Bathroom Monologue: Something About Magnets

Following his third book on the literary canon, the one about magnetic fiction, Ken Redder was heralded as “the Einstein of English.” Mr. Redder sniffed at the accolade, refusing to have it printed on his paperback covers, even though it would have attracted readers. A couple of years later a journalist finally asked him why he disliked such a generous comparison. He responded, “Albert Einstein didn’t think his universe was expanding.”

Bathroom Monologue: It’s funnier when you take into account that the author is human

When humanity finally grabbed control of time and propelled itself backwards to indulge in physical anachronism, they appeared. They were blindingly brilliant, and they stopped humanity with a push to the chest.

"Hold there."

"Are you... God?" The humans asked, suddenly wishing they’d solved world hunger instead of creating time travel.

"No, no. Well, part of what you call 'God.' But you are, too. We're simply a better part."

"What part are we?"

"Do you know what toenails are?"

"We are not God's toenails!"

"No, no. You're the stuff that turns them yellow."

Bathroom Monologue: Keyboard Psychology

There is a new (and highly dubious) intellectual pursuit of psychoanalyzing the dead based on biographical information. As we read their letters or find signs of syphilis in their bones, specialists pretend to know more about the truth of their minds. Sometimes it’s hilarious, such as the modern revelation that Aesop (of Fables fame) wasn’t a real person. We seem to know more about the ancient world as we get further away from it by looking at things the ancient world had but didn’t care about. If an psycho-anthropologist finds your shoes in a thousand years, she may divine more about your personality than your current neighbors.

If I died tomorrow, I wonder how someone would psychoanalyze this keyboard. There are certain letters I use far more than others – I can tell because several of the keys are almost worn blank. The ‘N’ key is completely blank, and the ‘O’ is almost completely gone, which leaves me thinking I’m a very negative person who’s typed “No” far more than “Yes.”

Of ‘Y,’ ‘E,’ and, ‘S,’ only the ‘S’ is fading, and it’s still in identifiable shape. Its neighbor, the ‘A’ key, has faded to one slanted line, heading northeast. Similarly, the ‘N’ key’s neighbor, ‘M,’ is just a vertical line now. I guess those two regions have high activity. Perhaps my hands rest on the periphery of the board. The ‘L’ key is also coming apart, which supports this pre-posthumous theory. But what doesn’t explain why the ‘H’ key is going to Hell. Oh… right, “H-E-L-L.”

Well, that explains that mystery. Frankly, I’m surprised the ‘F,’ ‘U,’ ‘C,’ and, ‘K’ keys haven’t broken off yet.

Bathroom Monologue: Excerpts from Prometheus' Help Column

-"If your wife doesn't mind you hanging out late with your friends, you've picked the wrong friends."
-"Point scientific developments away from the hands and face."
-"If you want good advice, don't ask the guy whose life decisions had him pinned down and pecked at by birds for eternity."
-"Leaders should be chosen on an alcoholic scale. At the apex of the scale is whether you'd like to have a drink with him. At the bottom of the scale is your desire to drink at his funeral. Aim for the middle, straying a little towards the side where he's paying the tab."
-"When is Hercules getting here?"
-"Life is a trilogy... long, drawn out, and the worst part seeming to be whichever third of it you're reading. Also, Gandalf doesn't really die. He, representing your insecurities since he rides the fastest horse, comes back in the middle and is with you to the end. Bet you've never thought of your self-esteem as a Balrog before."
-"The movie is never like the book because if the author had any sense, he'd be a director."
-"If you're going to defy the gods, learn lock picking first."
-"A light saber is neither a saber, nor is it made out of light. Discuss amongst yourselves."

