Bathroom Monologue: I’m not projecting on Homer here, so I don’t know what I’m really doing

HOMER,
OR,
I’m not projecting on Homer here, so I don’t know what I’m really doing

"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."

"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. 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..."

Bathroom Monologue: Adaptation

“The principle difference is that you want to make fairytales dark, and I want to make myths light. You make Little Red Riding Hood into a bleak murder story and Peter Pan an exercise in pedophilia; I make Jupiter into a lovable dolt, and turn ancient wars into sitcoms. You're fascinated with elevating the grim aspects of life and spreading them to regions where we've never seen them before. I'm fascinated with how stupid that is, and showing just that wherever your kind has already been. The winner of our little contest will be whoever outlives the other. The prize will be writing the loser’s biography.”

Bathroom Monologue: In the Blink

"My best friend is Splitsecond, a superhuman speedster. I'm pretty sure that he's faster than me, but he never runs at top speed on account of his asthma. It's funny, but when your molecules vibrate a million times quicker than everything else on the planet, you can outpace everybody else without breaking a sweat. One day, just for fun, we busted out the complete works of Shakespeare. Did the tragedies in under a minute. Shakespeare is very moving when you're speaking faster than sound can travel.

“He's a media whore. I've never gotten into that moral quagmire, but he's the millionaire, so what do I know? He's licensed his name and likeness to clothing, bicycles, and sports equipment (his shoes sell ridiculously well). There's a Splitsecond candybar. All granola and healthy energy, of course. His face is on one of those NASCARs, too. It never wins. I never let him live it down, either. How could you?

“I’m bulletproof, can fly, can see through walls or just plain punch through them, but Splitsecond is much more popular than me. He's a social critter. He basically leads the team and appears at every public event in his hometown - sometimes simultaneously. He's fast and showy about it. Can sign an autograph before you know you want it (and you will – they’re twenty bucks guaranteed on eBay, thirty if it’s on one of his million trading cards).

“He scored a hot wife, a man-hating Amazon. I don't know how they get along, considering one glance at a guy usually makes her snort smoke. Looking into her eyes makes you feel like a matador, and while he’s fast... he's kind of a twig. There's no question of who the boss in that marriage, and sometimes the way she yells at him, I wonder why she hasn't outright killed him yet. It may have something to do with her pet name for him: "My little vibrator." I try not to think about it. It's best not to."

Bathroom Monologue: Rebut if you will, rationalize as you like

"I love the unwashed masses for, no matter how much money I may make, I know I'm the lack of a shower and a day of hard labor away from being one of them. It's magnificent to see how little philosophy and so-called culture amounts to when tested under a lack of healthcare and an uncertainty over how you'll eat tomorrow. General fatigue destroys most intellectual abilities on its own. The people who think they're better because they have it better are... well, they're why public executions were so popular for so long. If the unwashed masses are dumb, then the washed elites are dumb, with accessories."

Bathroom Monologue: In the Name of “Love”

Love conquers all, but “All” is quite a lot. Sometimes it’s everything. Sometimes Love will reach out and conquer just a little bit of All, to show it can. This causes a Persian princess to fall for a thief from the streets. It causes Farmer Brown to kiss her cow. And in one case, it caused an Intergalactic Zombie Overlord, Kiz’Thral, to fall for a pious Warrior Maiden, Theresa. They met in college and bonded by despising each other in Philosophy 101. Philosophy class is a great place to meet girls, since the girls will bullshit every bit as much as the guys as they furiously to defend their lives’ values against logic’s ultimate points: that everything you hold dear is arbitrary and it sucks to be under the scrutiny of a tenured professor. The emotional ambiguity Philosophy 101 brings has caused more premarital sex than the condom. Kiz’Thral and Theresa went their separate ways after college. Kiz’Thral was infected with the sentient hyperplague and became a missionary of the dark forces. Theresa pursued the peace of the blade, the simple life and whatnot. But inevitably their paths crossed, and gee did they blush. And chat. And laugh about serious matters And bond. And bump. And now they’re living together in the central metropolis, another odd couple in Love’s scrapbook. The sitcom is coming this February.

Bathroom Monologue: The Family that ****s Together, Sticks Together, OR, Calm Down, It’s Pro-Sense of Humor.

