Bathroom Monologue: New Department Signage

The location is a posh New York City mega-boutique, a spot too big to hold real style while too rebellious to turn profit of anyone but those who pursue true style. It boasts unique department signage. For instance, on your left as you enter the door you might notice the sign hanging from the ceiling boasting a man in his underwear (he is clearly an abdominal model) yelling the word “Fuck!” The word “Fuck!” is in a word bubble, and is the only word on the sign. His department would feature rugged jeans, flannel shirts and sundry overpriced hats. This is, of course, Men’swear.

Bathroom Monologue: The Newsroom Day Two of Two: The Support

“We need the past to be brighter than the invisible darkness of future. We need a history of heroes to let us know that bravery is possible. A Greatest Generation and a century of inventors and soldiers and firemen leave us with the belief that many humans have the potential for action, not merely one president or general or saint. We need a canon of many saints who slump towards us. The photo of the many men raising the flag on Iwojima, the tales of many men running into the towers on 9/11, and that the Constitutional Congress was the labor of many minds rather than a gift to a lone Moses - these things tell every man and woman that history beckons widely.

“And we need to feel like we’re failing, because any other feeling will lead us to complacency. For whatever amalgam of reasons, we are the most likely nation to pursue self-improvement. By harkening to the great decisions, of Cronkite weighing against the Vietnam War and Murrow standing up to McCarthy, we invite a generation to seriously look at what present mistakes and evils are going unchallenged. The truth is that history assures we will always have made great decisions, and human nature assures we will always have great decisions we are not making. If history can goad us into living better, then we ought to lose our feet in its tide.

“A hundred years ago we saw Europe at war and could not let the forces of democracy be slaughtered. Today we see blood running in the streets of the Middle East and find ourselves too tired, too weary, too taxed and afraid, and ultimately too confused to answer the simple question of whether we should attempt to stop it.

“You were telling an audience to do more than sit, and for all the current anchors and writers and bloggers to do more than spend twenty-three hours of the day asking whether a single mother eight states away was a good parent. Using the past as a prop to coerce us into thinking we’re failing? We needed that, because we are failing, and if the truth won’t convince us of it, we’ve got to find other means.”

Bathroom Monologue: The Newsroom Day One of Two: The Attack

“When exactly was the United States of America a moral nation? When it interred a million Asians? When it only went to war against the Nazis because it had been bombed? Or perhaps it was in our golden days, when it was slaughtering natives and receiving shipments of blacks to pick cotton. We didn’t go to war for moral reasons. We went to war because we wanted Texas, or didn’t want Spain interfering with our interference in Cuba, and the newspapers were right there toadying. Benjamin Franklin was the first great American op-ed writer and he was such a stooge for the establishment they almost let him write the Constitution.

“This illusion! This illusion you have that the American public was ever informed. There was more than a century when the only reliable way to get a presidential candidate’s platform was if he happened to visit your town. And the Founding Fathers knew people were ignorant and never expected better from them, and so while they enshrined freedom of the press, they also institutionalized the Electoral College for Congress and a Presidency – a private crop of people who would select another private crop of people to decide everything while most of the country tried to survive the flu. Maybe, maybe the second private crop of people decided things for moral reasons, or maybe they fed into a Military Industrial Complex that Lyndon Johnson warned the entire country of live on television and still no one did anything meaningful about.

“So tell me when America knew what it was doing. Was it when we were scalping the natives for government credit? Was it when we were enslaving anyone even descended from an African? Was it when we dropped an atomic bomb on private citizens? When did we qualify as the greatest country in the world, who is the greatest country in the world now, and why on earth would we want to be that thing again?”

Notice: Newsroom Monologues Coming

Tonight is the season finale of HBO's The Newsroom. It's been a provocative show for many people, myself included, and we're going to play with some of what it's provoked. 

On Monday and Tuesday I’m going to run two related and contradictory Bathroom Monologues reflecting based on the series's seminal event. Will McAvoy’s inciting monologue went viral both in his fictional world and in our real one, and it’s stuck with me all season. It’s inspiring to sick-and-tired idealists, while also uniquely troubling with its rosy view of American history. You don’t need a feminist to tell you why the ethos, “we acted like men” is worrisome.

So on Monday we’ll see a monologue attacking Will McAvoy’s rant, and on Tuesday we’ll see a monologue supporting it, though maybe not for the reasons you’d immediately expect. If you like, record an audio or video performance of either monologue and link them in the Comments. It would be fun to do a mega-post of your performed debates.

True Story of John: Eulogy for the worst person I’ve ever met

It was an overcast afternoon and my family was exhausted from packing and the road. My little sister had leased her first apartment and was finally taking everything she’d left in our basement, and during a lull, I went out to cook for the group.

Most people don’t count wasps as people, but he was too much of a dick to grant him the excuse of non-persona. He buzzed with a friend as soon as I opened the door, flying directly at my face. I waved them aside with the spatula, but they only circled around the air-current and continued. I had to constantly wave the spatula to blow them aside as I turned on the grill, and he still managed to fly around to my chest, where I felt his stinger bounce off my shirt. I swatted him to the ground, but let him live. This was a mistake as he and his partner zipped up towards my exposed arm.

I ducked inside the house to let them cool off. There are no wasp nests on my deck, nor on the grill. These wasps were visitors. I chatted with my brother and sister for a few minutes before someone complained of hunger, and I went back outside to put the burgers on.