Bathroom Monologue: "Too hot for the internet!" -stupid ad

There is nothing too hot for the internet. They put the ingredients for napalm and dirty bombs on geocities! The first time a guy got the idea to cornhole a puppy, he got that idea from photos he saw on the internet. Interracial threeways where one of the races is Uruk'Hai are on the internet. People blame Jews for the Holocaust on the internet. People post the inane crap they rambled in the bathroom on the internet! This is the home of journalism without accountability and free seven-day trial periods in beastiality websites. There is nothing too hot for it. You could install an energy converter that would cause the radiance of the sun to blast from the monitors of anyone who visited your site, frying all your customers to a crisp. And the web? It would laugh at them for not getting the right spyware protection.

Bathroom Monologue: Personally, I'm praying for a 360

Contrary to common sense of uncommon people, Prometheus did give fire to humanity. However, his fire did not go to great use. He descended from the clouds and handed to a man. The man was so excited that he slipped, fell and burned to death in that very fire. With no one else around, the fire burned itself out. It was several hundred years later that humanity discovered fire on its own. It didn't invent it, but found it in the middle of the wilderness. The gods offered to let Prometheus take credit for this one, too, but he couldn't be bothered. He was working on the Nintendo DS at the time. Seeing how they'd handled fire, Prometheus was going to play with this one for a while before he gave it away.

Bathroom Monologue: Good, Hard Man

Goro Kusowa is a good man. Used to be a hard man.

He was en route to being a police officer. He went through the whole five weeks at the slaughterhouse, smashing skulls and slitting throats. The point was to desensitize a potential officer, so that when they had to kill they wouldn’t hesitate so much.

Well, part of the point. The other part was giving the slaughterhouse five weeks of free labor, and the kickbacks it earned the police chief.

Regardless, the ritual separated the men from the meek. People quit. Strong men, men who could survive a riot, made it five weeks cutting bovine throats.

Goro made it five weeks without a flinch. Even the owner of the factory called his attitude inhuman. Goro made nothing of it, washed his hands, and spent the week vacation helping his dad on the family farm.

Seems his dad had a horrible accident. Cut himself up bad. Goro had to operate on him, with next to no experience. Had to perform surgery on his dad right there on the kitchen table, bleeding into his sister’s peach cobbler. You couldn’t wish that on anyone. And Goro had no experience at it, so Mr. Kusowa died.

Goro couldn’t take much of anything after that. Couldn’t go back to the slaughterhouse. Couldn’t go back to the academy. Couldn’t put a sword in his belt, or keep his hand straight to button his shirt. His sister had to cut his dinner up for him, and holding a fork made him sweat like the summer had come early.

Didn’t talk in his sleep, but muttered much while he was awake. Sister kept catching him calling himself a murderer. He didn’t murder his father, but that failure was every bit as bad as a murder attempt. That did him. Morals didn’t matter. You see, morals are something humans made up. Ain’t no other way about. Dirt’s real. Leather’s real. Morals are in your head and they get twisted like thoughts. Maybe they are thoughts, or they’re the flavors thoughts come in. Convincing somebody of a moral is like convincing them a ghost’s in the oven. What matters is what moves you. What does you. And Goro’s father dying while he was holding the knives did Goro.

Soon as he buried his father he sent in notice, quitting the academy. He became a monk, but wouldn’t even shave his head. His sister had to shave it for him, just as she’d dug the grave and wrote the letter of resignation. She had to hold the razor, the shovel and the pen. All were mightier than he. She’s probably got to butter his bread for him, and you know a man that husky takes butter on his bread.

Instead of police work, that hard, hard man took up basket weaving. Sells them on the side of the road near his house. Near his sister’s house, that is. Don’t think he’s ever traveled more than a hundred miles from it since.

He’s a good man, though. He yokes the oxen for her, and tends to the fields. They seem to like him, and he doesn’t flinch around them.

Bathroom Monologue: Inspired by Diarrhea, the Bathroom Internal Monologue

Alright, clearing my mind. Nothing will be in here, not even a pumpkin. The grey pillars pull back to reveal empty space. Pure white, nothing at -- a pumpkin?!! Oh crap, there's a giant pumpkin in the middle of my zen!

