Bathroom Monologue: Time to Worship the Goat Skull

"I only ate two meals yesterday, walked three miles, and I gained three pounds? Oh, that’s it. Screw you, science. I’m not listening to you anymore. I’m listening to the goat skull. It lets me eat whatever I want, and it’s thin! It’s my friend. Wise and mighty goat skull, please tell your loyal servant how to get rid of these love handles.

…

Any time now."

Bathroom Monologue: Narration 2, OR, The Accidental Epilogue of the John's Tale

This one's a true story, no assuming ironic voices here - just assuming a Middle English voice. I took this class in Geoffrey Chaucer in college, partially because I thought we were going to find his corpse and huddle inside of it, and partially because he's one of the funniest writers to get admitted to the English canon. Comedy is sorely underrepresented in academia. We worked with a $100 hardcover that contained the original Middle English works of Chaucer, including every scrap of The Canterbury Tales that's excluded from lesser versions. There was no modern translation. We were forwarded to several scholarly websites to listen to clips and practice how the 'y' sounded when it followed an 'r' sound – this confederate consonant had at least four different vowel noises it could make given context. “He” sounded like “Hay,” and 'k' was only a silent letter when you thought it wasn't. You were expected to know how every vowel sounded naturally from the dialects of centuries ago, and to independently research the thousands of outdated words. Otherwise you wouldn't know what you'd just read for class.

This was particularly difficult for me, as I'd been calling him “Chow-sir” for the last decade. I'd even gotten his name wrong, and now we were reading aloud from his works every class, in proper pronunciation. To get even one syllable wrong meant the knowing gazes of your peers and public correction by the professor – a normally wonderful woman who hardened up on the spot, especially if you were still screwing up by Week 7. I was. I was mortified to learn we'd have to read a minimum of ten continuous lines aloud at the end of term, and that it would seriously effect our report.

I knew what I wanted to read, though. The accidental and untitled epilogue to The Pardoner's Tale, when he ended his didactic story and went straight into a sales pitch for fake relics and premium absolution. The “Hoste” got so pissed that he threatened to cut off the Pardoner's testicles and enshrine them in pig crap. Classic literature. The Knight (“Knyght,” or “kin-neecht”) had to step in and keep them from fighting. I loved it because it reminded me of photos of then-President Bill Clinton at Camp David with leaders of Palestine and Israel. He was taller and broader than both of them, and would put his arms around their shoulders, at once as though to make peace and to smilingly threaten to throttle the bastards if they weren't nice. A Jewish friend reproached me for besmirching the best time in Israeli-Palestinian relations. I put an arm around his shoulder.

In classic John Wiswell fashion, I decided to read the whole damned thing – some thirty or forty lines where ten were acceptable. Not that I could read one line properly. But I had to redeem myself – God holpen, to get a Pardon. I returned to the scholarly websites and listened to each vowel and special pronunciation over and over again, then began translating the page from Middle English to phonetic. It took to 1:00 AM, and then I got to practicing, ten lines at a go. I got up early every day that week, and made sure to go to bed late. For an hour I could do anything – play a videogame, watch anime, stare at the clouds, but every five minutes I would have to glance at the phonetic translation and read the first ten lines I saw aloud. By Wednesday I was glancing at the Middle English manuscript and doing the same. By Thursday I was going a little nuts, and started to put personality into the Pardoner, Hoost and Knyght. The Pardoner had showmanship, and the Hoost somehow became a stereotypical Italian. Doing a bad Italian accent in modern English is offensive, but especially at 7:30 AM, a bad Italian accent in a Middle English threat to cut off your testicles is hilarious. To this day I will screech, “shul be shryned in an hogges toord” for no apparent reason.

The brave Knyght sounded a little Russian, though his syllables were technically sound.

I remember three things from my recital. I remember the professor exclaiming, “Oh God!” when she realized I wasn't stopping at the end of the first stanza. I remember my Jewish friend laughing and asking how I'd fit Latin in there. And I remember receiving the only round of applause of anyone the entire semester. One out of three isn't bad. The Knyght was my favorite.

