Bathroom Monologue: The Amicable Haunting

The Dunsly House was not haunted. That would mean a soul, or a ghost, or a poltergeist, or a demon, or a boogeyman, or some other human affair had infested the floorboards. No, it wasn’t haunted. Psychic residue had merely seeped into the architecture, giving the place a personality.

It tried to express itself, but it wasn’t a person, so its manners were different. Too different for its owners to ever realizing it was trying to talk. Still, its actions were considerate it. It insulated much better in the winter than it should have, so long as kids were in the house. It prevented the power from going out during some very bad storms. When somebody forgot that they’d left a cup of water in the microwave for coffee, it sometimes opened the door and removed the cup to put it in view. But some nitwit turned around, upset the unexpected cup and burned herself, and well, from there on it was “haunted.”

But it wasn’t haunted. No one had died there. Two people who had lived there had died, but not in the house. The house didn’t even know those people were dead and hoped, much as pet dogs hope, that they would come home some day. It would be a happy day.

The house hated paranormal investigators and skeptics, and kept quiet around them. The kids who resided in it watched enough science programming for it to learn what humans did to new forms of life they hadn’t studied before. Damned if the Dunsly House was going to be the first house to be dissected rather than demolished. Its only expression to a “ghost hunter” was an incidental close of a door on one of their heels. They debunked it, and the floorboards groaned in laughter. Aside from being insulted that its sentience was mistaken for a lowly ghost, it didn’t want to be discovered. It wanted to be lived in.

Bathroom Monologue: Call of the Child

I was 22 the last time I felt the urge. I looked out my dorm window, at the empty soccer field, and immediately checked around my room for a makeshift sword. A cardboard tube or a stick would do. I'd just edited a hundred pages of my thesis in a four-hour marathon session, so my lucidity was certainly suspect. I caught myself as I checked behind my desk for a cable that might double as a whip, and realized how absurd I was being. It was a familiar urge, but one I hadn't felt in years. Probably not since I'd graduated highschool had I heard the call of the child, the strong desire to go outside and play. This urge to stomp around near the woods and slay imaginary dragons was at least as strong as any urge to get laid that I'd ever experienced. It was just different, associated with a far lower level of maturity in my brain - an embarrassing level of immaturity that today I'm willing to say also should be associated with all urges to get laid. The call of the child was something I'd heard and answered almost every day in my childhood, up until my friends and classmates hit the plane of amateur cynicism that made them try to act older than they were at the expense of everything they actually enjoyed. From that age on, I barely ever patrolled my backyard for monsters or supervillains. Like others, I sublimated the urge with sports, videogames, movies and books, which might have been supposed to wean me from the desire, but mostly starved it. Softball isn't an adequate replacement for high fantasy in the county woods, no more than the keyboard I used at 22 was a replacement for a marble composition spellbook. I think I heard the call again today. A shame it was cold outside.

Bathroom Monologue: Who's her baby's daddy?

Mother Nature frowned. She looked at the hole in the ozone layer. Swearing under her breath, she checked the thermostat again.

“Global warming…”

She checked the rain forests and the whale populations. Her nervous twitch was back by the time She got to the stripmines.

She popped a couple of pills, sighed and called her secretary.

"Yes, Harry. Call the dinosaurs. Let them know they can have another shot at it."

Bathroom Monologue: This Monologue in No Way Endorses the Idea that Celebrities and Other Assorted Beautiful People have Actual Personalities

Beauty isn't always skin deep. Sometimes it's only a layer of cosmetics deep. So Candy Delilah could have told you, if you recognized her. While Ms. Delilah was a famous pageant queen, she was also the product of hours in salons and make-up chairs. Whenever she went out without make-up she was never recognized, and the few people who did look at her whispered to each other, "Oh my gosh, that that sow is totally ripping off Candy Delilah's style." "She can't pull that off." "The nerve." She was okay with the whispers. Delilah the fashion icon was a character for her, and she enjoyed nothing more than breaking character. It kept the autograph hounds away. It kept the drunks from hitting on her. And when the odd man did offer to buy her a drink, it meant a little more. The actual dates she got were more rewarding, for her and for the guy, who unknowingly discovered that the bubbly idiot supermodel Candy Delilah was actually an interesting person, under her skin.

