Bathroom Monologue: "Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do" -John Lennon, "Imagine"

Laid my head on the pillow and did as he asked. All the lines disappeared off the globes. Tax men took off their ties and road workers dropped their jackhammers, no longer getting fiscally motivated. Pedestrians wandered out of their houses, looking skyward and puzzling out just had changed, just milling, just wondering around, not asking, because to ask would be to connect with a goal, and that would be governance. They did a lot of staring until a wave emerged, I think from China or Russia or Utah, one rogue government rolling forth, marching together and bombing wide. They blew all the accidental anarchists off the face of the earth. Nobody aligned to stop them, because the singer ordered no governments. So they died, asking why this one government was allowed to form and getting no answers. I never did find out why. I got up and had things to do, and by that time he was singing the next track on the CD.

Bathroom Monologue: I Hate Gay

There is an audio edition of this monologue. If you'd like to listen click the triangle on the left to begin streaming audio, or click this text to download the MP3.

Today, I hate gay. I hate people who are gay, people who might be, people who aren’t, and people who hate people who are. I hate the whole of it. I hate that when my best friend and I walked downtown chatting for two hours, people suspected things. I hate whoever threw the brick. I hate the protesters outside the hospital. I hate the counter-protesters who claim to support him and are chanting his last name wrong. I hate that they won’t leave him alone. I hate that blogs keep posting cell-phone pictures of his mangled forehead. I hate that he’ll have to wear a hat to cover the scar any time he goes outside. I hate that he’ll find a way to make it fashionable. I hate that “elective cosmetic surgery” isn’t covered by his insurance.

I hate that when I went to his apartment to get his stuff, people tried to encourage me. I hate that they told me to be brave, and to be there for him. I hated it because who were they to tell me to be there for my friend? I hated it because their sincere emotional advice referred to a relationship they only imagined I had.

And I hate the little old lady who scowled at me through the crack in her door, safety chain still hooked, busy hating me for another imaginary relationship. And I hate all the neutral faces that stared at me like, “Does he belong in my apartment building?” and “Is he gay?” and “Am I okay with that?” I hate them all and their crappy floral wallpaper.

On the drive back to the hospital, I hate all the pedestrians who don’t look at me or my car or in my direction. I hate everyone who doesn’t know, who isn’t preoccupied with this. I would hate them if they were looking, and I hate that they aren’t. I hate that they’re getting on with their lives, and that many of them have nothing to get on from because they don’t know, don’t care, have a club somewhere to look impressive at.

I hate the radio. I hate callers blaming religion, blaming my God Who is Love for people hating people who like people who are different from the people that they like. I hate callers blaming my evolution, blaming natural selection wiring our brains to be disgusted at someone not being disgusted at things that disgust us. I hate the host blaming my country, blaming a culture that enshrines free speech, allows rainbow marches, and pays for the public radio that introduced me to The Village People. I like The Village People.

Pulling into the parking lot, weaving amongst protesters and counter-protesters, I hate whichever amendment lets interlopers gather in groups. I hate that hateful people know what gay is. I hate that they’re not gay. I hate somebody’s sign saying you’re born that way, accusing your genes. I hate somebody else’s sign saying it’s a choice, and gays made the wrong one. I hate that either of those things would matter.

I hate that it rained. I hate that the box broke and his shirts fell on the sidewalk. I hate that none of those people helped me, and I’d hate if somebody offered. I hate that my friend is going to laugh at these dirty shirts in the context of all possible Bad News For the Day. I hate that I wasn’t the one who was hit.

I hate the crowds outside, and the journalists in the waiting room, and the three people in the elevator. I hate that I didn’t see who that fuck was when he threw the brick, and I hate each of them for possibly being him. I hate that I’ll walk around this city for at least another three years, potentially passing him every day, and never knowing that I could have caught him and beat his face in. I hate that I’ll blindly suspect people just like he did, and just like he did, I’ll almost always be wrong.

I hate that he’s watching cute cartoons and doesn’t have to scramble to turn them off when I come in. I hate the unguarded tone he uses on the phone with his mom. I hate that the half of his face that’s showing is smiling in assurance to a mother who can’t see him. I hate that she’d call when he needs rest. I hate his God-damned mother. What is wrong with me?

I hate the way he flaps his hand for me to set the box down and take a load off. And sitting there, waiting for my friend to need anything, I hate. I hate what others would say this means about me, or my feelings about him, or what our relationship secretly is in their minds and in none of our experience. In some way I hate myself, but mostly I don’t. I hate the things that make me hate. I don’t hate myself, not until he catches on and actually tries to comfort, reaches out from the bed and pats my wrist and asks if “You’re taking care of you.”

And what do you do there?

The Recyclable Villain

Mechagodzilla

the recyclable villain

Breathes rays, not exhaust

Bathroom Monologue: Experience of the Holy

Lo’s chest jerked erratically, like somewhere under the bed there was a man with a rope tugging on his ribs. The jerks slowed until he was still, and Puck worried the man had died on him. Not now, not when they’d contacted the big guy behind it all. He poked Lo’s shoulder, and the man’s eyes opened a sliver. Puck inclined, trying to angle himself to be visible in that narrow swath of eyelid.

“So what was he like?” he asked.

Lo put a hand over his face. “Have you ever looked at a stained glass window?”

“Really, he looked like all that white iconography? That’s almost disappointing…”

“No,” Lo cut him off. “No. Imagine looking at an eyeball.”

“An eyeball?”

“Except your eyes are stained glass windows. None of the optic nerves, cones or rods. And your beautiful stained glass windows are looking at an eyeball. Yeah.”

“That makes no sense.”

Lo removed his hand and looked up at Puck’s eyeballs. “It makes new sense. I’d never looked as a stained glass window before.”

“What the crap does that mean?”

“It may mean you have to see him yourself to talk about it. Or…”

“Or what?” Puck snapped.

“Or you can appreciate my best attempts to tell you what it was like.”

With that Lo laid back down and rolled his back to the ingrate. Next time Puck could have his own epiphany.

Bathroom Monologue: Walt Disney Star

Contrary to popular belief, Walt Disney did not have himself frozen on his deathbed so that he could be cured in later centuries. He had an intimate knowledge of death and larger things, which he imbued upon his many fine cartoons. Rather than be frozen, cremated or stuck in the ground, he took the appropriate course of being shot into space. Specifically, he was shot into Polaris, the north star, so that he would always be looking down upon his millions of fans. He even answers the occasional celestial-born wish. But do not pray to him – he is a good Christian star, and takes only wishes. Preferably those for transformation and riches, like a boy looking up from his drafting table and wishing he was one of the lights in the sky.

