Bathroom Monologue: Some Song About Ninjas

There’s a man who leads a life of danger
To everyone he meets he stays a stranger
With every job he takes
Another leap he makes
Odds are he won’t live to see Naruto
Secret… ASIAN Man
Secret… ASIAN Man
They’ve given you nunchucks
And taken away your glaive

(I've since been warned that someone else beat me to this parody. If you're out there, I just have to ask - what's wrong with you?)

“Physicians may use [a] placebo for diagnosis or treatment only if the patient is informed of and agrees to its use.” –American Medical Association

This week the National Rifle Association put forth a stern warning that rifles may only be used to shoot deer all the bullets are removed from the gun and dumped on the ground in front of the deer. Further, the deer must sign a waiver consenting to be shot by the empty gun. Empirical tests are currently being run to chart the effectiveness of “placebullets.”

Bathroom Monologue: Dwarfs on Stilts

Society said the stilts counted as cheating, but dwarfs weren’t fooled. If lithe elfs could wear corsets that hiked their diminutive boobs up to their eternal chins, they could wear lifts. Even the humans wore shoes, and if the shoes had heels, who were they to question an eight-foot dwarf?

For weeks the giant wee folk wandered around stores and asked strangers of other species, “How’s the weather down there?”

“Don’t worry. Maybe you’ll hit a growth spurt at your midlife crisis!”

“Sure, this is nice, but you have your advantages. When you trip, you have less of a way to fall!”

“Need to me reach that for you?”

They said that last one a lot. Within the first week there was nothing left on the top shelf of anything in any store, even stores where dwarfs had no interest. One dwarfish nun was so taken with the idea of taking things off the top shelf that she cleared out the upper tier of an entire sex toy shop.

She did penance by only wearing high heels that weekend.

Bathroom Monologue: I said it, thought nothing of it, and six hours later, burst into laughter

"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"Interrupting cat."
"Interrupting cat wh--"
"MOOO!"
"Cats don't m-"
"MOOOOOO!"

Bathroom Monologue: “Love is such an old-fashioned word.”-Samari Smith’s away message

“Decapitation is such an old-fashioned word. I prefer cranial rearrangement, or body re-decorating. You may have seen my work on Flip This Corpse. This isn’t the dark ages. We aren’t tethered to old ethics or aesthetics. People these days know if they’re hip then they can’t just let their body parts grow wherever nature tells them to. You need legs on your shoulders and a neck coming out of your navel if you want to be on the cutting edge. And to get that looking? You need my cutting edge.”

Bathroom Monologue: Refried Griefers

There’s this one videogame habit called “griefing,” where players go to online games, partner up with strangers, and then purposefully play poorly, or play annoying sound effects through their microphones over and over again, or in some other way generally try to annoy the other players. Griefers are sometimes called the parasites of entertainment, leaching off normal players, but if they are parasites, then the Refried Griefer is the immune system.

Refried Griefers track the ISP numbers and find the identities of griefers, then steal their personal information like bank account info and social security numbers, empty all their savings and max out their credit cards.

On what do they spend this stolen money? One Oklahoma Refried Griefer spent a regular griefer’s life savings on a giant array of speakers to blast annoying sound effects into his apartment building.

A south Florida refried griefing unit used one griefer’s credit cards to pay for a fleet of street limos that were dispatched when the griefer went out driving, specifically ordered to drive in back, in front and at the sides of her car, and to do so slowly and erratically. It had something to do with the way she’d griefed on World of Warcraft. Something about “mounts.” I guess you’d have to play to get it.

Bathroom Monologue: Strife with Sandwiches

So you’re walking by this restaurant that half your friends have said serves the best ham sandwich. Your life is feeling empty and pointless right now so you go in and order one, but the waitress says they don’t serve any. You tell her you’ve heard they serve great ones, and she just smiles and nods. You’re there for fifteen minutes before you get up and leave out of frustration. As you exit, though, you pass a couple leaving who are talking.

“What a great ham sandwich.”

“Yes it was. Thank you for sharing your other half with me. I’m definitely ordering it next time.”

What the Hell? You almost go over to look at their empty plates to see the remains of this sandwich, but you’re already at the door. It’d be embarrassing.

That night you hear someone else praise the restaurant’s ham sandwich, so you head back to the restaurant the next day. You get a different waitress. You order the sandwich, she nods and heads off.

Huh. I guess the other one was ornery.