As soon as I reached through the door to open the grill, the wasp flew straight into my forearm. I felt the sting as it jabbed me, and it rebounded off my flesh, having flown so hard it couldn’t control its flight after impact. It fly between the bars of the grill, stuck to a heating vent inside, and melted. He kamikazed me.

I was dumbstruck, never having been so angry at something for dying before. I’m also allergic to wasp venom, so that wasn’t a peach. I swore the stupid bastard’s memory for several arm-tingling hours afterward.

Bathroom Monologue: I Love American Writers

"Your book ending. She is like Sherlock Holmes, except not mystery. She keeps explaining things like they are important, and audience doesn't care. Is fascinating. I love American writers."

Bathroom Monologue: A Son of Rape

“I was conceived in an alley in Missouri. My mother fought him, but he broke her arm and muffled her cries with a garbage bag. If only it had happened a few years later, his blood under her fingernails would have mattered to the police. Instead they said little, the hospital charged her a ridiculous amount that she spent years paying off, and she went home to keep it quiet, until she wasn’t welcome at home anymore. I was born in Iowa.

“It was my birthday when, and you’ve got to imagine what feelings my birthday meant to her as opposed to any other sort of mother, the things… Excuse me.

“The only time I ever asked about it was after my sixth birthday. She put a candle in a Little Debbie’s Fudge Round, either because we were that broke, or because I loved them. I remember both answers on different days. As I climbed a stepladder to help her wash the dishes, I asked why she’d kept me. I remember her kneeling on my stepladder to be at level with me, and her resting a fist on the top rung. I could still smell the smoke from my birthday candle as she said she couldn’t get rid of me because she’d known I’d turn out like this. That’s what a mother told her son, so believe however much you want. I don’t think she slept for a week after my birthday. I never had the guts to ask her again.

“Rape was on my mind, not because I knew what it was, but because every child I ran into had an opinion. Did I know my Mom should have pulled me out with a coat hanger? Or thrown herself down some stairs? Did I know that any time he wanted, my father could come and take me from her? I remember having nightmares of him coming for me with a garbage bag, so I didn’t sleep a lot either, which is how I knew when Mom was sleeping or not. These children informed me that I wouldn’t have even happened if she didn’t dress like a whore, which made no sense to me, since she dressed the same as other mothers, just that she always walked on the other side of the curb from them.

“One of my earliest memories is watching two girls run away from me, I don’t even remember what they’d done, but I was lying on my back on the pavement in front of our school, and wondering why the two of them couldn’t have been aborted. I was just trying to live while everyone I knew was evil to me. What sanctity did they deserve? Even outside of their mothers’ wombs, why were they special?

“Mom didn’t allow that kind of talk. It’s very important you know that - she controlled conversations and forced you to be polite. She didn’t just do it to me; I overheard her doing it to the strangers.

“I always thought it was strange that Mom would volunteer. She worked no fewer than two jobs in a week, and sometimes four, and yet there were afternoons and late nights that she brought me to the local hospital or homeless shelter, where I’d wait in rooms the size of closets while she talked to strangers. She had… she had the bravery that changes the times. She spent our spare time counseling girls at the hospital. It didn’t matter how they were hurt. It couldn’t matter because when that program began, they didn’t think they could say they’d been raped. I think the only time I ever heard her speak that word, that actual word of what actually happened to her, was when she didn’t know I was outside the door while she was convincing strangers they had rights.

“It wasn’t fair that she died so young. Thirty-seven isn’t even an even number. She had a weak heart, the same as what killed her Dad. That’s why he didn’t come to her funeral, and I’ve never bothered to pursue why no one else from her family did. They were holes my whole life I never filled. Did you know…?

“You know, I don’t know how old I was before I met anyone who actually liked my mother. The shelters, the grocery stores and post offices where she worked were uniformly tense whenever I visited with her. I don’t remember a single landlord who looked her in the eye. Whatever you think of her decision, she didn’t deserve her son to think ‘Whore’ was her middle name, and it was adults that convinced me of that. I like to think she changed the world since then.

“So maybe her funeral was the first time I ever heard people be decent to her. A couple pews of people came, mostly young women, mostly unaccompanied, none with children. I didn’t have children either, but I couldn’t help looking for them for weeks afterward. These young women, and this one incredibly old man who needed two canes just to stand up, called her “bold” and “original” and entire sentences which would have made more appropriate middle names for her. No one cried, but there was this one Jewish lady who knelt and kissed her casket. I didn’t have the guts to ask what Mom had done for her, just as none of these people had the guts to say what they’d thought of Mom before she couldn’t hear it anymore. Nowadays, when I don’t sleep, what I think most about is how to get by, and second-most is whether I said enough to her when she could hear.”

Bathroom Monologue: Gyration Narration

“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”

“Hang on, hang on… it’ll pass.”

“Are you dancing at me? What the Hell is that?”

“It’s a neuromuscular syndrome. It’s complicated. My nerve-endings are messed up, and there these muscle spasms. Give me a minute.”

“It’s a what?”

“It’s kind of like muscular dystrophy, I guess.”

“It’s like what?”

“How about Parkinson’s? Not that it’s really like that, but...”

“What’s Parkinson’s?”

“You’ve never seen Michael J. Fox? Jesus. Okay, what about nerve damage?”

“I’m not really into that.”

“Into…? Listen, you ever thrown out your back?”

“No.”

“Then why am I talking to you? Get the fuck away from me and get some life experience.”

