Bathroom Monologue: Winner

I saw a lord in white dueling a man in black, and the man in black was the bad guy, but the lord in white was the villain, or so they saw each other. The man in black said there were no heroes, and yet if you could not see the color of their clothes or the grimaces on their faces, either could have been a hero. One slew the other, flourished, grew rich, grew old, and died.

Bathroom Monologue: What it Means to be a Winner

Lo stood alone on the hilltop as the thunderheads rolled in. It went from sunny to cloudy to pouring buckets in less than a minute. His clothes stuck to his body and his hair was plastered to his face.

He grinned his wicked fool’s grin.

“Well played, Mother Nature. But I prepared for this.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pink cocktail umbrella. The wind almost ripped it in half as soon as he opened it, and the rain soaked the paper. Undaunted, he held the ornament over his head.

It did nothing. He was still constantly drenched. The wind shifted repeatedly, so that he was alternately swatted in the face and backside with veritable sheets of water.

The paper umbrella didn’t break, and he kept it overhead. Always grinning.

“I win.”

Bathroom Monologue at an Anime Convention

“Why the Hell do these people keep looking at me like I’m staff? And why did I show two of them to their seats? There is such a thing as too nice, Wiswell. But what do I look like? Beard makes me look a lot older. I’ve got an actual button-down shirt on, and I’m not hiding my convention pass to look cool. I speak in a polite manner—oh, holy crap. They think I work here. I need a Hawaiian shirt as soon as possible.”

Noun Challenge Begins Sunday

Dear Readers,

Thank you for the surprisingly quick responses of the Joker, Kentucky Derby and volcanic pumice. At the very least you've enabled me to type a sentence no man has ever written before just by thanking you.

The first monologue in the experiment will go up Sunday, with one a day until Saturday. I'm doing my best to keep them different. So far I've got a sentient volcano, an unusual specialty restaurant, a supervillain taking a day at the races and an unsuccessful deity out of the deal.

I'll be doing another experiment sooner than later. This one won't be first-come, first-serve, so everyone gets a shot.

Thanks for playing along!

Cheers,
John Wiswell

Bathroom Monologue: “If the shoe fits…” –Annoying people, throughout the decades

If the shoe fits, then walk on it and see if it’s comfortable. Also see if the look appeals to you. No sense in keeping an ugly shoe just because it fits your foot. Examine the price – how much does this fitting shoe cost? If it’s too expensive, try on some others. It can’t be the only shoe in the whole store that fits. If it is the only shoe the store will give you that happens to fit, then go to a better store. If the shoe salesman is dumb enough to say you should wear it just because it fits, tell his manager. He may be wearing a size too small. If all else fails, get custom made shoes that actually suit you.

Bathroom Monologue: F.D.E.

Franklin Delano Einstein is not his real name. It is an unusually literate moniker for a 6’10” professional wrestler. “Delano” is a recent addition to his stage name; originally he was just “Frank Einstein,” a ghoulish pun referencing the horrible stitch-like scars all over his scalp, face and arms. He jokes that they are from chicken pox, but one night, under the influence of good seed, he confessed something about an accident on a stretch of highway. In character, they are the scars of his creation in a German lab. He took pro wrestling by storm as a silent brute, and carried on that way for three years before speaking his first words. They were: “I think, therefore I am.” From then on he portrayed an ironically intelligent scarred giant, wearing reading glasses to all of his pre-match interviews. Many of his fans don’t even notice the scars anymore, or pass them off as part of a bad hoax. After he started wearing the glasses, however, a few fans noticed that the well-spoken giant has two different colored eyes.

Noun Challenge

Dear Readers,

I want to try a little experiment. Next week all seven of the monologues will contain three specific nouns: a person, a place and a thing. Anyone who is reading is invited to leave a word in one of these categories. The first person can choose any of the three; the second gets to choose form the remaining two, and the last picks the final world.

