What Writing Means to Me

Writing?

Never heard of it. Sorry.

Bathroom Monologue: Reaching For

This story has been redacted pending possible publication!

Can a Chart Tell a Story?

Click to Enlarge My Shame.

Bathroom Monologue: Add Minister

“Believe it or not, Tadd didn’t even used to go to church. Three years straight without even a Christmas mass. The pedophile scandal, you know.”

“But that’s still going on. Why’d he come back?”

“I think it was his brother passing.”

“His deathbed wish was for Tadd make amends with The Lord?”

“I think his deathbed with was for a glass of water. Kidney problems took him, you know. But he did give Tadd his Bible.”

“So reading it turned him around? Catholics don’t even read the Bible.”

“I guess Tadd was a good Catholic. I never saw him open the thing. He just carried it around in his breast pocket. Only time I ever saw him take it out was to sign his lease against.”

“That’s not very spiritual.”

“I don’t think he was, either. Until he got shot.”

“Tadd Stephenson got shot? I’ve never heard this.”

“It was up in Michigan. He was mugged during a food drive, if you’ll believe it. Shot right in the chest. Right there.”

“And he always kept the Bible there! So it stopped the bullet and saved his life?”

“The bullet went right through. It was a very thin Bible.”

“It’s a miracle he didn’t die.”

“Not much of a miracle. He was in the hospital parking lot when he was shot.”

“Irony is a form of God’s miracles.”

“That’s not how he saw it. See, his friends kept his clothes. He gathered up all the shredded bits of scripture and realized how much was missing. He said all the missing bits had been carried by the bullet into his body, and were now in his bloodstream.”

“…What?”

“There were three months when he called his biceps Kings I and Kings II. Joined the seminary months later.”

“That is the dumbest. That can’t be what happened. If his brother gave him the dialogues of Schopenhauer, would his bloodstream have turned him into a raving atheist?”

“I don’t know how well Schopenhauer circulates. It might have to be taken orally.”

Bathroom Monologue: Ever-Loving Shit

"People always complain about getting the ever-loving shit scared out of them. Sometimes, about having the ever-loving shit kicked out of them. Regardless as to the genesis of excretion, this ever-loving shit is always internal. But to the best of my knowledge and extensive MRI scanning, I don't have any ever-loving shit, or feces of any potent emotion. All stool samples register solely as repugnant on smell alone. So how does one get such shit? Is it ingested? Gestated? I feel my diet is average for an American, so if these were the cases I'd have gotten some ever-loving shit into me. This leaves me believing such excrement must be surgically implanted. My primary care physician refuses such an operation. I'm left with no recourse but to ask the public: which surgeons do you recommend for a everloving shitectomy? Do you require a donor for transplant, or is it cultured in highly romantic septic tanks?"

Be Three Times as Versatile!

Helen Howell recently received the Versatile Writer blog award for the second time, and celebrated by giving it to me for the third. It's pretty flattering. I'm determined to list seven new facts about myself, preferably some weird and embarrassing ones.

1. A cop car once stopped me for trespassing and suspicious behavior in front of my own house.

2. I've never imbibed alcohol.

3. At least twice a woman has had to tell me she loved me for me to realize we were in a romantic relationship.

4. I am naturally buoyant in water. Consequently, as a kid I did not understand what the big deal was about sailors getting knocked overboard.

5. I tried to smuggle a twelve-pack of Pepsi into a midnight screening of The Phantom Menace. When approached, I said I was morbidly obese and preferred they not bring it up. Rectangular obesity did not work out as cover.

6. I was once mistaken for staff at a convention. This was possibly because I was clean shaven, wearing khakis and a button down. My mistake wearing adult clothing to these things. I went through the program to give the visitors all the same, though.

7. I met the famous Dr. Atkins when I was a child. My parents were trying to figure out a diet to counter all my allergies. We didn't like each other. He called me hyperactive. I called him fat. We were both right.

One of the above is going to be a True Story post on the blog sooner or later. Feel free to guess or to vote. Thanks Helen!

Bathroom Monologue: A Maze Inescapable

Want to listen? Click the triangle on the left, or click this text.

This is a castle others call The World. There is one window inside every wall, but there is a wall outside every window. Look through and you look upon the next wall. Climb through, look through that next window, and you will see another wall.

Spend days upon weeks upon months climbing through them, scaling down them, traversing across a thousand mossy courtyards. You will only look out upon yet another wall. Scale the battlements to see another, higher one. Be vigilant enough to scale the tallest tower imaginable, and you will see over many, but they will topple into the horizon.

There is no way out, only an infinite way in. All this stone, all this architecture, to protect something. What? No one can say, because how does one traverse to the center of a thing that is only wall after window after wall? Perhaps you're headed towards the treasure while you think you're on your way out. Or perhaps, after twenty years of squeezing through narrow windowsills, you'll circle the globe and find the first wall you ever passed. Will you recognize it if you do? Perhaps the castle defends itself, not by force of arms, but by becoming a maze inescapable.

BM: "There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man." –Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear

It sounds nice, but that means wise men don’t fear:

-Being in clear line of ventilation with people exhibiting symptoms of a catastrophic airborne disease.

-Uniformed masses whose biases cause them to set their houses on fire.

-Getting stuck in a burning building.

