Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 18

California
With large Hispanic, Asian, African and European communities and an international governor, we’re not afraid of different people.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 17

The state of New York can neither confirm nor deny California’s governor’s house, roads, or entire infrastructure was built by illegal labor and abused minorities.

Where’d those railroads come from, California?

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 16

California
At least our governor’s house wasn’t built by illegal labor.

(Did you really think we wouldn’t see your billboard go up at 2:00 AM, New York? That’s primetime here. Time zones are getting to your heads.)

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 15

New York
It’s not almost a part of Mexico.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 14

California: We’ll sue you, assholes.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 13

California
Home of dozens of sports teams and no champions!

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 12

California
We spoke to L.A., and they didn’t say that.

We thought you were above this, New York.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 11

Los Angeles: We can’t see the sky no matter how many solar panels a movie star puts around his penthouse.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 10

California: Home of Los Angeles, the greenest metropolis in the United States.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 9

New York never had an electric car initiative, but we’ve also never quashed the project when an oil company sneezed at us.

New York

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 8

California: We funded the electric car initiative.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 7

New York
It’s environmentally sensitive without hating you for driving to work.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 6

California
400% more beach property than some East Coast states, and no horribly polluted Coney Island Bay.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 5

New York: It’s got plenty of sun and actual things to do other than tour movie lots.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 4

California: Come to sunny California.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 3

New York: the GREATEST city in the world.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 2

California
Visit the true metropolis of Los Angeles, the charm of San Francisco, the entertainment capital of Hollywood, or dozens of other nationally important locales. Visit America’s greatest vineyards, thousands of miles of wilderness for true nature lovers, and more coastline and international culture than any other destination.

Bathroom Monologue: Ad Wars 1

New York
No other state mixes such culture, nature and charm. Come for gorgeous sights like endless nature trails, Niagara Falls and America’s most recognizable skyline. Come for our vineyards and award-winning wines, the Metropolitan museums of art, or take in a show on world-famous Broadway. From flea markets to Wall Street, every place has something, but only New York has it all!

Bathroom Monologue: Define "Ham"

“Mr. Raghevsky is one of the most dangerous men in America. He wakes up at precisely 6:30 every morning, even on weekends, so I want surveillance tapes starting at 6:15. We will bug his room, living room, home bathroom, the men’s bathroom on his floor at the office building, his cubicle, and his Prius. Document every word he so much as mutters, and pass the footage of any silently mouthed words on to our lip-reading specialists. He arrives at work somewhere between 8:50 and 9:05. Be sure to flag the tapes of any days he arrives later than 8:59. He takes his lunch hour at noon, but only eats until 12:20 at the latest. Pay careful mind to him during his spare time in this hour. This is where the most suspicious activity is most likely to occur. Sometimes he throws a random word into google and skims the results, and has seldom searched for the same two words. More often he visits one of the public libraries within walking distance of the office, walks down a seemingly random aisle and picks up the first book to catch his interest. Our operatives suggest he has not fingered the same book since January of 2005, when he spent two consecutive lunch breaks on the ‘E’ section of the O.E.D. He has not perused any dictionary since then, and operatives assume he may have left or picked up notes from that book. His spelling in intercepted e-mails since then has been atrocious. But his most dangerous act comes once a week. You’ll recognize it immediately, as he leaves everything at his desk and heads to the benches outside his workplace, leaving all files and books behind, and thinks for himself."

Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Monologue aboard Delta Flight 1972 from Cincinnati

“You know why I like you, John? Because I could smack this plane right out of the sky, sending you to certain death, powerless against it and without any contribution to it, smashing down on the highway beside the terminals and onto an S.U.V., and you’d feel guilty towards the driver. Somehow, somewhere in-between the miniscule amount of weight you added to the fall, your presence on the offending plane, and your proximity to someone else’s pain, you’d feel guilty right before you died. It’s adorable.”

Bathroom Monologue: Losing for Student Council Can Really Get to You

A man so ridiculously wealthy that he paid the wages of every government employee for one day, and did it every year on that day – his birthday. The terms were that they had to call in sick. After additional funds went to bribe officials until he shut down the government, just once a year, officially buying his own holiday: George Day. A wise man, he reallocated his birthday to permanently occur on the last Friday of the month, so that everyone would have a three-day weekend on George. He quickly became one of the most popular men on the planet, and while it eventually sent him into bankruptcy, he never had trouble paying for drinks. They were always on someone else.