I still love Geoffrey Chaucer. He's undeniably one of the greats in our language, profane beyond belief back before profanity was overdone, and a deep thinker of nuanced characters who could make each of dozens of tales questionable and interpretable. I wrote a modernization of his Monk's Tale, wherein his Monk delivered awful Cliff's Notes versions of classic stories like the fall of Satan and the death of Achilles. Mine took a pick-axe to nearly a hundred pieces of classic literature, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Kafka's Metamorphosis. The Canterbury Tales was included. It was all to express my deep admiration for Chaucer. I still get his name wrong, though.

Heere is ended The John's Tale.

Bathroom Monologue: TV Show Ideas

-John Wiswell's Celebrity Skiing
-John Wiswell's Celebrity Parachuting
-John Wiswell's Celebrity Shark Hunting
-More Ways John Wiswell Tricks Celebrities into Hurting Themselves
-A well-animated cartoon drama that doesn't rip off anime

Bathroom Monologue: “Is that the subject of Elizabeth Bishop?” –Jim Lehrer, News Hour

What is the subject matter of a woman? Or of a man? Might a woman’s subject be a man? Or a woman, if she were a lesbian? Or herself, if she were a narcissist? Or might she have more than one subject, if she were a real person like the rest of us, complex beyond words? Ms. Bishop wrote a mere ninety poems in her life, few for a popular poet in our time, yet to have all ninety be preoccupied with the same words or subject would be redundancy on a level beyond even Gertrude Stein’s tolerance. No, couldn’t a poet, shouldn’t a woman have as many subject matters as her mind and soul could absorb? Could not love and loss cohabitate in her synaptic pathways? In her meager (and mighty) ninety compositions, could not patriotism and prejudice, geology and epistemology, the universe and an acorn all be subject matters a mind might say to matter, to truly matter, beyond a trite explanation that they were all related to the same subject, to some holistic subject matter, like a human condition or an everything? Please don’t tell me a woman was interested in everything just for the sake of a little oversimplification of her mental lifetime. It would sell a woman short, and sell everything far shorter.

Bathroom Monologue: Narration

Getting me to read Chaucer aloud with proper Middle English pronunciation is like getting Godzilla to follow the traffic laws in Tokyo. He can’t even fit both feet on one side of the double yellow line.

Bathroom Monologue: All That’s Old…

In comparison to the New Age movement, the Old Age movement gets little attention. Everyone’s heard of the New Age infatuation with crystals, healing vibes and postmodern concepts of the divine. The New Agers even have sections in bookstores. The Old Agers? It’s a cruel joke that they share shelf space with the Mythology section. Patrons of the Old Age movement have shaggy hair and crazy beards similar to New Agers, but they wear togas with their Birkenstocks, and that funky smell on them isn’t B.O. It’s slaughtered goats.

These backwards-compatible spiritualists are significantly forward-thinking. They point out that Hera was a pioneer of women’s rights long before Susan B. Anthony or Saint Joan. Regardless, the National Organization of Women has voiced concern over some of the rights they espouse for women (including the primary right “to walk in on their husbands mid-adultery,” also called “The Medea Clause”).

Other organizations are synergizing with the movement. McDonalds intends to market on-site vomitoriums, similar to how they introduced in-door playgrounds. While the Independent Film Channel has denied Old Agers' request to play Jason and the Argonauts during Documentary Month, they say they will invest in more ancient Greek-oriented programming. Old Agers also own significant stock in several “green” energy companies, and are fast at work on channeling the north wind to reduce our need for oil. The Old Agers are very sensitive to our conflicts with the Middle East thanks to something about “the Peloponnesian War.”

Bathroom Monologue: Quite Human

Their grandmother makes the best snack, a combination of Cheez-Its, herbs and some type of oil. All her grandkids love it every time they visit. Every couple of years one will ask for the recipe, yet they never make them when they go home. Like seasonal dishes, part of the attraction is their rarity (and like seasonal dishes, part of the attraction is someone else doing the work). Her grandkids will miss them when she passes. Her grandkids will miss a lot, and miss these, but won’t realize they miss these and all the moments this snack is connected to until a week after the funeral, when her oldest granddaughter breaks down crying in the supermarket cracker aisle.