For the newly formed Family Love Union, the rational argument against incest ended with the creation of the condom.

“Really, the only logical reason against incest is birth defects,” says Barnie Hownson. “The genes don’t match up, so you have an increased risk of mental or physical defects.” But today, his group claims, this argument doesn’t work. “We’ve got birth control pills, morning after pills, diaphragms, condoms, and a woman’s right to choose. Consenting brothers and sisters who want to try it don’t run that risk anymore.”

Drawn into a debate, incest-lobbyists ask for other potential objections. “It always boils down to ickyness. Me kissing my dad gives you the willies,” says Sally Hownson, Barnie’s sister. “Well lesbianism makes me gag, but I don’t have the right to stop them unless they’re doing it in public. What me, my brother and cousin do behind closed doors is every bit as private as what the president does with a hooker.”

Incest-lobbyists are also looking to file lawsuits on behalf of the government against all non-incestual couples who have children with genetically-caused disabilities, stating they are placing the same burden on the world as incestual parents, but doing it with much greater frequency. “There are perfectly healthy children born of intra-family marriages,” says one protestor. “It’s all a crapshoot. If we can’t play craps, then neither can they.”

The Family Love Union’s stance on fecalphilia is neutral.

The lobby recently threw down the gauntlet saying that if their lifestyle really was immoral, they demanded Congress pass a bill outlawing mothers kissing their children goodnight. One poster at a protest read, “No partial-birth abortions, no kisses good night!”

If the Hownsons and their hundreds of incestuous friends have one message, they want it to be this: “We don’t pass judgment on you for marrying strangers. Don’t judge us for being more practical.”

Bathroom Monologue: Highly Improbable

“The scientist that does not believe in miracles does not believe in probability. The scientist who does not believe in probability does not believe in mathematics or physics. The scientist who does not believe in mathematics or physics can get the fuck out of my lab. Miracles are the rare positive things, low in probability, still occurring. Get out of my lab and look around at the world. Then look through a telescope, and see if there are any observatories looking back at you from any of the planets you can see. When you've realized what it is to be a scientist, you can come back to my lab.”

Bathroom Monologue: Geniuses fall in love too, Frankie Lymon

[GARY in a pink pinstripe suit, SPIDER in a spandex superhero costume, and ARYANA, dressed in fur-lined Valkyrie armor. ARYANA’s broadsword is propped up against the restaurant window. SPIDER’s mask is pulled up to his nose, and he is sipping a strawberry milkshake through a curly straw.]

Aryana: Why are men such fools?
Gary: Because otherwise, we'd never fall in love with you.

[ARYANA punches GARY, knocking him out of the booth]

Spider: We’re not all so bad.
Aryana: I’m unconvinced.
Spider: It’s not like I haven’t had my heart broken.
Aryana: Yeah?
Spider: It feels like they tear it right through the ribs. You can feel the emotional hole bleeding.

[GARY climbs back into the booth]

Gary: Your girlfriend was dropped off a bridge by a maniac in bionic armor. It’s not like your breakup was anything like hers.
Aryana: Actually that’s frighteningly close to mine.

[ARYANA shoves GARY out of the booth again, then leans towards SPIDER]

Aryana: What was her name?
Spider: “Wind Rider,” ironically enough.
Aryana: That’s terrible.
Gary: [From off screen] On multiple levels.

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Bathroom Monologue: Gift Certificates, OR, Monologue at a GAP Bathroom

Stores love gift certificates. To you they’re goofy fun: $50 for $50? Maybe you get it on sale, and now it’s five bucks off. It’s free money! But it’s not free money to us, the stores. It’s not because you might lose it - then we got $45 for a tiny piece of plastic. Or maybe you’ll move to a place that doesn’t have our store. Or (check the fine print) maybe it’ll expire. Again, $45 for us. It’s free money that you’re giving freely to us. They make great gifts because half the time your friends and loved ones hate our store and won’t spend them. On the occasions when they (or you) spend that whopping $20 gift certificate, they’re guaranteed to be spending it on our goods, which we’re already selling at marked up prices. Even everyday low priced items are sold at a profit. Plus you never spend $20 even. If you buy an $80 shirt with your $50 certificate, you had to drop $30 out of pocket, and if you spend it at the same store, that store nets $80. If not, it splits it $30/$50 with the other store in the same franchise. We win.