True Stories of John 6: Digital Horse, OR, The Life and Times of Felicity (Digital Horse)

Early in Red Dead Redemption your cowboy is taught how to rope, break in and keep horses. You chase a herd of horses across the sunny plains of Hennigan's Stead. On that mission, between all the brown and white backs, I glimpsed gold hair. I tried to chase it on my modest mare, but it was too quick.

Back in town a friend and I messed around the General Store and found the listing of all available horses. Near the bottom was the Kentucky Saddler, a golden-pearl steed that was supposedly one of the fastest alive, only matched by the equally rare American Standard. My friend and I were stunned. If we could catch that, we'd ride it for the rest of the game. We immediately ran back out into the fields, but the horse was gone. I was stuck with a standard horse, which I named Felicity. I name all my horses Felicity, because I love Zapp Brannigan.

Any time we passed through Hennigan’s Stead again, we’d run across the fields for a hint of golden pearl hair. Day after day we had no luck, until my vacation ended and I returned home. I wrote, did errands, cleaned the house, and finally sat back down with the game. I listened to two hours of streaming NPR hunting that stupid horse without any luck. One time, just once I saw it. I lassoed it, dismounted, and a cougar jumped from off-screen to kill me in a single bite.

I had trouble sleeping that night, so I sat up and went on a bounty hunt. Apparently there was somebody so horrible that the feds would pay be $200 to kill him or $400 to drag him in alive. I tracked him across the entire world map, about four minutes’ ride, which in playing feels like fifteen, which in memory feels like an hour. It’s an investment. I arrived at a rocky plateau and had to shoot it out with the hombre and his seven goons, all of whom had the high ground while I had a two-foot rock to hide behind. I managed to catch him alive, bind him and drag him halfway across the state.

Halfway I spotted a blonde horse drinking at the gully.

I left that stupid hombre and my normal horse instantly. If it was real, peasants probably would have gawked at the grizzled man sprinting down the slopes and squealing like a child.

It was bad. The Kentucky Saddler tossed me immediately. I lassoed it and was dragged fifty feet. I lassoed it, almost reached, and was flung over its ass. It took me five tries, always having to get back up and chase it down until it slowed to climb back on, before the thing took pity on me and stayed still. I won.

“Good boy, Felicity,” I told the TV.

He had fabulous stamina. This guy could run for ten seconds straight -- which again is an achievement in videogame time. We collected the bounty I’d left behind and dozens more across the landscape. We ran into the desert to hunt snakes, chased down trains, and stormed the high ground in a ludicrous number of shootouts. He helped me chase down every other horse in the game except the rarest black stead, filling up my booklet with horse stamps. I never kept any of the horses we caught. They were for sport. Felicity was for keeps.

Eventually I had to go to Mexico. I crossed on a raft under the cover of darkness. There was no other way, no bridge or safe rail. Felicity could not come, for he would drown fording the river and could not fit on the raft. Despite my stealth, banditos soon emerged and hurled Molotov cocktails at me. I was forced to shoot flaming bottles out of the air or burn to death over water.

When I reached the other shore, I whistled. Felicity galloped to my side, having defied the laws of physics and game mechanics to materialize near his master.

“Good boy, Felicity,” I told the TV.

He was my method of transport for everything down south. I was after Javier Escuella and Bill Williamson, two men whom the game would like you to shoot. They were in a gang with you years ago, but left you to rot and die. Within minutes of meeting them again in this game, they shoot you and leave you for dead again. They run a miserable gang now, one that stabs prostitutes and sets ranches on fire for fun. They’re so awful that the federal government wants them dead – has hired you to kill them, and kidnapped your family to make sure you do it. Every sign points to getting these guys.

I spent the week of my free time pursuing them. I double-timed rebels and the military for leads. I did favors for nuns, idealists and necrophiliacs. I defended a train from forty robbers and burned down a shanty town. I collected women for the General’s pleasure and escorted a girl safely into the U.S. Anything for a lead. And always Felicity was there, either carrying me along the mission, or waiting idly by the finishing point.

Finally on Thursday I got a clue, and Felicity sped me to the fort. Alongside a band of revolutionaries I laid siege to the place, picking off snipers and burly shotgunners. I worked my way through three stories of the hovel before pinning down Escuella in a store room. He tried to sweet talk me, then jumped out a window and onto a horse. I followed him and whistled for Felicity. The familiar blue dot appeared on my minimap – but he was too far away. Escuella would escape before Felicity would get here.

I had to mount a generic red-brown horse and lept into pursuit. I pulled out my lasso, throwing and missing over and over again as the bandit fired his six-shooter at me. Being a big-baddy, he had unlimited ammo. I couldn’t shoot back. I wanted this man alive for his information.

Then I heard a third set of hoof-thumps. I looked over my cowboy’s shoulder, and there was the golden-pearl horse. I wanted to jump to him, but there’s no such function in Red Dead Redemption. Felicity kept pace behind us, as though equally invested in my vengeance. I turned to Escuella and threw my lasso. It missed. He fired off three shots, and I veered to the left out of the way. Another throw and he was snared around his middle, jerked off the horse and flying to the ground. I dismounted and hogtied him before he could resume firing.

As I finished tying him up, I noticed the blue dot was gone from my minimap. I picked Escuella up and turned to put him on Felicity. Behind us was the golden-pearl horse, collapsed in the dirt. Escuella’s last three shots had missed me, but killed him.

I lost my breath for a moment and nearly knifed the fictional bandit in my arms. Instead, I threw him over the red-brown horse and plodded back to civilization. I passed through Hennigan’s Stead, hopeful for a reincarnation. Not a single horse frolicked on the plains that digital day.

I turned Escuella in. Nothing changes whether he is killed or captured; he’s forgotten and you’re ordered to Blackwater, a heretofore unreachable settlement in the north. I travelled aimlessly, figuring I’d find the new house, save and go do other things. It honestly did not feel right without Felicity, and I didn’t name my new steed. Night fell around me. Red Dead Redemption’s nights are breathtaking, grass going gloomy and skies filling up with pinpoints of light. As I passed through the frontier, I saw a black horse silhouette on a hill. I neared, expecting better light to reveal it was just a dark brown one.

But no. That was a pitch black horse. The American Standard. The only one I’d never caught, and the only one in Felicity’s league.

It didn’t run as I rode by. I stopped at the bottom of the hill. I hadn’t saved my progress and risked losing a lot if I stayed. I physically pointed at the TV.

“You. Stay there.”

Then I bolted for town. I’d only be a minute, so hopefully the thing wouldn’t vanish or get eaten by a boar. Boars are voracious in this game.