Request for Rare Questions

It's the time of year when I get to ask, "Have you seen my RAQ?"

The Rarely Asked Questions is my birthday tradition at The Bathroom Monologues. Until Friday night, August 31st, I'm requesting all readers leave questions they don't normally ask anyone. They can be questions about me, my writing, or anything entirely unrelated. Consider:

-What's the boiling point of Tungsten?

-What does my mother's snore remind you of?

-If he wants to avoid the conductor and skip the fare, what is the best time for a Mummy to hop the Baltimore light rail?

What you don't normally ask anyone else is entirely up to you, but please ask it of me. I'll compile every question and answer at least one per person on September 4th - my birthday.

That's how I celebrate. With my big RAQ.

Please leave your mysteries and queries in the Comments section of this post.

Bathroom Monologue: Abusive Alcoholic

"He was an abusive alcoholic. The man punished his liquor. Entire bottles of Jack Daniels suffered his nightly reigns of terror, and he never met a scotch he wouldn’t swear at the moment it was gone. The lucky ones were scattered on the floor, but by nine, or ten at the latest, he’d toss them to shatter against the wall behind our TV. And he loved liquor, that’s why he spent so much on it, so it’s no wonder he’d be crueler to the people he didn’t love, like us kids. I’ve heard he’s gotten much better. He only drinks out of Styrofoam cups now and seems to have a cordial relationship with coffee."

Bathroom Monologue: Imp and Triclops – A Love Story

“How could I not love you?”

“Have you tried?”

“Do you remember how we met?”

“I do, which is why I think you oversentimentalize it.”

“I hired twenty-five bodyguards for that cargo.”

“I could have told you it was too many.”

“The raiders ate twenty-four of them! After a week, I thought they’d eaten the supplies, too. If you’re dumb enough to kill for a living, you’re dumb enough to eat a syringe.”

“It was difficult gathering new beasts of burden and driving the lode to the hospital on my own. But of course I’d do it; I’m a man of my word.”

“You went to all the trouble of honoring your contract. So much blood, so much struggle, and yet you arrived at my hospital smiling.”

“You had lives to save with that medicine.”

“I made outrageous profits with that medicine! With all the convoy attacks that year, I was the only business for three cities in any direction.”

“That’s how a love story starts?”

“That’s how mine did. The wallet wants what it wants.”

Better Responses to Terrorism

I’ve been thinking about terrorism a lot this summer. It’s easy to, between awful events abroad, and multiple shootings here in the U.S. Terrorists are a peculiar set of murderers; they are one of the few segments of the human population who it is laudable to kill. They are black sheep who bring it upon themselves, folk who perform such evil work that no one will tell you to stop hating them.

There’s a corrosive irony to hating people for their hatred, and I fear in many cases it leads to harmful reciprocity. My family mostly hails from Ireland and what was once Czechoslovakia, two sources of nightmarish reciprocal hatred. Hutus and Tutsis, Jews and Arabs, Protestants and Catholics – history can be a catalog of revenge, but there are more personal examples. Consider Harvey Pekar being beaten daily in his childhood by black children who had experienced such oppression that they attacked a light-skinned child out of instinctive reciprocity.

In that context, even feeling terribly for his victims in Aurora, the national rush to hate Jason Holmes unnerved me. Especially if the man were insane, hating him would neither repair what he did nor better equip us to deal with others like him who are out there now. These are feelings I haven’t worked out, but they’re the same that gave me no pleasure at the killing of Osama Bin Laden. The “5/1” episode of The Newsroom reminded me how out of sorts I felt that night, when the U.S. celebrated that they’d shot a man.

Helping the harmed is more worth celebrating than punishing the harmer. That is how you spread a valuable behavior; we can be compassionate every day, rather than vengeful once, and if we were violently vengeful every day the world would be awash in gore. I appreciate catharsis. I understand our long (and likely genetic) history of vengeance, and that our senses of justice vary - but under no circumstances where there are victims ought compassion to be disengaged. After the Texas A&M shooting, I wondered why it was that millions of people can watch a news program hating a killer, rather than paying attention to those directly affected who require assistance. It would be ugly to reduce this to entertainment value.

This is why I support Indiegogo’s donation drive to assist victims and surviving families of the shooting at Milwaukee’s Sikh Temple. To the cynics: this is a cleat example of good in the world. This isn’t even a Kickstarter that will get you a neat gadget or album in the end; it’s just a drive by some connected people to connect many others in gestalt aid.

This is not about judging or hating a shooter. This is about compassion for victims. All proceeds will go to paying medical bills and funeral costs for people who were caught in this terrible event. Already over 1,500 people have pledged to help with medical bills of survivors and funeral costs of the deceased.

It’s heartening that they’ve passed their original $25,000 goal to (at this writing) $155,310. But anyone who has suffered the pain of burying a loved one knows funerary costs can be immense. The United States’ healthcare system has a proper reputation, too, for disastrously high costs for dramatic injuries, even with health insurance. In this case, no wounded victim could have suspected such problems before bullets tore into their place of worship.

If you can spare a donation, please consider it. If you can’t, and plenty of people can’t in this economy, please simply consider every other way we participate in these matters. It will determine what world we live in.

Bathroom Monologue: A brief autobiography.

At least once a week for as long as I can remember I have been overwhelmed by the desire to exuberantly express to someone how lovable they are, or how funny and insightful, or how giving and kind, or how beautiful, or otherwise how I am positively enraptured by their existing at the same time as I did.

