Bathroom Monologue: Will Kill

Twitter will kill Facebook will kill Youtube will kill television will kill the movies will kill radio will kill live theatre will kill fiction will kill the serious novel will kill poetry will kill philosophy will kill actually going outside will kill sleep…

will kill conscious imagination

will kill reason

will kill dogma

will kill politics

will kill independence

will kill unity

will kill the natural order

will kill chaos

will kill nothing.

Bathroom Monologue: Loving Cannibals

Because they lived near The Z, there were some customs they couldn’t discard. Leaving their uncle to die would only make him wander into their camp later that night, hungry and distant. Conferring him to the soil would likewise assure his rise, and the buried rose with the strength of the land. His liver was too grave and they simply had had to behead him to prevent the turn, and soon it was impossible not to submit to other customs.

As they ate his feet, they told stories of the walks he took at dusk and where he might have gone, and the times he carried medicine back from the east with nothing but rags tied around his ankles.

As they ate his hands, they recollected the many pots these fingers had spun, and their mother reminisced on how these palms had helped deliver two of them into the world.

When they ate of his ribs, they spoke of his heart and courage, his lungs and broad voice, and of his infinite guts and gall. No one was allowed to remain silent, no mouth empty, and no metaphor unplumbed.

When all from littlest to eldest ached with fullness, they committed what was leftover to their stock of jerky, mixed and unsorted so that no one could avoid consuming his remains, and so no one who ate in the weeks ahead could forget him. To those outside The Z they seemed a mad folk, unwelcome to any but the keenest opportunists. To each other, customs made them family.

Bathroom Monologue: Tug on That Cape, Redux

The best part of being a superhero happened Saturday morning. He wished he didn’t feel that way, but it was true.

On Tuesday he caught a train as it was derailing. A couple of people broke their arms. There were no fatalities. He signed more autographs for the stranded commuters than there were bruises.

On Wednesday he airlifted an iceberg to the southern Sahara. The governments assured him this would help irrigation, or at least give the locals clean drinking water for a few weeks.

He spent Thursday and Friday traveling through space to correct the trajectory of two satellites headed out of the solar system. It would have been lifetimes to build and send new ones, but now all that work was saved and new photos were beamed to earth, showing the cosmos from an angle never before seen. He took a minute to look from that angle himself, in person, before heading back to earth.

The best part was Saturday morning and he couldn’t help himself. He woke up and his costume was missing from the clothesline. His wife was still asleep, facedown on her pillow and snoring happily.

He padded to the living room and found his cape stretched over two chairbacks, forming a tent. His one son wore the pants of his costume like giant sleeves, and his one daughter wore the shirt like a flowing dress that ran over her little feet. She was drooling on his insignia. They were both transfixed with morning cartoons.

Maybe, if he were more profound, some other time of the week would have been the best. He wasn’t, though.

Bathroom Monologue: A Chance in Hades

For one day every decade, one person will be admitted per hour into the grand halls of Hades itself. This person must be desperately in romantic love with a citizen of Hades, who must have died in some way before the age of twenty-one. Every contestant will be brought into the heart of the underworld and put face-to-face with their lost lover. They then have the one hour to exit Hades with their lost lover, exiting solely by foot (void where ferryman is necessary), and if the two should reach the mortal world, the lost lover will be restored to life. The only challenge is that once the living contestant comes face-to-face with their alleged lost lover, the two must not break eye contact until they return to the mortal world. If the contestant looks away at any time, at anything but this person he or she claims is so dear that he or she would plunge into the underworld in rescue, then the citizen of Hades will be ripped away and lost to them forever. It’s something of a bet about mortal nature, and perhaps cynical, but it’s a chance.

The Most Despicable Antagonists in Fiction

I got over a dozen responses to my open query on the most despicable antagonist in all of fiction. I've listed them in the order they were received. No two voters agreed, though the first two did aim at the same book. Without looking, what book would you have guessed would spawn two nominees for Most Despicable?

It wasn't Shakespeare or Harry Potter, but it was British:

Tony Noland was the first to enter, saying:

The British legal system, in Bleak House. Many lives destroyed by Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

Katherine Hajer was second, also pegging Dickens’s Bleak House:

Any antagonist who does evil in the name of kindness or righteousness. Let's go with Tulkinghorn, then. I don't know about "most", but he's a great example.

  

Then Larry Kollar asked:

How about Satan in The Book of Job? Ruined his life & health on a bet.

Dave Cornford said:

Nils Bjurman from Larssen's Millennium trilogy. Few to choose from in those books.

Catherine Russell said:

Okay, well in print (but MEANT to be performed) Iago from Othello is the most despicable imo because he ruins lives for no other reason than sheer spite and jealousy.

Helen Howell said:

For me it's Voldemort from Harry Potter, because he's power mad and will try to destroy anyone who stands in his way.