Boars were not the problem. Nearing the town, I saw a broken down wagon. A woman yelled for help, which is a classic sign of a trap. Four bandits hide behind it to mug you. I usually dispatch them with Eastwood-like ease. But I was riding too fast, and so the characters all sprung up illogically quick and fired in unison, without aiming. I toppled off the horse and the screen went red.

I dropped the controller. I went downstairs, heated up some soup and called my grandfather. I like to check in on him.

After I simmered and the soup bubbled, I picked the controller back up. My cowboy woke up in a swanky frontier hotel with green wallpaper and blackjack in the lobby. I walked passed them and whistled for my horse. Felicity didn’t come. It was a random brown and white stead. For the heck of it, I rode back out to the hill. It was night again by the time I arrived, but there was no black silhouette up there. I rode up to where it had stood, then looked across the plains.

Down at the bottom of the hill were five horses. Four seemed to be running away from the fifth, which looked darker than the others. I descended, and it was indeed the American Standard. I lassoed him, hopped on his back, and as God is my witness, stayed on for the entire struggle. He reeled to his hind legs with the full moon behind us, then fell forward, complacent.

A grey and green logo flashed at the bottom of the screen: “Achievement Unlocked: Buckin’ Awesome.”

I’d caught him. The last horse, and possibly the best.

I told the TV, “Good boy, Felicity.”

Today we fought two grizzly bears at once. We’re bonding fast.

Bathroom Monologue: There is a monster behind you

There is an audio edition of this monologue. To listen either click the triangle on the left to begin streaming, or click this text to download the MP3. And don't look behind you.

There is a monster. You never see him because he's constantly behind you. Turn your head, and he'll move to stay out of sight.

He follows you everywhere. He is behind you in line at the grocery store. In traffic, he is why they flashed their brights at you. In the empty movie theatre, he sits too close. He doesn’t like movies. He prefers to watch you sleep.

Maybe everyone has a monster. I do, and you do. That’s at least two. They prize anonymity too much to talk to each other, and often do not even believe in each other. A census has therefore been very difficult to conduct. Monsters are solitary and solipsistic things.

You cannot film him. Set up a camera behind yourself, and it will be his hand framing the shot. Stick the camera in your wall and he’ll climb in with it – he knows all about the insides of walls.

One day, he’ll try to eat you. Not today, not with us talking about him. He’ll wait months and years like you wait ticks on the egg timer. He’ll wait until you’re cooked, sick and weak, and certain he’s not there. That’s when you’ll see his hand on your shoulder. That’s when he’ll crack your shell and bite the yoke.

There is no malice to this. He doesn’t hate you. Often when you’ve broken your heart, lost your love, or have to sleep in the backseat of your car, and feel like there’s someone else crying along with you, it’s him. He times his gasps with yours so you won’t hear. He can’t bear to give himself away, especially not in those times. You might get attached, and then he would.

Bathroom Monologue: Slice

Always served a little too cold, though the stale smell of suburbia is so common you may mistake it for fresh. The crust is thin and flaky, buttered and glazed as though the cook thought she would fool you with its appearance. Cut from the whole, it immediately loses shape, triangle collapsing, filling dribbling out the sides. The juice is thick and red, sweetened with aspirations put off too long, congealed with a suspicion of greater meaning. There are innumerable fruits to it: crunchy little relationships, pudgy occupationals, and big fat failure berries. No forkful is the same, though critics complain about culinary monotony. Discontent is a fad both in food criticism and post-modernism. Still, if you can appreciate that you get served at all, a typical slice of life is pleasant.

Bathroom Monologue: Thoughts Down from 40,000 Feet

At 40,000: “The handle totally doesn’t move. It’s locked. I’ll bet you a tequila it doesn’t.”

At 39,997: “Son of a bitch!”

At 39,000: “Oh my God, it is fucking cold up here.”

At 38,000: “Oh my God, I’m going to die.”

At 36,000: “Oh my God, it is fucking cold up here. I wonder if I’ll shatter when I hit the ground.”

At 33,000: “If I spread out my limbs I’ll slow down. I can survive this.”

At 32,500: “If I curl up into a ball it’s a fuck of a lot warmer.”

At 32,000: “Curling into a ball will protect me too, right? I can tuck and roll when I reach the ground.”

At 31,000: “Rationalizing is dangerous.”

At 29,000: “Would I rather die? Or land, have all my bones pulverized, and be a human ball of goo in a wheelchair forever? Like Stephen Hawking but dumb?”

At 26,000: “Why doesn’t everyone on an airplane wear a parachute? The tickets are really expensive.”

At 25,000: “How much does a parachute cost?”

At 24,000 “My shirt could stretch out into a sweet parachute. I’ll float to safety and look damn sexy on some random local news program.”

At 23,950: “Well that failed.”

At 23,900: “Oh my God, it is fucking cold up here.”

At 22,000 “Why didn’t I dare Jake to pull the lever instead?”

At 20,000: “If I studied for half an hour per test, and had at least one test every two weeks, in at least six classes per year, from first grade through high school…”

At 18,000 “I spent over a thousand hours reading boring shit in my life and none if it is going to stop me from hitting the ground. Teachers are paid too much.”

At 17,000: “I wonder if they’ll have a funeral.”

At 16,700: “I wonder if Jenifer will be there. I wish I’d hit that.”

At 16,500: “Jenifer totally wouldn’t let me hit that.”

At 16,100: “Jenifer totally would let me hit that now that I’m dead. Why can’t I get pre-emptive grief sex?”

At 13,000: “I wonder if my mortician is secretly a necrophiliac. They’ve all got to be, right? Why else would you hang out with dead bodies.”

At 12,500: “I wonder if I’ll get a mortician. A wet-vac makes more sense.”

At 12,000: “God, if you save me I’ll totally start going to church. Just answer this prayer.”

At 11,500: “‘No’ is not a viable answer to this prayer.”

At 11,000: “Unless they have my funeral in a church, in which case I’ll have gone to church even if you say ‘No.’”

At 10,900: “You’re a crafty one, God.”

At 10,000: “Oh man those are pine trees? And all the little cars. Life really does look like a Godzilla movie from up here. I thought they just had shitty budgets.”

At 9,000: “It would be really sweet to be Rodan right now.”

At 8,000: “It would be really sweet to be any kind of creature that can fly right now.”

At 7,000: “No, Rodan is the sweetest.”

At 6,000: “Is this really all I have to think about before I die?”

At 5,000: “I wish I was more sad. Maybe I’m a sociopath.”

At 4,000: “They will totally call me a sociopath. I opened the door on a freaking plane.”

At 3,000: “Dad will just call me a moron.”

At 2,000: “Fuck you, Dad.”

At 1,500: “I wonder if this would be more impressive if I was born a hundred years ago. No TV and special effects movie bullshit making crazy shit seem unimpressive.”