Bathroom Monologue: Oh yes I did

“Hey, what’s it when you write like through your own perspective instead of detached and stuff?”
“Who was Adam supposed to be?”
“What?”
“First person.”

Bathroom Monologue: Rorschark Attack

An anonymous Washington D.C. Rationalist Think Tank was on holiday at the undisclosed beach that day. Three rationalists saw it break the surface. Tammy saw a deck of playing cards. Guido saw a platter of fried shrimp. Ironically only one of the rationalists, Virginia Welsley saw that it was a shark fin. Even more ironically, she was the only one of them in the water.

She swam like Hell. Tammy would attest that the shark went straight after Virginia, while Guido swears it swam in the opposite direction. Other beach-goers looked when they heard the screams, but the majority said they didn’t see a shark at all (while three saw an ice cream truck treading water behind Virginia).

When Virginia looked over her shoulder mid-breaststroke, she saw the gaping jaws of her third grade Math teacher – the one who always put impossible bonus questions at the end of his quizzes, presumably just to watch his pupils struggle and fail. That pungent memory felt apt as she swam for her life, and even more apt when she was seized in the middle-aged Math teacher’s jaws.

She was fortunate enough to awake, alive, in the local ICU. Apparently the shark had nearly ripped her in half. After much fighting with her doctors she was allowed to see the damage the shark had done to her torso. When the medical technician removed the bandages so that she could see the marks he instantly stepped back and crossed himself.

“It’s the Blessed Mother!” he exclaimed, looking at the bizarre shape of her bite wounds. She frowned at him and looked down.

“No it isn’t.” she said disdainfully. Then she squinted at the sutures. “Is… is that a Ferris wheel?”

Bathroom Monologue: Very difficult to believe in oneself, but not in the oncoming S.U.V. doing 75 MPH in a school zone

Solipsism is a very difficult concept to politicize since any given solipsist doesn’t believe others exist. Very difficult to get people who don’t believe in each other to take numbers, stand in line or wait their turns to speak. But the National Solipsist Party is made up of liberal solipsists who are at least willing to tolerate the delusion of reality all around them. The National Solipsist Party rejects any applicants who are only minor solipsists, believing consciousness originates in the mind but that the rest of the world is still knowable to some degree. They want as devoted a crew as can still function. The N.S.P. is an understandably anarchistic group, with positions against all forms of government that directly affect them, such as selective service and the I.R.S. They claim to be against social security as well, as it anticipates a future that none of them is certain will come, but the party heads are willing to admit that, “it’s a little lower on our list of priorities.”

Bathroom Monologue: Backed Up

Bakton was a city of some one thousand and five hundred people with two sheriffs. Considering Bakton was a brewery town, the sheriffs were overworked, and hence they were liberal to dub people deputies. Their first, Gene, was deputized on the sheriffs' first day on the job when they were giving him a friendly ride to his flophouse and stumbled across a robbery. They went in and foiled the robbers, but had Gene not been waiting outside blocking the door, the gunman would have gotten away. Instead he ran away without looking and rammed full-speed into him, knocking the wind out of Gene, and just plain knocking himself out. When Gene caught his breath, he was handed a badge. Most of his career was spent guarding an exit and helping old ladies across the street, but it was still powerfully nice of him. He saved on bills by sleeping in the empty cells at the jail instead of renting a room; on the nights when there were no free cells, he was too busy to sleep anyway. He was the first at the station when they needed help, the first they called into the car for an emergency, and the first they handed a beer to on Friday. He was the first to save a sheriff's life when he jumped on a bandit's pistol. He was the first the sheriff's department recommended to the academy, and the first to turn the academy down. Why? He didn't think the job would suit him.

Bathroom Monologue: Whatever Works

"The human gets tired when he works? Why? That makes no sense. Why would his evolution let that happen? Being tired is not fun, and certainly a poor reward for labor. He needs to do more labor to out-compete his competition. And mental fatigue is dangerous when you are working. To get weaker and more wandery of mind as you do physical tasks goes against practicality. You should get stronger the more you do something, like us! You should get more perceptive. That would be an incentive for productivity. What does the human do when he works and works and works? ...He sleeps? But it’s such a waste of time. Kills a third of a day. We sleep when we don’t work enough, and we find work in order to avoid it. Why would sleep be an effective incentive? He… dreams? What’s a ‘dream?’"