Joshuo Londero said:

In The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B the main character meets a little boy at boarding school of the same name. He goes by the nick-name Beefy. They become life-long friends, but Beefy has a way of turning everything to shit. He is one of the most vile, despicable and endearing characters I have ever met.

Beverly Fox said:

Baby Kochamma from The God of Small Things because she destroys lives using the most age-old weapons available: religion and manipulation.

Cynthia Schuerr said:

Jane Hudson in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? She was frightful. It's very old and not many may remember the horrible things she did to her sister. But she was truly despicable. She kept her sister locked up and tormented her physically and emotionally.

Chuck Allen said:

I vote Mrs. Coulter from Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy because crimes against children seem especially evil to me.

Eric Krause said:

I'd say Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King's It has to be up there. Just the way he gets Georgie at the very beginning would put him on the list, and he's just getting started there.

Jemma Mayer said:

For despicability, I nominate the Patriarch Rostov from Jacqueline Carey's book Naamah's Curse. Over the months of her captivity, he forces the main character to tell him about sleeping with the multiple people she's fallen in love with, one of whom is now dead, and tells her it's a sin, sullying her memories of her loved ones and her opinion of herself. He's sadistic too, of course, but I hate that he tries to turn her own thoughts and feelings against her.

And just before midnight on the deadline, Randall Nichols wrote in:

Darcy Parker from Strangers in Paradise - alive, she was little more than your average, mustache twisting villainess, sporting all the cliches of manhating, weaponized sex, incest, pimping, and organized crime. But the way the specter of her and her actions hovers over Katchoo's life after she's already died, sucking in David, Casey, and even the the seemingly unshakable amazon Tambi [the woman who killed her] is her true evil - by having a hand in bringing almost of all of Katchoo's loved ones into her life, she poisons almost ever relationship a damaged woman has.

If you have your own opinion, feel free to drop it in a tweet or in the Comments below and I'll add you in. Now that we've come to the end, you may ask: "What's our host's opinion?"

Well, I do have one, and I'm unsurprised no one picked it. I kept it down to an honest Tweet-length.

I said:

The kid from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. After everything else, he even takes the tree’s pathos.

True Story of John: YA Fiction Versus Real Young Adults

I didn’t have much of a YA phase when I was an actual young adult. By my teens I wanted Stephen King and Noam Chomsky and whatever else people my age weren’t supposed to be able to handle, just as I craved R-rated movies and staying up past midnight. I wanted meatier fiction with more robust characters and plots, and for authors to do more with their prose. It’s only in recent years that I’ve tried to acquire a taste, or at least a respect for YA.

Among titles about teens, few excited me as much as Among Others. It stormed the early 2012 awards, and as soon as it was available at my library I seized the peach-colored paperback. I found a folding chair and carried the book down to the lake, away from phones and computer and human distractions. After slathering my Irish self with sun tan lotion, I sat back to read of Jo Walton’s faerie-loving bookworm. “Morwenna,” what an exotic name, and she was so reserved, so sympathetically introverted and brave and well-read and well-meaning and timid and enchanting and wise within her inexperience. She was the archetype of a child, and I could think of no adolescent trait she lacked.

A few dozen pages and a stiff wake shaking the dock later, I looked up from the paperback. Behind me in the woods there was a girl screaming at her wrinkled grandmother. The girl could have been the age I imagined Walton’s protagonist to be, though she behaved nothing like what I’d been imagining as she wriggled in her grandmother’s grip. I also hadn’t imagined Morwenna in a pink bathing suit.

Most of what she screamed was raw noise, not words, since protest is often the chief weapon of children. There were stray phrases about how unfair she was, and how she was mean and she wished she were dead. The grandmother was less audible over the shrieking, but I made out that the girl had been swimming for an hour and they’d be late for something if they didn’t leave now. “But I’m sorry,” I heard as they trekked towards a car in a hail of juvenile wailing.

For several moments afterward it was difficult to look at Among Others, not unlike the difficulty of meeting someone in the eyes after a humiliation. I clucked my tongue at this portrait of a fictional girl and the display of a real one in stereo.

“Realism,” I said. I had to laugh to myself. Fiction is harder to get into when you’re hit with the reasons people mistake it for lies. 

It's since come to my attention that Jo Walton does not consider her novel to be YA.

Bathroom Monologue: Set your hair on fire

So set your hair on fire. It’s the easiest way to do things; nobody questions a burning man, and it’ll all grow back after you drink them. Douse a little lighter fluid on your scalp as you walk up to their door, and howl as loud as you can. If they don’t open immediately, pound on their windows. They always come out for that, and when you beg them for water or to dunk your head in a toilet, they always invite you in. Once you’re in, do whatever you want. I only drink enough to make it through the night, since personally, I feel bad about draining good Samaritans dry.

Bathroom Monologue: John is Not a Shark

During the reformat I lost my Skype information and had to create a new account. But how could I convince my friends to add me to their contacts when no one was online?


This, like everything else, can be solved with a Bathroom Monologue.

