pine Creek there is a fish that holds a peculiar world record: it’s been thrown back more times than any other in documented history. At least 235 people have caught the Sheldon Gould Bass, and few of them did it out of hunger. The first man to catch it, coincidentally named “Sheldon Gould,” looked into its left eye and immediately realized how to solve all the problems he'd been having with his wife - problems that had him out of their bed at 3:00 AM, and fishing in 30-degree weather. He was so relieved that he didn't even realize he'd thrown the big bass back into the water. It wasn't until the fourth fisherwoman, Rachel Weiss, caught it and looked into its right eye and immediately figured out three habits that would ensure she kick her nicotine addiction, that the public realized there was something up with that fish. All 235 of the successful fishermen and fisherwomen who agreed to be interviewed have confirmed that if you look into one of the fish's eyes, you'll see something in your own mind that you've been looking for. There is only one notable exception, Phillip Barlowe, who saw a medium rare steak. He was very unsatisfied, but he came from a troubled family, and he did go on to open up a very successful chain of bar and grills. We've done our best to discover the source of the Sheldon Gould Bass' power, but everyone who's gone to catch and dissect it had an epiphany and stopped returning our calls.

Bathroom Monologue: Have you ever made a pun of which you were way too proud?

"Can you get that lid for me?"
"Of what lineage was Napolean?"
"....Huh?"
"Of Corsican."

Bathroom Monologue: C Your Way Out

Today's lesson is the A-B argument. It's very popular in places where its being popular would be dangerous. What's an A-B argument? Are videogames dangerous or not? Either A) videogames are dangerous, or B) they are not dangerous. This frame of argument does not allow for Grand Theft Auto 4 to be a potential negative influence on developing children, while Mario Paint and Spore may encourage creativity. There are no third answers. No fifth answers. No ninetieth.

The A-B argument is very handy if you're sure you're right, or if you can benefit from being right. You simply make "A" your belief, and find one other belief to be "B." Now either all Hispanics are lazy and just want to leech Welfare, or you're a racist bastard.

Once A and B are accepted by people who weren't paying attention, all you have to do is discredit, slander and defame "B" in order to be right. There's no mucking around in the murky grey area. There are only two dimensions of argument left in your three dimensional world.

The A-B argument has been popularized worldwide as being part of straight talk; if someone asks "Is Islam the religion of terror?" and you say, "Well, I've met some very nice Muslims, but obviously some terrorists founded their beliefs on the Qur'an," you're a double-talking bastard who cannot be trusted and must be silenced as rudely as possible. Otherwise, you'll be detrimental to the monochrome rainbow that is life in ignorance. It's got to be Conservatives or Liberals. TV or movies. Prose or poetry. Freedom or fascism. And it doesn't have to be kept this way to prevent people from thinking; it's got to be this way so the people making money off of A and B stay rich. Oops. Was that an A-B argument? Yes or no?

Bathroom Monologue: The Amicable Haunting

The Dunsly House was not haunted. That would mean a soul, or a ghost, or a poltergeist, or a demon, or a boogeyman, or some other human affair had infested the floorboards. No, it wasn’t haunted. Psychic residue had merely seeped into the architecture, giving the place a personality.

It tried to express itself, but it wasn’t a person, so its manners were different. Too different for its owners to ever realizing it was trying to talk. Still, its actions were considerate it. It insulated much better in the winter than it should have, so long as kids were in the house. It prevented the power from going out during some very bad storms. When somebody forgot that they’d left a cup of water in the microwave for coffee, it sometimes opened the door and removed the cup to put it in view. But some nitwit turned around, upset the unexpected cup and burned herself, and well, from there on it was “haunted.”

But it wasn’t haunted. No one had died there. Two people who had lived there had died, but not in the house. The house didn’t even know those people were dead and hoped, much as pet dogs hope, that they would come home some day. It would be a happy day.

The house hated paranormal investigators and skeptics, and kept quiet around them. The kids who resided in it watched enough science programming for it to learn what humans did to new forms of life they hadn’t studied before. Damned if the Dunsly House was going to be the first house to be dissected rather than demolished. Its only expression to a “ghost hunter” was an incidental close of a door on one of their heels. They debunked it, and the floorboards groaned in laughter. Aside from being insulted that its sentience was mistaken for a lowly ghost, it didn’t want to be discovered. It wanted to be lived in.