Bathroom Monologue: 'Till Armageddon do you Part

The Golden Emperor and the Jade Empress weren't the first human beings to be elevated to godly status after death, but a thousand years later they would be the most famous. This was because they were the best at projecting images. Each only had one rival: the other. No one but the Jade Empress would contradict the Golden Emperor. No one would remain seated when the Jade Empress entered a room, save the Golden Emperor. Their feisty marriage was one of the quirks that turned them from mortal people to immortal legends.

Their empire stretching from sea-to-sea helped a little.

They tapped into the knowledge of the time; theirs was the first culture to discover pollination in plants. Theirs was a culture that exploded the importance of male and female elements of nature and society. The Golden Emperor and Jade Empress quickly came to embody the two halves of nature: the father and the mother. Even the materials of their namesakes symbolized the two great aspects of life. Gold represented the sun, the source of life energy. Jade represented flora, in the grass and trees of the country that fed the livestock, which in turn fed all humanity. One gave life unto the other, and the other grew life unto the former.

They were infallible. They never lost face to anyone else in a debate, or fencing practice. There was no record of dissidence within the capital. The few insurrections in the country went down as villainous, but this was because insurrections were vilified. Dissidents were dissuaded or assassinated. Keeping their reputations spotless in the time and historical record was hard work – not for the two rulers, but for their gaggles of supporters.

Jangs, a court retainer so portly one poet referred to him as “The Sphere,” was in charge of the Golden Emperor’s reputation. He was followed everywhere by highly trained ninja who could strangle a disobedient warlord without even becoming visible. They were, by and large, Jangs’ political leverage. They were necessary leverage, for Jangs’ work wasn’t all strong-arming rogue philosophers and flower arrangement. Often he was dispatched to the wilderness to retrieve an imperial stamp, or to keep three hundred barbaric nutcases from turning a narrow pass in the mountains into a bloody embarrassment to the throne. The Golden Emperor’s immortal reputation is testament to how good Jangs was. All of his deeds went unsung, but those who knew him know he worked very hard – especially against the plots of the Jade Empress. She was a conniving, vindictive wife, and worse, she had better staff.

Bathroom Monologue: Have you ever been so tired that you...?

-Dropped your keys in the toilet, reached down to get then, then midway decided to close the lid instead to keep them safe?
-Opened the medicine cabinet, and seconds later looked inside for your reflection?
-Drove five miles with your left blinker on?
-Drove ten miles with your left blinker on?
-Argued with the police officer that your left blinker was not on?
-Daydreamed about napping?
-Put the ice cream in the cupboard and the crackers in the freezer, and when you sensed something was amiss you switched the boxes of baking soda?
-Were prepared to retire and give up all your worldly possessions to lead a life of sitting in this wonderful recliner?
-Stared at a tree out the window, trying to mentally chart how it could have grown such that its limbs looked exactly like that, rather than go through the effort of finding the remote for the TV?
-Remained in bed hoping to fall back asleep despite you bladder threatening to burst like a water balloon in the grip of an ADD-addled preschooler?
-Smelled dinner burning, and elected to give the taste of char a chance?
-Took an unbiased view of sex and concluded the pursuit was needlessly complicated, degrading, expensive, and otherwise not worth the pleasure of the squirt?
-Actually sat through the nightly news?

Bathroom Monologues: The Product of Three Trips to the Bathroom

One of many clichés in need of obliteration is that of the sheep. The sheep is the person who follows something without question, which is rather unkind to shepherds, whose jobs can be a lot harder than this analogy gives them credit. Politicians are rarely fired when a couple of their voters stray away from the ideology and are mauled by mountain lions.

While people are unlikely to stray away from an idea and into the path of wild animals, they do assume many things as part of the herd-mentality of society. All human culture is made up of individuals following patterns that they perceive others are following, sometimes adding variations that may seem radical up close, but are miniscule in the grand scheme. The man who refuses to do anything that everyone else does will have to babble in nonsense, as words no longer mean what we tell him they do. He’ll die of the first harsh ailment that strikes him. Modern medicine and the scientific method are, after all, well-dressed sheep mentality.