Monday and Tuesday

Something a little different is happening around here on Monday and Tuesday. It may seem a little confusing at first, but I promise it will make less sense as it goes along. You may want to check back a couple of times over those days.

Bathroom Monologue: His Plates

The difference in the mindsets of husband and wife were best displayed in his choice of license plates. Bob lived in jubilation with his “EAT ME” plates, cackling any time someone drove by and looked offended. He was a profane man. Alice was a pious woman, and drove this thing to work every day in terror of stopping at a light and having a truck full of cannibals with an “OKAY” license plate pulling up next to her.

Bathroom Monologue: Blurbs for “Night of the Cobra”

“Never has a ten-storey python been so sympathetic.” –Scott Smith, author of The Ruins

“What every literary novel has tried to be since Godzilla.” –Publisher’s Weekly

“Big monster, small plot, medium thrills.” –New York Times Book Review

“The next great American family tragicomedy.” –The Economist

“You will walk away from this book forever asking yourself, ‘What is my Empire State Building?’” -Atlantic Monthly

“I wasn’t sure if the giant python would kill himself before I did. Mind-numbing.” –Onion A.V. Club

“A ballet of logic… a sleight of hand of language.” -Ruth Scurr, former Man Booker Prize judge

“At least it’s short.” –National Review

“That titanic python’s struggle to become a cobra will be the Ugly Duckling story for our millennia. Just watch.” –Mark Y., metacritic.com

“If nothing else, read it for the fight with the cruise liner.” –Pat Robertson, 700 Club

“You see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream things as they never were and ask, ‘Why are they not like Night of the Cobra?’” -George Bernard Shaw, via séance

(Cop-out: Only one of the above quotes is real, though the book each quote describes remains equally fanciful.)

Bathroom Monologue: I need that burn

Day 6 of the wisdom teeth adventure and I'm up to semi-soft foods like macaroni and cheese, which is more of a slurping adventure than real chewing. At present I am honestly more anticipating the day when I can brush my teeth than when I can chew. The looks on people's faces when they come in close has nothing to do with swelling. It's the smelling. Swishing salt solution won't kill the odor. And at two times a day, toothbrushing is a hard habit to break. I can feel the itch. My right hand reaches for the cupboard every time I enter the bathroom. Last night I snuck in here and cheated, brushing just the front four. Yet every little bit of grime, which I might as well pick off of my teeth, demands bristles. Do they put nicotine in toothpaste? Is it the same compulsion that makes a man reach for a bottle of Jim Beam and Listerine? I need that burn.

Bathroom Monologue: Diet by the Book, OR, I actually met Dr. Atkins when I was a kid, and he was fat

His diet book only has one page of entries, written in various colors for all the different years he’d updated it: blue pen, black ballpoint, black felt-tip, red editing pen, and several different thicknesses of pencils marked the updates in popular dietary science since his adolescence.

As a child fat had been dangerous. Fat, and oil. At school he learned these things were the same: they were lipids. So these were at the top of the page. Just below these is a note that saturated fat should be avoided even more than normal fat, though normal fat should also be minimized.

Near the top of the page is a very recent arrow and a new note mentioning something about transfats.

During the period of elegant black ballpoint comes cholesterol. He didn’t know what that was, but knew how to avoid it.

Sugar was out next. They made you crash, changed quickly into fat, and refined ones had extra chemicals. A more recent note adds that artificial sweeteners were also forbidden, since they could cause cancer and kidney trouble, as well as turning into the same harmful biological byproducts as sugar if you didn’t exercise them off.

Thus he wasn’t surprised a few years later when fad diets nixed carbohydrates. Sugars were carbohydrate chains. Glucose, sucrose, fructose, dextrose – all merely scientific jargon for the sweet stuff. But now he knew to avoid all carbohydrates: bread, pasta hamburger buns. A note in smaller letters than usual says that hamburger is okay, though, since it is protein. “It just had to be really lean.”

A table in the margin of the notebook showed the three existing kinds of foods:
-CARBOHYDRATE
-PROTEIN
-LIPID

“Carbohydrate” and “Lipid” are crossed out in red pen. Proteins became the only substance he could eat. Except some sources of protein were dangerous: fish might have mercury in it, beef might have mad cow disease, and all the vegetables with protein still had the deadly carbohydrates. It gave him quite a shock to learn that the crunch in his celery was a crunchy sugar chain. How sneaky of the sugar to not be sweet.