Also at least once a week for as long as I can remember I have been overwhelmed by the desire to scream expletives directly into the mouth of another, or to seize them by the shoulders and beat them in the face until their nose was as flat as their brows, or to otherwise exuberantly express my displease with their passion, religion or other elements of their person.

In my entire adult life I have striven to exercise the first of these overwhelming desires, and likewise striven to prohibit appearance of the second. As a direct result, a few people like me, most people don’t know who I am, and a slightly larger number than that hold me with outrageous contempt. I’m quite at peace with all of this.

Bathroom Monologue: Zhanjee Vs. The Dactyls

No sooner were the Greater Sauropods pacified, then the Dactyls emerged. Previously Tyrannosaurs had frightened them from hunting the plains; now, without the king lizards, the winged beasts descended. They roamed in flocks, each able to carry off a bison or hogbear for its lunch. They possessed ceaseless hunger and soon ravaged Frontier farms and set about eating Munenori platoons.

Zhanjee the Butcher was already in the Old Valleys for the incursions against the Sauropods, and so he intervened. He climbed to the tallest peaks to observe. The Dactyls nested low rather than high, cherishing water sources. Above human or khimeric flesh, they loved the fat of the Cloud Seals who played along the high waterfalls. Whenever a Cloud Seal would dive from a waterfall, a Dactyl would swoop in to snap her up.

Zhanjee waited atop the most popular waterfall. He watched as one Cloud Seal dove, and a young Dactyl struck. He watched as a second pup dove, and was similarly struck. He bided his time until all the young had Cloud Seals, and it was only the mother who remained hungry in the skies. Then he flung himself off the falls.

When her jaws attempt to catch him, he jammed the great Deviltongue between them and propped them open. Sheathed as not to slay the beast, he rested the endcap into the soft flesh of her lower mouth, digging it deeper whenever she resisted his steering. Then he mounted her neck and forced her to ground her young. Within the evening, he became the first human to break and teach a Dactyl mount.

It was ironic that he seldom rode them, preferring the company of horse or bison. Yet the Munenori army was eternally grateful for the gift of war from the sky.

Bathroom Monologue: The Descent of Magic

That an infection could reanimate the dead is preposterous, and it appears more preposterous for every zombie that gets back up and wanders around The Z. How could microbes cause dead cells to not only reactivate, but coordinate movement, digestion, the senses and complex motor abilities?

Because they’re magic microbes. All science has been a cover-up of the obvious and insulting answer that just as life began at the microscopic level, so did the arcane. If you study fossils or present live bacterial cultures, you’ll find they’ve evolved little since the dawn of life. That’s because they mastered it. All they needed was to develop enough magical potential to survive a little better than anyone else. The typical virus either dies out fighting the immune system or dies out when it kills the host. The magic microbe that could magically reanimate its host was much better, and spread its offspring much better, given that zombies shamble around sharing the miracle.

Coincidentally, vampirism is believed to be the work of a more advanced but less photo-resistant microbe. Lycanthropy, though, is just a hoax by guys in hairy suits. All real magic in triclopes, humans and imps can be credited to the plagues that first bred it into us.

Bathroom Monologue 2000: A True Story of What Makes John Tick

This is the 2,000^th post on The Bathroom Monologues. I’ve been daily for a few years now and even I’m surprised I got this far. I asked you what you wanted for our 2,000^th get-together, and the majority of people said they wanted either a true story about me or an explanation of what makes me tick. I’ve done my best here to do both.

I didn’t actually remember this story until my sister told it to me a couple years ago. She was in college then, doing a paper for Developmental Psychology, and chose me as a subject. I took this as both amusement and offense. Rather than merely interview her subject, she interviewed our mother to find out what I was like before now.

I was the first child in the family – first to our parents, and first to all four grandparents. I enjoyed being the center of the world for about two years. They sang me songs, they read me stories, and took me everywhere, until my brother was born. Surely you’re familiar with how much older brothers love being ousted.

While Mom claims they didn’t entirely ignore me, the shift in attention clearly registered that way on the two-year-old John. I cried more, picked more arguments, and tried to interject myself on situations where the baby was getting too much attention. My father’s general answer was to send me to the basement to play by myself. This was wretched to the two-year-old John, though realistically that basement was stocked with colorful toys.

I told you all of that so I could tell you this: one weekend my parents heard me get up early and make noises for attention, but they refused to cave in. They were exhausted, and my father would be furious if I woke the baby. They heard come closer to their door and babble at it. They heard me rustle around the kitchen. Then the noises stopped. They didn’t hear anything for an hour.

My mother did what any mother would: concluded I’d killed myself, and ran around the house to find me. I wasn’t in my room, or the halls, or the kitchen. She heard a low hum from the basement and went down to check. There I was sitting in my little onesie, staring up at the television on the shelves. I’d figured out how to climb them to turn it on and was watching a cartoon about The Incredible Hulk with such awe I didn’t notice my mother had arrived.

This is my sister’s favorite part, and she got Mom to repeat it for me. “He was just watching the cartoons all morning,” she said with an adoring smile. “And he never came back.”

According to her, that is where my career in Speculative Fiction came from. When my parents were too tired for a bedtime story, now I'd offer to tell them some version of The Smurfs, or GI Joe, or The Hulk.

Hey Mom, can I use this as an author photo?