It can be any person (Jimmy Carter, Liu Bei, Apollo), any place (Paris, Fortress of Solitude, Lake of Tranquility on the moon), and any thing (a boulder, the Blarney Stone, the color green). Doesn't matter if the place is fictional or the person is a name you just made up. Any ambiguity is my territory - you tell me to write seven monologues about someone I've never heard of, and at least one of them will be a different person with the same name. You pick the "Quickening" from Highlander and I get to interpret it as a verb. All's fair for the runner. In turn, you can choose one as difficult as you want (Anthony Venn-Brown, Mobile in Alabama, Kentucky blue grass). Boy, I hope you won't.

The first point of the experiment is to see if I can actually do it. The second is to see if I can make any of it fun. For the sanctity of the experiment, there will not be more than one list and not more than one Strange Company dialogue. Can't cheat.

Though really, a list that managed to cover Jimmy Carter, Paris and a boulder would be impressive.

Thanks for playing along. Your submissions for the experiment can go in the Comments section of this post.

Cheers,
John Wiswell

Bathroom Monologue: To Arms and Armor

In the last days of the local monarchy, King Rykshtand commissioned a suit of armor befitting a king. He hoped a truly grand appearance would restore the faith of the people, or at least their fear.

For comfort, they fashioned him several articles of durable cloth, overlaid with strips of leather. Over the leather padding they laid articles of the finest chain mail, made up of tiny links such that even a needle would need to be lucky to pass through. However, the mail was very thin, and despite the alchemists attesting that it was strong, King Rykshtand demanded at least three layers of the material. And so it was done. Atop the layers of mail they set about the suit with thick plates of tempered and folded steel, given wicked curves for the most ergonomic fit and functionality. But the functionality left too many joints open for his majesty’s liking, so he had additional plates strapped around the knees and shoulders, and devised a steel waistcoat to protect the royal posterior.

Unfortunately when they were invaded it took King Rykshtand three days to actually put on the suit of armor, by which point the kingdom was lost.

The Rykshtand Armor is on exhibit in the Museum of Irony until Thursday.

Bathroom Monologue: Re: “Immigrant’s Song” by Led Zeppelin

Fight from the land of the ice and snow
From the moonsault sun with the handsprings elbow
The Hammer’s at odds
We’ll drive our shit to new lands
To fight the horde, singing and stand in line,
“Victoria, I am coming!”
On we sleep
Totally bored
I want to go where there’s a wrestling show!

Bathroom Monologue: “May Jesus kick your tires.” –Me on the way to the bathroom, in a really cheesy Irish accent

“May Jesus kick your tires” is an old Irish blessing, wishing you the best luck with your new car. It should be a relatively recent blessing, what with automobiles being about a hundred years old, but it dates back at least a thousand years. Scholars suggest the original speakers were referring to wagon wheels, even though kicking them was closer to attempted sabotage in that time period.

Bathroom Monologue: Lead to gold, gold to pawnbroker, pawnbroker to mansion

“Actually my racket is turning gold into lead. All the other alchemists were so busy with the traditional stuff that they get caught, robbed or executed. I take their gold and turn it back to lead for shipping. They head down to the Cayman Islands and sign for their load of sixteen tons of lead, turn it back to gold, and they're rich in safety. I'm also very popular with the thieves. Once I turned the crown jewels into so much scrap metal and marbles that we smuggled them out in garbage bags. The one guard who stopped us thought we were dumping crap merchandise from the gift shop.”

Bathroom Monologue: Cheater

Close your eyes and imagine… you cheated. If you can read this, your eyes are open.

Bathroom Monologue: Ezie/Zeke

“No, if you’re nicknaming me, don’t call me ‘Zeke.’ The world has enough Zekes. Call me ‘Ezie.’ My dearest love used to call me that. ‘Ezie.’ ‘Ezie.’ She was an angel, you know? She had the tiniest wings. So little most people couldn’t even see them. I thought they were ugly things, and always made her cover them up. Eventually she cut them off. I didn’t force her to, didn’t ask her to, but I knew she did it for me. There were so many times after that, after we’d finished rutting or dancing, when she’d look away and down. You could tell what was on her mind. Sometimes she’d put a hand up to her shoulder.... Someone else murdered her, but I did the worst thing anyone ever did to her. So call me ‘Ezie.’”