Are you a “sheep” for not questioning why 2 + 2 will always equal 4? Are you a “sheep” for thinking that there are seven days in a week? No. True, the week is an arbitrary invention of humans, but all ignoring the existence of Monday will get you is fired.

The sheep label developed in part to avoid having to deal with individuals. Everyone comes to his or her conclusions based on experiences, reasons and intuitions, and even their seemingly most arbitrary decisions can have quite complex origins. However, dealing with everyone who comes to one view as a general crowd avoids the responsibility of dealing with individuals. You don’t have to actually know anything but a few statistics about the person, don’t have to form any kind of relationship or truly care beyond a blind anger directed at strangers - a group, a mass, a glob of people who, you can convince yourself, don't even think. They're barely even people. If dehumanization is possible, this seems like one of the places from which it springs.

Sheephood has little to do with not thinking for yourself and almost everything to do with not coming to the conclusions the speaker desires. If you were smarter, you see, you wouldn’t follow whoever you’re following (even if you’re following your own conscience), and instead would follow the speaker. One political pundit calls the millions of people who hold the opposing view “sheep.” Those who hold her views aren’t sheep. They’re bright chaps. They thought for themselves, even if their thoughts sound spuriously similar to the way the pundit put them. Such smart, unsheeply people, who will never realize they are being sheered because, of course, they aren’t sheep. They are independent, freethinking human beings who are proudly superior to those sheep over there.

(I don’t mean to become such a shepherd-pundit, but I must point out that thinking there are only two sides to anything is highly sheepish)

The loss of the sheep cliché, as a word and as a concept, would be scary for those who rely on it. They couldn’t dismiss blocks of people anymore. It’s very comforting to homogenize those who disagree with you, especially as it allows you to disregard them. It seems almost essential when running things like social sciences or federal politics, at which points you couldn’t possibly have deep personal interactions with all your subjects, least of all with the ones you dislike. But that’s a flaw in their systems, not a virtue.

Every leader follows myriads of other people. Every great original thinker is barely different from his peers, as bold and brave as that slim distance may be. Everyone in society is a sheep, but we’re also other forms of mammals that you might find more interesting. How human beings are like the pachyderm, for instance, I find downright charming.

Bathroom Monologue: Entertainmentalists

They believe earth is a sitcom. The situation for comedy? A planet with life on it. A quick survey of the solar system shows this to be a novel concept. But the lack of other planets with life shows the unpopularity of the sitcom, or so says Margo Quentin of the Entertainmentalist party.

“If we were a good show, more similar planets would be created. Rip-offs, knock-offs, spin-offs, you know. Being alone in the cosmos proves we’re a dull show.”

Entertainmentalists suggest that what we’ve done is boring the audience. What have we done? A lot of famine, and a lot of war. Not much of it is very funny. Perhaps the time Maine declared on Canada is chuckle-worthy in hindsight, but human history is mainly bleak, and so, the Entertainmentalists argue, we don’t have many viewers.

“We’ve got to break out of our rut,” says Ms. Quentin. “We need to be funny in order to pick up the ratings. We need our sense of humor. Consider every empty planet to be a Nielson home that’s watching something else, or worse, has the TV set off. You being so serious about everything is essentially keeping the universe from watching.”

(All "Perspectives" are dedicated to Tim Meadows.)

Bathroom Monologue: Bright Boy

“The boy brought a cheat sheet to an eye exam. Printed it on the inside of his eyelids. An’ he still failed. He figured he’d get bored of looking at A D X R V D the rest of his blinking life, so he had a nekkid girl printed on there to them. Come the eye exam, he got all... distracted. And failed. Became a narcoleptic shortly thereafter, I hear.”

Bathroom Monologue: Intentionally Mishearing Queen's "Princes of the Universe"

I am a portal,
I have within me lots of things,
Yeah! Yeah!
I have no rival,
no man can steal my key code,
I’ll take you to the future of you all!