Bathroom Monologue: Missing: one short-haired cat burglar

MISSING

one short-haired cat burglar

lost little kitten, no collar

wears leather two sizes too small

may be in possession of rare coin collection

REWARD offered for coin collection

cat burglar need not be returned

photo of body acceptable

REWARD DOUBLED if she’s cut in half

warning: claws v. sharp

Bathroom Monologue: Mana From Heaven

There’s peculiar weather in the most southerly isles. It’s more predictable than the seasons themselves, more predictable than war and politics, more predictable than old milk turning to new smells or young love turning to old disappointments.

One day a year, and on the same day every year, it snows yellow and green flakes across those shores. They’re cold as ice, and they stack and stick and turn into fluffy mounds of odd snow, and they taste something like powdered mango that’s gone off.

Originally the islanders ate such flakes out of poverty, but soon they realized the unique properties of the annual precipitation. It appears anyone who eats these “mana flakes” is given the gift of magic, able to cast spells from the tops of their heads and keep going until they tire themselves out.

Folks fly from island to island, and conjure parades of imaginary creatures, and do the same old card tricks they always do except for this day they’re real. There is something like a two of spades really vanishing rather than going up your sleeve that tickles a certain kind of person. I spent one such frosty afternoon listening to a little girl teach her pet pink elephant how to sing. Never been much of a mana flake eater myself, though I do enjoy watching the tourists frolic in waking dreams. My hotel takes all major credit cards.

Consumed: Walter Lewin, R. Scott Bakker, and Saint's Row The Third

Today the second and final of the "lost episodes" of the Consumed Podcast is up and available. It's our most eclectic mix of topics ever, and features one of my favorite pieces of media in years.

That media is Saint's Row the Third, a videogame from THQ and Volition. In many ways it is what ignorant people think Grand Theft Auto is: loud, crass, violent, anarchic and shameless. It pulls the rare trick of taking slews of potentially offensive material and turning them into something lovable; it's an open-world game so absurd that everyone I've shown it to has fallen in love with it. There's just no other game out there that has a giant purple stuffed bunny lashed to a whaling ship as a lure so a gang of drug-running luchadores can jump you. The podcast discussion gets particularly fun when we realize this game passes not only The Bechdel Test, but tests for representations of transgender characters.

On the more serious side, we also have two books to discuss. The first is R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness That Comes Before, a Fantasy novel that Max actually enjoyed for once. Bakker's philosophy and psychology makes us question recent trends in characters who know or manipulate too much to remain believable, and the tenuous relationship between skepticism and religion worlds with bizarre and inscrutable events.

Lastly Nat provided us a copy of Walter Lewin's gorgeous For the Love of Physics, which may be the best science-advocate book I've read. If you haven't seen Lewin's energetic lectures on Youtube, then you should check them out (just as soon as you give our podcast a listen). He begs comparisons to Hawking, Sagan and Tyson, and we ponder what the best ways are to teach Physics, the science that seems to turn the most number of people giddy, while still scaring off so many others.

They are about as different as three topics could possibly get, and yet it's one of our best podcasts. A big pat on the back to Max for digging this one out of the archives and polishing it up. You can get the episode for free right here.

Who is the most despicable antagonist in fiction?

Next Tuesday I will be hosting a meta-blog on this very site. All writers and readers are welcome to participate, and it only takes one sentence to pitch in. To participate, simply answer the following question:

Who is the most despicable antagonist in fiction?

Give us the name, the source material, and if you please, a sentence or two on why. Ideally you’ll tweet this to me @Wiswell or leave it in the Comments of this post. It can be from any form of fiction, including sequential art. The answer will look something like this:

Ken Kesey says:

Screwtape from C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. He spends the whole book advising Wormwood on how to ruin a life and he’s insipid about it.

Though I doubt Mr. Kesey will participate, you are welcome to. I’ll be happy to you’re your name to any blog, page or book you please. Submissions end on Sunday, July 22^nd. On Tuesday, July 24th, we'll see a master list of everyone's answers. Keep your answer short, keep it honest, and we ought to have an interesting and diverse list of what people see as despicable.

So, what do you think?

True Stories of John: Grandma's 95th Birthday

This weekend I did my good deed for the year. I spent the last several months wrangling my brother, sister and aunt from three very different locales and shuttled them down to Maryland for my grandmother’s 95^th birthday. 

While there were many good moments this weekend, the best came months before it, when my family members were goaded just enough that they took over the planning and didn’t need a mastermind anymore. They needed me to start it, tell them where to go, who to call, what was covered, what to do when, and then, without me knowing, I was being told who my ride was and where to sleep. It was like a plan coming together, though one that required eight-hour trips each way for my sickly body.

The whole thing was worth it when my grandmother opened the door, laid eyes on my brother, and her face opened up. Later my sister, a fully grown chemist, laid on the sofa with her head in Grandma’s lap and they reminisced about life twenty years ago. 