This waitress returns with a bowl of tomato soup and doesn’t even listen to your protests as she heads off to wait on another table. Infuriating! Almost as infuriating as when you leave and pass an entire party of people talking about how great their ham sandwiches were.

For forces beyond your ability to explain you return the next day. You sit in the same area as that party had, thinking maybe the waitress in this area will provide the sandwich. Maybe she makes them herself and you can only get them from her.

But no waitress shows up. Other people come and sit in the area and don’t even look for a server. In fact, they almost look full the moment they sit down. When one of them belches you lose your temper and go into another area to grab someone who works there and yell that you know there’s a ham sandwich somewhere in that back room and you’re damned well going to eat it.

Logic only kicks in at this moment, and they call the cops. You’re hauled out. You head over to your normal restaurant to cool off and order the grilled cheese sandwich, your favorite. It comes and is delicious. It soothes you right away.

But just as you’re finishing you see someone screaming at the front door about how he knows they don’t serve grilled cheese sandwiches and he’ll fucking kill them if they don’t admit that there’s no such thing.

Anyway, that’s my experience with other people’s religion.

Bathroom Monologue: Rejected Proposal #6

So what we’ll do is re-title the many genres in print. With the recent decline in book sales comes many stupid ideas on how to sell books, but I think there’s a whole new generation of Alexander Pope fans just waiting to be fooled into thinking he’s like Jay Z – which is why “Poetry” will now be known as “Hip Hop.” It doesn’t stop there. We’ll do…

Horror – Scary
Humor - Funny
Biography – I Lived This!
Fantasy – Magic
Science Fiction – Magic 2.0
Speculative Fiction – Guessin’
Romance – Fuckin’
Culinary – Do Not Eat This
Classics – You’ll Impress Girls
Psychology – Brainstuffings
Science – We Checked
History – Boring But No Wait Come Back!

Bathroom Monologue: Rejected Proposal #5

So what we’ll do is make a videogame based on all those dystopias. It’ll be spin-off from Koei’s Dynasty Warriors franchise that pits several ancient Chinese kingdoms against each other in beat-em-up action. Our Dystopia Warriors is set in a terrible pan-future. Instead of Asian emperors, you’ve got Big Brother. Those freakish convoys from Beyond Thunderdome go head-to-head with a zombie apocalypse, with the winner taking on the Terminators. One level will require you to escape L.A., while another forces you to face the irradiated mutations of a nuclear disaster. All the infamous awful futures collide, not to taint the present, but to beat on each other – and they have all always been at war with Oceania. Coming this Fall – A Brave New Asskicking.

Bathroom Monologue: Rejected Proposal #4

So what we’ll do is print a small explanation along with the coin. You can’t have failed to notice that the U.S. Mint has set George Washington’s giant head looming over president elect Obama on the one side, which is a very odd idea on its own. President Washington owned Negro slaves. They worked for him in Virginia. I guess the vague idea was that he has a really idealized image as president, and so we’ll just associate him with other guys we like, like Obama. They could have just as easily put Thomas Edison’s head behind him – if anybody knew what he looked like. But we don’t, and we don’t have a Lincoln/Obama coin here. We have a Washington/Obama coin, on which we will print the bold-faced rationalization that President Washington emancipated his slaves in his will, and thus had he lived to this century he would have happily let Obama stop working on his plantation and let him be president just as soon as he died. I think that should take the potential offense out of it for everyone.

Rejected Proposal #3

So what we’ll do is knock down the external wall of the church. Not the whole wall, just the little bit beside the padre’s confessional. We’ll build in the same little wicker thing to obscure the face of repentant, but realistically we’ll want intercoms so that they can confess from the drive-through. Maybe we’ll install an automated system so they can tell the operator the nature and severity of his sins, so the padre can produce pertinent penitence in the most expeditious manner. I don’t know who the operator will be. Do you have a spare nun around?

Bathroom Monologue: Rejected Proposal #2

So what we’ll do is abduct babies straight from the nursery. Publishing is dwindling and some say we should go to all e-distribution, but do you really want to depend on a medium where piracy is the norm? We’ve got to create brand new technology. We’ve got to pre-load our books in the brains of children straight from the womb, then charge for the privilege. It’s what PC’s have been doing with software for years – Microsoft Office comes loaded, with charges going back to the home company. The moms won’t even know what happened, but their little chubby miracles will be pre-loaded with Melville and Proust. Their first words won’t be, “Dada,” but, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” It’ll be tacked on to the bill as they exit the hospital. Nobody reads those.