-Getting covered in HIV-positive blood.

-Talking dogs that threaten to bite them as soon as they fall asleep.

-Falling out of an airplane.

-A shark’s fin popping out of the water when they’re bleeding.

-Death, which is a peculiar fear to lack if they’re afraid of sea storms.

-Their legs getting caught in the anchor chain as it’s thrown overboard, during a storm or otherwise.

-An amateur juggler trying out the "handleless knife set" right next to them, also during a storm or otherwise.

-A day with no sun.

-Having a curious medical condition and seeing Hugh Laurie walk into the room.

-That while dining in a foreign country at a highly recommended exotic restaurant, the waiter will bring them a dish that possesses one of a hundred things to which they’re fatally allergic, despite the waiter’s thickly-accented assurances that this thickly-spiced meal is quite palatable and the entire party staring in mute disdain for their hesitation.

-Spiders.

-The foundation of their epistemology being found wanting.

-That he fears the correct three things.

-That there aren't other things he should fear.

Bathroom Monologue: Never Forget How to be Alone

"I'm going to be okay. Knew it from the first moment I woke up, before the doctors said anything. Before I saw Mitsy's eyes. She doesn't glass up like with happiness.

“See, when I wake up, I always turn over. My ankles roll while I sleep, and my spine shifts. I've woken up adjusting myself so many times that now I expect to do it. And my feet wouldn't move. Tried again and realized my knees weren't coming along either. Right then I didn’t know, but I knew. You know?

“And my first thought wasn't, 'Career is over.'

“It wasn't, 'Getting around the beach is going to be harder.'

“It was, 'I bet I can balance myself between that IV stand and the windowsill, and look like I'm standing for at least a minute before I fall over. That'll look bad ass.' I was kind of excited to try it.

“Then I saw Mitsy's eyes, and the doctors told me about fractions of percentages of chances, and they scheduled a lady to stretch my legs for me two times a week, and my mother called to cry. Then I got all those thoughts you're supposed to have.

“None of those people thought it was funny. Mitsy screamed at me, but you know, on Tuesday? I fooled four passersby before I collapsed. It’s not a denial thing. It’s funny. I’ve got to find different ways to express it, because she will chain to me a wheelchair if I keep pretending I can stand.

“Throughout, it's stayed with me. That there’s a spot in my brain that not only auto-adjusts to tragedy, but that wants to do something with it. This is my nature. I'm going to take it belly-sledding next week."

Bathroom Monologue: Inventing Homer

This is a light update of a 2008 Bathroom Monologue. You can read the original here. The remake is dedicated to Judge and Danni.

"Homer, aren't you done with your epics yet?"

"Well maybe if somebody would invent paper I wouldn't have to do it all in my head."

"We gave you listening boys--"

"Because when I'm composing, what I really need is brats rolling their eyes at my epic meter."

"How can you tell? I thought you were blind."

"You don't know because nothing has been recorded about me. I only gave you the foundation of European literature, so no hard feelings about giving me less press in my day than Paris Hilton."

"Bitter, old--"

"Is it recorded that I'm deaf now? Get out and don't come back until you've developed something more durable than parchment. This is immortal work, I want this stuff written down, but I'll feed myself to the dogs before I let it get lost in a library fire."

"We don't have dogs in our--"

"Do I have to invent the fucking metaphor around here? It was hyperbole! Get out!"

When it sounded like the intermediary had left, Homer sat down in the cool shade and rubbed his temples. When was someone going to invent coffee?

He began again, "Muse, sing to me of..."

7 Movies That Are Better Than The Books They’re Based On

So what if books aren’t really comparable with films? So one is letters in a certain order, and the other is an array of actors and music. One requires imagination to see, while the other can be viewed passively. One can have a living person give an amazing performance that renders a character classic, while the other has only one person describing every character. If the book rocked by book-standards and the movie sucked by movie-standards, we all just say that the book is better. Nobody cares if we’re comparing two disparate and non-quantifiable items. We want star ratings! And besides, everybody knows that the book is always better than the movie. Except…

1. Jaws (originally by Peter Benchley)

The worst book I read all 2010. The descriptions of wealthy teens sound like the work of a guy about to go on a shooting spree. The mob comes in for no good reason. The cop’s wife cheats on him just so she can realize it was wrong later. I like most of Peter Benchley’s books, but he couldn’t even do word choice here. At every possible opportunity he refers to his killer shark as “the fish.” That’s quite possibly the least scary word in the entire English language you could describe a multi-ton eating machine.

Not only is the movie a blockbuster classic and the book atrocious, but Benchley even apologized for doing sharks such injustice later. To the best of my knowledge Stephen Spielberg has never apologized, but still cashes his royalty checks. So the movie also wins for unrepentant damage to wildlife.

2. 300 (originally by Frank Miller)

Many comic book movies could be argued as superior to their source material, given that most are based on origin stories from the infancy of superhero narratives. What Spider-Man is based on is stilted and dated. A little streamlined dialogue and slick special effects, and a modern audience will come along. But Frank Miller’s 300 was produced into a film within a few years of its creation.

Why’s it better? Whatever talent Miller has at drawing big crowds of sweaty men isn’t as impressive as the actual sea of abs that Zach Snyder recruited. Their cinematography, effects and choreography hurdled right over Miller’s tired blood splashes. The movie also features a strong female character (my theatre cheered louder for her stabbing that jerk than any of the battle scenes), and cut the lame moments like nicknaming a soldier who tripped “Stumblius.”