At 500: “Nah. They didn’t have planes back then.”

Bathroom Monologue: Demotion of Pluto

Not enough mass, too short a radius, too much ice. There were other celestial bodies nearly the same size, and it wasn’t doing anything about it. Few understood the demotion of Pluto, and fewer appreciated it. Petitions emerged, millions of people who had never been to an observatory demanding Pluto was a planet. A full planet, not a “dwarf planet.” There were seven dwarves and none of them were Mickey Mouse’s dog. It was plain logic. But science made like Atlas, and shrugged. Atlas was silent. Pluto’s sky toppled in protest.

But one man found it all convenient. The debate was settled out of court, off campus, no scientists asked or equations answered. The demotion was convenient, as full planets cost a lot. Governments want to land on them, plant flags and dreams. You can buy a planetoid on the cheap. Our intrepid investor landed first, signed the papers, and planted his sign.

“Welcome to Planet Pluto.”

So said the ownership. Whether your science said one thing and somebody's math said another, branding put the official name on it. Economics solved the controversy.

He'll Be Back

first-ever cyborg

felt winter's chill, laid back down,

and switched himself off.

(This haiku originally appeared in SciFiKuest. First paid sale I ever had.)

Bathroom Monologue: Ghouls, Ghouls!

The man wrapped his brown fingers around the bars of his cell. He slammed his body into them until they rattled.

"Ghouls, ghouls!” he yelled at them. “The dead are rising from shallow graves in an army that honors to debt made in life. High-born and casteless shamble together across the islands, eating the flesh of any who stray too close. They devour bird, buck and man alike. Any who survive their feast fall sick and rise like them. It is a plague of carrion that has already wiped out three of the islands. They do not stop, feel pain or drown. They walk off the edge of the island, plunging into the sea, not a single body floating. For days it seems like it is over, but they walk along the basin. Soon it is as though the ocean is afraid and alive with gooseflesh, a thousand scalps rising along the shoreline. They come dressed as their loved ones buried them, not listening to reason or threat.”

The man drew himself up, pinkshot eyes imploring at his jailers.

“If we don't stop them they'll finish the archipelago and come here!"

"That's fucking ridiculous," said the succubus. She returned the cell keys to her belt. "I eat dead souls. If there was a roving buffet I'd have gotten an invite."

She turned to the wraith deputy, who had no rational objections. They linked arms and walked out the cell block, leaving the man to rant about his ‘living dead.’

Bathroom Monologue: Not a Slut, OR, Bafflingly inspired by A League of Their Own, OR, I’m awful

"They say you're a slut."

She smirked into her cigarette-holder. "Do they?"

"Why do you cheat on your husband so bad? I seen you with a man a night at least every night since the war started."

"That's not cheating."

"I bet your fella wouldn't agree."

"You never met my Hatiel. Before he went off to fight he said I'd miss him sore since he was the best I'd ever have. Dared me to try every man I found until he got back."

"That's the most twisted thing I've ever heard."

"Then listen to this."

"What?"

She sighed from her diaphragm, blowing smoke out the window. "I can't wait for him to get back. He was right."

Anyone Can Do Malaise Redux - The Audio

Cathy Webster won our Third Anniversary contest. She requested I record an audio of this oldie, "Anyone Can Do Malaise." To hear the audio version either click the triangle on the left to begin streaming or click this text to download the MP3.

Dear Professor Hannaford,

I spent two hours last night trying to co-write a piece with Ed like you assigned. I wrote one paragraph, then he did the second, and so-on. In two whole hours he ruined every story, leaving it unwritable. I cannot work with this man any further. I am attaching our last co-written piece below as an example.

I went first.

Sincerely,
Charlene


The popcorn chicken is too cold. Hot outside, but a squeeze shows it's frozen in the middle. I poke some buttons and add a few minutes to the timer. In the next room some guy who sold me a magic mop that didn’t work is selling something that has to do with X-Rays and hospital visits. Somewhere, someone coughs.

Out of nowhere an armored transport smashes through the wall! It crushes my stupid microwave oven. Popcorn chicken bits get stuck between the treds and fling up at me in all kind of crazy slow motion before the transport totally crushes me! Oh my God, the humanity! Armored commandos ignore my lame emo carcass as they jump out the back to secure the room. Let freedom reign!

Bathroom Monologue: Why Youtube Hurts My Soul

Watch the ad that sponsors the video that is a trailer for the movie that’s the first of a trilogy that you’ll have to buy on DVD to see uncut, upon which you’ll see ads for the BluRay which has even more content including the trailer for the spinoff that will have the tie-in videogame for the system you want that you’ll have to sift through six blades of ads to launch before you see eight studios advertising their brand on the load screen, all company logos flashing directly above the manufacturer of your TV or monitor, which is eternally stamped before your eyes. And you pay for the bandwidth.

Bathroom Monologue: Me, Myself and You

There's an audio edition of this little story. To listen either click the triangle on the left to begin streaming, or click this text to download the MP3.

You take a hundred dollars and tomorrow's newspaper. Bet everything on and win the first, second and third races. In the fourth, bet a thousand on the most favored horse that loses. Sit out the fifth, then bet everything and win the sixth and seventh. Blow five thousand on any horse you like that loses in the eighth. Before the ninth, go up to the window and make a show of being unable to pick a horse. Even ask the teller for his advice. He won't say anything – every man can see enough of the future to know it’d get him fired. Wind up not betting on any of them and go home for the day with your winnings, which will be comfortably over a hundred thousand.

It's not the millionaire's scoop you want. I know because I wanted it, back when I was you. But you've got to lose some of the time, and never come out ludicrously far ahead. Humility is a smokescreen, and in time you’ll come to realize owning just one percent of the company that topples Apple makes you plenty rich enough. It's a principle you'll soon be applying in the Commodities Market, in politics, and at the lab when you purposefully get every equation wrong and convince the company that these new particles are useless. Your co-researchers cannot be allowed to figure out time travel too. This only works if we're the only one in on it - me, myself, and you.

Bathroom Monologue: Thanks Anyway

They were pale and pink and puffy people. They wore too much and it did not keep them warm. Though they arrived on large boats, they did not return to them or sale away to wherever they were meant to live. Instead they dug at frozen ground, hunted drunkenly and starved sober. The Woman of Myth hollowed out a gourd and stuffed it with crops. She held it aloft, commanding, "Give us your poor and your tired."