Bathroom Monologue: Serenity Now

War brought about world peace in the end. It was unexpected, to say the least, but it was true. The peace was total. No one cried. No one went hungry. No one suffered the ideology of another. There were no issues of tolerance. There were no clarion calls of war; indeed, there was no noise at all, or at least no ears to hear the noise. It was not the world peace that the people who deemed themselves "the world" wanted, but they got it. Violence begat perfect non-violence when it finally emptied the planet.

Bathroom Monologues: Enjoy the Festivities

“Festivals are about the people. Get out and celebrate them if you’ve got them. They aren’t about sitting inside and watching the TV special, unless you’re watching it with other people. They aren’t about the discounts at the store, unless you’re buying it for somebody else (or somebody else is buying it for you). Festivals can’t be about the harvest. The harvest is food, and it’s stupid to throw a party for something you’ll be shitting out tomorrow. Festivals can’t be about events; events are things people do, or things that happen to people; and in either case, events remain about people. Festivals can’t be about the gods. Festivals are about the people. Gods are about the people. “About” can mean “around” or “for.” If the gods aren’t for the people or around the people, they don’t deserve a festival, and if the festival is around for the people, it serves the gods. Festivals can be inspired by food, fortune, and gods, but they are here for you. Always bring it back to the people in your life, to loved ones and strangers, and enjoy.”

Bathroom Monologue: Meteors, Asteroids, Comets – You Have Them? We’ll Buy Them.

It's been brought to my attention that the KT impact, which wiped out the dinosaurs and destroyed the environment some 65,000,000 years ago, was caused by a single three-mile-wide asteroid. When I heard this, it hit me – we need to stop putting all our money into nuclear weapons, and start funding huge rocks. We’ve got miles and miles of stone that’s currently only serving as boring scenery next to highways, but if this goes right, soon we’ll have a giant slab of asphalt hanging from a satellite directly above the U.N. Let’s see them kick us off the Security Council when we’re dangling a man-made meteor over their toupees. And why stop at three miles wide? We’re not using Montana for anything, and I’m sure Alaska will part with a couple of the Aleutian Islands. Why build a missile silo on an island when you can turn the island into a projectile? This level of destructive force wiped out all dominant life forms on the planet last time, and in our hands? I don’t see how it can go wrong.

Bathroom Monologue: It’s “MP3 Player of Middle Eastern Descent,” thank you very much

Gary and Samid came up with the plan. They called everyone they knew, including everyone at Samid’s mosque. Most of them weren’t impressed, but thankfully a lot of the younger guys were into it. Come Monday morning they would re-brand “iPod” as a dirty word. You see, Gary and Samid had realized the nature of profane words while playing pokler on Friday. Specifically as they used them to jab at each other. “Fuck” was just one of many words for procreation. “Shit” was just one of many words for fecal matter. Why were they bad? Because angry people said so for a long enough time. And people were particularly sensitive to racially sensitive words. Since Islam was still hazy to most politically correct Americans there was the opporunity to introduce new forbidden words from that culture and insist no one say them anywhere. New forbidden words like the ancient Arabic word for an unwashed, uneducated heathen, used for centuries as the most caustic slur against Muslim slaves – “Ay Pahd.” According to Gary and Samid it was a millennia old, even if it really dated back to a drunken conversation in a New Jersey suburb. But if they showed enough outrage, and got enough brown-skinned people to play along, they might have an anti-hate speech suit against Apple by August.

Bathroom Monologue: What do you say when someone coughs?

“Bless you” is an interesting little saying. It’s replaced, “God bless you,” making it almost as secular as a toothbrush or signaling to change lanes. People don’t even pay attention when they say the “blessing” part. This phrase was originally contrived as a spell against the heart attack thought to follow a sneeze (or so numerous people have told me, all singularly proud in their knowledge). The intent has fallen out of the public mind. Today saying, “Bless you,” after a sneeze has everything to do with a momentary extension of good will that is not particularly connoted by its words and not necessitated by its situation. It is a peculiar wonder in our increasingly insular and seemingly selfish society; it is an example of needless kindness. We need a great deal more kindness in the world, and this rare example of needlessly contributing may just help solve our deficit. The saying doesn’t force you to convert, defend your belief structure or scoff. And really, you shouldn’t do anything so caustic – you owe the speaker a debt of gratitude, if not for the momentary verbal kindness, then because he didn’t clock you for sneezing on him.

Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Sentences

-Vampires invented “Welcome” mats as a trick not just getting you to unwittingly invite them in, but to pay them for the opportunity.
-To conserve resources, sensory deprivation chambers will now be two people to a unit.
-Most things charged to Logic's account are fraudulent claims made by Sweeping Generalizations, who stole her pin number.
-“In this painting he appears to be force-feeding her a banana—OH GOD!”
-He had the expression of a physicist who has just accidentally disproved gravity.
-Stephen King is rolling over in his grave, largely because he's not dead and struggling to escape.
-“Funnier than a paraplegic grinning around a condom.”
-He who knows no bounds falls off a cliff.
-“How pretentious of a minister to tell us how to live our lives,” we say, pretending we don’t think we know how he should live his.
-Mr. Guillotine was ejected from the carnival after he got too into Whack-A-Mole and tried to pull one of them out of its hole for saying something disparaging about his mother.
-When you consider my misanthropy under the light that I am human, you’ll understand that my humility isn’t false at all.
-Falling is like flying until you hit the ground.
-Hiphop is not only dead, but vivified as a zombie that feasts on the flesh of living culture.
-The agnostic is a heretic to Islam, the anarchist is a heretic to democracy, but the individual is a heretic to everyone.
-Science is a bitch to Religion, but to be fair, Religion did beat her when they were married.
-“If you’re bipolar, please switch to the other pole.”
-Minimalism.
- He got the abridged audiobook, but it felt too much like cheating, so he listened to it twice to even things out.
-Octology: A new belief system positing that sports are actually defense mechanisms.
-Life is a series of “but,” “and,” the occasional “therefore,” and every so often, a “now.”
-“You seem to be arguing that the holes disprove the existence of the Swiss cheese.”
-"The orthodox believed the world would end in the year 1,000 or 2,000 because, apparently, God really fucking hated round numbers."
-The most painful part of scholarly studies is learning that people far smarter than you disagree with you.
-The most relieving part of scholarly studies is discovering that people far smarter than you disagree with each other.
-Real maturity is recognizing the overwhelming majority of what culture defines as maturity is conformist idiocy with which only the immature would comply.
-We knew the end was nigh when Richardson reached for the power switch and the supercomputer asked, “WHERE DO I GO WHEN YOU TURN ME OFF?”

Bathroom Monologue: Methods of Transport

Horses were the cars of the 18th century. People switched from horses to cars because when a car has to stop for gas, the passengers don’t throw up. People also jumped to cars because they had multiple “horsepower.” Every attempt to increase the horsepower of a horse, by grafting additional legs onto it or feeding it caffeine, tended to fail and kill and the mode of transportation. So the horse was left behind for the automobile, and years passed. The car was intelligently designed, growing bigger and faster. The horse evolved, growing smarter. Horses attained speech in time to ask humans what they were thinking in sticking to the combustion engine, just before the environment collapsed and killed them both. Fortunately the car was advanced enough by this point to run things without them. Unfortunately, it was not advanced enough to appreciate the irony of the earth’s new dominant species being the Ford Mustang.

“Mowing the Lawn” Monologue

Karma is Communist, not Capitalist. Christianity is Capitalist, which explains why Europe and North America exploited the world economy so well. In Christianity you get the Heaven you want if you earn it – you’ve got to do good works, think good thoughts, and most of all, save. Those are your assets in this economy.

Karma does not work that way. It is not designed to give you what you want; it gives you what the system has. What you get in return for good work is positive, like a tractor or a leggy blonde. Unfortunately the gift isn't always useful for your particular circumstance. So Communist Karma may yield a tractor to an accountant rather than to a farmer. You cannot alter or direct Karma with prayer; the only thing prayer ever got anyone in Communism is shot. You can hope, though, that you get the leggy blonde instead of the tractor. According my bi-curious Buddhist buddies, the leggy blonde is a universal positive.

Bathroom Monologue: Electroedipal

"Cloning will unite our Freudian impulses. Currently you want to have sex with your mother and kill your father. Once we start cloning there will only be one parent, who you'll both want to fuck and kill. It'll be like a real girlfriend."