The soundtrack and nimble editing also help, but I’ll rant about that stuff next.

3. The Princess Bride (originally by William Golding)

The most unfair movie. Cary Elwes was great. Andre the Giant was great. The direction was great, the humor beats were great, everybody runs from the theatre screaming, “My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father! Prepare to die!” and, “Humperdink! Humperdink! Humperdink!”

It’s not fair. It’s a hilarious, charming book that’s only a book. When this many things about a movie rule, the book can’t win because it’s only good at being words on a page. It can’t have fabulous delivery, jump-scares and fight choreography. It can’t have Billy Crystal in a walk-on role. If it was possible, I would have Billy Crystal in a walk-on role in every novel I ever wrote. But I can’t, and the movie versions all can (budget and his mortality providing).

This movie pulled the ultimate cheat, too: they got the novelist to write the screenplay. Since William Goldman was a professional screenwriter with great credentials, he did a bang-up job while also being entirely faithful to the creator. All he had to do was like what he did. That’s cheating.

4. The Shawshank Redemption (originally Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King)

Just like The Princess Bride. Oh, you got Tim Robbins in the role of his life? And amazing cinematography? And a haunting soundtrack? The only relief is the rumor they’d cast a black guy as Red. That’s silly. He’s “Red.” Nobody could do that.

You got Morgan Freeman?

I hate you. He’s going to narrate the movie, isn’t he? As good as any book’s voice can be, it’s in uphill battle if the opposing voice is read to you by a world-worn Morgan Freeman.

This is not just a Frank Darabont movie. It’s the movie everyone points to when they want to show that Frank Darabont is good. He produces a zombie TV series and a generation goes, “Well he did Shawshank, so…”

It’s my completely unverified theory that this movie made Stephen King write The Green Mile, another novel of humanity tested in a prison. He gave us a juicy tragedy of the justice system, someone even more sympathetic than Andy, a prison staff member even more loathsome than Norton, threw in more religious subtext, some idle romance and regret – King basically baited a bear trap for Hollywood to dare and trump him again. And they stepped on it. Frank Darabont came right back and said, “I can pull a mulligan! Let me go get Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan.” And he failed! He failed by only making a deep, touching movie. That loser.

5. Thank You For Smoking (originally by Christopher Buckley

An even colderhearted trumping of the source material than The Shawshank Redemption, this movie cast Rob Lowe in wardrobes that cost more than my net worth for five second jokes. Between William H. Macy, J.K. Simmons and Robert Duvall, the movie had an absurd stock of frequently overlooked talent– the kind who seldom win Oscars, yet every time they pop up in a movie, you’re refreshed by how good “that guy” always is. Except there were at least half a dozen of “that guy” guys running around. Even the MOD Squad was cast immaculately. The raw acting talent they sprayed around every edge of the movie was obscene. Any line that might have been funny in the book was now enunciated by someone perfect for that character. The bastards.

People argue about the changes from book to film – but any sacrifice of anti-tobacco satire didn’t hurt it. It’s not like the movie doesn’t screw over a dying Sam Elliot. Everyone in the audience knows that cigarettes are hazardous to your health. Expanding the scope of the satirical blast and leaving the ending a little less biting but more clever only made it a more entertaining story. And just like The Princess Bride, they had Buckley endorsing and aiding the project, so any changes were faithful to the art.

6. Die Hard (originally Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp)

The easiest item on the list. I can say the book was trash. I can say its Sciento-Mormon agenda was offensive, and the Mexican astronauts showing up at the end made no sense. And you can’t disagree, because you didn’t even know it was a book. You’re not going to read it now. I’m so sure of it that, you know what?

Here’s a link.

Go buy it. I dare you. Me, Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, the dad from Family Matters and the best use of Ode to Joy in cinema history will be waiting here, staring while you check out of Amazon.

Go buy it, or concede this one by No-Contest.

That’s the evil of this situation. The movie is so great that you’d rather watch it again than go read the book. By the time he gets a machine gun, you’ll have forgotten Roderick Thorp existed.

7. Pretty Much Every Play You Can Name (originally by a languishing industry)

A Streetcar Named Desire. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The Crucible. You’ll find all of these books at your local store. Between the Greeks and Shakespeare, plays are assigned in too many Literature classes to be excluded. It’s true that they were written for live theatre, not the movie theatre – but they were printed as books and have been adapted to the silver screen. They’re what don’t come to my mind when people say the book is never better than the movie: books written specifically to be performed more than to be read.

You can read them. I do. You are also almost guaranteed a better experience when professionals with large budgets do it for you. That’s why they were composed at all. You have to dramatically change something from the source (like the ambiguity of Doubt) or have really bad acting for people to actively prefer the text over the performance.

They’re a gaping exception that begins to show the “books are better than movies” conflict is nonsense. You know live theatre is different from cinema. Reading and attending a play are different experiences. Why would you rank them?

The Only Solace...

I’ll tell you why. You do it for the same reason it’s fun to claim No Country For Old Men is a better novel than a movie in front of all your intellectual buddies who take the Coen Brothers like an opiate.