I got an entire restaurant to sing Happy Birthday to her while the waitress brought in the cake we snuck behind Grandma’s back. On Sunday morning we sat with her on her actual 95^th birthday and she dug out faded envelope with her baby photos, her high school graduation, college graduation, and wedding with the original John Wiswell.

Everyone managed to step on someone’s toes at some point this weekend because that is how families work, but I could not have asked for a better birthday for my grandmother. We got her a tiara, and slippers, and a card that sang “Born to be Wild,” and learned that Grandma doesn’t know what “Born to be Wild” is.

Of the many highlights, my favorite is below.

Her final birthday gift was a brand new copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. A gag gift (or ball gag gift, if you ask me). It turns out my sweet old granny knows what this book is and hollered laughing at the ceiling over it. She promises to hide it under her pillow when polite company comes over. It’s only better that the book was Mom’s idea.

Bathroom Monologue: Revenge of Pigs

The Pigs were mistrusted, distrusted and even disdained after the revolution, so their generosity was surprising to many, especially to horses. The farm fell on hard times without centralized management, and it turned out winter kind of sucked as far as food supplies. Their offer of unlimited grazing appealed at first to the forgiving, and then to the hungry. The Pigs promised hundreds of miles of land for which any beast could sup on all the grass they found, open to everyone, refusing no one. They would even stay here, refusing to eat of the foreign grass and look after the farm while the other animals ate abroad. It was their attempt to show they were more equal than others. Day by day their haters dwindled, largely in the face of no local vegetation, joining the steady stream of free-thinking critters excited for a free meal. They’d never heard of a “tundra” before, but they couldn’t wait to get there.

Bathroom Monologue: Blatant Sports Night Riff

"They had this amazing stripper."

"Amazing?"

"He was built like a Greek god."

"Did he have a better body than me?"

"Of course he did, Casey. It's his job."

"Okay, but when men are asked that question, they know how to answer it."

"Oh yeah? Did the last woman you saw naked have a better body than me?"

"Of course she was, Dana. That's why I picked her over you."

"Men do not know how to answer that question."

"It worked for me."

Bathroom Monologue: Regret the Right Thing

“I love you, Mom!”

Why did he have to say that? Of everything Kyle could have said on his way out the door, or every nothing, of all the times he muttered in his life. Why did he have to be audible that afternoon? And why did he have to yell that he loved her right then? Why not any other time, she couldn’t remember any other time in at least two years, so why not pick any moment in those two years other than the last?

Kyle was above embarrassing emotions. He was too old, too young, too manly, too preoccupied, too thoughtless, too next-generation. She played out the reasons as she wandered his room, and her room, and the garden he’d planted for her birthday, around the tree fort she’d broken her hand building for him. It was reducible, she thought one midnight: he was what she’d been at that age. She would have made fun of such clichés when she was his age, but now he’d never be her age.

Now it was all she heard. Now when the pressure cooker hissed, she heard, “I love you, Mom!” Now when the alarm clock beeped, waking her or confirming she’d laid awake all night, she heard him yelling between the chirps, “I love you, Mom!” When tires screeched on the pavement outside their house, she imagined her boy skidding off the highway and yelling, “I love you, Mom!” Twice now when Freddie opened the front door, she’d honestly heard him yelling it.

Some nights she felt like a living ghost, her son’s ghost, inspired by him, tethered by him, tortured by his absence, tortured by his refusal to come back through any doorway she checked. The neighbors said she wandered, as though walking around your own property was uncouth just because of the hour. She’d paid her mortgage, she’d earned this place without her runaway husband, and raised two good boys at the same time. So didn’t she have the right? Who had the gall to revoke that, to call the cops, to call Freddie to intervene in her rights?

Freddie wanted to help her. She saw it in his face, mixed in with the hurt of being the other son, the other man, the person she couldn’t help but find less interest in, all because he was simply there. He slept on the sofa, which wasn’t even a fold out, to make sure she wasn’t alone. Sometimes when she turned into a ghost, he followed her around the house, taking sharp things out of her hands. She forgot she picked those up. Sometimes he put stress balls into her palm, a sort of jestful, sort of earnest compromise.

She sat on the coffee table Freddie had bought her, squeezing a stress ball until she felt the sand inside grate against her fingertips, and watching her surviving boy sleep. Her eyes lit on his chest, constantly assuring herself that he was breathing, that he was okay, as though if she was certain enough one was alive, then the other would come home, come through the front door and yell, “I love you, Mom!”

Freddie murmured something in his sleep, something idle, something anodyne, something intelligible. Something that wouldn’t haunt anyone. She wished she could fixate on that, and knew she couldn’t. So she reached out and stroked his mangy beard, and whispered, “I love you, too.”

Bathroom Monologue: Perfect Ruin

The golems knew little about their ruins. They retained information poorly, and had been at a loss for order ever since the returning dinosaurs ate their creators. The returning dinosaurs did not eat the golems because the golems were made out of rocks and hair.