Coming this... Huh?

You've probably been to metacritic, the website that quantifies movie reviews, then tabulates the numbers to score each movie. I like to skim the paragraph-long excerpts from a dozen professional reviews every so often, to get a taste for how critics feel. Yesterday morning I checked out Cloverfield, the "love-child of Godzilla and the Blair Witch," as metacritic put it. Was there ever a description more geared to my taste?

I clicked on the image beside the title on the main page for the Featured Review ( check it out - http://www.metacritic.com/ hasn't the link in the image as of January 19th) and was shocked to find a string of perfect 100 scores, and compliments like, "Gorgeous cinematography," "A singular achievement -- romantic, sensuous, intelligent and finally shattering," and, "This is one of the few adaptations that gives a splendid novel the film it deserves."

I didn't know Cloverfield was a novel.

I scrolled back up the page and let it finish loading. My connection is sluggish sometimes. It was then I noticed that I was reading reviews for The Atonement, the romantic critical darling of 2007. I'd bypassed the title and image and went straight to opinions, only to find them so vague that I didn't realize they were about a love story instead of a giant monster movie.

This is an anecdote of my incompetence, but not of mine alone. I like to think we all failed a little.

Bathroom Monologue: The Science of Minimalism: Like a Drill in a Doctor's Bag

Occasionally we artists and scientists get tired of actually doing anything of value and stop to argue over who is more important. The newest edition of this argument is whether scientists have more to learn from artists in the next millennium, or if artists have more to learn from scientists. As an artist with a passion for science, I think we have much to learn from psychology, sociology and anthropology that can verify or alter our feelings on the way people interact. There is a wealth of information about biological imperatives, about evolution and environment, the chemistry of our chemistry, the physics of our physicality, and the great sums of forces at work in the universe, like entropy or the dual nature of light. There is even a field of cognitive science for how we organize and express, which would give any painter, dancer or composer a greater appreciation for how the human mind shares itself. Artists have so much to learn from science. Meanwhile the biggest thing scientists have to learn from art is how to fucking write.

Bathroom Monologue: Real Titles that were Disappointingly Not Comedies

-Our Lady of the Sauropods
-The Dream Hunter (A Dream Hunter Novel)
-Hell Hath No Fury
-Letter to a Christian Nation
-Tyrannosaur Canyon
-Beauty's Release: The Conclusion of the Classic Erotic Trilogy of Sleeping Beauty
-Bite Me If You Can
-World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
-Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
-The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Bathroom Monologue: Snow Job

Little Becky made a snow "man." Little Bethy made a snow "woman" and two snow "babies." Their father made a snow "off my fucking driveway." He was no fun.

Bathroom Monologue: Generous in General

General Electric recently pledged to harvest millions of gallons of pure water from the oceans every year. Billionaire philanthropist Stewart Tiddlesworth will not be outdone, even by a major international monopoly. He has already pledged to retrieve millions of cubic yards of air from the atmosphere by the year 2010. His land development wing is already hard at work liberating tons of surcharge-free stone from the Rockies. And in case this summer is again too boiling hot, his expeditionary divisions are extracting ice from the south pole, which they will distribute at a modest fee. There is no height of philanthropy Tiddlesworth Co. Ltd. won't go to (and copyright) for the good of humanity.

Waiting to Talk to the Fourth Straight Operator in the Same Hospital Monologue

The Fodati were a very enterprising species. They were very good navigators, they were very good pilots, and they were very good shots; which meant, they were very good conquerors. They ruled almost half a continent under a bureaucratic fist, with three archipelagos on the side, like change in their purses. Soon everything had its own office: the Office Conquering, the Office of Strip-mining, the Office of Cultural Dismemberment, the Office of Re-Education, and the Department of 'No, You Can't.' Nobody could even get his hands on the paperwork to begin an insurrection. Soon the Fodati even sold shares in government, which paid the best dividends in the land for five generations. Then they went extinct. It was a cunning new form of influenza, dubbed the "Orson W. Strain," named for the first Fodat to sneeze it out. The extinction was brutal, but only half as brutal as what the Fodati did next. Only ten years after their extinction they bought up all the common stock available, giving them 51% ownership over Hell. This quarter's financial report suggests that service in the inferno will not change dramatically, but it will be streamlined.