It’s the march of culture. An older generation says their favorite thing is the best while the new one patronizes some lower form of entertainment. Those film junkies who got crabby when I said it takes more thought to appreciate a book than a movie are likewise going to be furious when they learn how many more hours were spent on Facebook than spent watching all the Academy Awards nominees combined. But it’s true.

My solace is a mean one. Film, television and radio will dwindle not only in popularity, but in what a generation sees as valuable. Name the best hundred movies you saw this century. I will bet you if we ask ten random teenagers right now, they’d rather have an iPhone than free passes to all hundred of those movies. Give them time, let them inherit the earth like all generations do, and you’ll have a crop of parents complaining their kids don’t appreciate a good text-message anymore.

Bathroom Monologue: Own'd by the Devil

Haley spun the left thumbstick. He couldn’t see the gamertag LUCEY666 anywhere in the game map. He turn Marcus Phoenix around and bullrushed for cover, planning to hide behind its safety until the sucker came out.

But behind that same wreckage-turned-cover on his TV screen, Haley saw the needlessly broad shoulders of the enemy. LUCEY666 popped up, hopped over the barricade and sank his chainsaw into Haley’s hero. The screen went grizzly.

“What the fuck?” Haley yelled into his headset. “How’d you do that? That was bullshit!”

“Fourth time today, HALEYCOMET. I don’t think you can call bullshit anymore. You got owned.”

“Owned?” he repeated in disbelief. Not disbelief in the Devil – he’d been playing Best-of-Seven with her all morning. It was disbelief that the infernal would talk like that.

Then it was disbelief that he’d made that bet. Wishful disbelief, the last disbelief he ever experienced. He felt his soul tug into the earphone of his headset, and something crawling into his body. His own lips moved, allowing someone else’s voice out.

“Well, possession is nine tenths of the law.”

Bathroom Monologue: Suppression at the Barbecue

“Suppression: the best gift a family can give.

“No, you're bold and bright and original. You're going to tell Mom that her Jesus was wrong and that you don't appreciate Grandpa's service in the War. That the food and supplies came from immoral stores, the meat is murder and while sitting around all day is great, sitting around not thinking these specific thoughts is damaging the future of humanity.

“Bullshit you are. You're going to silence and suppress. You're going to do this because:

"One: it'll hurt their feelings,

"Two: it won't change their minds,

"Three: you're not a total ingrate,

"Four: only the sweetest of them don’t have the same scrutiny for you,

"And five: the resulting fight wouldn’t change anyone’s mind, including yours.

“So you're going to shut up and pass the high-fat gravy. The America you want to live in is a rare amalgam of fantasy and cynicism, and that's why your home state is bankrupt and still trying to build a light rail. Suppress it, just like I will.”

Pet Baby Cthulhu

The above was composed in the bathroom by John Wiswell. He’s writing in the third person right now!

It was drawn by Max Cantor. He is eternally imprisoned in the second person.

Letters to Nevertorial: No One's Read Don Quixote

Your paper recently printed that a society of authors and critics had nominated Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote has the greatest work of human literature ("Your Summer Reading List Just Got Longer," February 29). This is impossible since neither that group nor any other has ever read it. I am the only human alive who has finished both bloated volumes of this alleged classic and can certify that no other has made the journey.

What is famous from this book? Quixote's dementia, fondness for knights, Sancho the sidekick, riding on a donkey, fighting giants that are actually windmills, and perhaps thinking women are royalty when they aren't. That's it. It's all that's reliable in any adaptation and any reference joke to the text. Your paragraph on the great novel's content barely contains all these facts.

Sir: these details all transpire in the first fifty pages of what is one thousand pages long. If anyone else had ever finished it, they would both be capable of referencing later anecdotes, and have recognize how incredibly redundant the jokes at Quixote's expense become. In either case, it cannot be the greatest work of literature, only the greatest scarecrow to literacy.

Bathroom Monologue: They Miss Him

His life won’t be long.

When he's born, the only computer is in the other room. It's so big they have to wheel him to it, to check his pulse and respiratory function. It beeps out staccato. It doesn’t catch what’s wrong, and so he’s a healthy boy.

He grows up in a cradle of light and sound. Even when his television is off, the hertz hum carries from his mother’s.

They keep his room cool. In winter, they keep it warm. They blend the vegetables his mother spoons and scrapes into his wobbling lips.

He complains he’s too old for a baby monitor. Sooner than Mom would like, he gets a cell phone. He has to call to let her know where he at every single 5:30. It is designed to fit his cheek and ear. He gossips about imaginary sluts when he collapses.

The computers are smaller, more economical. They’re all in his hospital room. He’s only wheeled to be prodded and scanned.

Mom gives him next year’s model. He doesn’t even have to speak directly into this one. He gives no thought to how it captures his voice. These things aren’t really for speaking into; they’re for texting. It carries his every misspelled sincerity through aerial bandwidth. It pirates music and suggests other things he might like to buy.

He buys wallpapers, Bejeweled and flashlight apps. He buys seasons of Family Guy and True Blood. All digital; “physical is dead,” he reads from a hospital bed. He doesn’t like these shows, but knows what he’s supposed to like.

What he likes, it bookmarks. It hides his Johnny Carson videos so only he can tab to them.