Bathroom Monologue: Frat Girls

Not a sorority of lesbians. A fraternity of lesbians. The brotherhood of sisters that swing that way. Fi Delta Strap-On. They competed against male frats in the Spring. They held very similar hazing rituals, and you don’t want to know where they held the olive. True, their brotherhood had a less stable roster than others, since people don’t realize they aren’t men in the middle of the semester. Quitting FDS meant a lot of harshness. Sexuality is a tender subject for young people, and converting out of FDS meant a lot of social problems. Problems that only the guys at the Sorority of Queens could understand.

Bathroom Monologue: “Wait ‘Till We Get Our Hanes On You” –Television Commercial

Lawrence finally snapped when he heard a commercial from the other rooms, back-up singers repeating, “Wait ‘till we get our Hanes on you.” That was clearly a threat, and a perverse one. Were they going to strangle him with a pair of underwear? Smother him with a t-shirt? They’d said “on you.” On top of him? Would he walk out his front door tomorrow and have six tons of 100% cotton boxers dropped on him, crushing him to a cushy death? He’d be damned if he’d be beaten by some global organization of old people grown rich off of child sweatshop labor, even if its spokesman was Michael Jordan. He sent the basketball legend a series of frantic e-mails, begging for help, or at least for him to call the goons off. Meanwhile Lawrence took to an all-polyester-and-hemp wardrobe and knocked down the wall between his kitchen and the driveway to create a shortcut to his car. He’d dare Hanes to airdrop tons of downy-soft death on him now.

Bathroom Monologue: Tell your life story in X-number of words.

1: I’m.
2: Went in.
3: Couldn’t stop thinking.
4: Challenged myself and lost.
5: Couldn’t stop hurting or working.
6: Laughed in pain’s face. A lot.
7: Didn’t laugh at Death. Laughed with Death.
8: Moved out of womb, daycare, school, home, life.
9: Traded faith in myself for faith in the world.
10: Felt inadequate. Convinced myself everyone else was, too. Feeling better.
10 again: Saw peak of the mountain, decided I preferred the middle.

Bathroom Monologue: A Courtesy Flush for George

I do not normally editorialize here because it is not an editorial page. However recent events have moved me to speak on the death of George Carlin. I let time pass, respecting the man’s decision. Now, a month removed, I am still overcome by the magnitude of what may be the worst move of his career.

For one, his death exposed flaws in Mr. Carlin’s morality. In one track of his “Back in Town” CD, Mr. Carlin mocked the deaths of Benito Mussolini, John F. Kennedy, and the comedy duo of Abbott and Costello – men of his own trade. In other performances Mr. Carlin mocked death in general, including death by strangulation, gunfire, plane crash, terrorism and war. Dying himself shows Mr. Carlin to be a huge hypocrite.

Mr. Carlin was not afraid of risky career moves. He gambled with his safety in breaking public decency laws in favor of free speech and cuss words. His bold use of caustic language and bawdy character was highly original to audiences that hadn’t seen Lenny Bruce, and made him a star.

In one particular bit, “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television,” Mr. Carlin recited and examined the seven major bad words. He was arrested. A year later, he was famous. That bit even caused this writer to re-examine why words like “fuck,” which is the beginning of life, should be used to hurt others. So one can appreciate why he might think seemingly insane career moves would be beneficial.

One risky move came late. Originally Mr. Carlin found funny things about unacceptable language, and wove unacceptable language around funny things. This inspired thousands of young stand-up comedians who thought swearing itself was funny and so went on to just say a lot of offensive shit. In the later stages of his career Mr. Carlin saw his relevance waning in comparison to these idiots he'd helped create. Not content merely to inspire, Mr. Carlin became one of them. He was a man of the people.

Being a comedy legend only to have Dane Cook outsell every album you’ve ever pressed would force a lot of people to do drastic things. But is dying worth it? It got him onto CNN and made him the talk of NPR, but in a few years when he doesn’t have any new books or CD’s coming out, what will Mr. Carlin do then? Decompose? That is undignified even for a grown man who once got an entire theatre to attempt armpit farts.

Please, Mr. Carlin: rethink your juvenile decision. We’ll work something out.

