Bathroom Monologue: Noun Challenge with Strange Company

[ARYANA sits along the bar in an impractical chainmail bikini guaranteed to piss off feminists; THE INSULTINGLY BLAND SCOTT sits to her left in a t-shirt and jeans; THE JOKER sits to his left in a red vest and slops, sipping an empty martini glass; SPIDER sits to his left in a spandex superhero costume, eyeing THE JOKER warily, even though his mask has no eyeholes.]

Scott: So I thought Ledger stole the movie.
Joker: I liked Eckhart better. More believable.
Spider: And really, it’s too broad a film with too much quality work in the lighting, soundtrack and performances of the whole cast, even in bit roles, for it to be able to be stolen by a single performance.
Scott: But he was so awesome! His laugh gave me the creeps, and he made Nicholson look like a--
Joker: [Glaring at Scott] Listen, you market-tested middle-American pea brain, if you don’t shut up about him I will puncture your larynx with a plastic cocktail sword. [Looking at Spider] If he’s good, I’ll do it with a penknife.
Spider: I always thought Mark Hamill had the best laugh.
Joker: Me too. Had real panache.
Aryana: [Leaning forward to look at Joker] What are you doing here?
Joker: Infringing copyrights, mostly.
Aryana: Oh.
Spider: But he’s wearing a red vest as to avoid being too similar and getting us sued.
Scott: Top work.
Joker: Did you know that my sidekick was drugging me?
Spider: Where is she?
Joker: Hospitalized. Took a chunk of volcanic pumice to the forehead after the tragedy at the Kentucky Derby.

Bathroom Monologue: In Soviet Russia, Noun Challenges You

“It’s the worst scandal to hit the Kentucky Derby since bookies started photoshopping our photo finishes. Seems some joker went around loosening all but one of the jockeys’ straps – er, that is, the straps on their saddles. Only one jockey, Catali, had an untampered saddle. It was raining little men that morning, Catali won, and because of some bad internal legislation, he got to keep the trophy and prize money, and even got his name in the record books for biggest margin of victory. But since then he’s been ostracized and quietly banned from racing.

“He didn’t do it, though. Didn’t do the tampering. He had an alibi, and frankly he’s dumber than his mount.

“No, it was part of the cement consortium that was turned down for the 2001-2005 renovations at Churchill Downs. People outside of Kentucky may not know this, but Churchill Downs is a place – the Kentucky Derby is a thing that happens there. The Downs is really popular thanks to that two-week festival they run every year, and they needed it renovated in the millennium, to put in a bunch of suites and such that they could charge more for. A lot of bidders funneled in for the project, and those who were turned away got real bitter, especially this one distributed of lime and volcanic pumice – the stuff that goes into concrete – who pretty much went out of business when the owners of the Downs reneged on a deal they promised behind closed doors. Ruining a big race and turning the winner into a pariah was their revenge, you see.

“The consortium was thwarted, though, because for all the negative press the Downs made back all its money and popularity by becoming the first race track to ever hold a Rolling Stones rock concert. A couple of the punks from the defunct consortium tried to sabotage the guitars, but they got caught and shuttled away in secrecy. The people who run the Kentucky Derby are still pretty sensitive over anything bringing up the memory of that scandal, even news of them catching people who were in on it. Guess hosting a race where all your world-class jockeys fall off their horses in the gate is pretty embarrassing.”

Unwise challenge? Blame it on my teeth.

Dear People Who Make it to Wednesday,

It's Wednesday, meaning we've hit the middle of the Noun Challenge. It also means I'm having my wisdom teeth pulled. This notice goes up at 8:00 AM, the time when surgery begins. I don't expect it to be fatal, but what do I know? I'm typing this to you from Sunday night while the real me sits in a recliner with two people wielding pliers hovering above, and I'm paying them to do it.

I expect to be out of commission for the rest of the week, as I fully expect (and intend) to be at my most grumpy and helpless while the opportunity presents itself (plus we're fumigating the house, which includes my computer area). Fortunately the rest of the Noun Challenge monologues are done and scheduled to post one per morning. However, I may not be available to respond to comments for a little while. Any well-wishes, offers of gifts and/or thoughts on how the Noun Challenge is going are still welcome.

Offer me a chewable present and you may be banned from the internet.

Cheers,
John Wiswell

Bathroom Monologue: How do you spell “Solzhenitsyn” in the Russian alphabet?

Should you write some kind of a farewell to Solzhenistyn, John? You wrote one for George Carlin, and you certainly like him more, if it’s possible to prefer a psychotically brave novelist embedded in a totalitarian culture to a stand-up comedian hybrid of a class clown and social critic. But if you write one for Aleksandhr Solzhenitsyn, then that’s a precedent. Writing for Carlin was kind of goofy and kind of okay. You can do anything once. Do it twice, and a pattern is expected.