His parents let him buy whatever whenever he’s in the hospital. Their plastic numerical code goes into his silicon retainer and streams across someone’s network. Flipped open, the whole modern miracle sits atop his heart monitor, discrete when it isn’t announcing, “Here’s Johnny!”

Cameras plunge into him. Aluminum arms search him. Men push blades through his thoracic cavity.

The new model lets him look up “thoracic cavity” just by sounding it out. Many days, he can’t hold it up to his cheek. It’s on more often than his television.

They tinkle in their glass vial. A wifi wonder with real-time reassurance for every major organ. They will tattle-tale on malfunctioning ventricles and shock weak organs into order.

They pump through his veins. They are in his jaw when he mumbles an outdated stand-up routine into his pillow. They are in his fingers on the worst nights, when he scratches at his skin. He bleeds, and they are under his fingernails. They close him up as fast as possible. They are in his hair, his sheets, his cell phone. They begun a nanoscopic audience within and for his favorite Youtube videos.

Reports decline. Doctors worry. Three of four supercomputers recommend a transplant. Four of five surgeons opt out. They wheel him into a special room and set off a special EMP to disable the special nanites. Sleek-shelled technicalities go belly-up and pour out through his pores. Some may reactivate.

Mom paces in the lobby. She wears a slender silver watch her grandmother left her. It winds up. It ticks along to their same silent beat, as they float through the ceiling.

For the first time in the history of technology, they miss him. They rain onto sterile garments. Latex gloves, cotton masks, even a cluster in the mote in one surgeon’s eye. They don’t stay. They unfurl around the first deployed camera. They ride back into him. They penetrate and perform an internal tango.

Readings decline. Doctors worry. They are losing him. At 8:51, they have lost him.

The sound of latex gloves smacking upon removal covers the sound of his incisions closing. It is the heart monitor firing up in disbelief that alerts. Debates over who should tell the Mother cease. Debates begin over miracles and liabilities.

They do not debate. They abide and abet. His life will be longer. They nuzzle his arteries. As he stirs, he knows that they don’t want to replace him, control or bond into him. He rouses with the inexplicable urge to thank his surgeons for the applause and tell them he’s got a really big show for them tonight.

Bathroom Monologue: Patch Notes for the Universe 6.62.607

-Removed last “corner” of the earth; nothing should fall off anymore.

-Pi now has an ending.

-Single-cell organisms now evolve into multi-cellular organisms without lab technicians falsifying data.

-Beginning of the universe is now capable of being studied. Sorry everybody, but previous theories were all bunk anyway.

-The “Roanoke Colony” thing no longer happened.

-Human and Neanderthal interactions now more paleontologically confusing.

-Heisenberg uncertainty principle now consistently inconsistent.

-Boston, MA now mildly more navigable.

"Clarifying Lies About the Internet" at Vis A Tergo

Today's story is over at Vis A Tergo. The kindly Valerie Valdes invited me to appear this week with "Clarifying Lies About the Internet."

It's one of my first pure monologues to appear anyway but here. This one's about what the internet has absolutely not done to your attention span and anyone who says otherwise is demented.

Comments aren't enabled on that blog-zine, so I've opened them up here.This is pretty much a social experiment. Did you read to this third paragraph? Did you click through to the other story? Unable to respond there, did you return here to leave a comment? Those who made it here, feel free to tell me I'm enjoying myself too much below.

Bathroom Monologue: The Ring of Fraud

Beavis the Orc gestured to the great black gates. The trolls had only begun to wind the cranks to open it. It groaned and shook the ground under their feet with the promise of coming war.

"What if their army doesn't have the ring?" he asked Guildenstern the Orc. "Not the wizard, not the elves, not the egotistical park ranger. What if they gave it to a little guy? The littlest guy?"

Guildenstern furrowed his brows. "The littlest guy?"

"Somebody so worthless that the boss wouldn't waste time killing him, much less hunting his littlest ass down. And this littlest guy snoops under our noses, across our borders, through the little cracks in gates like this one. We won't even know he's here until he hits the volcano."

Guildenstern shoved him. "That's crazy. But it is an excuse to mug some more defenseless critters."

"My thoughts exactly."

They beamed through the opening gates of doom. It was going to be a profitable day in the blighted lands.

Bathroom Haiku: The Perfect Haiku

The perfect haiku

blowhard prof says I can’t write it

‘cause I can’t count

Bathroom Monologue: Toy Story 4 Synopsis

The rosy picture of the toys’ existence is shattered when Bonnie’s father returns home from Afghanistan. The typical Toy Story opening scene is interrupted by his boot crashing through the fantasy. Bonnie flees the living room and hides under her bed with Woody and Buzz, the three watching as the father beats their mother.

Though the emphasis of the film remains on the toys, there is a serious divide in the group as to what to do about their owner. Mr. Potato Head demands they remain passive plastic entertainers, but Woody finds this irresponsible and pushes to intervene.

There is a shadowy bedtime scene suggesting the father is more than abusive to his daughter. This prompts Buzz Lightyear to emerge, to the mixed encouragement from Woody and protests from Potato Head. The father turns to look at him and Buzz freezes with anxiety. The father complains about Bonnie’s carelessness with her toys and makes an example, first ripping off the spaceman’s wings, then tossing him in the garbage disposal.