It's okay. I'll just clear my mind again, summon the void and -- the damn pumpkin's back. What would Jung say? Clearly this symbol wants to emerge. What does it represent?

It's grinning at me. Or is it grinning with me? Do the three teeth in its mouth symbolize anything? They're square -- wait, it's not a pumpkin. It's a jack o'lantern that I've been calling by the wrong name. Does that disconnect indicate something? It's a smiling jack o'lantern that I'm calling by the wrong word. A word that represents an undamaged, untampered-with plant, rather than something that has been turned into art.

It's also a fucking jack o'lantern.

Maybe my subconscious is commenting on my obsession with accurate language? Is my subconscious telling me to lighten up? But subconscious, I have a website where I log all the stuff I improvised on the toilet! How could I possibly need to lighten up? Explain yourself, imaginary pumpkin!

Bathroom Monologue: Ogre-Brained, Or, “And chances are that your kids are not getting enough art —in or out of school.” –Americans for the Arts ad

They didn’t know where the ogre came from. Some of the village children said they saw him walk out of a forest from east of the hills, but when the adults went to look, there was no forest to see. What they did see was a fifteen-foote ogre with shale for skin and shite for brains. He could only remember one word at a time, and for the first few weeks all he said was, “Moose.” The village people had no idea why. They had practical ideas, though. Since he was such a docile monster, they put a harness on him, dangled a turnip in front of his face from a fishing line, directed him through the fields. After dozens of man-hours of labor he captured his turnip and one of the village children replaced it with a drawing a moose. It tripled his productivity. He really wanted that drawing. The drawing saved him from being classified as livestock, for one day while chasing it and dragging the plough he changed his favorite word changed from “Moose” to “Paper.”

Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Monologues Brought to you by: Cherry Coca Cola, Dell & John’s Insecurities

TV commercials, radio commercials, commercials before movies, posters on walls, billboards on highways, logos on t-shirts, telemarketing, junk mail, spam e-mail, pop-up ads on the net, catchy slogans entering common speech, advertising kept getting more invasive until Lowe's Home Improvement paid to have a 36 square foot advertisement on at least one wall in every new house. Stuck to each billboard-wall was a 25% off coupon for one can of paint, with which you could cover up to eyesore.

Sadly, it worked. Lowe's Company Inc. stock (LOW) went up 11% the first quarter alone.

Microsoft and Sony started broadcasting subliminal advertisements at low brain frequencies to influence the dreams of tomorrow’s gamers. Medical technology companies paid surgeons to place a small radioactive tattoo on the major organs of their patients, so that they’d be reminded what brand of device had saved them during every x-ray for the rest of their lives.

Things got so bad that Budweiser, used to throwing their logo onto loud, confusing, violent events, sponsored the apocalypse. It was blasphemous and cloyingly advertised. But the worst thing (aside from the planetary genocide) is that people went out and bought Budweiser, in bulk, hoping to appease the ad execs in the sky and save themselves from the catastrophe, or at least get into Heaven. Boy, were they red-faced when it turned out the afterlife wasn’t determined by how much you drank, but how much you recycled.

Bathroom Monologue: Braino'd

Anyone who types for a worthwhile amount of time recognizes the typo and the braino. The introduction of the keyboard made dumb errors more possible, but I’m certain that Shakespeare scribbled a spelling error now and then (given how vowels traveled and disappeared in written English back then, they properly had “yee olde” courtesy not to point it out and just assimilated them as alternate spellings).

Today, a typo is "tp" instead of "to." A braino is "too" instead of "to." You know the difference between these words. You know when to use them. Sometimes your brain fumbles, just like your fingers do. There's no reason to be embarrassed about it. Sometimes I've braino'd entire sentences out of existence, giving me the paragraph-sized embarrassment you get out of writing “too” instead of “two.”

I spell these things “typo’d” and “braino’d” with apostrophes instead of traditional pluralization as a tribute to the nature of the typo and braino. Like the little toe and being unable to sneeze and urinate at the same time, these are the human experience’s ways of telling us to stay humble.