Fifth Straight Night of Shredded Wheat for Dinner Monologue

I've got a new diet idea. It's a little drastic, but this just isn't cutting it. I'm going to go buy a gun. Then I'm going to use my remaining money to eat extra cheese pizza and huge hamburgers for every meal until I run out of money. Then I'm going to have one more meal, and when the check comes, I'll shoot myself. I expect I'll gain weight the first few days, but by the end, I'll probably drop pounds rapidly. Embalming fluid isn't very fattening, you know.

Bathroom Monologue: Mitochondrial Hussie

Every cell of our bodies has a mitochondrion, an organelle that turns food into energy. This little item is so novel that many scientists say it couldn't have evolved with in the primitive biology of the single-celled organisms in which it is believed to have originated. Perhaps, my biology teacher said, one came about by pure chance in the chemical soup of the primordial world and was swallowed by a greedy single-cell organism ate it, which assimilated rather than digested it when it proved to be so handy around the office. Regardless, mitochondria stuck around, and you’ve got one in every cell of your body. Mitochondria have their own DNA, unique from the DNA of the majority of the human body. Most mitochondria are inherited from the mother, allowing us to trace back lineage of all human beings to one common ancestor, who lived approximately 150,000 years ago. She has been dubbed the “Mitochondrial Eve,” in the hopes of making Christian fundamentalists' heads explode. However, she was not the only woman at that time - it would have been very impractical, and you can only use the "I've got a headache" excuse so many times to a continent of primitive men. It is merely that her progeny thrived and replicated where those of the Mitochondrial Lilith, Mitochondrial Gertrude and Mitochondrial Emily Dickinsons were too busy gossiping and writing poetry. It's also interesting that the earliest common male mitochondrial DNA-ancestor we can trace back to lived about 90,000 years ago, separating the Mitochondrial Adam and Eve by about 60,000 years - a long distance relationship of Biblical proportions. What happened in those 60,000 years? We can't be sure, but the gap suggests that lesbianism was much more creative back then.

Bathroom Monologue: Show of Hands?

Raise your hand if when you were a kid you didn't realize "fig" was the flavor of the cookie, and so thought Fig Newton was the name of the product. So when they were raspberry-flavored, they were Raspberry Fig Newtons. Apple? Apple Fig Newtons. And how surprised were you when you found out that figs were a fruit? There's nothing profound here. Just thought I'd ask for a show of hands.

Bathroom Monologue: I'm No Better Than My Worst

Back in middle school I made up a lot of characters to live out fantasies. I was bored with my parents and afraid of my peers; and they all thought I was weird. So I lived through my stories. One was of Colonel Vortez, a black knight of the darkest shade. He lived a contrived existence, purely ridiculous with its carnage and excess, but it was real to him. It wasn't easy on him, either. He fantasized about the original Black Emperor, a mythological figure who consumed all the lands in his kingdom and took all strife with ease. But you know, that emperor had his weak moments. They weren't written down, but they happened, and they felt long. In those times the Emperor wished he were something other than human. He wished he were a dragon, like the Fjiorjund of legend. But the Fjiojund dragon, for all its treasures and bluster, had a deathly fear, for there were cracks between the scales on its belly, and so much as a needle between them would end its eternal life. And there were so many brave hunters and would-be dragonslayers in its time, with so many more things than needles. It wished to be something smaller, less sought-after. It wanted to be an Elf King, one of the Jou, tucked away in the misty woods where no one could walk uninvited, and all trespasses were lost. But Fjiorjund the dragon had only heard thirdhand rumors of the Elf Kings, and didn't know how lonely these perfectly safe, secluded rulers were. Each and every Elf King wanted to be someone else. One every wrote poetry about the life he wished he could lead, if only he was human, out in a big human society, in their concrete buildings. How much he would have liked to grow up a human, with a lifespan, limited to give his years meaning. How much he would have liked to grow up a human, to grow up with parents who cared, and go to school surrounded by other children, instead of living all alone in his boring, real world.