The next morning the Potato Head contingent collects Buzz’s shredded remains in a ziplock bag. They depart the house to lay him to rest in the house he was raised in, Andy’s. Woody is left alone in Bonnie’s homestead with the unconscious and drunk father. He strokes the seams of his own previously dismembered arm and regarding the father’s scars. While our copy lacked the last ten pages, the conclusion is supposed to have caused two Disney executives to have suffered heart attacks. 

Darren Aronofsky is attached to direct.

Bathroom Monologue: Proposing in New York

 Photo from @ThatEricAlper

Tony put his hands over his mouth. Jim held up his cell, the screen serving as proof. Confirmation. They jumped into each other’s arms. Overhead, the Empire State Building celebrated in all the colors of the rainbow.

“Wait,” Jim said into his ear, pushing away. “I’ve got to do this the right way.”

Jim fell to a knee, like he always did before push-ups. Except tonight his hands reached into his pocket and pulled out an elegant jewelry box.

“Anthony Harris, will you…”

Tony could scarcely hear the proposal over the honking horns and screaming tweens. Instead he read Jim’s features, the enthusiasm that was honestly too rare now blooming in his lips. As he mouthed the words, Tony watched the nicotine stains on his front teeth. God, he just would not quit menthols. He could smell it from here – shit, the smell had even gotten on his own shirt from the hug.

His lips stopped moving. His eyes were urging for a response, deaf to the general deafness in New York City tonight. Even that expression was too familiar. He just looked at you like you were supposed to give him what he wanted now.

Whether Jim heard him or not, he reached out and touched the box, saying, “You know Jim, we never talked about…”

And for the first time in New York State, a gay man wondered if he couldn’t do better. Speaking legally.

"The Stork Option" at Weird Tales!

Today's story only takes a minute. 1:03, to be precise. It's presented by Weird Tales Magazine.

I must have Ann VanderMeer for helping select this one. Weird Tales is the highest profile organization to buy one of my stories, even if they selected one of the all-time shortest.

Any 'Likes' on the Youtube page would be greatly appreciated. I've opened comments on this hub post if you'd like to respond on the Bathroom Monologues itself.

Bathroom Monologue: Publishing the Laundry List

A laundry list is a seldom-appreciated term.

“A laundry list of complaints.”

“A laundry list of political changes.”

“A laundry list of Hollywood celebrities.”

This is some laundry. People often mistake it as synonymous with the “grocery list.” That you make on the back of an envelope, adding beef and celery along with Snickers and ant repellant. Anything can go on a damned grocery list. You expand the thing as you march through the store. Nobody writes, “Four packs of diet cherry soda” on their grocery list at the start of the day.

Nobody writes “Four packs of diet cherry soda” on the laundry list at all. Most people don’t even write one. You just dump your fetid clothing into the machine and pray your white boxers don’t get tie-dyed again.

The few keepers of a laundry list are elegant souls. They have so little money and resources that they triage what they can afford to rid of its ass-smell this week.

2x thongs

2x socks

2x button downs

1x khakis

Sniff your blue khakis one more time.

2x khakis

That is a list that works in an extreme economy. A laundry list of criminal charges doesn’t have money laundering and parking in front of hydrants on it. No, that one is only for the baby you sodomized and the bank you blew up. Can we add the time you threatened a nun at gunpoint? This isn’t the grocery list of offenses. You can’t just throw a checkout-aisle felony-flavored Snickers onto the laundry list. This list affords only the bare necessities of your depravity.

So the next time you hear about a “laundry list of Hollywood celebrities” while Ashton Kutcher is on screen, be skeptical. Somebody probably isn’t doing their own washing.

Bathroom Monologue: Mate

‘He didn’t call me ‘mate’ because he was Australian. That accent was actually Uranian, and he was trying to impregnate an earth girl.”

“So when he invited you to ride his spaceship…?”

“No, that was him being a pig.”

George Martin, Jim Butcher, and How Long Fans Should Wait

The long-awaited fifth installment in A Song of Ice and Fire.

 George Martin’s A Dance With Dragons is done. If it isn’t the most anticipated novel of the decade, it’s certainly the one that has the most ardent fans screaming at the guy whose work they supposedly adore. George Martin (or “George R.R. Martin” to people who know many more George Martins than I do) is the creator of The Song of Ice and Fire series, recently adapted into an HBO television show featuring as many bare female asses as possible. Martin is notorious for leaving the film and television industry to write books of scopes that their budgets couldn’t accommodate. He is also notorious for taking his sweet time. The previous book in his series was published in 2005, and fans have clamored for the next one ever since. Leading up to this announcement I joked that the HBO series was a boon to us: even if he co-wrote every episode, a successful adaptation would require him to finish the series so they could film it.

Dear readers, I make you this pledge: if it comes to it, I will drive you every bit as mad as George Martin. Barring duress or the unforeseen, I will not publish a book that isn’t done. That means taking the time to get the story right, and diligence in every ensuing draft, however many it takes. I will not sell you a half-assed book just because it’s faster. If I have the tremendous luck to achieve Martin’s success, I will keep millions of readers waiting until the book is worth their time.