The dinosaurs ignored their temple, since it was made of still more rocks. It was The Apocalypse of Skyfire that ruined it, with the meteors and meteorites, and very little fire, and very little visible sky. The golems tried and failed to rebuild the pillars and ceilings for several hundred years, before The Apocalypse of Demons, which scorched the entire place and destroyed two thirds of their otherwise amortal ranks.

It was the devastation that led them to finally being useful again. Many golems lost limbs to the wicked demons, and went about trying to rebuild themselves in order to rebuild the ruins. Except golems have never been any good at self-determination, and one golem missing one arm linked itself to the remains of twelve of its dismembered kin. This did not spawn a nightmarish granite caterpillar, but rather a rippling wall of loyal minerals.

This golem-that-was-thirteen crossed a golem-that-was-twenty, and five golems-that-were-five became a disorderly link-of-twenty-five. None of them were decent architects, but they were damnably difficult to get around. Golem after broken golem built upon each other, linking or simply climbing until they formed a consenting dome over the ruins.

Then? They stood still. It was the single greatest event in golem autonomy ever known. And while it seems petty compared to their biological competitors, it’s kept their ruins in perfect condition for three apocalypses since. Nothing’s managed to mess up their beloved property any worse.

Bathroom Monologue: His Damned Niece

His damned niece.

He got up two hours before Denice every morning, so they couldn't talk about Freddie, or about work, or their inevitable divorce. Getting up that early, rising with that little sleep, made it feel like the avoidance postponed inevitabilities. He took his one cup of coffee in Freddie's doorway, watching the underdeveloped chest inflate under the instruction of tubes. He always left before the boy woke. He did so for many reasons, but mostly for one.

He took forty minutes in the parking lot, leaning on the steering wheel, exercising his breathing. Music, self-help books, even pot didn't steady his nerves as much as gathering his will over time. The gradual tick towards work.

He cancelled all his company e-mails accounts, refused any physical mail at the office, and kept his phone off until he walked out the building's doors. No one overheard a single sentence, and when they asked, his sentence was always, "Fine, Denice thinks he'll be a ball star," followed by an annoyed exhalation that always shut the conversation down.

And it worked. For weeks it constructed the silence on the topic that he needed, and then his God-damned niece had to fuck it up. A grown woman would have known that not answering her e-mails meant to leave him alone. She had to call his department and ask how he was doing with his son's cancer. That call spread like Freddie's disease, through the body of his workplace, though his co-workers and superiors, atrophying his morning in the parking lot, corrupting it into therapy sessions and office-mates dropping by to ask how the kid was. It made everyone feel at liberty to prod inside his wounds. He never asked anyone to deal with it. They told him to, and they controlled his family's health insurance.

Bathroom Monologue: TiMechanics Repitch

Introducing TiMechanics-brand time machines!

Tell your aunt how you feel before the old bat died!

Getting bad grades? Take that Earth Science exam as many times as you like!

Forget an item at the store? Now you can go back with the coupon, and pay attention to catch the clerk looking down your blouse this time!

And the best thing is that TiMechanics brand time machines are up to 67% accurate*, the most reliable on the market.

TiMechanics: where every second is precious.

*TiMechanics brand time machines may result in chronal dislodging, schizophrenia, and/or accidental transportation to the Pleistocene epoch. If you are mauled by a sabre-toothed cat send defective TiMechanics merchandise and proof of purchase to TiMechanics Headquarters at 0 Washington Avenue, New Washington, circa 2801. Consult an estate attorney before using TiMechanics. Warranties voided by paradox.

Consumed 8: Skyrim, Dark Souls, Secret of Kells &

The latest episode of Consumed is up today. It's actually not the latest, but a behemoth "lost" episode from several months ago. It manages to transcend time by leading in with Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, and discussing particular problems that game has that Dawnguard hasn't fixed. Is it just generic Fantasy? Why are blockbuster games so entrenched in world-building that was trite in prose decades ago? And when does filling out a giant world cause creativity to collapse and eat itself?

Nat Sylva and Max Cantor considerately waded through all these issues, and then into Dark Souls, Skyrim's big competition that's due to leap from console to PC soon. Max has some inspired ranting on why the two franchises are nothing alike, and why he can't stop playing it. Even though this is a lost episode from months ago, Max actually still hasn't stopped.

The most provocative topics came from our discussion of The Secret of Kells, a beautifully animated film with some serious trouble handling race. We debated token roles in media, as well as the popular theme of "HERO THINKS TRADITION IS BAD" and how ambitious such writing rarely gets.


We were also joined by educator Ross Dillon, since he had keys to the apartment and Max hasn't taken any self-defense classes. Ross begged us to discuss Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the show too smart for its own good that 30 Rock trampled to death a few years ago. It had a strong heart, and we discussed how the series had aged since its brief run, and the incredibly gutsy elements the cast managed to get onto network television. The stance on Cocaine V. Drunk Driving is still stunning to me.