The bottom of the page had notes on protein shakes and some incomprehensible scribbles in red marker about preservatives. These notes go on, and rather than running onto the next page, curve upwards and into the margins and empty lines. Several are upside down. There is no telling what he might have done with the rest of the book as he died in the middle of this red marker period, starving to death reading labels.

Bathroom Monologue: How exactly are you different from a dentist?

$2,572 for wisdom teeth. I wonder if I have to put the check under the surgeon’s pillow. I wonder if they add a random two-digit number to keep you from realizing that thousands of dollars for something I could have done with pliers and a steak knife is way overpriced. Instead you just look at that awkward sum and figure it must have calculated it with a complicated oral surgery algorithm. Screw it. I’m doing this at home. I cut my toenails by myself. This can’t be much more complicated. What do you mean it isn’t sterile? I’m not planning on having kids anyway.

Bathroom Monologue: If I get to Heaven, the first thing I’ll ask is…

“Really, ‘monosyllabic?’ Five syllables comprising the word that means ‘one syllable?’ How did that get in there? It gave You away immediately. "

The second thing will be about the same guy inventing both the lie detector and Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth. There will also probably be a request for an address.

Bathroom Monologue: Noun Challenge Concludes

He would have come up with a better name, probably something in Latin, but seeing that Apollo was filling out a patent form for the same God of Jokes position, he had to rush. And so for all eternity the deity of humor would have to be “the Joker.” It’s made him the butt of many jokes since; Vulcan frequently asks if he should have named himself “the Armorer,” or Helios “the Sunner.”

His treatment around Olympus has driven the Joker into a permanent bad mood. Taking queues from the Old Testament (which was new when he got this job, and which he considers a reliable handbook for the job), he persecutes his divine competition. Unlike any entities in his handbook, though, his targets could just as easily be represented in a temple as in a nightclub that hosts stand-up. His competition is not just the divine, but all sources of entertainment. He’s razed far more places of amusement than holy sites – possibly out of fear of reprisal from gods, since reprisal from the investors behind Disneyland or the Kentucky Derby are less intimidating.

The biggest snafu so far came from destroying a waterslide park in the Middle East. He thought reducing the place to so much lava and pumice was a good gag. Ironic. The local animistic deities disagreed and the God of Jokes was beset by a hundred thousand immortal flies that cannot be swatted.

In a show of devotion to the craft, rather than seeking vengeance on his competition, the Joker is avidly seeking the license for these flies. He considers their potential in practical jokes to be limitless.

Bathroom Monologue: Noun Challenges You to Up the Ante

They skipped the Kentucky Derby that year, for the first time in twelve years. Twelve years ago Clarissa had come down with measles. This year there was a special poker game between high-stakes rollers of a stripe called the “P.P.G.”

There were four players, all impressive. The first as nearly a giant of a man with one eye and a Santa Claus beard. The second was a man all in black, his dark hair shining like bird feathers – and indeed, he wore some from an earring. The third was the most beautiful man Clarissa and Pete had ever seen, with hair of gold, not blonde, but rich and lustrous stuff. The last was an African with a bizarre accent and a bipolar disposition – one pole incredibly depressed over some lost job, the other jubilant, and thankfully, both with expert poker faces.

A hushed audience of ninety-nine ticket-holders was allowed to sit in on this rarest of games. There was Nexus Hold ‘Em, a form Texas Hold ‘Em played with tarot cards. When the big man with one eye won the first round two girls in the front sprouted wings. The African won two people on opposite sides of the room inexplicably fell in love. They were wed at intermission.

There was a game played not for chips, but articles indigenous to the homelands of the players. The one-eyed man actually gambled away bones of arcane creatures. The African had gold embedded in the pores of volcanic pumice, claiming they were born from the first belches of the world. They let out an ethereal shine from their holes that filled the audience with a lust for money. The beautiful man gambled teeth of unknown origin. When one accidentally fell onto the floor a dragon sprouted and nearly ate the bystanders.

The oddest game was straight-up five-card draw, where the man in black, who someone called “Raven,” drew an infeasible hand of five jokers, all wildcards that he claimed constituted a “divine flush.” Raven won the game so hard that he not only took home all the rocks and chips, but broke the entire world economy.

When all was said and done, Pete agreed that this was worth skipping the Derby. He preferred watching the horses to watching old people play cards, but any money he might have won at the track would have been worthless by the end of that final game. Pete was prudent in his aesthetics.