Bathroom Monologue: So It Is Written

[Panel 1]
God: At first I wanted the Bible to be accurate since, you know, that might be important eventually. But I kept running into problems like:

[Panel 2]
[Flashback]
Joshua: And over millions of years monera evolved into prota--
Peasant: What's a "million?"

[Panel 3]
[Flashpresent]
God: The second time I had to give a prophet an epiphany on what a triceratops was, I said, "Fuck it. Everything in 6,000 years."

Bathroom Monologue: Sleepy Head

While everyone else rummaged through the yardsale, Som napped in the passengers seat. That’s the way it always went when they went out; him waking up would ruin the fun, and he understood it. Som wasn't a fairy or a wizard or one of those mutants in the movies. He was just a circumstance of the world. Whenever he was awake, anyone around him fell like a stone. Not dead, don't worry about that. Just asleep. Being asleep isn’t so bad unless you happen to be driving on the highway, performing surgery, constructing a skyscraper, serving as a 9-1-1 operator-- alright, it could be quite bad. Which was why he stayed out of the way. He only chatted with people over IM’s and cell phones, but even that left them feeling drowsy. It might have been his personality. He only roamed the streets late at night, with bed hair and crinkled pajamas. According to one note he left on the fridge, you ceased to care about your appearance when all the better-dressed people around you fell to the ground the second you so much as got in their peripheral vision. He’d stuck with this group of friends for two years now, and every morning they’d wake up to find him dozing in front of the TV. Back before they met Som two of them had been insomniacs, and the curmudgeon among them had been narcoleptic. Now everybody went to bed at the same time, and the curmudgeon hadn’t had so much as a long blink in – well, two years. They took a shine to Som, and the best part was that, according to all the notes he left on the refrigerator and the pleasant, subdued smile he always had while napping, he really enjoyed their company, in his own way.

Bathroom Monologue: Grim? Yes, please.

Harold tried to fit his wife's severed arm in the freezer, but there was too much stuff in there. Frowning, he opened the refrigerator. Tonight was leftover night, so there was ample room, but Harold worried that it wouldn't keep the limb cool enough. He nibbled his lip uncomfortably. For a moment, he considered going back and asking them what to do. But no, that was stupid. It wasn't like they'd let him back in the room. Not after what he'd done. So Harold shut the fridge and began pulling ice cube trays and tubs of cookie dough ice cream (his wife's favorite) out of the freezer. Then he placed the arm as apologetically as possible on the top shelf. To make it fit, he had to bend the wrist at an angle that made him squeamish. Jesus, he hoped they'd be able to sew it back on. With a sigh, he plopped down at the table, and stared at the two tubs of cookie dough ice cream. He thought about going and offering some to them. No, that was stupid. None of them would want to see him after what he'd done, even bearing ice cream. So he pulled out a spoon. There was nothing else he could do until the ambulance and police got here. So he ate, and hoped his wife had calmed down. At least she'd stopped screaming. And the ice cream was really good.

Bathroom Monologue: The man behind the curtain paused a moment, and cleared his throat

You see, language chases after reality. Action does not describe words. Words are assigned to action, and they follow after it. Some of us, the thinkers, philosophers and assholes, try to make sense out of action through words. Some of us, the journalists, storytellers and liars, try to convey what happened through words. Some of us, the truly insane, try to tell what happened and assign meaning to what happened through words. We speak and we write to share a part of the human experience that theatre and film cannot, those aspects of thought and observation that are not shared in a visual recreation. It can be funny, it can be heartbreaking, it can be horrifying, but it ought always to be genuine. It is an act of creation that has nothing to do with gender, and an act of mind that has nothing to do with I.Q. Disagree? Oh, there are a lot of dumb writers who lived more interesting lives than smart types. If they're too intimidated to share or improve, whose fault is it? It's skiing down parallel structure, friends, observing what makes things go perpendicular. It is math, as it is music, as it is theatre - it's what happened that night at the theatre, the memorial service thereafter, and the strife the nation went through. It's what the country became without Lincoln. It's what the country became without McKinley. It's what the country became without Kennedy. Without two Kennedys. In fact, it's what we all became, becoming, coming from somewhere, going to somewhere. It's walking, though walking isn't the movement of a body along a plane by way of its legs. Walking is a verb, and that describes just a tiny part of the world. It's words chasing worlds. And if you remember that, you'll have the humility a writer needs. Probably not the publishing deal, though.