Bathroom Monologue: At Least the Road out of Hell is Paved

Ezekial cackled and ruffled his visitor’s hair, “Those doors are always open! It wouldn’t be Hell if you couldn’t see the way out.”

Bathroom Monologue: Bitch, Please

Our language has sexual conjugations. “He” and “she.” “His” and “hers.” “Asshole” and “bitch.” Many people don’t understand the latter, but “bitch” absolutely is the feminine of “asshole.” In any case of bitchyness you can exchange a man for the woman and swap out the feminine derogative with its masculine and find it works perfectly. Observe:

“Barb is being a total bitch today.”

becomes:

“Bob is being a total asshole today.”

It’s seamless.

Such a conjugation, a veritable conjugal visit of nouns, should help take the stigma off of “bitch.” The vast majority of speakers mean no particular epithet against her gender – indeed, they haven’t even put that much thought into it. It is merely a general negative, tailored specifically to demean you, not based on what lies between your legs, but based on your actions and your character. Bitch is the “brava” to asshole’s “bravo.”

Bathroom Monologue: Every Passing Generation

"The world is all sluts and science today. In a century we'll all use cloning, and those who want to give birth will do so in painless, antiseptic processes, following artificial insemination. Sex itself will be purely recreational, if it isn't already. It strikes me that the surprising thing about the next virgin birth will be that there was still a virgin around. "

Bathroom Monologue: Admissions About Literature

-The first time I read Richard Matheson’s “Duel” was on a train. A third of the way through the story, I looked behind me to see if a truck was following.
-I cried reading the ending of Lord of the Rings… for the sixth time. I was fine the first five times.
-The first and only time I’ve read John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath from end to end wasn’t actually reading at all, but listening to it on audio cassettes while playing WWF: No Mercy on the Nintendo 64, day after day during a Spring break in high school. That’d teach my A.P. English teacher to assign a giant tome over vacation.
-Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was the first book I recognized as too deep and required putting off until I was older (until then I only ran into books that were full of crap).
-Erma Bombeck’s humorous column about handling a prosthetic breast was my introduction to cancer.
-I spent my entire first read through J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye wishing it would go faster so I could start Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter series. My next homework assignment featured a droll Holden Caulfield strolling through various scenes of Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, too passive, cynical and full of himself to be interested or afraid. My teacher did not give me credit for the assignment. This began my three-year struggle with the definition of “parody.”
-I thought Terry Pratchett was a girl and J.K. Rowling was a guy.
-I read Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (okay, again listened to the audiobook) several times during my adolescence and pubescence. I understood it less as I got older.
-Dean Koontz’s Fear Nothing is the only book I’ve thrown across the room three times. It holds first place for fiction throwing, but second place for all books, behind the nine times I’ve thrown one particular book of Sudoku across the room.
-I still mix up whether Ethan Frome or Edith Wharton was the author.
-I took Dante’s Inferno out into the middle of a windy field as a thunderstorm was setting in and tried reading some of the descriptions of torments, to see how it would feel. It was really damned cool.
-I don’t remember the title of the first book I finished and immediately went back to the first page to re-read, but it was about dinosaurs.

Bathroom Monologue: Pit Stop at La Guardia Airport, OR, No Foot-binding Jokes Allowed

Did you see that blonde Asian girl back there? Her walk worries me. She’s wearing heels far too high for her body. Sure her legs look great, but they also look ready to snap off at any moment. From her amiable expression, I doubt she realizes we can see her garters with every step. And her steps – it looks like she’s hiking through brittle snow. How she stumbles.… Her foot doesn’t rest when it touches the ground, but shifts or makes a small stumble. An inelegant microstumble. It forces her to lurch, her feet looking for proper purchase. When she stops her toes push together, forming a right angle with her feet. She keeps shifting, but doesn’t so much as frown. Can she enjoy this?

Bathroom Monologue: Behold, the King of Kings

He is The God of Gods, a being so awesome you even have to capitalize the ‘T’ in “The.” If the gods don’t properly worship the God of Gods, they can expect their followers to be obliterated by meteors, raped by the Huns, or raped by meteors. The God of Gods thinks meteor-rape is very funny. He delights in making up utterly impossible things that the regular gods will spend all eternity trying to pass off as plausible to the mortals.