You can download the podcast or shout feedback right here.

Bathroom Monologue: Spider-Manologue

“People say I’m just spider-powers and a pretty face I keep behind a mask, but I’ve got more to offer. Did you know I was a teenager when I developed a fluid that was stronger than steel? Also wrist-mounted squirt gun that could spray that fluid several hundred yards in a splitsecond. For the work of a teen, it’s surprising I wasn’t picked up by Super Soaker, right? But don’t stop there. In my garage, I made a costume thin enough that I could cling to walls through it while supportive enough that I don’t freeze my butt off on top of skyscrapers. This is a tall one, by the way. If the webbing gives and you fall, you might be dead before I can catch you. That happens sometimes. Before I could even get a learner’s permit to drive, I’d built homing devices, broken into Fantastic Four Plaza, and… well, I caught you. So I guess the radioactive spider that bit me as a teen was pretty smart, or criminals are getting a lot dumber. So what I’m saying is: I could make this a very long night for you, or you could just tell me where the old lady is.”

Bathroom Monologue: Friendly Exchange

"You know what they say. 'A friend in need...'?"

"Is someone you'd help?"

"Well, now I feel like a cynical asshole."

"Happy to help."

Bathroom Monologue: The Tower of Babble

This is one of the oldest apocalypses, though the most recent that had signs of deliberate and divine intervention. This is at least thirty apocalypses ago, and there’s precious little record of it. Still, no matter how true it is, it’s quite popular, especially on this side of the Uncanny Valley, where the government isn’t so popular.

It came about because of a construction job. They were one of the first empires in the history of the world, maybe the very first. A little club of warlords, of gremlins and satyrs and humans, the most pernicious critters in the west, got their peoples together. No two tribes spoke the same tongue, and no dissidents were permitted within their tribes, so they didn’t know what they were doing until they showed up.

High in the Cloud Hills, the tallest mountains anyone’s ever climbed, they carried stone slabs. Some were so huge we still can’t figure how they got them up there, but there they still stand. They enslaved the nine-legs and dorads and centaurs, and the vampires to labor at night. They spread the infection so as to have a more active nocturnal construction crew, which soon outpaced the daytime one.

No laborer knew anymore than where he was putting his block. They couldn’t discuss it, and so it was weeks before they realized their slabs were coalescing into the shape of tower. And though the peoples were ignorant and hungry, they took pride in their grand structure, for every day it stretched taller than any person had ever been. It pierced the clouds, and laborers perished walking through thunderstorms. Others froze from the ethereal climate. There seemed to be sudden and wicked weather up there, as though the sky was fighting back. The stairs grew increasingly narrow and soon slick, such that centaurs could no longer navigate them, and new diseases brewed at those terrifying heights, traveling down the tower and out into the world.

But it wasn’t a plague that ended this tower-building reign. It was a miracle, or a metaphor, depending on your bend. One morning all the species of the world awoke speaking the same language. Centaurs awoke beside slave-satyrs to find they fully comprehended each other, and their human overlords, and their gremlin architects. Our sources attribute the one language to serpentine gods, which hints at which species wrote the sources.

The first news was the common language, a tongue reporting on itself. But the second story to shoot down the tower were details of what was being constructed, at its base, and at the top, and what for. This tower was a conduit to control the sky, from which their rulers could lob lightning across the entire continent, or deny rain to anyone’s crops, and otherwise ensure expansion of the empire. Plans ran down the tower faster than any pair of feet, such as those to annihilate unruly tribes, many folk of which had come to help build this as a peace offering.

An informed public can be hazardous to tyrants. When that informed public grossly outnumbers you and is already inside your monstrous tower, they are potentially more hazardous. That morning workers at the foundation looked up to see it raining politicians.

The laborers usurped their labor, and with influence over the winds, there was a golden age of agriculture. Species that had fought each other witlessly for centuries now comprehended and cooperated. Or so they say. Everyone understanding each other seems to have created more problems, at least in the modern age. We don’t know what wiped out their unilinguistic utopia. We only know there’s very little of that tower left up there.

Bathroom Monologue: Who Reads Anymore?

Sure, you could write your book. But who will read it? It’s got to have the philosophy, the big ideas that are touched upon without going too deep. You don’t want to alienate readers by writing over their heads.

Now if you want a movie deal for this populist philosophical masterpiece, go SciFi. People have been paying Orson Scott Card for years just to mess up trying to make a movie out of his stuff.

On second thought, it’d sell more if it was Fantasy. Preferably Medieval Fantasy, with swords and magic everyone gets.

If you really want it to sell, though? Make it YA. YA Fantasy? They will snort it off the page. People stand in line for teen-friendly make-believe.

The only way you could top a good YA Fantasy is by… well, not writing a book. Movies, Youtube ads, iPhone games! That’s where the real money is. Because who reads anymore?