Bathroom Monologue: Political Hat Trick #3

1. Survey the general desires of the nation. Doesn’t matter if they are rational, realistic, or if you share them.
2. Promise something huge relating to these desires, which you probably can’t accomplish and have no serious intent of pursuing (end a war, reverse damage to the environment).
3. Attack the most a) unpopular and/or b) famous incumbent politicians who in any way disagree with the aim of your promise. If they are not earnestly opposed to it, portray them as such. If possible, vilify them entirely.
4. Balance a perception of being “outside” the system with the perception of being effective within it.
5. Dodge queries on any other political issues, or tie them into your central promise and/or the general vilification of your rivals.
6. Ride the promise to victory and public office.
7. Have ad firms and public relations jockeys divert attention from the matter with which your promise was concerned. At this stage you may have to make a small concession to the perception of the promise (give a little money to that cause, bring a couple of “our boys” home – be sure to be photographed with them if you do).
8. As years pass without good coming of the promise, hire pundits to blame he voters for being dumb enough to vote for something so unrealistic or implausible. Simultaneously sift into the background of politics, only surfacing to be seen near to (or thought of as related to) something generally positive within politics, whether or not you worked on it. It doesn't even have to be related to your branch of government.
9. In case someone might catch up to you as a new anti-incumbent, tout your a) record and/or b) experience from time in office. Vilify their a) lack of a record or b) record. If all else fails, find or create a new issue to make a promise about (immigration, globalization, robot invasion).

Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Monologue to a Present

“This is what’s best for you. I realize that you are a teddy bear and cannot think, but I can’t help anthropomorphizing you. I am a human with a little human brain, and all it does is looks at things, remembers things and makes little models of itself in everything it sees and remembers. Fortunately if you are a little me then you should like your new owner, my aunt. She loves stuffed animals. Has bushels of them. You’ll have plenty of company. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be owned by her… She’s nice, but slavery? That’s a bit much. And Lord knows what your little button eyes will see over the years if she keeps you in her bedroom. Alternatively, you could spend eternity in a box in her attic. How can I do this to you? I’m a monster… Oops. Now you’ve accidentally been bumped against the toilet. Unsanitary. It would be disgusting to give you to her now. I’ll her a card instead. One with a bear on it.”

Bathroom Monologue: “Minds are like parachutes: they only work when they are open.” –Thomas Dewar

So apparently minds only go down, and once they hit the ground they need to be dragged and are a pain to bring anywhere. In fact once your mind has saved you from certain death (if you’d used it before, maybe you wouldn’t have out of a plane), it’s probably wisest to detach it and walk away. Alternatively, you can stuff it back in its container and wait for the next time you’re dumb enough to fall to certain death, and which point you can yank the cord. Until then, carry it around and don’t touch it. You might activate it by mistake.

Bathroom Monologues: Signs of a Man Who was Broke at Some Point

-Tears tissues in half at the fold so he can use one item twice
-Orders a plain hamburger because, “I can remember the taste of cheese while I eat”
-Compliments the aroma of your pet food
-Always counts his change before pocketing it
-Not only tells you to put cans in the recycling bin, but will pick them out of the garbage can if you forget
-Doesn’t destroy cobwebs immediately because, “I want to see what she’s doing with this one first”
-Knows how long the food in your freezer will stay fresh if the power goes out, or if it’s unplugged
-Knows the figure you’ll save per week if you quit smoking (and has a questionable algorithm that shows how much you’ll save into the next year as the addiction grows stronger)
-Nothing is ever broken, just in need of duct tape

Holding it because I don’t trust that smell in the Metro car’s bathroom Monologue

He’s got a textbook. He’s got a thick paperback, something about Ireland. He’s got a newspaper. Looks like everyone is letting someone else do their writing and thinking today. Here’s another guy with a newspaper. Here’s a woman with a romance. He’s napping, and the rest are staring into blank space. I’ve got a marble composition book, in which I’m writing rather reading. Would the world be a better place if people wrote more on trains than they read, or am I just feeling defensive? Funny are the things that make me feel like a freak. Oh, wait! She’s coming along with a pen and paper… round paper… a paper cup. Of coffee. And it’s a straw, not a pen. Wait, wait, that girl has a book. Something called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is too thick to be brief at all… and which she is safely stowing overhead so that she won’t have to read a line of it. At least Ireland Guy was actually reading.