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.

Bathroom Monologue: Who's her baby's daddy?

Mother Nature frowned. She looked at the hole in the ozone layer. Swearing under her breath, she checked the thermostat again.

“Global warming…”

She checked the rain forests and the whale populations. Her nervous twitch was back by the time She got to the stripmines.

She popped a couple of pills, sighed and called her secretary.

"Yes, Harry. Call the dinosaurs. Let them know they can have another shot at it."

Bathroom Monologue: This Monologue in No Way Endorses the Idea that Celebrities and Other Assorted Beautiful People have Actual Personalities

Beauty isn't always skin deep. Sometimes it's only a layer of cosmetics deep. So Candy Delilah could have told you, if you recognized her. While Ms. Delilah was a famous pageant queen, she was also the product of hours in salons and make-up chairs. Whenever she went out without make-up she was never recognized, and the few people who did look at her whispered to each other, "Oh my gosh, that that sow is totally ripping off Candy Delilah's style." "She can't pull that off." "The nerve." She was okay with the whispers. Delilah the fashion icon was a character for her, and she enjoyed nothing more than breaking character. It kept the autograph hounds away. It kept the drunks from hitting on her. And when the odd man did offer to buy her a drink, it meant a little more. The actual dates she got were more rewarding, for her and for the guy, who unknowingly discovered that the bubbly idiot supermodel Candy Delilah was actually an interesting person, under her skin.

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.

Bathroom Monologue: The Science of Minimalism: Like a Drill in a Doctor's Bag

Occasionally we artists and scientists get tired of actually doing anything of value and stop to argue over who is more important. The newest edition of this argument is whether scientists have more to learn from artists in the next millennium, or if artists have more to learn from scientists. As an artist with a passion for science, I think we have much to learn from psychology, sociology and anthropology that can verify or alter our feelings on the way people interact. There is a wealth of information about biological imperatives, about evolution and environment, the chemistry of our chemistry, the physics of our physicality, and the great sums of forces at work in the universe, like entropy or the dual nature of light. There is even a field of cognitive science for how we organize and express, which would give any painter, dancer or composer a greater appreciation for how the human mind shares itself. Artists have so much to learn from science. Meanwhile the biggest thing scientists have to learn from art is how to fucking write.

Bathroom Monologue: Real Titles that were Disappointingly Not Comedies

-Our Lady of the Sauropods
-The Dream Hunter (A Dream Hunter Novel)
-Hell Hath No Fury
-Letter to a Christian Nation
-Tyrannosaur Canyon
-Beauty's Release: The Conclusion of the Classic Erotic Trilogy of Sleeping Beauty
-Bite Me If You Can
-World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
-Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
-The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Bathroom Monologue: Snow Job

Little Becky made a snow "man." Little Bethy made a snow "woman" and two snow "babies." Their father made a snow "off my fucking driveway." He was no fun.

Bathroom Monologue: Generous in General

General Electric recently pledged to harvest millions of gallons of pure water from the oceans every year. Billionaire philanthropist Stewart Tiddlesworth will not be outdone, even by a major international monopoly. He has already pledged to retrieve millions of cubic yards of air from the atmosphere by the year 2010. His land development wing is already hard at work liberating tons of surcharge-free stone from the Rockies. And in case this summer is again too boiling hot, his expeditionary divisions are extracting ice from the south pole, which they will distribute at a modest fee. There is no height of philanthropy Tiddlesworth Co. Ltd. won't go to (and copyright) for the good of humanity.

Waiting to Talk to the Fourth Straight Operator in the Same Hospital Monologue

The Fodati were a very enterprising species. They were very good navigators, they were very good pilots, and they were very good shots; which meant, they were very good conquerors. They ruled almost half a continent under a bureaucratic fist, with three archipelagos on the side, like change in their purses. Soon everything had its own office: the Office Conquering, the Office of Strip-mining, the Office of Cultural Dismemberment, the Office of Re-Education, and the Department of 'No, You Can't.' Nobody could even get his hands on the paperwork to begin an insurrection. Soon the Fodati even sold shares in government, which paid the best dividends in the land for five generations. Then they went extinct. It was a cunning new form of influenza, dubbed the "Orson W. Strain," named for the first Fodat to sneeze it out. The extinction was brutal, but only half as brutal as what the Fodati did next. Only ten years after their extinction they bought up all the common stock available, giving them 51% ownership over Hell. This quarter's financial report suggests that service in the inferno will not change dramatically, but it will be streamlined.