Mother Nature Vs. Illegal Immigration: Deporting Humanity

There is considerable debate over immigration in the U.S. Conservatives would have no illegal immigration, and are resoundingly shouted down as bigots and historically ignorant. After all, the United States of America was founded by European immigrants who settled it without permission of the locals, and often with bloodshed. If you aren’t related to Sitting Bull or Red Cloud, you should shut up about this topic.

Yet this critique misses a fundamental American point. Reconsider the indigenous peoples, those pre-American Americans, those absolutely-not-Indians. They did not start on this continent, nor even in this hemisphere. Humans evolved in Africa and spread outward over the course of millions of years. Even the Native Americans immigrated here, without permission.

Without permission from whom, you ask?

From Nature. You can tell nature didn’t want them here because as soon as it realized what was happening, it melted or tectonically shifted their land-bridges away, preventing any further immigration for centuries. As for those who remained on her shores?  What was Mother Nature’s immigration policy?

The mountain lion.

Or, consider the rattlesnake.

Or, consider the Grand Canyon, a 277-mile long drop into certain death.

Or, consider the winters so abominable they were worse than our Global Warming ones, and these natives didn’t even screw with the environment to cause them.

Nature has a long history of telling humans to get the fuck out. You think anti-Irish Immigrant sentiment was bad in the 1920’s? Consider that the incoming hunter/gatherer immigrants travelled all the way from Canada to Argentina, on foot, just looking for food. Nowadays you can barely muster the willpower to go to the fridge for another beer.

The modern disparity is because the modern world, and America in particular, has recognized that Mother Nature is an abusive drunk that should be respected. That fridge runs on power that is killing her, and uses the power to refrigerate artificial chemicals in the beer that is killing you. We have surpassed our creators by killing both them and us, and one hopes will one day fulfill the dream of deporting everyone from this mortal coil.

Bathroom Monologue: Designer Genes, Redux

Muscle is hard to build and easy to lose. Meanwhile fat is easy to build, and while it is supposed to turn into energy, is hard to get rid of. But one pair of Tyrex's designer genes will switch this inefficient paradigm in time for bikini season.

Tired of your appendix rupturing when it's never done anything to help? Tired of testicles being so sensitive that one whack prevents you from being able to flee a threat to your masculinity? Or maybe you've always wanted magenta skin. When you look at all the stupidities of the human body, it's hard to believe in evolution at all, let alone an intelligent designer. Fortunately, Tyrex is here to help.

There is a mild-to-moderate risk of sprouting additional appendixes when using Tyrex. Women who are pregnant or who may become pregnant should not use Tyrex (seriously, we're tired of fertile women suing us). Normal side effects include liver failure, morbid obesity, spontaneous belief in backwards reincarnation and magenta skin. Talk to your physician if you have asthma, heart conditions or swelling of the ankles. Otherwise, just get this stuff already. Ask your pediatrician about Tyrex Chewables (patent pending), because let's be honest, trying his best is not enough. You want a winner, and we will give him to you.

Gearing For ChiCon Workshops

Today I’m doing one of the hardest things I’ll do all year. I’m putting my current work-in-progress on the shelf at the 50,000-word mark in order to complete one more draft of my previous 110,000-word novel. Beyond the anxiety of abandoning some beloved characters right before something terrible happens to one of them, there’s the anxiety of having two weeks to return this book and turn out the new draft.

All the beta and theta readers have returned their copies, the family is out of the house, and in mid-July the ChiCon workshops open for submissions. If I’m lucky I’ll have this book in front of three incredible authors for a sit-down in September.

On the plus side, the feedback has been pretty glowing and I know how to accommodate just about everything. Every individual criticism, that is. In writing both of these novels I’ve found the biggest anxiety actually comes from an irrational sense of scope, of looking at the mountain of work rather than the individual bits. I know I can do all of this, I have done all of this before, and yet my lizard brain views it as impossible. It seems like the hardest thing in the world.

Of course, five minutes calling my cousin Will or looking up the latest from Syria disproves that notion. But it’s a notion.

I’ll apologize in advance of some Bathroom Monologues in the next few weeks are inspired by a book you can’t read yet, or if my Twitter feed turns into a stream of consciousness on the process. Feel free to jab me if I devolve too rapidly.

And thank you all, in earnest, for your support. I think I’m pretty close to rendering this the best thing I’ve ever written.

Conservatives Moving to Canada, and Other Wastes of Your Time

A week later, what haunts me from the pilot is the line,
"People choose the facts they want now."

Last week a different sort of news story took over the internet. On Twitter, a few apparent Conservatives claimed that if Obama defeats Romney in the upcoming presidential election, they will move to Canada. The users were not politicians, office-holders, or actually individuals of any note. They were merely people who said dumb things online. Their tweets were copied and pasted into mega-posts and ran as feature stories on sites I won’t name because I don’t want to send them further traffic.