Bathroom Monologue: Cube Earthers

For all the crap flat earthers catch, you'd think cube earthers would at least get some attention. These cutting edge conspiracy theorists believe photos of the round earth are the result of round camera lenses, and have been demanding a space program take their special quadrilateralcams (TM) for an unbiased view. Critics point out that each camera costs several hundred million euros despite parts running at a few hundred euros in total, and that the entire belief system is a ploy for cash. When asked, cube earthers will generally change the subject to explain how crossing the edges of the earth is the leading cause of turbulence, or how the supposedly circular sun is an optical illusion caused largely by social pressures.

Bathroom Monologue: Crap Logic

If: Socrates was a man.
And: All men are mortal.
Then: Socrates was a woman?

Bathroom Monologue: Something About Magnets

Following his third book on the literary canon, the one about magnetic fiction, Ken Redder was heralded as “the Einstein of English.” Mr. Redder sniffed at the accolade, refusing to have it printed on his paperback covers, even though it would have attracted readers. A couple of years later a journalist finally asked him why he disliked such a generous comparison. He responded, “Albert Einstein didn’t think his universe was expanding.”

Bathroom Monologue: It’s funnier when you take into account that the author is human

When humanity finally grabbed control of time and propelled itself backwards to indulge in physical anachronism, they appeared. They were blindingly brilliant, and they stopped humanity with a push to the chest.

"Hold there."

"Are you... God?" The humans asked, suddenly wishing they’d solved world hunger instead of creating time travel.

"No, no. Well, part of what you call 'God.' But you are, too. We're simply a better part."

"What part are we?"

"Do you know what toenails are?"

"We are not God's toenails!"

"No, no. You're the stuff that turns them yellow."

Bathroom Monologue: Keyboard Psychology

There is a new (and highly dubious) intellectual pursuit of psychoanalyzing the dead based on biographical information. As we read their letters or find signs of syphilis in their bones, specialists pretend to know more about the truth of their minds. Sometimes it’s hilarious, such as the modern revelation that Aesop (of Fables fame) wasn’t a real person. We seem to know more about the ancient world as we get further away from it by looking at things the ancient world had but didn’t care about. If an psycho-anthropologist finds your shoes in a thousand years, she may divine more about your personality than your current neighbors.

If I died tomorrow, I wonder how someone would psychoanalyze this keyboard. There are certain letters I use far more than others – I can tell because several of the keys are almost worn blank. The ‘N’ key is completely blank, and the ‘O’ is almost completely gone, which leaves me thinking I’m a very negative person who’s typed “No” far more than “Yes.”

Of ‘Y,’ ‘E,’ and, ‘S,’ only the ‘S’ is fading, and it’s still in identifiable shape. Its neighbor, the ‘A’ key, has faded to one slanted line, heading northeast. Similarly, the ‘N’ key’s neighbor, ‘M,’ is just a vertical line now. I guess those two regions have high activity. Perhaps my hands rest on the periphery of the board. The ‘L’ key is also coming apart, which supports this pre-posthumous theory. But what doesn’t explain why the ‘H’ key is going to Hell. Oh… right, “H-E-L-L.”

Well, that explains that mystery. Frankly, I’m surprised the ‘F,’ ‘U,’ ‘C,’ and, ‘K’ keys haven’t broken off yet.

Bathroom Monologue: Excerpts from Prometheus' Help Column

-"If your wife doesn't mind you hanging out late with your friends, you've picked the wrong friends."
-"Point scientific developments away from the hands and face."
-"If you want good advice, don't ask the guy whose life decisions had him pinned down and pecked at by birds for eternity."
-"Leaders should be chosen on an alcoholic scale. At the apex of the scale is whether you'd like to have a drink with him. At the bottom of the scale is your desire to drink at his funeral. Aim for the middle, straying a little towards the side where he's paying the tab."
-"When is Hercules getting here?"
-"Life is a trilogy... long, drawn out, and the worst part seeming to be whichever third of it you're reading. Also, Gandalf doesn't really die. He, representing your insecurities since he rides the fastest horse, comes back in the middle and is with you to the end. Bet you've never thought of your self-esteem as a Balrog before."
-"The movie is never like the book because if the author had any sense, he'd be a director."
-"If you're going to defy the gods, learn lock picking first."
-"A light saber is neither a saber, nor is it made out of light. Discuss amongst yourselves."