Bathroom Monologue: Behind every great dog is a carpet with no stains

"Behind every great man is a great woman. Except behind every great gay man, behind whom I guess there must have been some very disappointing woman. And behind every great woman must have been a father who was too busy trying to be a great man to be a decent father. Behind every great father? Probably a bunch of things he did in his twenties that he's praying his daughters won't find out about."

Bathroom Monologues: What about the pink bits under my nails?

" It's recently come to my attention that presidential hopeful Barack Obama is not black. I was very surprised, given his skin color. Apparently "blackness" is not defined by fleshtones (which is nice to learn, since that is really kind of brown), but instead is defined by having ancestors who were brought over from Africa to the Americas as slaves. Given this revelation, I believe there are further steps that need to be taken in political correctness. For instance, I am not "white." Not only is my skin a pale beige affair with a spattering of sandy taupe freckles, but I have never appreciated being lumped in with the "white group." Hereafter I will not accept your ignorance when you call my people by this inaccurate term. Hereafter, "white people" are only those who owned, shipped and/or bought Africans and their descendents as slaves in the Americas. My lineage comes from Irish and Slavic immigrants, who not only arrived on the continent after slavery was abolished, but who had their own historical horror stories that have gone lamentably ignored because the oppressors and oppressed had the same skin color. Also interesting to note is that there were Africans and African descendents in the Americas who owned, used and abused slaves - the descendents of these Africans and African Americans will hereafter be called "white." Remember, it's not about skin color. It's about the truth. Though there may be some kind of truth about the inane labels we use to culturally segregate each other that I'm missing. Still, I'm sure we'll figure it out once somebody comes up with a color-appropriate, character-inappropriate name for whatever Mr. Obama is. I'm also pretty sure somebody will come up with one and put it in commercials before the 2008 presidential race. "

Bathroom Monologue: Back home we call a broken telescope "a stick"

On a blue planet somewhere in the dull end of the universe, there exists a species of dwarf giants. They reside on the brown and green spots on this largely blue planet; some scientists suggest this is because the dwarf giants live on irony, though empirical data suggests they live rather on water and lesser-evolved lifeforms. They aren't very spectacular, only slightly scientifically inclined, and not at all spiritually or athletically inclined. Even their smartest thinkers only come close to realizing the limits of logic's practicality. They cannot fly high in the skies or dive deep in the oceans without devices, which is unspecial because anything can fly or dive given a task-specific device. They think themselves very clever for inventing these devices. Any tourists interested in visiting the dwarf giants are advised to keep their distance and only approach those natives who are intoxicated with any of the various mildly poisonous chemicals they ingest in order to forget their problems, pretend they live somewhere else, or to kill an afternoon. The dwarf giants love their poisonous chemicals almost as much as they enjoy pretending they know more about the universe than they actually do. It doesn't matter what they're wrong about or how wrong they are; they're determined to be determined. Despite their attempts to build mechanical tubes that will fire a couple of them (mind you that there are over six billion dwarf giants on the planet) into space for a few days, and despite all the riches made by natives who religiously, philosophically and scientifically try to divine the universe as a whole, much of their work is introverted. They show a great propensity at killing and coming onto each other; these are such great aptitudes that they will soon be incorporated into the encyclopedia definition for these creatures, supplanting the illustration. Even their humor is introverted, largely focused at each other in decreasingly amiable and increasingly hateful forms, pointing out the baselessness of everything that any other dwarf giants enjoy or rely on to make it through life. Our researchers suggest that this may be the first empirically-observed example of entropy in stand-up comedy, which has made for some wildly interesting anthropological papers, but gets a lot less funny after a while.