You can’t write obituaries for every person you’ve ever liked and never met, especially because as time passes people you’ve loved and actually known will drop and then you’ll be stuck with the problem of whether you should tell an audience of strangers about your departed and less remarkable best friend, because even if he’s less accomplished in the market of ideas and global identities, won’t he be worth more to you than the famous or somewhat famous dead people you’ve written about? Likely more important than all of them combined? At least on the day of impact. For all your attempts to become a smarter man, would you not trade Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a devastatingly great novel that carved you off a slice of life in gulags you’ve still yet to fully digest, for one more day with Dan Loden, a fine man of whom no one reading this has ever heard?

And let’s be even more intellectually honest, John: you had to look up how to spell “Solzhenitsyn.” You’ve only read one of his books, even if his passing has tempted you to buy the whole catalog. And while you admire his mind and his boldness against Stalinism, when you realized he’d written over a dozen somewhat pricey things, you were trying to rationalize a purchase of only six – and true to your mental caliber, you caught yourself trying to divine the best by their titles rather than reviews or content.

Yet you do feel strongly for this man and this writer. His is the first author’s death that sent you to the library (and Amazon.com), spurring you to read the works of the recently deceased. Ken Kesey and Kurt Vonnegut didn’t do that to you, and the cultural event of a notable author’s death giving people rise to read his works is something that a part of you has been dying to join. Weren’t you disappointed when Vonnegut dying didn’t make you want to pick up Slaughterhouse Five? So this departed stranger has a particular saliency, because he’s a writer who dug deep with humanitarian characterization, ruthless honesty about an atrocious system of government, and a tone that jumped across the translation and forced you to read that whole book in one day. How many literary books have you read in a single day? Ironic, maybe, but you miss him already because you wanted more of that despite never getting around to reading any of his other books.

But that doesn’t solve the problem that if you eulogize Solzhenitsyn here, if you type it up, and if you put it on that site, then you’ll have to install an Obituary tab on the sidebar. The deaths of real people, who are posthumously discussed enough in every major newspaper in the country, will rack up like so many points, like so many undrawn cartoons and dialogues between strange people. Do you want that?

And do you want to wake up in a few years and find Stephen King, Kenneth Miller or Terry Pratchett has died, and feel yourself obligated to write about them? King you can swing; you’ll probably write a micro-horror story about a surreal absurd demise for a man who’ll probably pass on natural causes. It’ll be funny. But maybe Pratchett’s won’t be. Maybe Bill Clinton’s won’t be. And once you’ve written about the lives of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Terry Pratchett and Bill Clinton, how do you remain silent about your mother? You can’t and you won’t.

So don’t eulogize him. Let people go read his works for themselves. Go read him yourself while they’re at it.

Bathroom Monologue: Noun Challenge - Pacific Edition

In the Pacific Rim there exists a peculiar volcano. It has been sentient for at least one hundred thousand years. It does not know if any other volcanoes are sentient because volcanoes are very poor communicators. This one has been trying to give the same message for all those hundred thousand years since it realized there was life out there. Life, which trampled its igneous structure. Life, which came to gawk into its maw, like it was some tourist attraction, some kind of infernal Kentucky Derby. Well the volcano was not a wilderness reserve or a pretty painting. It made itself as craggy as possible, with erratic, porous pumice slopes that were difficult to ascend. And yet life kept coming and ignoring the one thing it had said with every earthquake and eruption for millennia: “You’re annoying. Go away.” But Mother Nature didn’t endow volcanoes with particularly good vocabulary, nor some mammals with particularly good comprehension. Mother Nature, it appears, is some kind of joker.

Bathroom Monologue: Noun Challenge at the Races

The Joker put his hands behind his head, reclining as Harley pumiced his calluses.

“This is the life, Harls. All because of preparation.”

“How’s that, Mistah J?”

“Got my work done this morning.”

He brought up a pale hand, looking at the track in the valley below. He tuned his radio with the volume low until he heard the murmur of the commentators.

“Always wanted dad to take me to the Kentucky Derby. The races are pure skill, but the gambling? The swearing? The lost tuition payments? Ha-ha! The whole place is a monument to chance and not doing your work beforehand. But today they get a real windfall – a hundred tons of C4 guarantees that the first long shot to come in will bring down the house.” He rubbed suntan lotion over his white face. “Why didn’t I think of leaving Gotham sooner?”

“No idea, Puddin’,” Harley said with a happy sigh, hiding the bottle of prozac in her bag. She’d been slipping him the last two weeks. Only a hundred tons of C4? The pills really did work!

Bathroom Monologue: Noun Challenge Recipes

“We’re talking 100% lean horse. Our distributors get them right from the Kentucky Derby, off of the latest mares to come in unsatisfactory place. We only serve the highest sports-grade horse. We marinate them in our special blend of sea salts, ground Hawaiian pumice and an extract from cougar livers that gets it at the perfect tenderness and evokes the natural equine flavor. This is nothing like what those jokers down the street are selling. You know, McDonalds actually owns that franchise. I bet even their pony is low-grade.”

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.