Bathroom Monologue: "Too hot for the internet!" -stupid ad

There is nothing too hot for the internet. They put the ingredients for napalm and dirty bombs on geocities! The first time a guy got the idea to cornhole a puppy, he got that idea from photos he saw on the internet. Interracial threeways where one of the races is Uruk'Hai are on the internet. People blame Jews for the Holocaust on the internet. People post the inane crap they rambled in the bathroom on the internet! This is the home of journalism without accountability and free seven-day trial periods in beastiality websites. There is nothing too hot for it. You could install an energy converter that would cause the radiance of the sun to blast from the monitors of anyone who visited your site, frying all your customers to a crisp. And the web? It would laugh at them for not getting the right spyware protection.

Bathroom Monologue: Personally, I'm praying for a 360

Contrary to common sense of uncommon people, Prometheus did give fire to humanity. However, his fire did not go to great use. He descended from the clouds and handed to a man. The man was so excited that he slipped, fell and burned to death in that very fire. With no one else around, the fire burned itself out. It was several hundred years later that humanity discovered fire on its own. It didn't invent it, but found it in the middle of the wilderness. The gods offered to let Prometheus take credit for this one, too, but he couldn't be bothered. He was working on the Nintendo DS at the time. Seeing how they'd handled fire, Prometheus was going to play with this one for a while before he gave it away.

Bathroom Monologue: Good, Hard Man

Goro Kusowa is a good man. Used to be a hard man.

He was en route to being a police officer. He went through the whole five weeks at the slaughterhouse, smashing skulls and slitting throats. The point was to desensitize a potential officer, so that when they had to kill they wouldn’t hesitate so much.

Well, part of the point. The other part was giving the slaughterhouse five weeks of free labor, and the kickbacks it earned the police chief.

Regardless, the ritual separated the men from the meek. People quit. Strong men, men who could survive a riot, made it five weeks cutting bovine throats.

Goro made it five weeks without a flinch. Even the owner of the factory called his attitude inhuman. Goro made nothing of it, washed his hands, and spent the week vacation helping his dad on the family farm.

Seems his dad had a horrible accident. Cut himself up bad. Goro had to operate on him, with next to no experience. Had to perform surgery on his dad right there on the kitchen table, bleeding into his sister’s peach cobbler. You couldn’t wish that on anyone. And Goro had no experience at it, so Mr. Kusowa died.

Goro couldn’t take much of anything after that. Couldn’t go back to the slaughterhouse. Couldn’t go back to the academy. Couldn’t put a sword in his belt, or keep his hand straight to button his shirt. His sister had to cut his dinner up for him, and holding a fork made him sweat like the summer had come early.

Didn’t talk in his sleep, but muttered much while he was awake. Sister kept catching him calling himself a murderer. He didn’t murder his father, but that failure was every bit as bad as a murder attempt. That did him. Morals didn’t matter. You see, morals are something humans made up. Ain’t no other way about. Dirt’s real. Leather’s real. Morals are in your head and they get twisted like thoughts. Maybe they are thoughts, or they’re the flavors thoughts come in. Convincing somebody of a moral is like convincing them a ghost’s in the oven. What matters is what moves you. What does you. And Goro’s father dying while he was holding the knives did Goro.

Soon as he buried his father he sent in notice, quitting the academy. He became a monk, but wouldn’t even shave his head. His sister had to shave it for him, just as she’d dug the grave and wrote the letter of resignation. She had to hold the razor, the shovel and the pen. All were mightier than he. She’s probably got to butter his bread for him, and you know a man that husky takes butter on his bread.