Two years later, my brother was ousted by our newborn little sister. Suddenly he couldn’t get time in Mom’s lap or on the family bed. Suddenly he was spending a great deal of time in the basement, starved for attention. Mom feared I’d use this position for revenge on the boy who had ruined my perfect existence, and we certainly fought a lot, especially once he grew big enough to hit back. But she was surprised to find that I commiserated with his ousting and took him under my wing in games. It seemed I kept coming up with stories for us to live in while our parents were busy. I’d had two years with the television to train.

Twenty years later, this helped my sister pass her Developmental Psychology course. She ran the paper by me to check its grammar and if the narrative made sense. She claimed that for her entire life I'd had the talent.

Bathroom Monologue: Paul Ryan Worked At McDonald’s

“Find out the specific years, the specific store--and who was the manager? I heard a rumor that his manager thought he lacked social skills. Confirm it. Find me anyone who worked at that McDonald’s with him; Wisconsin is full of Democrats, sure enough we can find some who’ll say something. Find me surveillance video of him jacking off in the deep-fryer and I’ll marry you.

“They keep mentioning this because it brands him as the common man, so we have to show that he was a shitty common man. Everyone loves the idea of their neighbors until they get to know them. Why’d he quit? Who resented him? What has he said about it since then? Has he ever talked shit about the job? Did he hate the people, or the pay? God bless him if he bitched about the pay that millions of Americans are still trying to get by on.

“What town was it in? I bet your ass its mean income is under what he spends on suits today. Pelt him with questions if that town makes too much money. Pelt him with figures of how few dollars they’d get under his tax plan. Ask him how many of his co-workers could afford healthcare on their salaries. Do you think we could be lucky enough to find one who got cancer and couldn’t afford it? Or if she died and only her kids are left. One of those kids would be worth ten Joe the Plumbers.

“And is the store still there? An old McDonald’s probably looks like hell. Can we use a black-and-white of it in the background of an attack ad? Because I’m imagining water stains, foggy windows, a morbidly obese Latino frowning into a Big Mac, and an overlaid quote about Paul Ryan getting his start in business by exploiting unhealthy eating habits.”

Bathroom Monologue: Be Another Yourself

“They don't want you to be yourself. And it's not just because deep down people are insecure, scared, misinformed, hungry and horny. Your base characteristics are not your real safe. No grandma that pats you on the shoulder and says, "Just be yourself" is saying "Go be a braindead animal." But that grandma doesn't want you to really be yourself, either.

“That grandma and her society don’t even want you to like Yu Gi Oh cards. It certainly doesn't want the full person inside you. Not the one who finds that anodyne department store music helps her concentrate. Not that one that will never be a full crossdresser, but certain days doesn't understand why a long skirt isn't an option for him. That one that, every few Wednesday nights, wants to cry to reruns of Barney the Dinosaur.

“Society does not want your personality. It wants a norm we've all unconsciously assented to, so nobody gets weirded out and everybody gets home with minimal eye contact. You and me both signed the contract in invisible ink. If you don’t remember anyone else being there, it’s because we were all ignoring each other. That’s the benefit of suppression.

“You must be this tall to ride this girl. You must look this sad to enter this funeral. You must be this embarrassed that this number of your countrymen don't know where Yemen is on a map, even if you know that the economy is so bad that none of those people will ever get the chance to visit that hemisphere. You must, above all things, suppress your bullshit in favor of the bullshit of society. This is because none of us want the real you. We want the real us, and if we can't get the real us, then why the fuck would we want the real you?”

First look inside The Last House in the Sky

I’ve been tagged by Adam Byatt and Danielle La Paglia to share a snippet from my work in progress. Here’s the deal: you’re supposed to search through your document for the word “look,” and then share the surrounding paragraph. I presume you go with the first occurrence of “look;” I got lucky with mine. Then we tag a few authors to get them do the same.

So here is a first look inside The Last House in the Sky, introducing one of our heroes:

"He was too naked. There were men who were simply not built for nudity, and this was one of them, with his long, rat-nested hair, and his paunch, and the way his hips leaned a little too far forward such that even if he put trousers on he’d still look indecent. A black cat pawed its way around his shoulders and messy mane."

I'd like to pass this on to:
Linda Wastilla
Tony Noland
Emma Newman
Linda Wastilla
Laura Eno
Tom Gillespie

Bathroom Monologue: "Mech Fighting" Added to Olympics

In what was either a legitimation of Rock-Em Sock-Em Robots or a robust embrace of the late Richard Matheson, this week the Olympic Committee announced that in addition to Sevens Rugby and Golf, “Mech Fighting” will be added to the 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil.

Grappling between human-piloted titanic machines has been popular for so long as they’ve been built, and truly before that, for as long as people could draw them into cartoons. With international standardized rules requiring all models feature butts they can be knocked onto, medical tests proving it was less hazardous to the health than Judo, and the overwhelming number of appeals from fans, the Olympic committee simply couldn’t keep it out, especially not if they wanted to keep Equestrian.

Still, Mech Fighting has its detractors. Some claim it will be too easy a competition to medal in, given how expensive a proper mechanized unit can be. Only a select few first-world nations can afford to build “medal gear.”

Bathroom Monologue: Glass Slipper Fetish

All throughout the kingdom the prince traveled with his exotic glass slipper. This belonged, he explained at every door, to a maiden of unparalleled beauty who had danced with him at the last fortnight’s ball. He wished to wed her immediately. And every girl was eager to try on the slipper, for who’d turn down that kind of money gig? But it was rumored odd, for no one remembered the prince dancing that night. And further, the slipper was of such an awkward shape, demanding a perilous heel over a peculiar set of toes. Surely only one woman’s foot could ever had fit into it. None of the applicants needed to know she’d never existed, and that he’d only had it fashioned to enable his foot fetish. It didn’t feel too dishonest, though, since he’d damn sure marry the arch of his dreams, if he could only find her.