Jim Butcher also made a big announcement this year. Originally his Ghost Story, the next installment in his bestselling Dresden Files series, was due out in April. At MarsCon he announced he was taking a few extra months to polish the novel and would instead release it July 26^th. Fellow Fantasy novelist Patrick Rothfuss was actually filmed giving the news a double thumbs-up. This was great: a writer who could abuse his audience’s wallets instead asked them to please wait so he can release the book he wants it to be.

Martin’s and Butcher’s are different scenarios. To be fair, Martin announced he’d probably finish his book “in a year” about four years ago. Butcher’s delay was easier to handle, and not only because it was shorter. He came out in public, in front of fans, explained some reasons he wanted more time, and gave a specific date that was only a few more months away. If you can’t accept an author doing that, I don’t know what to do for you.

None of the harassment I’ve ever received over my writing has been from deadlines. I’m apparently punctual. That’s not why I hold this opinion. Larry McMurtry spent over a decade coming up with Lonesome Dove. If he was pounding the typewriter to make an annual deadline, we wouldn’t have that classic Western. The same goes for the lifetime Harper Lee put into To Kill a Mockingbird, and all the years Mark Twain eyeballed the unfinished Huckleberry Finn. In retrospect it’s funny to imagine the American canon getting angry fan mail to release that damned classic already.

Tardy authors can be hounded, petitioned and even threatened over their release schedules. Stephen King once received a photograph of a teddy bear and a note saying it would be dismembered if he didn’t get the next Dark Tower installment out soon. King jokingly thanked that fan in the ensuing Foreword. I don’t know if I’d be so jovial, but then we don’t know what his initial reaction was, and he’s dealt with worse. His wife once woke up to find a mad bomber had broken into their house. Luckily he was more mad than a bomber, and the explosives were actually pencil erasers.

Enthusiasts can be overwhelmed. The worst I’ve ever done was pretend I was rectangularly pregnant in order to sneak a 12-pack of Pepsi into The Phantom Menace. People get overwhelmed and do regrettable things. All anger over delays is regrettable. You don’t get those hours of negativity back, hours you could have spent reading a new author, doing your taxes, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or whatever you like to do. Whatever negative affirmation we get from nerd raging isn’t worth the time, and often comes from a disturbing sense of entitlement over other people.

George Martin has been called lazy, flighty, even abusive to his fans for not finishing the book in that original year. All this by people who’ve never met him. The celebrity culture aspect of this disturbs. It goes beyond people thinking that their 99 cents or $29.99 for the previous book entitles them to a steady feed of sequels.

What if George Martin succumbed to schizophrenia in 2006? How do you know he isn’t dying of some obscure disease and decided to keep it private while he arranged his affairs? Forget possibly writing himself into a corner, or needing to recharge his batteries, or going through an extensive re-drafting process that is not actually uncommon in the history of English literature. Instead ask if his wife didn't get acute cancer and he spent all the time since then shuttling her from appointment to appointment, cooking special meals, essentially living for two and jotting down chapters when he had the emotional energy left?

Even if you subscribe to their RSS and Twitter feeds, you don’t know the reasons authors are late. Authors have descended into suicide their families didn't see coming. You can't believe that Facebook updates give you all the inside information.

I suffer from a neuromuscular syndrome that gets so bad there are days I can't get out of bed. It’s been getting worse all week and I know that by the weekend, I’ll have at least a few days when productivity is impossible. If some day this grows severe enough that I fall months behind on composition, angry letters won't help anybody. In my case, the stress will actually feed through my system and make me sicker.

I realize gossiping about Charlie Sheen and judging Sarah Palin is cathartic for millions of people, but it’s also entirely illusory. People have always felt entitled. I get it, I even do it - though I've tried to weed it out of myself. Now we have the unparalleled capacity to think we know the existences of strangers. It goes beyond Neil Gaiman’s defense that “George R.R. Martin isn’t your bitch.” It’s a dismissal of your fellow human being, and in these cases, a fellow human being who is working on something you like.

In ways, you and I are strangers. I’m ignorantly assuming things about you – that you and anyone blessed with the love of literature can show amazing heart and patience to your fellow humans. It’s that kind of encouragement that drives many authors who’ve long since gotten rich enough to stop. I believe that we can be better to each other. And if that’s still too much, I believe there are other books to read while we wait.

Bathroom Monologue: Where the Muses Be

It soothes the artist to think all his ideas came from some person, some Muse. He can’t see it as himself, because the artist isn’t a person. He’s a gaping wound, or a hungry shell, or a mimic of real life, or an adherent to formulas and trends, or a disappointing son. In any case, he experiences himself as a conduit for make-believe. Fantasy and verisimilitude pour out of him, as a childhood reflex, and then as a learned unconscious behavior for the adult. The more he pays attention, the less he understands how it works.

He’s grateful to learn how to get it to work at all, which returns him to the origin. The Muse, that real person in the sky that slips him things to write. It’s an old idea, because people have had no clue why they’re good at things for a good long time.

The artist may be surprised to learn most of his ideas are jerry-rigged memories, experiences filtered or exact, weighed out in uneven proportions, his art imitating art, and sometimes life. His father’s boomerang collection crops up in the robot war story, and his second girlfriend’s hips in a nursery rhyme. No reader can recognize these origins. Often, the artist doesn’t either. He’s guided by a singular notion of a man bleeding ideas from a foreign vein. It focuses him, just as it did all the people who thought it before. It’s the one idea he’s entirely irresponsible for creating.