Fifteen Authors Who Influenced Me

There's a game running around where writers name fifteen other writers who influenced them. I did it for Paul Brazill, but people kept tagging me on Facebook about it anyway. Reading a few, I was annoyed not knowing how these authors influenced the people listing them. So I'm going to do it again, but I'm also going to say a little about them. Prepare to watch a man admit he stayed up to 1:00 AM Fridays to watch TV and compare cartoonists to classicists. Dignity, I'll miss you.*

1. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit was one of the first true novels I read from cover to cover and is partially to blame with me getting into literature at all. Tolkien’s world-building and sense of gravity for all the fantastic elements drew me into prose in ways no modernists and post-modernists did. I still remember reading the end of Fellowship of the Ring at my grandmother’s and trying to hide under the bed, for terror at the prospect of someone as great as Gandalf being killed. By college I wasn’t writing anything like Lord of the Rings, but I had the “Tolkien Instinct.” If there was any question of what to do in a story, I’d ask, “What would Tolkien write here?” It was almost always the wrong answer for what I was doing, and it took me another two years to get a grip on it. Imitation was not how I needed to pay homage to the father of Fantasy. Just writing good Fantasy should do.

2. Akira Toriyama – Most famous for his comics Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, which actually had a bigger impact on me than Lord of the Rings. It was reading those bizarre comics that I realized how hard it is to come up with truly alien stories. I loved Tolkien’s Norse and Medieval fantasies, but they were still familiar enough to the Arthurian stuff I grew up with. Toriyama had the advantage of drawing on thousands of years of Asian culture and classics, so my little white ass in New York was baffled. Monkey-tailed boy living in a dinosaur-infested wilderness that is sometimes invaded by sentient plants that might be the devil, then escaping on adventures with a perverted bipedal pig in a car that fits into a capsule. Delightfully outlandish. First I imitated it, actually writing fanfiction that helped me ace my Humanities class. Then, around 180 pages in, I realized this thing wasn’t publishable and wasn’t mine. This was someone else’s world. Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Dragon Ball – worlds that were hard to make, shouldn’t be made again because someone had already done it, but that if I really wanted to write towards, I should study. Oh, and Majin Buu is my role model.

Imagine them high-fiving. Imagine it!

3. Stephen King – The biggest influence. At age 13, I was crippled by a neuromuscular syndrome. I was in constant pain and bedridden. The only reason I made it through many sleepless nights was having a King audiobook. I was entranced in Needful Things and Desperation. It wasn’t escapism. It was immersion. I was where I was, could not forget any of it for how badly I was suffering, but I wanted to know what happened next. I’m not exaggerating to say that curiosity about fictional events gave me the will to live. Ever since I’ve been dismissive of academics who look down on fiction for being entertaining. I’ve mined a lot about voice and the nature of endings from King’s writing since, but saving my life is a little bit more important. You can’t do more for a reader than that.

4. E.B. White – Through whose pen I also got the wisdom of William Strunk. I’m somewhere in the middle of prescriptivists and descriptivists. The only thing dumber than literary totalitarianism is literary anarchy. But there are general rules for the way most prose functions. Especially interpreting White (and Strunk via White) for the spirit of the rules, like why “Omit needless words, omit needless words, omit needless words” has six technically needless words in it, has given me a decent sense for editing.

5. Eudora Welty – Possibly hazardous to my career, but Welty’s versatility in the short story impressed me more than any other feat of any other author in literature. “Why I Live at the P.O.” is airy, trivial and funny. “Where Is That Voice Coming From?” is profoundly disturbing in its violence and racism. “A Still Moment” is ethereal. They tell you to find a niche and stick to it, that way you become a solid commodity. I can’t stand that.

6. Dante Alighieri – My worst influence. Dante convinced me to always do another tangent, to throw in another point or observation. Thank goodness I learned to edit them out later.


7. Douglas Adams – The perfect sense of humor. He seemed to make fun of everything and hate nothing. The first hundred pages of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy dismisses God, logic, friendship, government, and the earth itself. But any jackass comedian can do that. The big trick with Adams was to mock a thing and hug it at the same time. It was the comedy that accepts even the absurd and the intolerable. He could always invert a character to soften a criticism, deflating didactics in the service of pure humor. I still can’t listen to those radioplays without getting ideas. Horrible, stupid, purple ideas that I hope someone, somewhere will laugh at.**

8. Mark Twain – He was so easy to read that his were several of the first novels, after The Hobbit, that I read cover-to-cover. His narration achieves mental voice very quickly. I spent a decade trying to work out how. While recently I’ve become disenchanted with fiction that exists to make a point, his observational fiction still gets me. Even in a boys book like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the fence painting anecdote illustrates a great principle I’ve never read put better. Re-reading my favorites (The Diaries of Adam and Eve, Joan of Arc, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court), I think I’m pinning down how he drew me into humor writing, and why the humorist establishment in literature disappointed me so badly. Twain wrote humor to make people laugh and think. Today many writers, especially those who think they are “edgy,” write humor to make people think and luck into laughs, which shows a distinct lack of thought. I think about that. One more way in which Twain influenced me, and continues to be ahead of me.

9. GK Chesterton – How did I make it through college and never hear about this guy? He was the writer I spent years looking for: the one with whom I could disagree frequently and respect entirely. God, sound way too full of myself. Listen, he was rad. The Man Who Was Thursday has aged to perfection, time robbing its original context and adding a second edge. Now it satirizes both Chesterton’s opposition and allies. He stood up for orthodoxy and satirized satire. That's Welty-like range in non-fiction. He and Twain duel in my head these days, as I’m trying to weed out the impulse to reach for good quotes in my writing. They duel almost entirely in good quotes.

 Very funny men.

10. Gail Simone – I actually gave her closing run on Deadpool to a college professor. I walked in on him one day laughing his ass off, and before recognizing it was me, he actually tried to hide the comics behind his back. At a certain stage in my life she specialized in the irreverence of dangerous people and irreverent people in dangerous circumstances. Humor was not just a defense mechanism or an excuse for a point (like it’s treated by too many humorists), but a reason to be, a mode of existence. I loved that so much that it wound up at the core of my first novel, and will probably keep showing up until I go sane. She (and writer #11) almost made me recognize that I love a dynamic cast. You can drop them into the most enticing or boring circumstances, and I will read them. I will read three hitmen in spandex chatting about existentialism while they monitor the Prom. Gail Simone has not written that. Perhaps I should, but if I do, it's because of her sense of casts, which existed in Deadpool, then Agent X, and right now in Secret Six.

11. Aaron Sorkin – Television writers should also count. Literate people of my generation still watched more than twenty-five hours of TV for every book they read, and it influenced us. In high school I’d stay up to 1:00 AM on Friday nights to catch reruns of Sports Night, for its wit and profound monologues. There was a solid year when all dialogue I wrote on my own was a bad imitation of Sorkin’s repetition. He was for me what certain titanic playwrights were for others. Even after I grew out of the imitation phase, I credited his shows (and M*A*S*H) with making me realize my favorite thing in fiction is to establish a few interesting characters and just listen to them talk.