And yes, while the ‘g’ in “gods” is normally lower case, you have to make it uppercase for Him, too. The ‘o’ in “of” is only lowercase to keep deities on their toes.

What’s that you say? Of course there’s a God of Gods. There’s a god of war and a goddess of love. Somewhere there’s a god of swimwear and sports equipment (we hear Apollo is vying for the position). Gods have subjects, but the gods themselves are subjects – and He is the subject matter. The God of Gods is the big kahuna. The entity That doesn’t have to do anything It doesn’t want to. He doesn’t have to trouble with war, love or swimwear – He troubles with the gods, which He finds very funny.

The God of Gods is not as popular as you might think. Gods, of course, exist on faith. They sup on belief. So you’d think His omnipotent fellows would worship their Patron, but they don’t. Some are even so full of themselves that they call Him an allegory, and they’re only nice about Him when they think He’s in earshot. You’d think a bunch of nigh-omniscient entities would realize an omnipresent transcendent entity is always within earshot, but being a god makes your sense of reverence rusty. Perhaps they’ll get it eventually, at which point He’ll finally stop that entropy thing He’s been doing since someone first had the temerity of asking for a light when He was napping.

Bathroom Monologue: Ratings 2: Rate Harder

Die Hard 2 References- 2
Old Spice High Endurance – 7
Jonathan Swift – 9.5
My hypocrisy – 10
Your hypocrisy – 0.5
Standard Tissues for blowing your nose - 5
Aloe-Treated Tissues for blowing your nose - 8
Vicks-Scented Tissues for blowing your nose – 8.5
Vicks-Scented Tissues for dabbing your eyes – 0
Tearing a standard tissue in half so that you can use it twice - 2.5
The three readers who realized that was a math joke, dividing the score of the standard tissue by two – 9
The one reader who figured Jonathan Swift was the mathematical equivalent of one's own hypocrisy minus someone else's hypocrisy - 9.5
Anyone who doesn't base their opinions of complicated topics on arbitrary and illogical numerical scales- 0
Kosovo – 6

Bathroom Monologue: Double and Nothing

There’s an old question of whether you’d like a hundred thousand dollars a month for every month of your life, or if you’d take one dollar for the first month, and have the sum doubled every passing month. The knee-jerk answer is to take the hundred thousand. It’s a lot more than one dollar, or two dollars, or four. On the doubled-dollar option, you’d only receive $2,048 in December (if you began in January).

But a mathematician will tell you that the doubling monthly sum will quickly surpass the hundred thousand. By the end of the second year, your check will be for over eight million dollars. The figure will keep doubling, and the hundred thousand will never catch up. This is what grandfathers have grinned over for generations, while feeding the brainteaser to their know-it-all grandchildren.

But that unlimited wealth proposes an unintended problem. In under four years the recipient will be pulling down over a quadrillion dollars a month. That much money barely exists in the currency of a single nation, meaning they would have to take all the money from everyone else in the country and print more just to hand him his check. This would leave everyone else in poverty, and probably get him killed. If the treasury just printed up the extra few quadrillions for that month, it would so grossly inflate the dollar that the currency would become valueless, again driving everyone else into poverty, and quite probably get our rich man killed.

Because of this terminal flaw in the doubling sum, the meager hundred thousand dollars a month remains the correct answer. It’s good news for the economy, and for all those grandchildren that felt so stupid for not having reached multiplication tables in school.

Bathroom Monologue: Lying Eyes

“The best lie is not the little white lie. White stains too easily. Similarly, do not trust a big, black lie. It is too ostentatious. The only one you can trust is the truth-colored lie. Make the lie look like the truth by making it close to the truth. Ground it in the things they already know. Confess a little to save the lot. You tore up some of the backyard rather than all of it. You ate three cookies rather than seven (or “some cookies;” “some” is enormously useful to a lie). The point is to make a lie-fiction close enough to the truth-reality that people will recognize the content of the lie when they view the truth. Thus when you say you went to return DVD’s to your wife’s sister at her motel, surveillance tapes showing your arrival will only corroborate your story. Meanwhile the truth-colored lie will shelter you actually did in there.”