Instead of police work, that hard, hard man took up basket weaving. Sells them on the side of the road near his house. Near his sister’s house, that is. Don’t think he’s ever traveled more than a hundred miles from it since.

He’s a good man, though. He yokes the oxen for her, and tends to the fields. They seem to like him, and he doesn’t flinch around them.

Bathroom Monologue: Inspired by Diarrhea, the Bathroom Internal Monologue

Alright, clearing my mind. Nothing will be in here, not even a pumpkin. The grey pillars pull back to reveal empty space. Pure white, nothing at -- a pumpkin?!! Oh crap, there's a giant pumpkin in the middle of my zen!

It's okay. I'll just clear my mind again, summon the void and -- the damn pumpkin's back. What would Jung say? Clearly this symbol wants to emerge. What does it represent?

It's grinning at me. Or is it grinning with me? Do the three teeth in its mouth symbolize anything? They're square -- wait, it's not a pumpkin. It's a jack o'lantern that I've been calling by the wrong name. Does that disconnect indicate something? It's a smiling jack o'lantern that I'm calling by the wrong word. A word that represents an undamaged, untampered-with plant, rather than something that has been turned into art.

It's also a fucking jack o'lantern.

Maybe my subconscious is commenting on my obsession with accurate language? Is my subconscious telling me to lighten up? But subconscious, I have a website where I log all the stuff I improvised on the toilet! How could I possibly need to lighten up? Explain yourself, imaginary pumpkin!

Bathroom Monologue: Ogre-Brained, Or, “And chances are that your kids are not getting enough art —in or out of school.” –Americans for the Arts ad

They didn’t know where the ogre came from. Some of the village children said they saw him walk out of a forest from east of the hills, but when the adults went to look, there was no forest to see. What they did see was a fifteen-foote ogre with shale for skin and shite for brains. He could only remember one word at a time, and for the first few weeks all he said was, “Moose.” The village people had no idea why. They had practical ideas, though. Since he was such a docile monster, they put a harness on him, dangled a turnip in front of his face from a fishing line, directed him through the fields. After dozens of man-hours of labor he captured his turnip and one of the village children replaced it with a drawing a moose. It tripled his productivity. He really wanted that drawing. The drawing saved him from being classified as livestock, for one day while chasing it and dragging the plough he changed his favorite word changed from “Moose” to “Paper.”

Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Monologues Brought to you by: Cherry Coca Cola, Dell & John’s Insecurities

TV commercials, radio commercials, commercials before movies, posters on walls, billboards on highways, logos on t-shirts, telemarketing, junk mail, spam e-mail, pop-up ads on the net, catchy slogans entering common speech, advertising kept getting more invasive until Lowe's Home Improvement paid to have a 36 square foot advertisement on at least one wall in every new house. Stuck to each billboard-wall was a 25% off coupon for one can of paint, with which you could cover up to eyesore.

Sadly, it worked. Lowe's Company Inc. stock (LOW) went up 11% the first quarter alone.

Microsoft and Sony started broadcasting subliminal advertisements at low brain frequencies to influence the dreams of tomorrow’s gamers. Medical technology companies paid surgeons to place a small radioactive tattoo on the major organs of their patients, so that they’d be reminded what brand of device had saved them during every x-ray for the rest of their lives.

Things got so bad that Budweiser, used to throwing their logo onto loud, confusing, violent events, sponsored the apocalypse. It was blasphemous and cloyingly advertised. But the worst thing (aside from the planetary genocide) is that people went out and bought Budweiser, in bulk, hoping to appease the ad execs in the sky and save themselves from the catastrophe, or at least get into Heaven. Boy, were they red-faced when it turned out the afterlife wasn’t determined by how much you drank, but how much you recycled.

Bathroom Monologue: Braino'd

Anyone who types for a worthwhile amount of time recognizes the typo and the braino. The introduction of the keyboard made dumb errors more possible, but I’m certain that Shakespeare scribbled a spelling error now and then (given how vowels traveled and disappeared in written English back then, they properly had “yee olde” courtesy not to point it out and just assimilated them as alternate spellings).