12. Joseph Campbell – Made me look at structuralism. I’d already had most of his key thoughts on culture and cross-culturalism (actually got very angry upon first exposure to him at 12, claiming he stole my ideas thirty years in advance). But his breakdown of the hero’s journey made me diagram stories in a new way. He sort of made me a post-modernist, when I tried to tell a story that was a purposefully backwards version of the heroic arc. Part of me still go back to his lectures when I ponder cultural and religious resonance.

13. Homer – My gateway into Literature. While I don’t pretend to know a mind thousands of years old, he appears to have had a sense of glory, of riveting action, and of sanguine humor. His Iliad caught me at an early age, for being similar in structure to those massive superhero crossover battles I liked so much. Even through translation he had ways of expressing the magnitude of a hero and the intrigue of action. As I grew older I appreciated his way of expressing things, comparing a lance tearing out an eyeball to the blossoming of a flower. That’s repulsive, but it also speaks to why war was waged. There are big pictures hidden behind every book of his poems. The dozen translations of read of his two surviving epics were my analytical training ground, and a significant reason for me giving the rest of literature a chance.

 This list is pants-optional.

 
14.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - I'm pretty dismissive of melancholy and bleak fiction. I think attraction to these usually indicates a life that hasn't been hard enough and a resultingly lethargic mind in dire need of exercise - say, the kind by getting its owner off its ass and living, doing some work in soup kitchens or clothing drives or relief work in a disaster zone. But if I'm bad now, I was impossible about this stuff earlier in life. You could not bother me to finish such tripe. I dismissed even classics of world literature as defeatist, authors who were regrettably celebrated for lying down before hardship. Nothing t swayed me until One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This is an inescapably bleak novel that used bleakness for purposes, particularly to show how a person may refuse to be destroyed by it. Solzhenitsyn was almost doing bold political work in prose, but it was his character in the face of these things, and the character of his characters in the face of these things, that shook me. I've already commended Gail Simone for writing funny people who don't yield their humor. The big thing in Solzhenitsyn's work was creating austere or severe men who did not yield and made me admire that position, something I'd long given up on as valid. Here is work that does not lay bare some discontent and masturbate over how unfair it all is, or how bad life sucks, or how it's meaningless, or you don't like the meaning. It's not the wishywashy unhappiness that dominates so much of modern literature, and that is really just a well-dressed and bourbon-soaked negative of the Care Bears. Reading any Solzhenitsyn is distinct, purposeful, and disturbing in ways Horror can't be. It's an entire border of fiction. There was that time when I asked, "What would Tolkien write here?" Now I am more prone to ask, "If Solzhenitsyn hated this, would I have the balls to stand up for myself?" If I would, then I feel I'm doing right.

15. Flannery O’Connor – Like a lot of these writers, she taught me little things, such as desiring character descriptions that seem sharp but are actually just vague and short (these work amazingly well, at least when she did them). But the big thing for me was learning that this shrewd, frequently shocking storyteller struggled with illness and questioned if the work she did in the hospital counted. That’s a kind of doubt I have – am I responding too much to my conditions, is sickness holding me back or tainting my work? No rational argument makes this doubt go away. You’d think rational people would realize that, but they keep trying with their rational arguments, and thereby disproving the existence of actually rational people. This sick-doubt is something that haunts. The closest thing to curing it is that O’Connor produced an amazing body of work. So, maybe I’m tainted and ruined, but that’s all just an excuse. Good work can be done. Thanks, Flan.

*No I won't.


**Honorable mention goes to Terry Pratchett for writing several thousand more pages of Adams, and convincing me that’s not what I wanted to do.

Bathroom Monologue: Clarifying Lies about the Internet

I need to the clear the air. The internet has not diminished attention spans. People were never able to take in more than four paragraphs of information unless it was formatted into The Top Ten Best Asses in Hollywood. There were never newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, or epic poems that entire tribes memorized verbatim. No one ever intended you to finish a short story in a single sitting. Man did not evolve to read the entire Nutrition Information on the side of a cereal box, and certainly not to figure out how much saturated fat he was actually consuming in four bowls of the stuff, unless someone first designed an app for doing so. Except man has never had the patience to design an app. They are found in the wild, caught, captured, domesticated and price-coded by Apple. Contrary to your memory, you could not spend all day reading for pleasure when you were a child. You sat by the window and dreamed, wished and prayed that someone would put videogames on a phone, and you sat there doing nothing more than this wishing until it went on sale. You should not feel badly for skimming Cracked to get to the next item, or for only reading the funny captions under their stock photos. Nor should you feel bad for having the same NYTimes article open in your browser for two weeks, perpetually intending to finish it. It cannot be finished. If you had the superhuman will to consume every sentence, you would find that the writer herself did not finish it, instead trailing off into a series of vowels and punctuation marks. This was the result of her bravely passing out from the effort of trying to sustain thought. This is hazardous and should not be attempted for so long as you can get Angry Birds at a discounted price. I’d go on, but then I wouldn’t have the mental stamina left to tweet about Twitter going down for half an hour tonight. Farewell.

Bathroom Monologue: Could James Joyce Succeed Today?

“I’m trapped in a hypothetical.”

“What is the hypothesis?”

“People are wondering what I would do if I were to publish my work today. Not today-today, as is the only sense of today that I, James Joyce, would know, but in the today of some people in America in 2010.”

“That is a ways off. These hypothesizers want to know what you would do with your life?”

“Specifically in regards to my fiction. They wonder if I would be able to publish as lucratively as I have today-today.”

“If you were to publish today instead of today?”

“What’s more, it seems I have dramatic influence on the future. I essentially give English literature the tools of the anti-hero and stream of consciousness. Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are highly influential. Even Dead End creates a certain existentialism amongst short story writers.”

“I didn’t think you cared for that sort of infamy.”

“I don’t, but they do, so the James Joyce of their imagining does.”

“I’m a little relieved the short story has survived so long.”

“It survives, though it is in questionable health.”

“So the hypothesizers want to know how successful your works would be if published many years in the future?”

“Yes.”

“But in the future, your works have already been published. Are you going to live in a future where your influence has already spread?”

“It would be difficult to market new fiction that had been canon for so many years. I’m not even certain if I transported to the future by some ugly Wellsian means, or if I grow up there, raised in a world unknown.”

“Something a little too clever for Wells to think up, that one.”

“If I were to mature in a world where all my ideas had already spread, I would not be myself, but the product of influences from my-other-self. I’m completely uncertain what I’d produce. I’d be a different James Joyce.”

“Though if you retained your style exactly, and your style is popular, you should be popular.”