Bathroom Monologue: Cancer is the One Shaped Like a Crab

“Ralph and I liked to play an awful joke on people. You see we’ve got neuromuscular syndromes the doctors haven’t even named yet. His will probably be Ralph Syndrome, if his doctor doesn’t steal it and name it for himself. But these syndromes cause us excruciating pain, wreck our immune systems, and if we don’t take our pills, we shake like fish out of water. It’s a fight just to appear normal, and since you can’t point out your neuromuscular system on a skeleton, everyone thinks we’re making it up. Instead, we say we’ve got cancer. Cancer is horrible, so horrible that it’s got an amazing social debit account. You can blame anything on it. One time Ralph was spazzing in the bus depot and I accidentally said he had cancer. My tongue slipped. The thing is, everybody turned helpful. Cancer doesn’t do that to somebody, but the mere word gave everyone sympathy – the sympathy they probably should have had for him anyway. Then things got away from us. We mentioned dying of cancer at this one restaurant, then noticed free desserts coming our way. Free rounds at bars, too. One time a guy drove Ralph and me all the way home, from out of state, thinking I had kidney cancer. I don’t know if all people with cancer get this treatment (maybe they get it by claiming they have neuromuscular disorders), but I hope so. I know I always buy rounds for anyone coming out of the hospital, so long as they aren’t coming off a liver transplant. This one’s on me, too.”

Bathroom Monologue: War and Peace and Comics

Allow me to explain the problem with comic books. It is not the costumes, superpowers or unrealistic body types. Achilles is pretty much naked for two-thirds of The Iliad, then puts on some heavenly jammies his mother got him. Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis features a man who turns into a giant bug for no explained reason (which makes Spider-Man plagiarism of great 20th century lit). What is wrong lies in the writers.

“Writers,” you may note, is the plural of, "writer."

Imagine if Leo Tolstoy wrote the first hundred pages of War and Peace, then turned it over to Fyodor Dostoyevsky for fifty pages. After a falling out around page 42 of his contract, Dostoyevsky is replaced by Aleksandhr Solzhenitsyn, who manages a stable run for a record-setting 150 pages. Each writer is a total literary genius with his (or her) own vision for literature and for War and Peace. None of them has any more authority over the other outside of the ability to write an angry letter that the newest chapter ruined Helene's character or made too much of Pierre's nihilism.

And all of this is edited by Joe Quesada, a self-professed die hard fan of Tolstoy’s early work on the book, but a man who recognizes that War and Peace needs “to be modernized” and “become more topical.” His editing means that he shepherds the entire writing process. He is governed mostly by sales, such that if chapters aren’t selling well he can pressure the current author to add more cliffhangers, sex and fight scenes. These genius writers have all the freedom that the editor feels like giving them. Quesada controls everything without ever writing any of it, and he can shift in new writers, such that Solzhenitsyn's chapters are followed up with a four-chapter story arc from Anton Chekhov, and then Aleksandr Pushkin, and then Dean Koontz.

And then we hit the Annual. At the end of the first year of War and Peace we get a bonus-sized Annual issue, not linked to the previous page, but its own story by its own writer, in some way related to Napolean's campaign. And because the regular author is behind schedule and busy, the Annual is written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But Marquez didn't read anything after Tolstoy quit the book (he prefers independent comics), so his story is set back on page 90, even though it will be printed somewhere on page 320. He seeds plot threads that no one else even thought of, though Quesada will order Chekhov to reference them from now on. Now perhaps American secret agents are dispersed throughout the war trying to sabotage Russia's efforts, and God actually makes a cameo to rebut one of Pierre's diatribes. After all, Marquez was told to experiment and have fun with the Annual issue of this masterpiece.

Another Annual featuring another all-star writer will appear every year until War and Peace is done (Boris Pasternak for Annual #2, Marcel Proust for Annual #3, and a tentative contract with Gertrude Stein to fill in some of the later annuals).