Bathroom Monologue: Rejected Proposal #1

So what we’ll do is load a super-virus into the server that only appears on that one page. They can search Wikipedia for King George, Sesame Street or Absurdism, but not Wikipedia itself! It’s like biting your own teeth. Instead of a normal page what loads is a series of flashing messages like, “Why would you do this to me? Why, operator, why?” before their hard drives fry. It’ll be hilarious.

Rejected Proposal Week

This week, from today to Saturday, I'll be posting monologues with the theme of Rejected Proposals. You'll see recommendations for the U.S. Mint, the Catholic Church and videogame companies looking to court our ever-increasing interest in the end of the world. Please vote for your favorite in the poll, which should show up in the next couple of days.

Bathroom Monologue: To Be Wrong

“My greatest unease is when I don’t hear any of the loons saying this stuff anymore. It’s not when all the men of reason disagree that I become worried. Einstein was the only one to believe certain things for a time, as was Newton’s lot, as was Galileo’s. People make reason say whatever they want it to say; it’s a puppet that can do any dance. It’s when all the crazies disagree with me that I worry. They are such a diverse lot, some with theories of UFO puppeteers, some of a violent blasphemous trinity, of fairies controlling gravity, and all of them so divorced from sense as I know it that if not one of them has any thoughts congruent with mine, I must be worse than mad. No, for a hundred geniuses are apt to agree with each other, but a hundred madmen have a hundred ideas, and if none of the hundred so much as echo mine, my theory must have gone wrong somewhere.”

Bathroom Monologue: Phoenix Baby, OR, Interpretations Are Not What They Seem

The phoenix appeared when Marina was born. They couldn’t have thought to time it, but it seemed the first attack came when she was spanked and cried her first breaths. Every ensuing time she cried the phoenix attacked anew, knocking over skyscrapers and ripping up the roads. The attacks grew more savage with time, ripping up more and more of the earth, and became especially worse when Marina grew old enough to throw tantrums. Her uncle began keeping a diary, a crude catalog of her misbehavior and the bird’s assaults. When she didn’t get what she wanted for her birthday and the phoenix ripped up the highway, he convinced himself there was only one way to stop it. He smothered her at 8:01 on a Monday morning. At 8:01 across town, the great dragon emerged in full rage from beneath the concrete and immolated a third of the city’s population. The phoenix’s head fell in shame; she had been too late to stop it.

Bathroom Monologue: Giant Dissection

Phenotypically they most resemble humans, though you will notice the spine is more curved providing a natural slouch, the hands and feet are disproportionately large, and there are sundry internal differences. They possess three lungs and five heart-like organs of amazing toughness and resilience. We have still yet to cut through one of the hearts, so it should be several more weeks before we can say anything about the cardiovascular system. For flourish’s sake, though, they have arteries that could reverse a small mountain stream, compensating for the sheer space they have to pump blood through. You will notice the fingernails are calcified to the point of being part of the skeletal system, and bones have integrated with all the major organs, providing structural support and a defense mechanism for each much as the human skull provides its brain. The giant skull is as thick as rumored, but shelters a brain much larger than anticipated. We find all the lobes in human physiology as well as two incomparable ones. Based on their proximity to what would be the reasoning centers in humans, we may be looking at the schematics for the next evolutionary leap – the housing of giant intelligence, if you will. It’s most unfortunate that science will not be able to chart further growth with their oncoming extinction, but then maybe it is fortunate, or else human science might vanish altogether.

Bathroom Monologue: “How many equal sides does a scalene triangle have?” –The author’s brother-in-law in Know-It-All

“One. Now I know what you’re going to say: that a triangle has to have at least two sides be equal to each other to have any that are equal at all. But you didn’t ask how many sides a specific scalene triangle had to itself. You asked how many equal sides it had, so I answered how many sides the triangle had that were equal to another triangle I was imagining. It may have three similar sides to an identical scalene triangle. However, it cannot have any identical sides to itself because it’s scalene – so you can only be asking about its relation to another triangle, so I picked one on my own. Booyah.”

Bathroom Monologue: When I was a kid, I thought Gandalf was Merlin on vacation from England

When I was a kid, I thought Gandalf was Merlin on vacation from England
As soon as the last grail meeting ended, Merlin slipped out the door and lit a cigarette.
One of the squires came over.