Bathroom Monologue: The Bough Breaks

[GARY and SAMID sit on opposite sides of the booth, each in banana yellow tuxedos, both reading menus; AJA the GIANT FLOATING EYEBALL levitates beside SAMID, wearing a central retinal artery knotted like a bowtie, reading the menu over his shoulder; ARYANA in platemail, sitting on the windowseat beside GARY, trying to make out the chalkboard house specials; and GRUFF STOVER, inexplicably shrunken to six inches in height, with a miniature rifle and plastic cocktail sword across his lap, sitting on ARYANA’S armored shoulder. All are silent for a minute.]
Samid: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there, does it make a noise?
Aryana: Yes, because your hypothetical only exists in our minds, and in my mind it made a noise.
Aja: If not, why did the birds fly away?
Stover: It invariably causes a massive disturbance that results in the vibrations that we identify as noise. It’s a technicality to say it’s not noise.
Gary: Pretty much like calling a piano not a piano just because you don’ see it falling out a third storey window.
[All look out the window. A beat passes. They resume reading the menus.]

Bathroom Monologue: Hotbed

Dillon’s mother often yelled at him to close the front door because they weren’t paying to heat the whole world. Because Dillon was dropped on his head too often as a baby, this made him wonder how hot he’d have to make in their house to heat all the other homes in the world. He didn’t think setting the thermostat at 95 and leaving the windows open would cut it. One time he went to a bonfire, and felt the heat on his face from the other side of the beach. That suggested that setting their home on fire might warm up the neighborhood, though it probably wouldn’t do much for the neighboring counties. In History class he saw videos of the atomic bomb. It had quite a blast radius, and was supposed to be incredibly hot – yet even that only lit up part of Japan. Mainland China didn’t get so much as an unseasonably warm breeze out of the deal. It would take a long chain of atomic blasts to kickstart global warming, and Dillon didn’t think he could get that out of their boiler. They had electric heat, you see. But maybe if he left the oven open while he did it…

Bathroom Monologue: Banning Headscarves; Banning All Scarves

The secretary walked quickly along the line, yanking shirts, skirts and trousers off those who resisted. Most of the people stayed still, keeping their place in line. Most were already undressing themselves. It was an indignity, but they worked in a national office, and this was better than getting fired.

He ordered, “Everything off. Even the thongs.”

“Can't we just take off the headscraves?” one woman asked, though she seemed hesitant to part even with that.

“No. That's offensive, but so too could a crucifix or a scullcap,” he said, yanking a yarmulke off a Hebrew. No one moved to stop him. “All clothing can potentially offend somebody, so the government's banned every scrap of it. No slutty micros, no nun's habits.”

At the back of a line a naked man shuddered, clutching his catheter bag. The secretary glared at him.

The old man asked, “This too?”

The secretary nodded sternly. “Might offend somebody.”

Bathroom Monologue: “It was a dark and stormy night.” –Edward Bulwer-Lytton

This is actually a eulogy for a bathroom monologue. I went on quite a rant about this famous phrase, then threw it into blackle.com to find out who begat the cliche. The offender was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, but it turns out I wasn’t the first to rip into his writing. It turns out I may be the last, as everyone else on earth has already made fun of him. Madeleine L'Engle, Ray Bradbury, Star Trek: The Next Generation... really, the second Star Trek series made fun of him? Now I can’t bring it to heart to slam old Edward. That’s just not right. You can only disagree with something so much before you become more annoying than the center of your ire. The guy overwrote. So did Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin. Yes, it being a dark night is redundant writing, and this phrase associated with a sort of self-indulgent drama that begs to be made fun of, but the suppression of women’s rights in the Middle East hasn’t been made fun of nearly enough. Debated? Fought? Yes, but not made fun of the may Mr. Bulwer-Lytton’s silly opening sentence was, and not nearly as often (there are even contests to parody his writing style - look it up). So now let’s venture over to some fresh territory of mockery. Let’s not execute Osama Bin Laden when we catch him; let’s give him a top-notch sex change, put him in a string bikini and parachute him into downtown Baghdad. That’ll be a bright and sunny day.