August Writing Goals and Updates

It’s been a brutally busy summer. With my syndrome, no travel is easy, and I’ve had to hit the road three times already, and there are two more big pushes before my birthday. As I type this, I find my left hand is shaking a little too much to seem polite. From the 15^th to the 22^nd I’ll be hosting a college reunion, and from the 29^th to September 4^th I’ll be at ChiCon.

That gave me from August 5^th-14^th and 23-28^th as pure work time. Barring syndrome flare or emergency, I’ve already got a schedule in mind. The current work-in-progress, The Last House in the Sky, is at ~63,000 words.

The current 5-14^th stretch has given me a leisurely nine days to get over 70,000, in which I’ve aspired to write the build-up to the climactic sequence of chapters. I expect to hit it by Friday, and perhaps worm a little further. I wouldn’t dare spoil what’s building, but it’s the biggest thing this fictional world has seen for at least two hundred years. Also, there are robots and dinosaurs.

The 23-28^th stretch gives me six days to write either the entire climactic stretch, or the first half of it, leading to the convalescence of surviving characters and the stuff I’ve been daydreaming about writing for months. If I hit the full 90,000 then, that’d be great. Rough drafts can close loose. I only ask, though, to get over 75,000, and maybe up to 80,000, with a more realistic expectation of writing through certain storyline events. The chapters will definitely be more important that the word count by then, just as they were in my early-July push.

On September 4^th I’ll be in the clear from all unusual obligations. It looks like the promised time, and it’s even my birthday. It’d be nice to have only ten thousand words to knock off before closing the rough draft on the manuscript, but anything below 15,000 can be done in a couple weeks.

Even feeling sick today and electing it as my weekly day off, I’m terribly excited. The productivity I’ve experienced, day-for-day and week-for-week, has been unlike anything else I’ve written in my life. It’s only now, with two thirds of the draft behind me and all the travel issues, that I’m starting to flag. This novel is also a little lighter story than the previous work-in-progress, The House That Nobody Built, funnier, more open with its heart. To compare to film, The House That Nobody Built was Kurosawa, where The Last House in the Sky is Miyazaki. Not that I ape either director in my prose, but that’s been the feeling of the two rides.

I’ve never been this productive in prose in my life. About time, I tell myself.

Bathroom Monologue: Hero Out of Context

It was the morning after the government imprisoned the second slew of reporters. It was not much in the news, for obvious reasons.

That morning he sold his minority share in the food stand to the chicken vendors, and mailed all of his earnings to the bank and his uncle. This paid off his debts. He also mailed an apology to his cousin, not for selling his minority share, but for miscellaneous grievances that had not received due attention. He thanked his cousin for all his tolerance in their youth, and for a lighter he’d given him for his twelfth birthday, which he still owned despite quitting smoking.

After returning from the postal office, he spent an hour at coffee with his wife, and another hour at another coffee with his mistress. With each he talked about their hobbies and what they might do for careers if the government became more violent, or if riots began. Neither believed riots were possible. He argued very little, and left each with a letter that he felt was not safe with the postal system.

This took him to lunch. He spent what was in his pockets on oil rather than food, and sat in the most popular food court until every table was full. He gave up his own table to a young couple, asking if they had cameras in their phones. When they said yes, he walked three paces from the table and doused himself in the oil. He screamed to God and a camera crew of passersby as to his reasons, then ignited himself with a nickel-plated lighter.

Riots began the next day.

Every Sport is Derived From Tennis

The following geneology will reveal how all sports derive from Tennis. It's commonly known in the sciences that all sports are either descended from Tennis or Ping Pong. Which of these is the prime mover of sports is a futile debate, as Ping Pong is a cuter version of Tennis, while Tennis is clearly Ping Pong while standing on the table*. For the sake of this exercise, we will assume Tennis is the prime mover, because no one calls it “Ground Ping Pong,” but many refer to Ping Pong as “Table Tennis.”

Tennis is people separated by a net, whacking a ball at each other’s sides with a racket.

-Pairs Tennis is Tennis with more people; all other multi-person variants will be excluded

-Ping Pong is Tennis where you do not stand on the court*

-Badminton is slower, wispier Tennis

-Racquetball is Tennis where both players face the same direction

-Volleyball is Tennis with no rackets

-Pole-vault is Tennis where the goal is to get over the net

-Golf is Tennis with no opposition whatsoever and several clubs to defend yourself

-Fetch is one-way Tennis where the dog is your teammate

• Skeet-shooting is Fetch where the gun is your teammate
• -Bowling is Skeet-shooting with many targets and no ambition
              -Chess is bowling where the pins are skilled and fight back
• Checkers is Chess with no ambition again

• Baseball is one-way Tennis where the court is square and there too many people for so little to be happening
• -Cricket is more Baseball

-Football Europa/Soccer is Tennis without the net in the way, mostly with feet

• Football Americana is Soccer, mostly with hands
• Rugby is meaner-spirited Soccer
• Basketball is Soccer with an annoyingly placed goal, mostly with hands
• Field Hockey is Soccer, mostly with sticks
• Polo is Field Hockey that needlessly confuses horses
• Water Polo is Field Hockey in water
• Ice Hockey is Field Hockey, on ice
• Ice Soccer, sadly, does not exist