“Good boy. Is my horse ready?”

“Yes, sir. But are you certain you should go now? Their crusade could begin any month.”

“Listen, that hobbit isn’t going to pull this off by himself and Arthur knows what he’s doing. I’ve got two weeks vacation from Camelot and if anyone gets suspicious I’ll blame it on Morgana. You can blame anything on the old bitch. Two weeks is all I need to ride to Rivendell, from there around the cliffs and I make the necessary cameo to inspire and point him in the right direction again. I swear, if I didn’t show up regularly they’d wander into Las Vegas before they hit the Misty Mountains.”

He combed his beard with his fingers, changed his pointy blue hat for one with a rim and swapped his staff for that sword the elves dropped. Then he turned back to the squire.

“How do I look?”

“Exactly the same, sir.”

“Good, good. If Hogwartz calls again tell them I’m not playing phone tag anymore. If they want me to be head wizard, I want time and a half plus a pension that doesn’t rely on disgusting jellybeans. Playing two roles is hard enough.”

Then the wizard hustled to the stables, mumbling something about how having to make so many dramatic appearances had turned his hair white.

Bathroom Monologue: Fragrance of Success, OR, That is not how evolutionary biology works

Their evolutionary biologists suggest human digestive systems evolved to produce feces that smell repugnant so that we would shy away from them, as they contain unhealthy materials. Our evolutionary biologists are quickly processing a new GeneTech ™ pill to rewire your intestines to produce new feces in Rosewater, Fresh Pine and Sanitary Lemon scents. Each pill will run $50,000 and the treatment takes a few months, but GeneTech says it’s always cost a lot to think your shit doesn’t stink (TM).

Bathroom Monologue: Another tuna monologue, OR, I’m Feeling a Little Woody Allen Today

“I lost seven pounds this year without a gym membership. Does that please you, mistress?”

“Lick my boot.”

“I really don’t want to. You say those are your house stilettos, but even so, a lot drips onto the floor of this apartment, and I don’t think a swiffer can pick all of it up. Can’t a just compliment your shoe-shopping purchase? Can’t we just talk? You can dominate the conversation.”

(In case grandma reads this one: it's fiction, grandma. I'm a dom.)

Bathroom Monologue: New Archery Event Announced

“This is a bad event! I know a lot of things are called sports when they aren’t, but this is not a sport! Whoever said we should see who could stop the most arrows was clearly intending to be a spectator! I forfeit! Can I forfeit? I protest! I’m morally opposed to being shot to death!”

Bathroom Monologue: Sitting over an imaginary Ivan, who is in a permanent vegetative state in my tub

“I can’t pull the plug on Ivan. He used to be a dude. I can kind of dig abortion – that little thing was never a dude and isn’t a dude now. I can’t have a bratwurst with it. Ivan cooked me bratwurst. He made bratwurst on the weekends, pastime he picked up from his dad as a little kid. He was a dude, and his dudeness abides to the present. Having been a dude totally changes the equation.”

Bathroom Monologue: “I'd buy a hog and ride it to California.” –A random character in Kelly Link’s “Louise’s Ghost”

Clark Quelsy rides from coast to coast atop his massive pig. The hog drags a sack of tanned leather goods, which he distributes to any charitable children he can see from the road. His is a rare eye that can discern moral character for a mere glimpse at the back of a head. His is a rare hand that can hurl a homemade football to a second grader from eighty yards and through two panes of school glass window. His gifts will not be denied, nor will his passage. Tollbooth workers know the sound of his mighty pig’s hooves, and always leave their gates open out of fearful respect.

Bathroom Monologue: “What happens when an Orc goes underwear shopping?” –Me, trying to stump myself

Clear out Men’s Wear, because Orcs never go alone and they never give up the right of way to other shoppers (or drivers). Orcs never go alone in the way Valley Girls never go alone to the mall and American Football players never go alone out the tunnel of a stadium. Like Valley Girls they scorn all those in their path, and like American Football players their scorn probably means tackling. Remove any glassware or displays from the immediate area – destroying a store display is one of the few things Orcs can write off on their taxes. You are advised to get some young associates to the neighboring departments so that they may begin cleanup immediately, and to give them durable mops. For the actual shopping experience, only stock boxers, and only ones with skulls and crossbones, ironic phrases like, “If idiots could fly this would be an airport,” and anything with a sports logos on it. The helmet of a favorite team on the ass of his underwear will cause an Orc to spend his entire paycheck in your store.