“I think style has become exceedingly unpopular, in favor of populist entertainment and plot. The hypothetical is about challenges I’d face where I was a fad that had passed.”

“Well, I’m sorry you don’t have lasting success.”

“But publishing old or new fiction in a world where I’m no longer the same James Joyce, and have an entire different literary establishment to rebut, seem like much greater qualms to me than whether or not I could sell what I’m compelled to write today-today.”

“Oh, selling’s not the thing. You would rise through workshops, lectures, a university scene and fellowships. You would meet the people you need to impress in order to garner publication and doubtless succeed, if not amongst the masses, then in the intellectual niche that’s bound to develop.”

“I detest this hypothetical. Time traveling. A plot flare to distract from dim style.”

“Only one thing worse.”

“And that is?”

“John Wiswell’s attempt to write you.”

“Oh, I sound nothing like that.”

Bathroom Monologue: Stay Where You Are, OR, Composed during a bathroom break from Marathon Man

Want to hear today's monologue? Either click the triangle on the left to begin streaming audio, or click this text to download the MP3.


Stay where you are! Both of you. I said stay! No, I don’t care that you’re not with him – I don’t care who sent either of you. I’ve got a gun and even if you’ve got something, I’ll shoot at least one of you first. Faster than me, smarter than me, more than me, but this is pointed at you two. So stay where you are.

Good. That’s good.

Uh. Hands up. Yeah. Take off your jackets. Shrug them off. I know I said hands up, but take them off! One at a time. First you. Move and I’ll shoot. No, I know what I said, take it off! Drop it in the mud. Who cares how expensive it was, I said drop it.

That’s good. For what it’s worth, it did look nice.

Now you. Take it off slowly.

Slower.

I knew it. You’d have gone for that gun, wouldn’t you? Do it now and I’ll shoot.

Okay. Reach behind yourself and unfasten the holster. Slower. Let it fall. Now kick it halfway to me. If you grab it or kick it into me, I will blow the top of your head off. Swear to God.

There. Okay.

Both of you step out of your shoes. Kick them off. I don’t care if your socks get dirty. Do it.

I don’t care if you’re not with him. Why would I care? One or both of you has been chasing me all fucking day and now… Now, you know what? Rub your feet in the mud. Do it or I’ll shoot right in the socks. Both of you. He was an ass and now you’re both going to have disgusting toes.

You wouldn’t be willing to admit who sent you, right?

No, of course. It’s all a misunderstanding. My car always blows up in this kind of weather. Shut up. We’re almost done.

Whichever department sent you. I don’t have anything against you guys personally outside of being scared shitless. I just want you to know that, and to wish you the best of luck chasing me with no guns or shoes. Please stay where you are at least until I’m out of eyesight, or I really will shoot you.

Bathroom Monologue: God Class is Sweet

God Class was largely empty tonight. It almost always was – in this age when ideas sped over the internet, few deities felt the need to fly. Demeter’s newest daughter peered out the oval window of their plane, blinking at all the blinking lights below.

"No wonder most sky gods have fled,” she said. “The men have put more stars on the ground than there are in the sky. How much they must hate us, to work so diligently to improve on our work. Do you think they want to be us?"

Demeter reached across her field of vision, blocking it, grasping the shutter, and sliding it down to close off the window.

"Now stop that,” she said. “Don't deify people. It's bad enough when they anthropomorphize us."

Bathroom Monologue: The Vampire Plan, OR, What John Thought When He Heard About Vampires Taking Over the World

Quincy slept the entire way. He let Biggs take him wherever he was going. After the biters ripped apart his entire office staff, he was done. His lunch buddies, the fantasy football pool, Gina... There were many ways he'd dreamed of seeing Gina Hernandez from Accounting's sweater come off, and they'd found the one that would give him nightmares. So he was done. Not dead, not suicidal, but ready to close his eyes and let someone else drive a while.

Biggs poked him in-between the ribs, making Quincy contort in the passenger’s seat.

“Quit it.”

“Eh? Eh?" Biggs said. "Am I genius?”

Quincy exhaled slowly and opened his eyes. The light was harsh beyond his window. It took his vision a moment to create contours. A sea of still waves, minus the water. Dunes.

“It sure looks like sand.”

“Right?”

“I think you’re expecting me to like sand more than I do. I’d rather, like, an aircraft carrier.”

“Vampires aren’t going to be afraid of stealth bombers, dumbass. They can turn into fog. You can't bomb fog.”

Quincy rubbed his eyes. “And fog is afraid of sand, why?”

“Look.” Biggs pointed to the back of the SUV. Just like when Quincy had gone to sleep, it was stuffed with cardboard boxes. “Three hundred litres of water. We each get one a day. Doctors say you need more, but doctors say you need riboflavin and we’ve both done fine never paying attention to how much of it we got.”

“Peerless reasoning.”

“Plus a couple hundred army MRE’s, plus enough butane to cook all the baked beans you ever wanted, plus these.”

He leaned his jowls into the steering wheel and fished around under his seat. He produced two foil packs, each stamped with three lines: one pink, one brown, one white.

“Astronaut ice cream. Fucking ten cases.”

“You know they don’t really eat that.”

“Probably why I got them so cheap.” He tore the top of the package and bit into the chalky vanilla part. He winced, as it didn’t taste as much like space or candy as he’d wanted. Still, he maintained a chipper expression. “This will rule.”

“Eating baked beans in a car with you will definitely not rule after a few hours.”

Biggs slapped the rest of his astronaut ice cream into Quincy’s chest. It crumbled colorfully across his grey t-shirt. Biggs pointed out the passenger’s side window.

“We are two hundred miles into the dessert, dude. Off road.”

“Dude. Why is that good? It’s the end of the world and your idea is just fucking sand.”

“Because even if they knew exactly where we were, they’d have to flap their little bat wings two hundred miles without two leaves to hide under come morning. There’s no shade. It’s fucking vampire-proof.”

Quincy took this in. He rested his elbows on the dashboard, staring at the yellowed sand dunes.

“Holy shit.”

Biggs percolated in his seat. “Yeah?”

“When this is over, the Arabs are totally taking over the world.”

“And that’s why I brought you. Interesting conversation. Have an ice cream.”

Bathroom Monologue: Refugee Camp Regrets

I don't regret why I'm in here. They can starve me, beat me. Call me a traitor. I'm not one. What I did was for the good. I was a General in name only, put in charge of the children and the lame. A sea of starving, helpless people, with less than a dozen armed guards, all of whom were routinely called away for more glorious service. I couldn't lead my charges to safety. The raiders would find us in any cave or stronghold I managed to reach. We were ransacked weekly. We lost our supplies and the youngest starved. When the raiders returned to find no more food, they took the near-pubescent girls as slaves. No number of missing or dead on a report changed the minds of those in command.