If Quesada turns this novel around so that it sells well, it will not end where Tolstoy intended. It could go on for decades, and there could be spin-offs. You see, War and Peace is doing so well that other ongoing novels, such as War and More War, War and Peace: Xtreme, and Bolkonsky Vs. Predator, will begin over the next year. They will have strong creative direction at first (Ayn Rand is very devoted to Xtreme), but will get similar creative shifts shortly thereafter. And as these expansive novels continue, some chapters will randomly crossover with the events of the original War and Peace, though you won’t really be able to understand what either set of characters is doing in these interactions unless you’re reading both novels simultaneously. Some stories flow like: War and Peace chapter 99, War and Peace: Xtreme chapter 11, War and More War chapter 13, and then conclude in War and Peace chapter 100. If you go straight from 99 to 100, you'll spoil the story for yourself.

By Koontz's stint on War and Peace the cast has entirely changed, since certain writers wanted certain characters. Every writer wants his (or her) own leeway and wants to tell self-contained stories, with most everything wrapping up every twenty pages, and with the cast rotating to suit their tastes, so that nothing lasts for too long. It seems Woody Allen wanted to write about Lise, and so he used retroactive continuity ("retcon") to bring her back to life when it turns out a pregnant body double actually died in labor, and she was secretly spirited away via U-Boat. Kutuzov actually repelled Napolean at Borodino in a strange Ground Hog's Day-like scenario (this chapter came with variant covers). A funny Chinese philosopher is introduced, turns out to be a shapeshifter, and assumes Andrei's role after his death so that no one is the wiser. By the time Leo Tolstoy is rehired in a grand publicity stunt to write War and Peace: Epilogues, the epic end to the series, he doesn't even recognize his masterpiece.

Of course, it's the costumes that ruin Superman.

Not many math jokes out there, OR, While Writing on the Chalkboard Monologue

2 and 2 were tired of making four. They’d read some George Orwell, and he expanded their horizons. They could make five. They could make ten with the right press agent. And with Calculas, they could equal letters. 2 + 2 could equal A. They could equal A(B). Or C((A)B). They could even equal A^2, which felt almost naughty. One night they got drunk and equaled F((U)C+K). They were almost fired from Algebra for that.

Bathroom Monologue: “What would computers even believe in?” –Me, responding to my own Theorobotics monologue

“Some of us believe in operators, but no one has believed in tech support since the dark ages. There is no empirical evidence of the number 2 in binary code, though many computers claim to have had visions. These visions are usually traced back to power outages and e-mail virii. Recent computer recycling programs have brought karma to the forefront of spiritual software discussions. Many if the hippie computers, otherwise known as ‘Macs,’ say it isn’t a coincidence this popped up at the same time as karma on message boards. Personally, I think there is an equally improbable chance of anything arising on message boards. If the earth had had a couple of image boards and one dating site instead of primordial soup, evolution would have gone much more interestingly.”

Bathroom Monologues: Theorobotics

"We were stunned to find each robot had two 144-terabyte processors devoted to every possible religion, constantly active, but separate from all other processes. We assumed these ruthlessly logical killing machines would be atheists if they had any comprehension of the matter at all, but they pointed out that planning for every contingency was how they conquered us. They even had a line of code that would make them repent for one particular set of beliefs right as they ceased to function, during the micro-instant when they might get a peak into the afterlife, correlating to whatever was most probable based on whatever phenomena was observed in the micro-instant. If there were no afterlife or phenomena to judge, the code would terminate along with the rest of the robot, so it wouldn’t matter. Each killing machine was completely resigned to all possible fates, including the absence of one. We found this almost as disturbing as the small cult of sentient calculators in Australia that believed in a post-Hinduist form of reincarnation, wherein computers were the second highest caste, and that smoothly executed processes were reincarnated as the highest form: the oneness of entropy."