Bathroom Monologue: Sitting over an imaginary court, OR, “You are as wise as you are gentle, my lord.” –A eunuch in George Martin’s Clash of Kings

"We are all only as wise as we are gentle. There is no intelligent violence. There is not a genius who cripples, no murderous brilliance. The strategy of war, planning to disable and maim, is only a compensation for failures of integrity. Wisdom comes in cooperation and compassion. The best indication of practical wisdom is how willing people are to do what you wish them to do; if they are willing without fear, then you are wise, and if they are willing without malice towards others, you are among the wisest. To be brash is to have not thought on something enough. To be harsh may be thought to set an example, but it is only thought so by the unwise – and that is why the death penalty has not outlived crime. All violence is some expression of ignorance or desperation. Sometimes these things extend into the supposedly higher faults, like greed. But greed is just ignorance of where resources will come from when you’ve used them all up, or harmed all the suppliers, or something of which I am ignorant."

Bathroom Monologue: Things for which a police officer has never pulled me over

-Speeding
-Slowing
-Driving under the influence of Methodism
-Breaking the speed of light
-Leaving my headlights on at the speed of light
-Being on fire
-Having my car flooded to the roof with water
-Punching an orangutan
-Underwear stuck in my butt (a seventh sense tells you everyone else knows it’s happened despite their inability to observe)
-Thwarting a snowplow
-Running over the last echidna
-Suspicion that my car is a robot in disguise (a lie – I would never fraternize with Bumblebee)
-Drving while wearing a zoot suit
-Pursuing Daffy Duck
-Pursuing Donald Duck
-Pursuing a flock of young mallards and screaming they lead me to their number one dime
-Driving while verbally composing a cogent and persuasive argument that Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow deserved the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (for which I deserved to be pulled over, as I hadn’t read it yet)
-Using a rainbow as an off-ramp
-Using the carpool lane with an imaginary stuffed tiger in the passenger seat
-Failing to deploy my air flaps
-Opening my doors, taking to the air and jetting over traffic to beat the yellow light

Bathroom Monologue: The Six

One of the popular religious groups in the jail worshipped entities called “the Six.” It was an ancient pantheon, one from the tribal regions. The worshippers didn’t even consider The Six to be gods until the imperial theologians explained the concept to them. To the tribes (and to the prisoners), The Six were merely thieves who carried off land, sea, sky and life from the oppressive creators of the universe. Two thieves carried off land, understandable as the religion was developed before sea-travel explained that oceans weren’t merely oblong lakes. A third thief carried off the sky (considered to be very light despite its size; hence why it floated up there), while a fourth carried all the water, and a fifth carried off life, which she then pumped into everything else. The imperial theologians were perplexed that the worshippers kept reverence for all six thieves despite none of them knowing what the sixth carried off. Theories that he stole the afterlife, stars or fire were all suggested by those same theologians; the tribes didn’t seem to bother about it. The shaman dismissed the sixth stolen item as something to be figured out later. It was only the prisoners who realized this was not a copout; the sixth stolen thing was actually what came later. It was the future. After centuries of scholarly tradition, it took people with nowhere to go and nothing to do to figure it out.

"Rorschark Attack" on Short Story Library

"Rorschark Attack," the monologue about a shark that no one sees as a shark, will be the story of the day on Short Story Library on April 5th. You can check out their site at the URL: http://shortstory.us.com/2009/04/rorschark-attack-by-john-wiswell/

If you like it, let them know with comments or e-mails!

Bathroom Monologue: “Ledger Oscar bittersweet” -Herald Sun headline

“We figured, why waste actual gold on a dead guy?” said Academy reprentative Ed Nygma. “Since his daughter was receiving it, we just made a chocolate mold and put a gold wrapper on it.”

The chocolate Oscar was supplied by the Kyle, Ivy & Quinzel Confectionary Agency. An anonymous confectioner within the group stated the Oscar was, “bittersweet, with a green mint undertone.”

Of course, Mr. Ledger will never know how the chocolate beneath the gold man-shaped wrapper will taste. He was posthumously awarded for his deeply affecting role as a green-haired sociopath that fights a man dressed up like a bat.

No nuts were included in the Oscar, but it was packaged in a production plant that also manufactures peanut goods.