Bathroom Monologue: People Are Worse Than Clowns

"Clowns make me a little nervous, but they’re not bad. Some are really talented. They’ll follow you around trying to get you into the carnival spirit. Those ones? Okay, yeah, they wig me out. But clowns only scare me because they're people under that make-up. If they were demons, or shapeshifters, or juggling incubi, there'd be a chance I just didn't grasp what they were really like and this was their way of communicating goodwill. They could have their own nature. They could all just be misunderstood aliens. But clowns are people, and I understand people. There was one famous clown who turned serial killer; there are dozens of active people who are horrible serial killers. Sometimes a guy uses a clown mask to hide his face in a bank robbery; every day people shoot each other to death in muggings. There’s a song, “Send in the Clowns,” that jokes about sending a brigade of clowns to fight; people are currently carrying out more than a dozen wars across this world. Clowns can make me a little nervous. People scare me."

Bathroom Monologue: Dialogue for two soldiers sweeping for snipers in Iraq, OR, Things John mumbled to himself watching Hurt Locker

"Gunman spotted on the minaret!"

"Where?"

"11 o'clock! On the minaret!"

"What's a minaret?"

"The tall building. Eyes up!"

"Why didn't you say tall building?"

"Because it's a fucking minaret!"

'The Sea' over at 10Flash

Today's story is "The Sea in Which the Most Men Have Died." It's about Foreman and Aftman, two servants perplexed by a riddle: what is the sea in which the most men have died?

It was published in the July issue of 10Flash. 10Flash is a semipro-paying venue that cares more about theme than genre. The theme for July is "Are we there yet?"

You can read The Sea in Which the Most Men Have Died by clicking on this text. You can leave comments here or over on the 10Flash site.

Bathroom Monologue: Ogre/Troll

Many people have trouble telling the difference between ogres and trolls. They’re terrifying and come in a range of deformities that make taxidermy more difficult than figuring out if the emo teen with super strength and whose skin sparkles in sunlight is a vampire. There is a handy test, though. If the troll/ogre isn’t eating you, engage him in a conversation on things that matter (discounting topics like when or why he might eat you – these are dangerously suggestive). Make some platonic remarks about the gulf oil spill or the state of contemporary religion. It may respond with a dull stare, in which case it is an ogre. If it responds with clever but offensive observations that incite you into rage, it is a troll. Terminate conversation immediately. Trolls do this to upset people to the point where they can eat them and claim self-defense. Do not feed the trolls.

Bathroom Monologue: Tomorrow Man

"I’m not going to magically become competent tomorrow. That’s not the point. When all us residents run around celebrating like we’re becoming adults, we’re indulging in metaphor. We changed the bedpans and fixed the blood bags. We oversaw the surgery and broke the news to the widow. We earned our God-damned metaphors. I’m already competent, which is why I’ve been covering your rounds while you sneak off to hit on your ex. Tomorrow, do I transform some magic being? The Tomorrow Man, who’s never worried his diagnosis is wrong? Whose every patient has deluxe insurance to cover whatever she needs? No. Tomorrow I have more responsibilities, I get paid better, guaranteed steady employment, and you off my shoulder every time I meet a new patient. I will be no smarter, no braver, and no more confident than I am tonight. The Tomorrow Man will be the same guy I am every day. But if I want to put a red and yellow ‘T’ in the Superman font on my lapel, I can. Because I’ve earned that. So put on a party hat or run back to Sharon. Tell her I said hi and to close your blinds."

Bathroom Monologue: Thor the Jetstream

So Thor sits down next to Odin. Ever since Loki moved out, Thor’s been coming up with wackier conversation starters to keep dear-old-dad on his toes.

He says, "I'm thinking of being a jet stream."

Odin’s one eye widens. Even his eye patch looks perplexed. "A what?"

"A jet stream.” Thor takes his hammer and waves it around, illustrating the idea very poorly. “It's this thing air currents move along, building and carrying storms. I have a great resume for it, if there's an opening."

"You're the god of lightning!” thunders Odin, unironically. “What do you need with manual labor?"

"There's not so many worshippers, pappy. It's a bit dull out here."

"I bet just as many people believe in you as this jetstream business."

"That's only because they haven't heard what a jetstream is. They’ve all heard of me and the best I get is a slot in a superhero team-up movie."

"Now they'll hear of Thor the Jetstream and they'll think it's a new military bomber plane."