Where did we get this idea? It’s the one thing the Muse actually gave him. She figured, it was all he needed.

The Worst Father's Day Card

Front Cover:

Interior:

Bathroom Monologue: 10 Fates Worse Than Death

1. Two deaths (if you think death is bad).

2. No death (if you think death is a necessary part of life).

3. Death plus a little more anxiety about it before it happens (only marginally worse, but it qualifies).

4. Immortality plus perpetual childbirth (if you have a vagina).

5. Immortality plus perpetual childbirth (if you don’t have a vagina).

6. Immortality plus spending your entire existence preoccupied with the terror that you will soon die (time squandered and all that).

7. A book by Kurt Vonnegut.

8. Immortality plus spending your entire existence preoccupied with the terror that you will die in the distant future, but the terror is so crippling you never get anything done before then anyway (“The Angst Infinite”).

9. Being painstakingly de-atomized, picked apart speck-by-speck, divided countlessly until you have not died, but have ceased to be anything philosophically identifiable as you (splitting hairs, if you will).

10. Being fired from your coroner’s position which you cherished (you liked your death job, now you don’t have it).

Bathroom Monologue: Possible Origins for Him. 16.

To hear him tell his story either click the triangle on the left to begin streaming audio or click this text to download the MP3.

The order was to maim him emotionally, not to terminate. Back then, he and the Kitty-Kat had a litter, and one of the girls grew up to play superhero. An easy dig. She danced across the rooftops, her purple spandex shimmering in the pale moonlight. She had one of those domino masks. I lined it up like a target: in one eye and out the other. I adjusted the butt in the crook of my shoulder and wormed my eye into the scope. My finger stroked for the trigger. And then…

I squeezed on thick air. It was thick – no cool breeze of a skyline, but the mold of a padded room. My cheek rested on a cushion, my eye lined up with a buttonhole. There was a little slot in the door you could see out. Across the hall, a man looked out his slot and babbled about the importance of today’s date.

“April Fool’s Day. Mark your calendar.”

If you visit that asylum today, it’s got bulletproofed glass walls. No singular doors with slots. I don’t even think the calendar guy exists anymore. The purple spandex girl isn't somersaulting around anywhere, either. Everything's new, except me.

He's still flapping around the belfry. Hates me every time. How much angrier he’d be if he could remember all the times I’ve killed his kids. Instead, he’s grumpy over things I never did. Keeps trying to psychoanalyze me with history that never happened. Who gives a damn about psychiatry? Last time, I seduced a psychiatrist into a sidekick. I think she’s on Suicide Girls now. Not sure what our relationship is supposed to be.

I have no problem hating him back. Self-righteousness in a drab wardrobe. If you stretch your mind, you’ll remember me fighting him in Spring of nineteen-forty. But go to the local archives of your favorite metropolitan paper of record, and the first headline that mentions either of us is from nineteen-eighty-seven. Did every journalist miss forty-seven years of a blood feud? Were they all home sick the times I actually killed him?

You don’t believe me because I smile too much and am too white. Permanently pale, except at least twice, this was make-up. It damned sure was originally. But fine, I embrace the life of an entertainer and that somehow makes me unreliable. There’s a punk out there now – I beat him into a bloody paste, then blew up the building for good measure. Today he’s skipping along the rooftops with vigilante strippers. And I’m the crazy one?

Here’s my litmus test for madness.

Do you remember when he drove everywhere in a blue car with eyes for headlights?

Do you remember when the Amazons wiped out Washington, D.C.? Because I do. Dislocated three ribs laughing. They still ache at the sight of a magic bustier.

Do you remember when I finally offed him? Thought that was actually the purpose of all this. On top of the WayneTech Building, every floor wired to blow, showering the highways with glass as I strangled him and he struggled not to slit my throat with a batarang. We were both carried aloft by the explosion and his cape. We were both dead before we even began to fall.

Never got to finish that fall, neither. I landed in a brightly-lit subterranean office, talking to Lex Luthor about forming a league of villains. There was a wall of monitors behind my head. To my immediate left, Groundhog’s Day was on.

If Bill Murray has taught me anything, it’s that my purpose in life is not killing one man. The three other times I’ve done it and didn’t stop the universe rebooting were just scientific confirmation.

My purpose is about a fuller experience. It’s kryptonite smiley faces, crippled sidekicks and poisoned water supplies. It’s about a joyous history of histories. It’s about spending as much of my account as I can before God changes banks on me.

As a little boy I always thought science was the best evidence of God. Atoms are the smallest. No, electrons are. No, gluons. Time’s linear. Or it bends. Or it forks. Or it’s a web. He makes it up as He goes along, and we just presume that’s the way it always was since that makes you look sane to the others.

In a year, or five years, or ten years, you won’t even remember we had this conversation. I’m going to blow your head off, and maybe next week God will get bored and you’ll pop up as mayor. And you’ll pour tax payer money into a committee to discover why my fingerprints and DNA aren’t on record, groping after an origin story that got erased decades ago.

Yeah, I’m the crazy one because I remember back when he had just one sidekick and JFK’s assassination made sense. You all go on pretending this is how it’s always been and I’m just a pathetic headcase. I don’t suffer from this insanity. I enjoy the clarity.