Bathroom Monologue: Step 309, and how it went awry

Now that we knew the demographics for our criminal organization, we set out to exploit them. Since at least 72% of potential employees were grossly overweight men who worked either in tech support or videogame stores, we made t-shirts with our terrifying yet simple logo part of the standard attire for all employees instead of the more standard jumpsuits. They're a lot cheaper to mass produce. It was Jacob Wrathstein's idea to charge each employee for his clothing, and his wife's brilliant idea to provide only Medium and XXL sizes, with the Medium running $15 and the XXL running at $75. We dreamed of profits, but unfortunately all we got were snarky, overweight minions of evil in really tight t-shirts.

Bathroom Monologue: "Shakespeare is Old School!" –A professor who thought she was hipper than she actually was

William Shakespeare: Old school

Homer: Pre-school

Norman Mailer: Private school

James Patterson: Public school

Emily Dickinson: Home school

Saint Augustine: Sunday school

JFK's Profiles in Courage: New School

Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage: Medical school

Periodic Tables: Elementary school

George Orwell: Educational software

Aesop: Lecture series

J.K. Rowling: Recess

Smoking in the Boy's Bathroom: Hunter S. Thompson

Ernest Hemingway: Tour of duty to pay for college

Dante Alighieri: Semester abroad

Ken Kesey: Dropping out

Upton Sinclair: On the job training

Charles Darwin: Field work term

John Jay, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton: Senior thesis

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Masters degree

Nostradamus: Ranting guy on the street corner

Bathroom Monologue: Call it Fantasy if it makes you feel better; Hell, call it a Romantic Comedy if it makes you feel better

He is the god of atheism. There might as well be one. There was a god of war, a god of love, a god of the river on the other side of town, so why not a god of atheism? And it's not like he cares if his followers believe in him. Why would he? Their own disbelief feeds his power. The god of Christianity and the god of Islam are strong, supping upon so much faith, but there is no god that consumes so much as the one for whom belief and disbelief are the same. Better still, he doesn't have to play propaganda. If he doesn't care whether you worship, he sure doesn't care how you behave. Where the god of Judaism sent book after book of laws to get the world He wanted out of the little free-willed animals, the god of atheism only needs one thing: doubt. And doubt is to faith what shadow is to substance; the latter cannot exist without casting the former. So even if the entire world's population could be coerced into believing in deities, each little praying boy and girl would still feed him. Everyone who believes in anything is afraid that they're wrong. It's probably because he feeds on that fear that the god of atheism is so often mistaken for the Devil. Trust me, they're not the same, though they do eat lunch together more often than Moses and Jesus do.

Bathroom Monologue: But there are two hydrogen atoms to each one of oxygen...

"This is like the nature/nurture debate. It's insipid. Hey, your body is made up of organs, made up of cells, made up of molecules, made up of elements. The brain that stores nurtured features is natural. You're all-natural. But you're also all-nurtural. You couldn't speak language without nurture - you were taught words. You couldn't read novels, or write them. Human culture, invention, technology, science - the study of nature is a tradition, a product of the nurture-end. Our species gathering and synthesizing enough information on nature to have an opinion of how nature influences us is a product of nurture. To even have the discussion requires nurture, and to have nurture requires nature. You cannot separate nurture and nature and still have a person. Which one is essential? Both are! It's like arguing whether the hydrogen or oxygen atoms are more important to a water molecule: take either away, and you don't have water anymore. In fact, you may have fission. Ask Hiroshima how fun that is."

Bathroom Monologue: Ain't never gonna get another date with her

So this girl hounded me for weeks, said I didn't complain enough. Knew there had to be something wrong in my life that I was hiding. She complained all the time, and couldn't understand why I just wanted to kick my feet up and laugh. So one night I turned around and told her everything I don't usually talk about. It stopped her dead in her tracks. Stopped, she got to nagging on me. Said, "You spent a decade trying to fix it, couldn't and gave up? That's awful. How can you do that?" I put my feet up on the desk and said, "Like this." And she kept nagging. "That's like staying in Hell and saying you like the scenery." And I shrugged, "Well, the scenery is nice, but I stay for the company."