Odin throws a raven at him, but Thor catches it. He strokes the bird’s black feathers in the nefarious way his brother used to.

"That'd be pretty fun, though, wouldn't it?"

Bathroom Monologue: Pitch for “Odysseus: Dumb ****ing Author Killer”

After thousands of years, the craftiest hero in Greek history is back. And no, he’s not here to fix the government: he’s here to fix publishing. Odysseus ventures the wine-dark seas to slay godless writers who sent zombies to Regency England and turned Abraham Lincoln into a vampire hunter. His literary odyssey will take him to any corner of the globe with Creative Commons and authors who trample on it. See him trapped by a one-eyed publishing executive; see his men reduced to mindless pigs by a witch from Maxim Magazine; see the hilarious look on his face when he reads Clive Cussler’s remake of The Iliad. This summer, Odysseus is going to pop culture… right in the face.

Bathroom Monologue: Change

He said nobody changes. I shot him between the eyes. He looked surprised, but even if he thought I'd always been capable of murder, he suddenly couldn't talk anymore. That's change I can believe in.

Bathroom Monologue: Off

This story has been redacted. There was an offer to publish it. So here's hoping!

Bathroom Monologue: Total #eclipse of the Heart

Dear Steph,

I recently saw a commercial for your third movie and hope it isn't too late to recommend some changes. Now, I haven't read any of your books, but being a consumer I feel entitled to opinions. It looks like you've got brutish werewolves and emo vampires duking it out for your cipher white chick. So far so good. But while the boys battle, you should have a mummy roll up in a Rolls Royce. Sex him up however you want, but I think bandages imply sensitivity and girls love feelings, so there's that. He sweet talks your cipher like no other, because the slaves pulled his brain out through his nose, but they left his heart intact. While she's looking at a werewolf licking his own butt, the mummy's talking about a penthouse on top of a pyramid. While she's looking at a Seltzer-brand sparkling vampire, the mummy's reciting hieroglyphic poetry to mad jackal back beats. Naturally she runs off with him because pharaohs are rich and women are vapid, but you can tease it out for drama.

Sincerely,
Imhotep

PS: All mummies are loaded. Call me.

Bathroom Monologue: In a Few Short Months

One legal clause you have to be wary of is "in a few short months." This sounds like it takes very little time, or at least, a reasonable amount of time. It does not. Months come in three varieties: 31-day months, 30-day months, and the once-yearly 28-day month of February. 31-day months like July and December are clearly the long months, leaving 30-day ones like June and September as shorter, but not shortest. 30-day months are not short in comparison to February. Thus when someone promises something in "a few short months," they are referring to multiple Februaries. Anything that takes that long is actually going to take years, and the speaker is disregarding all the long-ish and outright long months that will pass alongside the few short ones. And because "a few" is vague, the contracted party can take two, three, or even five Februaries to pay you back. You're left waiting through January after January just to see if this is the short month he had in mind, all because you didn't make him be more precise in his wording.

"Exposure by Community" at Mad Utopia

Thanks to everyone who read and voted for "Exposure by Community." You made my little essay the first prize winner in the What #fridayflash Means To Me contest. In celebration it was republished today over at Jon Strother's Mad Utopia. You can read it by clicking on this text. Pop over there to join in the festivities or to tell me I'm too hard on editors.

And thank you all again. The turnout was very flattering and I'm glad to have touched on so many people's feelings about Twitter communities.

Bathroom Monologue: Uranium Plot

"This will cause international friction, but hear me out. Our neighbor states do not like us. They think us too brutal, even though half of them rose to power climbing a pile of bodies. What we will do is make our stockpile of 5% enriched uranium public knowledge. We will not say that it is mostly scrap and garbage that is unsafe for proper use in a bomb. Instead we will float rumors that we are seeking to enrich it to 90%, which the entire rich world associates with nuclear bomb manufacturing. We will build no such enrichment centers, but let them think we are. Their satellite photos will convince them of anything. Their assumptions will scare the neighbor states back into their petty holes. When the rich world comes to beg and browbeat us into not building the horrible weapons that they already have? We will resist for a year or two, showing our historic strength. Eventually they will offer assistance in building nuclear reactors and giving refined but non-weapons grade 20% enriched uranium rods. What they will build and give us will be magnitudes more expensive than the radioactive piss we will begrudgingly hand over. In five years, our country will have modern energy systems. A few rumors that we enrich weapons grade uranium, preposterous with what the U.N. or U.S. will actually offer, will go right to their hearts of our neighbors. They cannot help but believe the worst about us. Meanwhile, as a new friend of the rich world, we will have its military sympathies in case anything should break out. By the time our oil supply expires, we will be energy independent on nuclear power, and with no need for bombs.”