• Track is Soccer without anyone else in the way and no ball
• Nascar is Track in a car
• Equestrian is Track on a horse
• Swimming is Track in water
• Diving is Swimming without the follow-through
• Synchronized Swimming is Swimming where the goal is to not beat or lose to your opponent.
• Rowing is Swimming in a boat
• Yachting is Rowing if you’re rich
• Whitewater is Rowing in a boat when you can’t find a reasonable river

-Boxing is Tennis with no ball or subtlety

• Judo is Boxing with no manners
• Wrestling is Judo that starts on the floor
• Fencing is Boxing with swords
• Sumo is Boxing with no punching
• MMA is Boxing where you just hit them everywhere

Please let us know if you think we missed a sport. We hope to provide a holistic genealogy.

John at Otakon 2012

Welcome to Otakon 2012, an Asian culture convention that greeted 32,000 attendees this year.

Behold! Acres of B.O.

The convention has been an annual retreat for me for years. In many ways it’s my TED Talks, even though I go to film and show screenings rather than lectures. I don’t have the knowledge to curate viewing myself, but in a weekend I’m exposed to more new plots and characterizations than I’d find in a year’s subscription to HBO or Asimov’s. That’s not a slight against our American media, but recognition that it is American media. Otakon prominently features Japanese, Chinese, Indian and Korean film and fiction.

We have cross-cultural similarities, but they produce different thoughts and norms, which broaden an imagination largely trained by just one media culture. Even the mundane tropes of their TV shows cast different light on what we could do in our stories but never think about. No U.S. police procedural or cyperpunk was like Ghost in the Shell; no Romantic Comedy I’ve ever seen stacks up to Delhi Belly; and the only filmmaker I can compare Let the Bullets Fly to is Quentin Tarantino. I sit through some of the most juvenile programs, simply studying how they handle things we never think about. I sketched out the first original novel I ever wrote sitting in the back row during a High School Comedy marathon.

Totoro reminds John to stop being pretentious.

There are many reasons to go to something like this. The Voice Actors After Dark panel, where I heard a vampiric butler read Go The F*ck To Sleep, was one. The Anime Music Video Contest, in which fans create music videos of spliced popular music and clips from shows, routinely beats the hell out of what I see on MTV and validates it as an artform. I’ve got no desire to see Final Destination 5, but the fake trailer one fan made from its audio and clips from the anime Another is something I’d pay to watch, if only it were real. And then there’s cosplay.

I’ve never been into costuming. I enjoy that other people enjoy it, and have a profound appreciation for the fandom. As an author, I’d love to create characters that audiences would spend months patterning costumes after. Yet at the show I ran into a new breed of cosplayer, which almost inspired in me a desire to dress up. It’s not merely satisfactory to create a good likeness of your favorite character. These characters created the likenesses of their favorite characters from specific moments in their favorite stories.

For instance, anyone can fashion a purple vest and giant foam sword. But what about recreating the time Final Fantasy hero Cloud Strife dressed in drag to sneak into a brothel?

If only I were capable of photographing
myself high-fiving someone.

Full Metal Alchemist has enduring popularity in fandom, but it takes real tenacity to pretend you’re dead for two hours to recreate the saddest moment in the series.

Spoilers!

Yes. Yes, this is humanity tapping its full potential. My inspiration took me far enough to follow someone dressed as The Laughing Man for half a city block, until he was next to a payphone. If you know why, then you belong here.

Probably the only J.D. Salinger quote
that will ever appear on this site.

I didn’t bother too many people for photographs, especially as I only recognized a tenth or less of the characters. My favorite moments didn’t seem appropriate to photograph; people in intricate costumes at rest, hugging or chatting with friends they hadn’t seen in months or years. Once it leaves the individual experience, a lot of Speculative Fiction in any medium exists as an excuse to bond. Half the reason I photographed this group was just because they looked so happy to see each other.

For people with so many weapons, they were so cheery.

The other half was they looked like the bitchin’est version of the British Red Coats ever. Otaku and assorted anime fans get crapped on for liking such weird Japanese stuff. Why can’t they enjoy normal American things? You know, like...

It's Mysterio's hand gesture that gets me.

To be fair, both the anime-lovers and comics-lovers tend to get short shrift in our society. I endorse both the above-photographed groups, though, especially after they wore and carried all that stuff through a 100-degree city. Don’t bother asking why they’d want to go through such exertion - not the same week as the Olympics, my friend.

Fandom can get unnerving at such conventions. Craigslist fills up with roleplaying sex requests, and apparently in the Dealers’ Room one company set up a stripper pole for Panty & Stocking cosplayers. That grown women would do that for hours is entertaining to some segment. But for me, this is entertainment:

A stripper pole with a Gone Fishin’ sign. That’s all I can ask from any sales booth.

Bathroom Monologue: Don't Smile

"Quite often now I hear that people who smile too much are hiding something. They are likely stupid or unable to handle reality, and are thus untrustworthy. I wonder on this, because it strikes me that folk who frown too much aren’t hiding enough. Your marriage sucks? Your job sucks? Man, if you can’t handle that, then you aren’t trustworthy. A reasonable person can suppress mundane struggles and go around smiling to strangers. It’s that facial whiner who frowns because his train is ten minutes late that I won’t trust with an account. I expect every employee hates some aspect of his or her life. Smiling despite it is a sign you can handle your load."