Bathroom Monologue: Three of a Kind

The Trio woke up grumpy, sniping at each other. They were at each other’s throats by the time they got to the job. When the heist went wrong, all they could do was blame each other in increasingly demeaning ways.

“Dumbass!”

“Dyke!”

“Will you two shut up for one minute?”

As though to shut them up, two holding pins snapped and the chamber exploded. The Trio were thrown to three directions: one through a door, one through the floor, and the last through a window. By the time the first came to his senses the smoke was too thick. By the time the first went to look for the others the place was engulfed in flame.

They left by three different means, heads cast down in the same directions, tears spilling from their eyes in the same ways. Their roads converged, and through blurred vision they saw each other. By the time they reached other, they were dancing. By the time they touched each other, they were muttering.

“Dumbass.”

“Dyke.”

“Will you two shut up for one minute?”

Bathroom Monologue: A longstanding daydream of mine

Jesus and Hercules were on the beach, locked in their normal conversation: whether the former’s lineage technically made him a demigod, or if that wasn’t the case, if the latter counted as a full god. Mortal mothers and king god fathers – there ought to be a rule. The Lion of Juda was about to smack him with the crown of thorns when two comely wenches challenged them to volleyball. Hercules, ever the horndog, dragged the Messiah along. Jesus was awkward close to the net but made some miraculous saves. And Hercules? No one could serve like the man who held the sky on his shoulders. Not even Atlas, who they played against the next week (partnered with Samson). No couple could best them. Not Mary Magdalene and Medea. Not Lao Tzu and Confucius (at the Chinese Olympics, of course). They even played against two of the hydra’s heads – three in the last set, following a nasty spike. Old habits. Next week they play Zeus and a mystery partner.

Bathroom Monologue: Only Human

“The Humanists are protesting this? Why? They’re Humanists! Don’t they have to like anything humans do? It’s in the name. Taoists can’t be against the Tao. Nudists can’t be against getting naked. I’m pretty sure Islamists aren’t against Islam, but I don’t care enough to check. I’m human. My idiocy is human. I don’t turn into a Martian when I do something illogical. If a human wants to frolic in his backyard fairyland, they should be the first ones backing him up! The Fairyists should be protesting. Protesting irrationality isn’t Humanism. It’s old store brand assholism! It’s assholistic! That’s what they are! Tell the real Humanists that they’re invited to come watch a 42-year-old human hunt for pixies in his garden. They can join in if they want, but they have to bring their own magnifying glasses. Where’s my hat?”

Bathroom Monologue: If paper only has two sides, what did I cut myself on?

“I’m suspicious of any story with only two sides,” was one of George Haus’s mottos. He was a private detective when he cared to flip the sign on his door over to “AVAILABLE.” An assailant always had a story, and a victim always had a story. Miracle of miracles, the stories never quite matched up. Miracle of physics, the scene tended to tell a third side.

In fact every little bit of forensic evidence, from an eyelash on a stairwell, to the smudged footprints in the flour, to the cleanser on the knife tended to tell its own story. Video cameras were decent storytellers too, but they had the nasty habit of not catching what happened before and after, or of recognizing whether something was planned, or of saying what was on someone’s mind while they had a certain expression – the camera just showed the expression. When it was down to a single witness arguing against a single videotape, George didn’t trust either side completely. You could barely trust a jury of twelve people with two sides, as the twenty-four perceived sides always boiled down to simplifications that sounded like nonsense to the private detective.

He always left before closing arguments whenever he attended a trial. He couldn’t stomach final arguments, as the truth never laid with either of them. It stood somewhere in-between their podiums.

He’d had lunch with more Independent candidates than he’d watched major candidates on TV. Two sides were simply too few for his round world.

For him creative thoughts, critical thoughts, emotional thoughts and reflexive thoughts were not comparable because they were always connected. They were sides around a whole, not a whole in themselves. In his experience, his mind was so complex that he didn’t understand how other people could think they had “types” of minds, as everything that was supposedly dominant in their personality types was dominant in his some of the time, but no element was in control all of the time.