Bathroom Monologue: Macroscope

Carl looked again. Now there were two purple blobs on his slide. Blobs he’d expected, but these looking up through what looked like a telescope.

“Macroscope?” Carl muttered. One blob waved a flange and more blobs wobbled to the macroscope. They pointed up.

Were they looking at him?

He couldn’t tell the teacher. It’d be embarrassing if this was a prank.

Carl pulled the slide out, shook it, and returned it under the mircoscope.

He adjusted the dial until he saw a swarm of purple blobs. Several swarms. They worked around little silos with bullets sticking out of them.

“Missiles? Wait, I didn’t mean to piss you guys off!”

The girls at his table gave him ugly looks.

Carl sighed and peered in again. A silo fired. Its missile left Carl’s field of view. A second later, the entire table shook.

“What is wrong with you?” screeched one of the girls.

“It’s not me!” he protested.

The table jolted again. The teacher started coming over and Carl put up his hands. Then the world went black.

The microbes were too late. Several orders of magnitude above the giant mammal, God scraped His slide.

“Nothing interesting today….”

"Rorschark Attack" in Branded Words Anthology

Today's story is in an anthology. It's my first appearance on Amazon.com, which is a thrill in itself. The anthology is Branded Words, featuring the best stories of 2009 from the Short Story Library.

The editors have flattered me by including "Rorschark Attack" as one of the best. "Rorschark Attack" is about a shark that people can't see as a shark - instead seeing playing cards, an ice cream truck or a Math teacher.

You can get the Branded Words anthology at this link: Best of 2009.

Bathroom Monologue: Eat My Gun, OR, “…or I will eat my gun.” –Popular wager in the mythical Wild West

The right side of his face burned pink from riding against the east since dawn. Bad James had to hit town today or be called a welch, and that was one of the names he could not abide. He tied off his horse, grabbed a bag and pushed through the bar’s swinging door.

Red waited for him at the nearest table, a quarter-full bottle of whiskey keeping him company. He leaned up to see inside Bad James’s holster.

“I don’t see your gun, James. Are you welching?”

James scowled.

“I keep honest.”

“Looks like you’re trying to keep your six-shooter.”

James dropped his bag with a clank and sat on the chair opposite Red. His palms rested on the edge of the table like he might flip it over.

“You cheated on that wager, pretending you were drunk so you could win.”

Red’s lips twitched into the closest thing to smiling these sorts of men did.

“Sure sounds like a welch.”

“I’m not trying to welch.” James scratched his scruff. “Just riled. I never lost a bottle shooting match before.”

“Wonder how many of your past opponents were drinking cider instead of beer.”

“Well I got some questions about the terms.”

Red tipped his hat and poured another whiskey. “Ain’t many terms about it.”

“So if I was to set down and eat the gun, could I take it apart first?”

“Sure. Want me to get you a knife and fork? Some catsup?”

James did not rise to the bait.

“Could I eat it slow? Say, a piece a day?”

“You want to eat the trigger today, swallow the barrel tomorrow? That’s fine. You’ve just got to eat that whole gun eventually or you welsh. It’d be downright disrespectful of you to live through so many gunfights and then die shitting one out.”

“Well then.”

Bad James leaned down. Red stiffened, looking around the side of the table for a threat.

James’s collected his bag. He set it on the table, tugged the strings and let it yawn open.

Red looked inside. It was half full with little metal pellets, smaller than rabbit crap.

“That don’t look like a gun,” said Red.

James reached in and picked up a single pellet. He held it for Red’s scrutiny.

“It’s the shooter, melted down to once daily vitamins. Should only take a hundred days to finish her off. Now as I recall, your terms gave you buying me a beer to wash it down. Would you like to pay for a hundred now, or should the keep set up a tab?”



John is away this weekend. If you're a #fridayflasher, please a leave a link to your story so he can read it later. All comments are welcome on this piece, except Wales-bashing.