I remember the fifth attack most clearly. The smoke from tents they burned out of malice. The lamentations of young and feeble. A crippled mother crawling after them escaping raiders, barking for them to return her daughter. I watched her legs drag in the sand behind her, like a split fishtail. It didn’t even flop around. Other men would have found it heartbreaking. I found it inspiring, and I am not sorry for the idea it gave me.

I took arms. Only one per child. I took a couple of hands, but that wouldn’t be enough. I took no legs – every one of those children would grow up to walk. I even mailed them one of the limbs along with the reports and testimonials from children who could no longer write themselves. I packed it in salt. Six mutilated children and one arm were somehow harder to ignore than thirty dead parents.

The next week we had a brigade defending our camp. The raiders were rebuffed by bronze shields and long lances. Able-bodied men did their duty by the meekest.

Which of them gave me away? I don’t know. From the looks, I think it was some of the same children who had sworn by my testimonials. You can’t trust children, even parentless ones, to keep up your stories. I can understand the juvenile mind begrudging me my work. I don’t blame them. But I’m not sorry. Those one-armed children will live behind shielded camps because of me. If my story is spoiled and Command withdraws the brigade, then I’m still here, in a prison twenty days away from whatever carnage happens, with nothing but the story that they are safe. I have no regrets.

Three Year Anniversary Post

The Bathroom Monologues began three years ago this week. Go back to November 17, 2007 and you found me wrapping up my first week, having posted about a dozen microfictions, not knowing what microfiction was, and wondering if anybody would ever read it. Over 32,000 hits later, I want to thank you all for joining me in this wacky journey. I've told some weird stories, some of them true, like my struggle to write at all and then with writing too much, packing the 20th century into ten words, and a rant that could only be called Bea Arthur: A Novel.

But fiction is my love. A boy with an invisible dance partner, nine origin stories for somebody who sounds familiar, Poker Night of the Gods, a conversation without words, King Kong smacktalking Godzilla, shark-flavored beverages, the advertising feud between New York and California, the gardener of clouds, the explanation of why bulldozers make the best pets, Homer complaining about having to invent literature... it's been fun, sharing something every single day for years.

In celebration we're doing a little contest. Name your recent or all-time favorite Bathroom Monologue in the Comments section of this post to enter. The winner will be chosen at random, and two things will come of it. I'll record any one of your flash fiction or a blog post of similar length, no matter the material or how embarrassing it is. Maybe better if it is embarrassing. I'll also republish your favorite Bathroom Monologue with its own audio treatment on Thanksgiving Day. Well, U.S. Thanksgiving. I'll publish it on Canadian Thanksgiving only if you have a time machine you're willing to lend out.

I hope you've enjoyed it and will stick around. It's not ending any time soon. This ride has taken me to my first semi-pro and pro-rate publications, and nominations for Dzanc Books' Best of the Web and most recently the Pushcart Prize. I've met so many friendly and talented writers through communities like #fridayflash. Thanks again, everyone, for all the support.

Bathroom Monologue: For Night Drivers

From internationally acclaimed and miserably failed engineer John Wiswell comes the Night Driver's Friend Version 3. The latest version is entirely automated, requiring no effort from the driver of your vehicle. Using four light-sensors distributed across the front of your vehicle, the system registers dark driving situation and specifically senses the peculiarly intense light unique to an opposing car's brights. Upon registering brights-intensity light within twenty-five feet (seven point seven meters), it activates the pneumatic arm. Coated in any of seven realistic flesh-tones, the arm juts from your hood, rear passenger window or moon roof to deliver the offending driver with a sturdy, foam rubber middle finger.

Bathroom Monologue: Should Tweet and Should Not Tweet

You should not tweet that Idol just started. Everyone knows when it started. It has millions of viewers.

You should tweet that you’ve been smoking in my house and often forget to extinguish your cigarettes.

You should not tweet that you’re uncertain if this peanut butter is expired. The expiration is on the side.

You should tweet that this carpeting cost me over ten thousand dollars and is very flammable.

You should not tweet that your cousin Tiffany is a slut. She isn’t, she will read that, and she will cry.

You should tweet that you can’t tell the difference between the smell of popcorn in a microwave and a house fire upstairs.

You should not tweet bragging that you’ve been in my room. I will read that when I’ll already be in a very bad mood.

Bathroom Monologue: Better Than Stenography

There is an audio edition of today's story. To listen either click the triangle on the left to begin streaming audio, or click this text to download the MP3.

Three questions led to my current employment.

“How sharp is your memory for words?”

“Does it extend to print?”

“How much would you fancy having your hair trimmed daily?”

Mine is unorthodox employment, but it pays well and relies upon a rich organization, which suggests it will continue to pay well. Some four years ago I was a mere stenographer and clerk at the local courthouse, and there came this curious case. A man was accused of assaulting a barber. He passionately defended himself for eight minutes, then took notice of me. He stared all the way through the guilty verdict and his slap on the wrist.

Afterwards he waited outside the courthouse and accosted me. He had no gripe and stayed a polite distance. This was only about a few questions and a proposition. How sharp was my memory for words? Did it extend to print? And how much did I fancy having my hair trimmed daily?

It appeared some sixteen hundred pages of Benjamin Franklin's papers were in the possession of a London barber. They were family treasures, discarded carelessly during that great American’s tours of Europe and stowed away by a sharp maid. The barber was gregarious and allowed his patrons to read them. He forbade them to be copied or taken; he was very possessive, as they were quite valuable and fetched him some deal of publicity. There was no way to remove them short of burglary, and in addition to being a burly man, he was one door down from the police.

My accoster hailed from a historical society that very much wanted record of Mr. Franklin's words. While most tried to bribe or threaten the barber, one simply sat in the chair, reading them. He took a shave every day for five weeks, verifying these papers and perusing history. But he was very slow and no account he could memorize was exact. That led to his little scuffle and attempt to steal some, which he insisted the barber had exaggerated.

Through me he needn’t actually have the originals. I have a fine memory for words – I can recall several hundred in exact order, maintaining colloquial flair, hours after the fact. It is the nature of my work. Or, it was the nature of my work. Now the nature of my work is a leisurely morning shave, at ten times my previous salary. Whatever I read in the barber's chair, I would reproduce in transcription at lunch time. The historical society also covers my lunches, which I tend to take at historic restaurants.

It has been a jolly four years. I have learned much about Mr. Franklin's hedonism, the founding of the United States, and the simple joy of reading slowly when it pays.

Bathroom Monologue: Verified

Time travel and Creationism were accidentally co-verified this morning when three particle physicists passed through a rip in reality and arrived six thousand years in the past, finding nothing but a bearded giant looking for the light switch.