Bathroom Monologue: Got to write this idea out before someone steals it

The soundtrack of my life steals liberally from those anime shows with all the overdeveloped schoolgirls; you know, the really cheery, sugary songs that make you want to kill yourself. They don't make me suicidal. They just match my grin.

The soundtrack also has a lot of rock music in there. I've probably driven to "Them Bones" by Alice in Chains and "Live for the Moment" by Monster Magnet for more hours than I've listened to those songs on CD.

Every morning, my distinct opening theme is the anthem from the Godzilla movies. It's a wish fulfillment as hundreds of tons of mountainside (my blanket) slide off me and I begin my trek towards Tokyo (the bathroom). Oh, and the theme from Peanuts. That one occurs at least once a day in my life, even when I'm a pallbearer.

Some songs make more infrequent cameos. I'm pretty sure I've walked through Wal-Mart to the Imperial March from Star Wars. I know I’ve shoveled snow to the Uruk-Hai theme from Lord of the Rings (those Hobbits are probably in the next snow drift - why did we have to have an up-hill Moria?).

It's kind of funny that there's all that Seatbelts and Devin Townsend in the soundtrack of my life, given that I tend to write to Tchaikovsky or Mozart. Not that the playlist doesn't cycle to tracks from 28 Days Later and Silent Hill eventually - but hey, the background music from horror movies usually puts me in a good mood.

Good mood music is usually in the background when I'm shopping, walking or whatever else takes me out into public. Not on an iPod. Just on my soul (which I still need to upgrade). It's my contribution to a world that is overburdened with the sound of violins, or so the frowns of all those strangers sound to me.

Bathroom Monologue: There's only two things guaranteed in life: death and taxes

-Breathing
-Sleeping
-Eating
-Drinking
-Digestion
-Hope no one sees what you're doing
-Be at a point when you really should care about something (bank screwed up your balance yet again, girlfriend sleeping with your bestfriend, etc.), but don't
-Exaggerate
-Excretion
-Hold an incorrect opinion
-Come up with a clever retort hours after you lost the argument
-Think
-Feel
-Think or feel someone else is utterly stupid for not thinking or feeling the way you do
-Life

Bathroom Monologue: Peace of Mind

The ultimate swordsman was, of course, a woman. Violet Diamon was her name, and her sword was forged at the heart of the world. She taught the likes of Burning River and Egal Vineguard, but even her most heroic pupils fear their teacher. Violet claimed she could do anything with a sword, from cooking and painting, to balancing her checkbook and negotiating contracts. According to Burning River, she was particularly good at balancing her checkbook whenever she had the banker at swordpoint. There was no warrior of any gender or nationality who could bring her down; a draw in fencing against Violet was considered a great success. In fact, she was so wise in the ways of the blade that she could cut down a man without even unsheathing her sword. If there was one thing she could have changed about her life, she told her last pupils on her final night, it was, "that the whole sheathed striking technique was a metaphor for pacifism. Men."

Bathroom Monologue: Does anyone check these things?

More people can probably point out Superman and Lex Luthor than the Senate Pro Temps and the Speaker of the House. It's for this reason that I ask if anyone else has noticed a disturbing trend in our world. Gene Hackman, who played Lex Luthor in Superman 1, 2 and 4, is the spokesman for Lowes Home Improvement Centers and the Oppenheimer Funds investment firm. Now sure he's had other roles, but he isn't the only Lex Luthor who's gone on to become a spokesman for American values and low prices. Kevin Spacey, the Luthor of the recent Superman Returns, is the voice of Honda's commercials. He cut his girlfriend's breaklines in a 2006 movie, and yet he's still shilling these cars. Even Clancy Brown, who plotted to destroy the earth as the voice of Luthor in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited, was the voice of the Ridgeline commercials and the spokesman for Home Depot. Meanwhile, where are the Supermen? George Reeves, the Superman of the famous 1950's television series, killed himself. Christopher Reeve, our most iconic Superman actor, was paralyzed by a horse. How often does that freaking happen? How do the Lex Luthors become commercial icons and the Supermen fall from the sky? Does anyone check these things?