Bathroom Monologue: Make Her Reaper

Tragedy tonight at a downtown theatre when a magician made his assistant disappear. The Russian stage man was making his first English-language performance. After a few minutes of having the audience look for her, he gave an incantation “to make her reappear.” Because of his heavy accent, the assistant instead returned in a robe and scythe. There were no survivors. Commuters who absolutely must drive through downtown should be on the lookout for a buxom vision of death in a sequined cloak.

Bathroom Monologue: Vampire Heart Attack

“One of the boss's few weaknesses is his heart, right? A stake through it and all that. I was thinking the heart is pretty easy to target so long as it's in his chest. So I figured, for his birthday, we'd extract it while he was sleeping and hide it in one of those safety deposit boxes in airports. A random airport. I sent it to a guy who sent it to a guy who hid it in some country, and there's no way anybody could find out which since even the guy I hired doesn't know where the guy he hired went. I thought I was bound for a promotion, because now all the boss had to be afraid of was sunlight and crosses. But it turns out these vampire rules are kind of general. Maybe a stake through the heart was an example of stuff that would kill a heart, and unfortunately... well, being stuck in a safe deposit box several thousand miles from its body will also kill a heart. So I was wondering if you had any ideas of how to find it, or if I can file for Unemployment when he kicks?”

Fleming-Mayer Aid Drive At The Bijou

Today I have a guest post over At The Bijou for the Fleming-Mayer Aid Drive. Please stop over and give it a look. Jemma and Shelly are in a rough patch and could really use a hand. You can read my guest post by clicking here.

At The Bijou is a blog for the thirty-three authors involved in the upcoming Harbinger*33 anthology. I'll have one or two stories in there and will keep you up to date on its release.

Click on this text to see "John Wiswell Stages Serious" on At The Bijou.

Bathroom Monologue: The Monomyth

There is a theory that all the great stories of human literature are the same, sharing a humble origin, a journey, a heroic relationship to the world and/or the divine, conflict and resolution of cultural resonance. This is called the "monomyth" because, since the first physicians and philosophers, it has been believed that the muses suffer from intransient cases of mononucleosis. This causes acute fatigue and pain, the sorts of things that make it difficult to inspire truly novel art. The muses try their best, giving twists like Quetzalcoatl banging a nun and hobbits carrying the one ring to rule them all, but they're sick people and can only be asked so much. It is believed that the muses so often inspire immortality or long life into stories out of psychological fears that they'll never live long enough to recuperate and do totally fresh work. There was a time when they hoped humans would pick up the slack for them, but if you chain a million authors to a million typewriters all you get is social satire and poetry that doesn't rhyme. That's why they invented the million monkeys/typewriter scenario, though the monkeys have yet to reach the end of their monomyth.

Bathroom Monologue: She’ll Come Around

She fell in the puddle in front of his house, and he fell in love. He got his Pa and they helped her dry off. While her folks came, they played with his anthill.

The next day, she said ‘Hello’ passing by him in the hall. She’d never done it before. He beamed all the way through Algebra.

A week later, she’d forgotten he existed. His brothers elbowed him to do something about it. Go ask her out. Go ask if she’s started that ant collection. Go pretend to bump into her.

He did none of it. “She’ll come around,” he said.

She did great in Math, so he tried hard and made it into Advanced Placement with her. He’d watch her from the other side of the room and struggle to figure out the number of degrees in a pentagon. She never offered to collaborate when they assigned group work.

“She’ll come around,” he said.

She liked puppies, it seemed. She got a summer job at the Hearth Animal Shelter, the one with the uncomfortable location across from a cemetery. He lit right up and got a job as the assistant groundskeeper. She never came over to chat.

“She’ll come around,” he said.

She left town for college. He went to the bar when he knew her sisters were there, to overhear things about her. She switched from Mathematics to Education. She was a teacher. She got her own house. She got tenure. She got cancer. She beat cancer. She still got letters from that first year of kids she’d taught. She was thinking of writing a book.

In time, she passed. Her remains were shipped back to the town where she’d grown up. There was a big service with her sisters and cousins. A lot of crying and nice stories. He stayed out of the way, listening and offering the occasional box of tissues.

After the service, he came up and filled in the grave. When he finished, he patted the dirt with his shovel and said, “I knew you’d come around.”

"Child Eaters" at Thaumatrope.

My tweet-short, “Child Eaters,” was published by Thaumatrope. You can read all two lines of it by clicking here.