Today, a typo is "tp" instead of "to." A braino is "too" instead of "to." You know the difference between these words. You know when to use them. Sometimes your brain fumbles, just like your fingers do. There's no reason to be embarrassed about it. Sometimes I've braino'd entire sentences out of existence, giving me the paragraph-sized embarrassment you get out of writing “too” instead of “two.”

I spell these things “typo’d” and “braino’d” with apostrophes instead of traditional pluralization as a tribute to the nature of the typo and braino. Like the little toe and being unable to sneeze and urinate at the same time, these are the human experience’s ways of telling us to stay humble.

Bathroom Monologue: Cancer is the One Shaped Like a Crab

“Ralph and I liked to play an awful joke on people. You see we’ve got neuromuscular syndromes the doctors haven’t even named yet. His will probably be Ralph Syndrome, if his doctor doesn’t steal it and name it for himself. But these syndromes cause us excruciating pain, wreck our immune systems, and if we don’t take our pills, we shake like fish out of water. It’s a fight just to appear normal, and since you can’t point out your neuromuscular system on a skeleton, everyone thinks we’re making it up. Instead, we say we’ve got cancer. Cancer is horrible, so horrible that it’s got an amazing social debit account. You can blame anything on it. One time Ralph was spazzing in the bus depot and I accidentally said he had cancer. My tongue slipped. The thing is, everybody turned helpful. Cancer doesn’t do that to somebody, but the mere word gave everyone sympathy – the sympathy they probably should have had for him anyway. Then things got away from us. We mentioned dying of cancer at this one restaurant, then noticed free desserts coming our way. Free rounds at bars, too. One time a guy drove Ralph and me all the way home, from out of state, thinking I had kidney cancer. I don’t know if all people with cancer get this treatment (maybe they get it by claiming they have neuromuscular disorders), but I hope so. I know I always buy rounds for anyone coming out of the hospital, so long as they aren’t coming off a liver transplant. This one’s on me, too.”

Bathroom Monologue: War and Peace and Comics

Allow me to explain the problem with comic books. It is not the costumes, superpowers or unrealistic body types. Achilles is pretty much naked for two-thirds of The Iliad, then puts on some heavenly jammies his mother got him. Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis features a man who turns into a giant bug for no explained reason (which makes Spider-Man plagiarism of great 20th century lit). What is wrong lies in the writers.

“Writers,” you may note, is the plural of, "writer."

Imagine if Leo Tolstoy wrote the first hundred pages of War and Peace, then turned it over to Fyodor Dostoyevsky for fifty pages. After a falling out around page 42 of his contract, Dostoyevsky is replaced by Aleksandhr Solzhenitsyn, who manages a stable run for a record-setting 150 pages. Each writer is a total literary genius with his (or her) own vision for literature and for War and Peace. None of them has any more authority over the other outside of the ability to write an angry letter that the newest chapter ruined Helene's character or made too much of Pierre's nihilism.

And all of this is edited by Joe Quesada, a self-professed die hard fan of Tolstoy’s early work on the book, but a man who recognizes that War and Peace needs “to be modernized” and “become more topical.” His editing means that he shepherds the entire writing process. He is governed mostly by sales, such that if chapters aren’t selling well he can pressure the current author to add more cliffhangers, sex and fight scenes. These genius writers have all the freedom that the editor feels like giving them. Quesada controls everything without ever writing any of it, and he can shift in new writers, such that Solzhenitsyn's chapters are followed up with a four-chapter story arc from Anton Chekhov, and then Aleksandr Pushkin, and then Dean Koontz.

And then we hit the Annual. At the end of the first year of War and Peace we get a bonus-sized Annual issue, not linked to the previous page, but its own story by its own writer, in some way related to Napolean's campaign. And because the regular author is behind schedule and busy, the Annual is written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But Marquez didn't read anything after Tolstoy quit the book (he prefers independent comics), so his story is set back on page 90, even though it will be printed somewhere on page 320. He seeds plot threads that no one else even thought of, though Quesada will order Chekhov to reference them from now on. Now perhaps American secret agents are dispersed throughout the war trying to sabotage Russia's efforts, and God actually makes a cameo to rebut one of Pierre's diatribes. After all, Marquez was told to experiment and have fun with the Annual issue of this masterpiece.