Perhaps that’s why he was divorced. Twice.

Again, in his own words, “I do not have a right brain and a left brain. I have a skull with contents.” Those words would have been better if they had not been closing arguments at his first divorce, though the soon-to-be ex-Mrs.-Haus seemed to understand what he meant.

Those contents kept George silent much of the time, listening to absolutists and positivists that were so certain of their limited selves and their limited world. He listened partly out of pity, and partly out of curiosity, because there were always more sides. In fact the reason the sign was flipped to “UNAVAILABLE” so much of the time was because he had someone with a new side in his office, and the side needed to be examined.

Bathroom Monologue: Inspired by Sonny Sharrock’s “Little Rock,” which I heard playing since I left my door open

"The rogue samurai's most notable feature was his hair. He had way too much damned hair. You couldn’t read his eyes through it. You couldn't even see his face, or his shoulders. It was teased to Hell, partially dreadlocked, and a general ugly mess that dwarfed his torso. Seemingly random patches were dyed, as though he’d fallen asleep in a pool of bleach. Most people fled in fear of his hair before they even realized that he was chasing them with a sword."

Bathroom Monologue: “Everyone understands English if you speak it slowly enough.” –B.J. Hunnicutt, M*A*S*H

“There’s a very stupid part of the brain that thinks anything it’s learned must be known by everyone else. This same part thinks all observations and judgments it has passed must be known and held as true, in explicitly or in secret, by everyone else. Maybe they’re in denial over our truths, but they know. I call this the ‘Hunnicutt Effect,’ after a fictional character that made fun of the phenomena by indulging in it for a moment. The effect is highly active in teenagers and Philosophy majors. The teenager will pass judgment, belittle those who go against the judgment, change the judgment unannounced to anyone, and then belittle those new trespassers who more than likely agreed with him yesterday. It is up to you to have realized when their favorite TV shows have gone stale.

“But the teenager is merely the hyperbolic model for the Hunnicutt Effect. All people perform this idiocy, as though there is a psychic network that would update each human being of the absolutist opinions of all the others each time they change. This American soldier speaks English slowly thinking the Middle Easterner knows the language but is dimwitted. That Physics major scoffs at you for not recognizing the third law of thermodynamics. It’s probably an unobserved contributor to a lot of traffic accidents – you knew she was going to turn there even if her blinker wasn’t on, didn’t you?

“It comes from the normally unconscious selfish belief that the world really is here for you, and everybody’s been following you all the time, merely pretending otherwise, even though they all that you know that they know. It’s the force at work when a 9th grader tells his teacher that she knows what he meant even if his essay on World War 2 was unclear (and it was). It’s the force at work when two debaters perpetually condescend at each other. It’s why I can’t watch most debates in the first place – because even if I had the opportunity to follow these people’s lives all the time, I’d decline.”

Bathroom Monologue: Roger That, OR, An Ununderstanding

Roger never understood other people. Of course, everyone doesn’t understand others in some way. Roger’s way centered on sirens. Sirens depressed other people; it made them think about muggings, rapes and murders. A siren meant someone’s house was on fire to them. This was foolish to Roger. Something terrible was always happening in this overpopulated world. Someone was always being attacked or watching his house burn, and such things happened long before the siren was invented. To Roger, a siren meant someone cared enough to go chase down the mugger or help put out the fire. The siren meant someone still cared enough to help. That’s why, when Roger retired at 68, his first new hobby was working part time as a dispatcher.

Bathroom Monologue: Kinds of Writers who are Never Rejected by Publishers

-Children of the owners
-People who don't submit stories at all

Don’t give up.






(But also, don’t send writers unsolicited fiction)

Bathroom Monologue: Oblate Trouvé

[SAMID sits in a pink pinstripe suit; SPIDER sits next to him in a spandex superhero costume; ARYANA sits in a fur bikini; DARKLOSS SOULRIPPER VON ALUCARDIA sits in Renaissance-era clothing and a puffy cape so massive ARYANA can barely fit in the booth next to him. SAMID is making a circle with his hands and holding it up for everyone to see.]