The story was actually spotlighted over on Fiction Daily. Hilarious though it may be, they reproduced only the first sentence. It becomes more John Cheever like this, don't you think?

Thanks to both Thaumatrope and Fiction Daily for the publication and spotlight.

Bathroom Monologue: Get Rid of #1

There is an audio edition of this monologue. Click on this text to download the MP3, or click the triangle on the left to listen.

I knew you’d ask me some day. Eventually he’d know too much. He was coddled, overpaid, overpraised, and inevitably became a liability. Now he needs to go. But how do we kill the world’s greatest hitman? The #1 hands-on murderer?

Here's how.

Set up a puppet company years in advance, slowly building its own identity so that it looks unconnected to us. This puppet company can do lots of things. Like backing Latin American coups. Like bribing domestic senators. Like running guns into Africa. Lots of things that build good reputation among bad people. If you're so pressed for time that you can't build up a puppet company right now, you can borrow mine. Just this once.

The puppet company hires #1 to go out and kill #2. The second greatest hitman. Mildly deranged and incredibly connected. There are few targets so difficult to find and so dangerous to pursue. #1 is lucky that #2 doesn’t know he’s coming.

We tell #2 the son of a bitch is on his way. We give him plenty of warning, and because we look completely unrelated to the evil puppet company that hired #1, we don’t look suspicious. #2 arms up, grateful to us and pissed at a guy he’s resented for years anyway.

Now if #1 does kill #2? Bonus. Because #2 was going to ascend to the top spot when we killed #1, and who wants that? He’s deranged. He overcharges. He’s got a cancerous ego. He would have become just as much a liability, and he fucked my daughter.

Now you say to me, "Broker, #2 might not kill #1 even with preparation. He’s not as good a killer – that’s why he’s #2."

That is why we reach out to save #2 from the evil puppet company. He’s done wetwork for us before and we declare, duplicitously, that we want him to live. While #1 is in the field, cut off from information unrelated to his target, we hire the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh top hitmen to chase down and kill #1 before he succeeds. Thusly #1 will have #2 lying in wait for him in Barbados, and five more killers chasing behind. With that many men on his tail, if he isn’t killed in the crossfire, he'll be strangled in an elevator or poisoned by complimentary hotel wine. He will not live to cash the puppet company's check.

#7 is given the proviso that if #2 survives, to kill him when no one’s looking. If he gets caught, we’ll blame it on tampering from the puppet company.

That last part is just a professional recommendation. Regardless, we’ll get rid of #1.

Bathroom Monologue: Bad Penny, Life Two

David waved the whole story off like a bad smell in the air.

“I can’t explain it.”

“Really?” the waitress asked, tilting her head at him. “Because you’ve spent the last hour doing something that sounded an awful lot like it, hon.”

“It’s ridiculous.” He laid his fists on the counter and hunched a little on his stool. “But when I close my eyes at night, I feel like that penny followed me.”

The waitress shook her head with a sad smile. “Something that beat up was probably destroyed by now.”

“There’s no proving it, though.”

“So you think it’s in your pocket change?”

“No.” He wanted to look up but his admission was too embarrassingly heavy to raise his head. “I check.”

She lowered until her face was level with the countertop, so that she could look David in the eyes. She was cute. Too plump to be traditionally pretty, but there was something spritely in her. Christ, she was saintly to put up with him complaining for so long. Slow day or not.

“Should I check the register?”

“That’s okay.”

“So you think this evil penny killed your dad and flunked you out of college? You think it has that much power?”

“I don’t think it. I just can’t unthink it.”

She got up and waltzed over to the cash register. It rang open and David heard her sift through the change. He inhaled and rolled his eyes at himself.

She returned with a penny. It had the brightness of new minting on it, not the evil thing he worried about.

“I don’t mean to drag you into my insanity.” He shook his head, because that was what you did when your face wanted to apologize along with your words. “Let’s…”

“Let’s make a new penny,” she said.

She kissed the penny and put it tails-down in front of David. Her pink lipstick stained Lincoln’s beard.

“This can be Casper. The good ghost penny.”

David snorted. He touched the penny with the edges of his index fingers, admiring the contrast of bright pink on bright zinc.

“How’s it going to stay on?” he asked. “Lipstick’s not permanent.”

“How?” She grinned. When she grinned, she showed her upper teeth. David liked that. “That’s up to you.”