Bathroom Monologue: Too Big To Swim

“So they train their whole lives just so they can train for three years just so they can swim for two minutes, and the majority of the people who get to swim for two minutes will be deemed failures? This, my dear, is where depression comes from.”

“Wait, Alison Schmidt is six-foot-one?”

“I see we’re taking different revelations from the Olympics.”

“Six-foot-one?”

“It’s fine, Lita. I’m sure you could take her in judo.”

“I’m six-foot-one!”

“Sure, but you have more practice at judo.”

“That’s too tall to swim.”

“According to whom? Not the Olympic committee.”

“According to my swim coach who said you had to be slim and elegant!”

“You should take him at judo.”

“Wait, what did the guy say? Missy Franklin’s wingspan is wider than she is tall?”

“Is that rare?”

“Yes. Measure my arms.”

“Can’t I measure something else?”

“You’re never touching anything else if you don’t measure them right now.”

“What the lady wants, the lady gets. You hold this end of the measure, though. We’re not all giants like you… swimmers.”

“I can’t believe this! All I wanted to do when I was a kid was swim. You couldn’t get me out of the water.”

“Certainly your pipsqueak dad couldn’t.”

“Dad. All he wanted me to do was bake.”

“You’re an awesome cook! It’s why I’m wider than I am tall. But not so much wingspan.”

“So? How wide is it?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Say it.”

“This feels too much like when Jack Nicholson asks the surgeon for the mirror.”

“God damn it!”

“Seventy-four-ish. That’s, you know. That’s close to your height.”

“I could have been an Olympian!”

“What if they made an Olympic event for cakes? You could get the Gold Medal for flour. Well, I guess that’s already a thing, but—”

“Dad paid off that coach. I know it.”

“Maybe they were just dumb back then. I’m pretty sure when you were eleven, they still thought egg yellows were good for you.”

“If he was alive, I’d set his toupee on fire.”

“You could try out now.”

“I can’t try out now! These girls are, like, sixteen. That’s half… half my…”

“Please don’t give me that look like I’m supposed to finish your sentence. If I do, you’ll hurt me.”

“I had so much fun swimming. I wanted to do it more than anything, it was like flying in warm air. Do you even know how much I loved it?”

“No, because every time I go near water it’s for hydrotherapy. My leg makes the dream of the 200-meter backstroke a little harder to fathom.”

“I… hey, I didn’t… I just didn’t realize how much I missed it.”

“There’s a pool at the center. I think it’s ten bucks to mess around until closing time, if you want to do more than miss it.”

“You think?”

“I think ten dollars less sweets for me would do us both some good.”

Bathroom Monologue: Alternative Abstinence Argument, Redux

"Hey kids. You don’t know me because I’m not famous. I’m overweight, my fashion sense is dreadful and my beard is unkempt. I bring this all up because I fuck. Almost everyone I know fucks, and I don’t know many cool people. Fucking isn’t cool. It never has been and it never will be. It’s jamming an extra finger of meat inside a pink hole. Ignore premature ejaculation, rape, syphilis, chlamydia, HIV and the anxiety over whether your period is late for the next month – fucking is downright uncool because of who does it. Your mom fucks. She fucked to have you. Think about that the next time you’re swapping smut stories. Think about your mom moaning your dad’s name. Yeah. Fucking. Fun, but uncool."

Bathroom Monologue: To No One Real

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Bathroom Monologue: Steak the Vampires, Redux

“Here’s the deal,” Coach said as he heaped even more steak on Tim’s plate. It was pink, barely rare. The blood congealed with the juice of the spinach and lentils on the other side of the plate.

Tim looked at Josh. Josh just shrugged, took his plate and reached for the pepper grinder.

“You know how you’ve been saying the new janitor acts weird? How Susan and some other girls seem all drained and you thought it was vampires, and I told you to quit that shit?”

“Yeah,” Tim replied. He really didn’t want to get yelled at about that again, and couldn’t figure out what this had to do with a steak dinner.

“You know all that stuff about vampires? Bite you on the neck? Turn into bats? Crazy made-up shit?

“Yeah.”

“Well they’re real. They’re real and they’ll be coming tonight.” Coach rubbed his greasy hands together, then slopped the remainder of the steak onto his own plate. He cut it up as he spoke. “They’re coming in mass and they’re coming for you. Every kid on the team is going to be screwed. You’re the healthiest blood bags walking the streets.”

He gestured at Tim’s plate with the carving knife.

“Eat. You got to. It’s the plan I’ve got.”

Tim had a dozen objections, and none cared to voice themselves when his gym teacher was pointing a carving knife at him. He took a bite of his steak and grimaced.

“We’re going to steak them.”

“Stake them?” Josh asked from around a mouthful of meat. He didn’t seem to care. His parents never let him eat like this.

“Steak. E-A-K,” Coach enunciated slowly. “Vampires are magic, right? Well magic is weak as shit against iron. You read any old book and you see: iron stops witches’ spells and cages demons. So when they come, if they get you, they’re going to get a mouthful of iron-rich blood. Beef’s full of iron. So are those veggies. Shame I couldn’t get you some liver, but regardless, you’ll knock them right on their asses.”

Coach shrugged and contorted his face apologetically, then shoveled steak into his mouth.

Tim licked his lips, looking at Coach. He wondered if, in case vampires were actually coming, a History or Chemistry teacher would have come up with the same plan.

Josh handed him the pepper grinder.