This wasn’t the first time that the random opinions of people you never cared about before and will never care about again trended in social media. I first noticed it in March after the Hunger Games premiere, when a few bigots complained on Twitter that characters had been cast as black. That they were actually black in the novels didn’t matter to them. That there were very few people tweeting this and that none of the individuals had any significance didn’t matter to editors, who ran stories mocking their ignorance and pretended that the three or four quotes they’d found represented a large block of people.

After the “Moving to Canada” nonsense, I was disturbed at the rise of a new form of non-news: the story about someone of no significance who said something ignorant. Not who ran a KKK rally in front of a Mosque, not who protested en-masse at Wall Street, not who banned a minority’s customs or shot at soldiers. It’s much more worrisome than CNN pandering that “viewers tweeted this” about their headline story. Here, the feature is: “RANDOM GUY SAYS DUMB THING.”

"But the NYTimes needs those clicks!"

I’m used to (and sick of) the non-news story about a celebrity saying something offensive. Things Mel Gibson has said while inebriated have received more press than entire civil wars in Africa. It’s gossipy entertainment of some sort, and toxic of many other sorts, and largely a waste of the fourth estate.

These Twitter-quote stories are an expansion of celebrity infotainment. I understand that Gibson’s anti-Semitic remarks and movie-goers’ racism can be starting points for conversations about important social topics.

Except, they tend to spur very few conversations. I would have been blown away if Buzzfeed had featured a single journalist tracking down a single Conservative tweeter, finding out why they had radical misconceptions about Canada and Obama, culminating some sort of human exchange. But there is no dialogue with these individuals, only electronic shouting, and the Comments beneath such articles are full of partisan vitriol. The “Moving to Canada” story became an excuse for my Liberal friends to call Conservatives stupid all weekend. They were doing it anyway. This way they were only managing to do it more while being assured they learned nothing from reading the laziest possible news story.

It was hard not to line this “news story” up with the debut of HBO’s The Newsroom. The “Moving to Canada” nonsense was a sort of fodder for Liberal condescension, much as The Newsroom fodder for super-Conservative condescension. It’s hard not to reflect on the show’s plea for news media to focus on stories that matter. It’s also hard not to reflect on the Gawker columnist who told Aaron Sorkin that there should be a show about her site.

Bathroom Monologue: Shadow of the Valley of Death, Redux

Livington is a wonderful town with a great view of the Purgatory. In the mornings the shadow of the Valley of Death passed right over them, but even this sight doesn’t help Livington’s poor tourism. You see the town council of Livington spent the entire treasury keeping any new towns from cropping up in the locale, zoning out developers who would block the view. They put their last pennies into advertising, but it didn’t catch. The ad was in Psalm 23 of “the Bible,” a very popular circular back in the day. With tourism being nearly non-existent, the town is pinning its budgetary hopes on suing the studio behind Pulp Fiction for cribbing from their ad.

Bathroom Monologue: The Wedding Volleys

No one in the chapel knew that the bride wasn’t crying. From afar, with her sniffling and red eyes and breathing hitches, she seemed the most emotional woman in America for a few minutes. This was all actually an allergic reaction to her sister’s vegan breakfast burrito, but they couldn’t tell, especially when she had the veil up.

Her father, who had eaten at the IHOP, did not know, and he soon pulled the antique hanky from his breast pocket to dab at his eyes over his pride and joy.

Now her mother was the extreme type. Extremely strong, for instance, during all the wedding planning and rehearsal dinners and such, with a proud lower lip and steely gaze. Yet she was also extremely sympathetic, and thus extremely compromised when both her only daughter and her only husband teared up in tandem. So soon her dams broke and she became the proper most emotional woman in America for a legitimate stretch of minutes.

The priest, who was both an emotional softy and a cardiac patient, looked away from the red-eyed bride and to the bawling mother, and he himself took a sharp sob for such love in life.

Those were the variables one needed to cover to watch weeping consume the dearly beloved host. The groom’s aunt, who basically raised him, basically fell out of her chair crying for her little man. In consoling her, both of her natural sons, aged 4 and 6, took to crying, perhaps a little more for never getting to see their cousin again, since they didn’t understand that Oregon is actually quite close to Washington.

It was that volatile an arena. You could not discern what set off the ensuing weepers. There was no good reason for the aged cowboy in the back pew to begin squirting tears. No good reason for the bride’s boss and her husband to clutch at each other and murmur about their wedding day and cry in-between unseemly open-mouthed kisses. You had that sort of thing happening, and then of course the groom’s fraternity brothers started crying for suppressed laughter at the hazing they’d put him through later.

It was the single loudest audience for a wedding the church had ever seen. If you paid close attention, which you couldn’t have since if you were there then you lost your shit, you would have noticed the groom was the last person to cry. What finally got to him was a secret he kept for five anniversaries, until his wife confessed about her breakfast burrito fiasco. If she was embarrassed at her tale, she was rankled to learn at what had set him off: he was good at faking it, and did not want to seem left out.