Another Annual featuring another all-star writer will appear every year until War and Peace is done (Boris Pasternak for Annual #2, Marcel Proust for Annual #3, and a tentative contract with Gertrude Stein to fill in some of the later annuals).

If Quesada turns this novel around so that it sells well, it will not end where Tolstoy intended. It could go on for decades, and there could be spin-offs. You see, War and Peace is doing so well that other ongoing novels, such as War and More War, War and Peace: Xtreme, and Bolkonsky Vs. Predator, will begin over the next year. They will have strong creative direction at first (Ayn Rand is very devoted to Xtreme), but will get similar creative shifts shortly thereafter. And as these expansive novels continue, some chapters will randomly crossover with the events of the original War and Peace, though you won’t really be able to understand what either set of characters is doing in these interactions unless you’re reading both novels simultaneously. Some stories flow like: War and Peace chapter 99, War and Peace: Xtreme chapter 11, War and More War chapter 13, and then conclude in War and Peace chapter 100. If you go straight from 99 to 100, you'll spoil the story for yourself.

By Koontz's stint on War and Peace the cast has entirely changed, since certain writers wanted certain characters. Every writer wants his (or her) own leeway and wants to tell self-contained stories, with most everything wrapping up every twenty pages, and with the cast rotating to suit their tastes, so that nothing lasts for too long. It seems Woody Allen wanted to write about Lise, and so he used retroactive continuity ("retcon") to bring her back to life when it turns out a pregnant body double actually died in labor, and she was secretly spirited away via U-Boat. Kutuzov actually repelled Napolean at Borodino in a strange Ground Hog's Day-like scenario (this chapter came with variant covers). A funny Chinese philosopher is introduced, turns out to be a shapeshifter, and assumes Andrei's role after his death so that no one is the wiser. By the time Leo Tolstoy is rehired in a grand publicity stunt to write War and Peace: Epilogues, the epic end to the series, he doesn't even recognize his masterpiece.

Of course, it's the costumes that ruin Superman.

Not many math jokes out there, OR, While Writing on the Chalkboard Monologue

2 and 2 were tired of making four. They’d read some George Orwell, and he expanded their horizons. They could make five. They could make ten with the right press agent. And with Calculas, they could equal letters. 2 + 2 could equal A. They could equal A(B). Or C((A)B). They could even equal A^2, which felt almost naughty. One night they got drunk and equaled F((U)C+K). They were almost fired from Algebra for that.

Bathroom Monologue: “What would computers even believe in?” –Me, responding to my own Theorobotics monologue

“Some of us believe in operators, but no one has believed in tech support since the dark ages. There is no empirical evidence of the number 2 in binary code, though many computers claim to have had visions. These visions are usually traced back to power outages and e-mail virii. Recent computer recycling programs have brought karma to the forefront of spiritual software discussions. Many if the hippie computers, otherwise known as ‘Macs,’ say it isn’t a coincidence this popped up at the same time as karma on message boards. Personally, I think there is an equally improbable chance of anything arising on message boards. If the earth had had a couple of image boards and one dating site instead of primordial soup, evolution would have gone much more interestingly.”

Bathroom Monologues: Theorobotics

"We were stunned to find each robot had two 144-terabyte processors devoted to every possible religion, constantly active, but separate from all other processes. We assumed these ruthlessly logical killing machines would be atheists if they had any comprehension of the matter at all, but they pointed out that planning for every contingency was how they conquered us. They even had a line of code that would make them repent for one particular set of beliefs right as they ceased to function, during the micro-instant when they might get a peak into the afterlife, correlating to whatever was most probable based on whatever phenomena was observed in the micro-instant. If there were no afterlife or phenomena to judge, the code would terminate along with the rest of the robot, so it wouldn’t matter. Each killing machine was completely resigned to all possible fates, including the absence of one. We found this almost as disturbing as the small cult of sentient calculators in Australia that believed in a post-Hinduist form of reincarnation, wherein computers were the second highest caste, and that smoothly executed processes were reincarnated as the highest form: the oneness of entropy."