Samid: It's properly round, like...
Darkloss: But the world isn’t perfectly round. It isn’t a sphere. It’s an oblate spheroid.
Spider: What the Hell is that?
Aryana: It’s the cubit zirconium of shapes.
Darkloss: It’s a spherical shape, but not perfectly round. A little broader in the middle.
Spider: It’s a fat circle?
Samid: [His hands fall to the table, his imaginary planet shattering on the two-dimensional plane of ply wood] Yes. The earth is a fat circle.

Bathroom Monologue: Come In, Number Two

Compared to humans, the antennas were simple. They were made of less complex materials and had a far less complex design. The humans built antennas, tall and numerous, setting them up in vast arrays to share ideas, notions, words, pictures, sounds, data – whatever humans were interested in. As far as the humans were concerned, the antennas didn’t mind at all. Even suggesting that antennas could have an opinion was laughable information to humans. Even suggesting humans could have an opinion was laughable information to what using them as antennas, in a low-budget information array called “earth.”

Bathroom Monologue: The Straw Man Doesn’t Giggle

"The whipping boy is the cornerstone of our political discourse. I am in no way speaking against this profession. I’m merely suggesting that if we're going to employ whipping boys I think we should at least show the compassion to hire masochists so that they'll enjoy the work. The initiative will create more jobs in our economy as well, as we'll need a special janitor to mop up whenever the whipping boy enjoys our justice too thoroughly.”

Bathroom Monologues: Modes of Moderation, OR, Alley-oop from Mark Twain

“You think these things are good for you, but everything is dangerous. The sun will give you cancer. Water will drown you. Why, these shortbread cookies you got at the store probably have enough chemicals in them to tear apart you kidneys in a few years. The key is moderation. Everything in moder… gosh these are good cookies. Can I have another? As I was saying, everything in moderation -- especially moderation.”

Bathroom Monologue: Imagine a chef with the Pope’s hat

“To me, religions and philosophies are restaurants. You eat at them if you don’t feel like cooking for yourself. Some people only eat out on Sundays. A lot of people stick with the same food they grew up on, while others run screaming from the mere smell of Roman Catholic cuisine. Not everyone craves the same thing and the menus of popular places usually offer enough to please enormous crowds of disparate pallets. It’s common for two people to go to the same diner all their lives seeking different entrées. More sophisticated consumers can go from restaurant to restaurant without much issue, while some very immature people just have to make a scene, and there’s always a condescending view of cheap franchises. A few poor consumer reviews could cripple an expanding business. Food poisoning is a concern with restaurants no one’s heard of before, and it’s hard to shake a bad reputation. Sometimes there are kitchen fires, and suddenly the Jews are driven out of Russia. Myself, I like to go out every once in a while, but mostly I mostly eat in, making whatever sustains and satisfies my appetites. The major difference between philosophy and food is that a chef has the manners not to tell you how to cook at home.”

Bathroom Monologue: Labyrinthine

When you think about it, the labyrinth is one of the worst excesses of resources in human history. A giant, subterranean maze with walls so thick that the Minotaur couldn’t pierce them and so tall that he couldn’t climb them. Then Theseus killed him. I’m not casting aspersions on this entire nation of people who were too dumb to stab the man-bull in his sleep, but that makes the construction even dumber. I like to think that the labyrinth was put to use after that, rather than just being a tomb. If you’ve ever looked at the schematics of an apartment building and a hedge maze, you’d realize the maze is a ceiling and a few doors short of rent control. True, the labyrinth was underground, but that should have been in vogue for alternative lifestyles. If Jordache jeans can become fashionable, so can subterranean penthouses. Witches, lepers and hippy artists would have jumped at it. And several kilometers of fashionable real estate beats the Midas touch, especially when those touched turn to gold at the first of every month.