Bathroom Monologue: Bad Penny, Life One

He knew it was a bad penny when he was twelve years old. It was the one penny he got in the sum of fourteen dollars and ninety-six cents. The old man pulled out a ten and a five. He deliberated, then shoved the five back in his pocket and produced four ones. Then three quarters, then two dimes, and finally that penny.

The penny had been minted in 1983, and yet looked older than God. It was dirt brown and oxidized with disgusting green in bits. One green bit ran across Lincoln's eyes like a gash, as though a second assassin had blinded the president.

Fourteen dollars and ninety-six cents, David pocketed, for a week's work with newspapers and milk deliveries. He brought it all home, and that was the night of the last fight. His father pealed out of the driveway at dusk and never came back.

The penny, and most of the other coins, fell under his bed. He dug them out a month later to spend on lunch. His mother said his father was supposed to pay for school lunches and wouldn't give him the money. His father said his mother was supposed to give him that money out of child support and so wouldn't cough it up.

He had a test and needed food in his system, so he spent some of his money, including that penny, on a bagel. He went heavy on the complimentary cream cheese. It didn't settle in his stomach. He ran out of History halfway through the period to vomit. He leaned over the toilet, holding his head, and could have sworn his fingers smelled of pennies.

Having only completed a third of the test, he failed.

Because his parents excelled at telling him the other should pay for anything he wanted, he asked a favor to secretly work in the back of the cafeteria during his free period. It got him free lunch, and a little money under the counter. His first "payment" was a fistful from the coin drawer. He didn't even realize the penny was back in his possession until he got out of gym, wiped sweat from his mouth, and smelled damnable pennies. An irrational urge made him check his jeans, and there was the blind Lincoln, now with a second oxidized green gash, this one across his mouth.

He got busted by the principal the next Monday for working in the cafeteria. That was not allowed. He was reprimanded. His father was called in to "discuss" things with the principal, the first time David's dad would have been in town when it wasn't his weekend.

David waited for him by the fountain. He threw the blind Lincoln in and wished his dad would not be a dick about this, maybe be moved by the story and cough up some lunch money.

A half an hour later his father still wasn't there. David went inside and waited another two hours to learn his father had been killed in a car crash.

Many bad things happened to David in his life. Many bad things happen to everyone. He had a rich grandfather who would have paid his entire way in the world, but he died the month before David was born, and died without a will. The government took everything, David got no fairy grandfather, and no blind Lincoln penny was involved. Not in any way you could prove.

That grandfather did have holdings in a zinc mine that provided much of the US Mint's metals for penny minting. David found that out when he tried too hard to connect things.

The penny left that fountain and was spent on sno-cone, at a stand that was robbed two weeks later, by a thief who died from snorting tainted cocaine. Eventually it reached the right bank and went into the system, where it was destroyed. The bank it had gone through went out of business a year later, unable to compete with the big franchise with better annual percentages on the same street. That was after the blind Lincoln left circulation, though.

David sketched a theory. He always threw it away when he was done, but always rewrote it later. He wondered on a big thing, because money isn't coinage or paper. It isn't before or after the decimal on a receipt. Money isn't corporeal. That's why so much banking jumped online. The government could destroy damaged bills, but not one cent left the economy. In fact with big banks and stock markets, more and more money kept coming to be. Not one cent was destroyed. It all just shifted into the ether and the ethernet.

So when he bombed at community college, he wondered about the blind Lincoln. When his girlfriend admitted the baby wasn’t his, he wondered and cursed himself. When the economy crashed, he knew it wasn’t the penny. And yet, for days afterwards he could smell it on his fingers.


Please come back tomorrow for the conclusion of Bad Penny.

"Exposure by Community" in a Contest

Exposure by Community was nominated for the #fridayflash essay contest. The contest is for essays on how writers are affected by hashtag groups like #fridayflash. Public voting is under way. You can read all seven nominated entries and vote for your favorite by clicking here.

If you have a few minutes, I'd deeply appreciate your support with a look and a vote. Thank you.

Visit the #fridayflash essay contest page here.

Bathroom Monologue: L’aughterlife (It’s French)

Contrary to conventional belief, there is comedy in Heaven. If you know anything about comedy, you know it happens on every cloud and metaphor. If, like most people, you know nothing about comedy and require comedians to build in pauses and punchlines for you to laugh at something, then the comedy scene in Heaven is zoned mostly to one building. It is notorious as the only building in the place that gets absolutely no respect. The angels didn’t understand why until Rodney Dangerfield died and became management.