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: Mitochondrial Hussie

Every cell of our bodies has a mitochondrion, an organelle that turns food into energy. This little item is so novel that many scientists say it couldn't have evolved with in the primitive biology of the single-celled organisms in which it is believed to have originated. Perhaps, my biology teacher said, one came about by pure chance in the chemical soup of the primordial world and was swallowed by a greedy single-cell organism ate it, which assimilated rather than digested it when it proved to be so handy around the office. Regardless, mitochondria stuck around, and you’ve got one in every cell of your body. Mitochondria have their own DNA, unique from the DNA of the majority of the human body. Most mitochondria are inherited from the mother, allowing us to trace back lineage of all human beings to one common ancestor, who lived approximately 150,000 years ago. She has been dubbed the “Mitochondrial Eve,” in the hopes of making Christian fundamentalists' heads explode. However, she was not the only woman at that time - it would have been very impractical, and you can only use the "I've got a headache" excuse so many times to a continent of primitive men. It is merely that her progeny thrived and replicated where those of the Mitochondrial Lilith, Mitochondrial Gertrude and Mitochondrial Emily Dickinsons were too busy gossiping and writing poetry. It's also interesting that the earliest common male mitochondrial DNA-ancestor we can trace back to lived about 90,000 years ago, separating the Mitochondrial Adam and Eve by about 60,000 years - a long distance relationship of Biblical proportions. What happened in those 60,000 years? We can't be sure, but the gap suggests that lesbianism was much more creative back then.

Bathroom Monologue: Show of Hands?

Raise your hand if when you were a kid you didn't realize "fig" was the flavor of the cookie, and so thought Fig Newton was the name of the product. So when they were raspberry-flavored, they were Raspberry Fig Newtons. Apple? Apple Fig Newtons. And how surprised were you when you found out that figs were a fruit? There's nothing profound here. Just thought I'd ask for a show of hands.

Bathroom Monologue: I'm No Better Than My Worst

Back in middle school I made up a lot of characters to live out fantasies. I was bored with my parents and afraid of my peers; and they all thought I was weird. So I lived through my stories. One was of Colonel Vortez, a black knight of the darkest shade. He lived a contrived existence, purely ridiculous with its carnage and excess, but it was real to him. It wasn't easy on him, either. He fantasized about the original Black Emperor, a mythological figure who consumed all the lands in his kingdom and took all strife with ease. But you know, that emperor had his weak moments. They weren't written down, but they happened, and they felt long. In those times the Emperor wished he were something other than human. He wished he were a dragon, like the Fjiorjund of legend. But the Fjiojund dragon, for all its treasures and bluster, had a deathly fear, for there were cracks between the scales on its belly, and so much as a needle between them would end its eternal life. And there were so many brave hunters and would-be dragonslayers in its time, with so many more things than needles. It wished to be something smaller, less sought-after. It wanted to be an Elf King, one of the Jou, tucked away in the misty woods where no one could walk uninvited, and all trespasses were lost. But Fjiorjund the dragon had only heard thirdhand rumors of the Elf Kings, and didn't know how lonely these perfectly safe, secluded rulers were. Each and every Elf King wanted to be someone else. One every wrote poetry about the life he wished he could lead, if only he was human, out in a big human society, in their concrete buildings. How much he would have liked to grow up a human, with a lifespan, limited to give his years meaning. How much he would have liked to grow up a human, to grow up with parents who cared, and go to school surrounded by other children, instead of living all alone in his boring, real world.

Bathroom Monologue: So It Is Written

[Panel 1]
God: At first I wanted the Bible to be accurate since, you know, that might be important eventually. But I kept running into problems like:

[Panel 2]
[Flashback]
Joshua: And over millions of years monera evolved into prota--
Peasant: What's a "million?"

[Panel 3]
[Flashpresent]
God: The second time I had to give a prophet an epiphany on what a triceratops was, I said, "Fuck it. Everything in 6,000 years."