Mr. Dangerfield does not often perform, preferring to book talent and hit on the winged waitresses. Last week Will Rogers did six nights. This week Richard Pryor is doing six, with Sam Kinison opening for five of them. On the sixth night George Carlin will open with an updated, more ironic version of his ‘there is no up there’ routine. Rogers, Pryor, Kinison and Carlin can only perform for six nights as on the seventh professional comedians rest.

Alternative acts show up on the seventh night. Jonathan Swift, Kurt Vonnegut, Erma Bombeck and numerous other authors who all secretly just wanted to tell jokes from a stage finally get the chance. Mark Twain does a killer set using a Samuel Clemens dummy. Sometimes luminaries from other disciplines come in to try out humor, like Homer and Beethoven's “see no evil, hear no evil” routine. And every seventh day, Dangerfield announces that God will be on later “if we have time.” He’s yet to perform.

You may have to be there to get that last one.

There is a lot of laughter at the club that gets no respect. There has to be, because there wasn’t enough on earth. Not the kind that’s worthwhile. When there is enough good humor on earth, the club will finally close down and the patrons will go watch. They’d like it to be soon, but some will admit they hope to get Bill Cosby before then.

"Hold Down the Fort" at Muskoka River

Today I have a story and interview over as Muskoka River.

This is one of the first times I've been interviewed. We covered the origin of the Bathroom Monologues, my writing habits, and some of my favorite American authors (guess how many are dead). I also asked my audience an important question that I'd sincerely like answers to. Cathy Oliffe did something very amusing with my answers that followers of the Bathroom Monologues should enjoy.

The story is "Hold Down the Fort." It plumbs that peculiar phrase and whips up an absurdist history to explain its existence. It features Davey Crockett, Paul Bunyan and anti-gravity pirates in zeppelins.

You can read both the interview and the story by clicking on this text here.

Bathroom Monologue: "How are you feeling?" -A well-meaning friend

"How am I feeling? I feel like going to bed until Sunday. At the crack of noon on the holy day I'll order a pizza. Delivery. I'll bribe the deliveryman to come into my house, upstairs, and to set the pizza on my mattress. No matter how heavy a tip he demands, I'll give it to him so long as he leaves the box open, so that I can roll over and gnaw at the pie at will. He'll depart, I'll eat what I assume is one and a half slices before falling asleep - hopefully not face down in cheese, but I make no promises. I'll sleep through Monday, and if Monday is dumb enough to poke through my light-blocking blinds, I will grab it about the throat and throttle it. I'll leave its remains in the pizza box and go back to bed. I will sleep so long and so thoroughly that princes will show up wondering if they're supposed to help wake me. Any who intrude will receive Monday-like throttling. I will only leave the bed once it is so soiled that I can't stand the smell - at which point I'll roll onto the floor and use the carpet as a blanket."

Bathroom Monologue: A Consumer Savage, OR, Taking a Swing at Arthur C. Clarke

Little Tommy yanked on his father’s sleeve in the direction of the boutique. It was so full of color and vibrating gadgets. Peacock feather wands in fanned displays, golden rods and splinters of dragon’s nails. There was a green wand shaped like a glowstick that lit up whenever Tommy looked at it. He didn’t know the shop owner was making it do that; he thought it was destiny.

“But I want a wand! Everybody has one!”

“No.” His father pulled the sleeve free. “You’re going to learn magic the right way.”

“It already does water and fire mancies. I bet it even raises dead animals. We'll save money on pets.” He stamped his sneakered feet. The heels blinked red, an overpriced feature in his father’s opinion. “You’ve got an iPad! What’s the big deal?”

His father turned his long, slender nose down on Little Tommy. He leaned down until the tip of his nose poked the boy's forehead.

“Thomas. Can you tell me the difference between a magic wand and an iPad?”

Little Tommy deliberated. He’d been furious with greed, but now had a dangerous question. If he answered this right, it might earn him a wand like the ones the McGillicuddy twins had.

“Is it the app store?”

His father shook that long nose in disappointment.

“That’s why you can’t have one. Youtube’s made you go stupid.” He seized Little Tommy’s wrist and pulled him from the boutique. "Any sufficiently whored out magic is indistinguishable from technology. Until you can tell them apart, you don’t get either. I’m not raising a consumer savage.”