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

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

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

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

Bathroom Monologue: Roger That, OR, An Ununderstanding

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

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

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

Don’t give up.






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

Bathroom Monologue: Oblate Trouvé

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

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

Bathroom Monologue: Come In, Number Two

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

Bathroom Monologue: The Straw Man Doesn’t Giggle

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

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

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

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

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

Bathroom Monologue: Labyrinthine

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

Bathroom Monologue: I’m not projecting on Homer here, so I don’t know what I’m really doing

HOMER,
OR,
I’m not projecting on Homer here, so I don’t know what I’m really doing

"Homer, aren't you done with your epics yet?"

"Well maybe if somebody would invent paper I wouldn't have to do it all in my head!"

"We gave you listening boys--"

"Because when I'm composing, what I really need is brats rolling their eyes at my epic meter!"

"How can you tell? I thought you were blind."

"You don't know because nothing has been recorded about me! I only gave you the foundation of European literature."

"Bitter, old--"

"Is it recorded that I'm deaf now? Get out and don't come back until you've developed something more durable than parchment. I want this stuff written down, but I'll feed myself to the dogs before I let it get lost in a library fire."

"We don't have dogs in our--"

"Do I have to invent the fucking metaphor around here? It was hyperbole! Get out!"

When it sounded like the intermediary had left, Homer sat down in the cool shade and rubbed his temples. When was someone going to invent coffee?

He began again, "Muse, sing to me of..."

Bathroom Monologue: Adaptation

“The principle difference is that you want to make fairytales dark, and I want to make myths light. You make Little Red Riding Hood into a bleak murder story and Peter Pan an exercise in pedophilia; I make Jupiter into a lovable dolt, and turn ancient wars into sitcoms. You're fascinated with elevating the grim aspects of life and spreading them to regions where we've never seen them before. I'm fascinated with how stupid that is, and showing just that wherever your kind has already been. The winner of our little contest will be whoever outlives the other. The prize will be writing the loser’s biography.”

Bathroom Monologue: In the Blink

"My best friend is Splitsecond, a superhuman speedster. I'm pretty sure that he's faster than me, but he never runs at top speed on account of his asthma. It's funny, but when your molecules vibrate a million times quicker than everything else on the planet, you can outpace everybody else without breaking a sweat. One day, just for fun, we busted out the complete works of Shakespeare. Did the tragedies in under a minute. Shakespeare is very moving when you're speaking faster than sound can travel.

“He's a media whore. I've never gotten into that moral quagmire, but he's the millionaire, so what do I know? He's licensed his name and likeness to clothing, bicycles, and sports equipment (his shoes sell ridiculously well). There's a Splitsecond candybar. All granola and healthy energy, of course. His face is on one of those NASCARs, too. It never wins. I never let him live it down, either. How could you?

“I’m bulletproof, can fly, can see through walls or just plain punch through them, but Splitsecond is much more popular than me. He's a social critter. He basically leads the team and appears at every public event in his hometown - sometimes simultaneously. He's fast and showy about it. Can sign an autograph before you know you want it (and you will – they’re twenty bucks guaranteed on eBay, thirty if it’s on one of his million trading cards).

“He scored a hot wife, a man-hating Amazon. I don't know how they get along, considering one glance at a guy usually makes her snort smoke. Looking into her eyes makes you feel like a matador, and while he’s fast... he's kind of a twig. There's no question of who the boss in that marriage, and sometimes the way she yells at him, I wonder why she hasn't outright killed him yet. It may have something to do with her pet name for him: "My little vibrator." I try not to think about it. It's best not to."

Bathroom Monologue: Rebut if you will, rationalize as you like

"I love the unwashed masses for, no matter how much money I may make, I know I'm the lack of a shower and a day of hard labor away from being one of them. It's magnificent to see how little philosophy and so-called culture amounts to when tested under a lack of healthcare and an uncertainty over how you'll eat tomorrow. General fatigue destroys most intellectual abilities on its own. The people who think they're better because they have it better are... well, they're why public executions were so popular for so long. If the unwashed masses are dumb, then the washed elites are dumb, with accessories."

Bathroom Monologue: In the Name of “Love”

Love conquers all, but “All” is quite a lot. Sometimes it’s everything. Sometimes Love will reach out and conquer just a little bit of All, to show it can. This causes a Persian princess to fall for a thief from the streets. It causes Farmer Brown to kiss her cow. And in one case, it caused an Intergalactic Zombie Overlord, Kiz’Thral, to fall for a pious Warrior Maiden, Theresa. They met in college and bonded by despising each other in Philosophy 101. Philosophy class is a great place to meet girls, since the girls will bullshit every bit as much as the guys as they furiously to defend their lives’ values against logic’s ultimate points: that everything you hold dear is arbitrary and it sucks to be under the scrutiny of a tenured professor. The emotional ambiguity Philosophy 101 brings has caused more premarital sex than the condom. Kiz’Thral and Theresa went their separate ways after college. Kiz’Thral was infected with the sentient hyperplague and became a missionary of the dark forces. Theresa pursued the peace of the blade, the simple life and whatnot. But inevitably their paths crossed, and gee did they blush. And chat. And laugh about serious matters And bond. And bump. And now they’re living together in the central metropolis, another odd couple in Love’s scrapbook. The sitcom is coming this February.

Bathroom Monologue: The Family that ****s Together, Sticks Together, OR, Calm Down, It’s Pro-Sense of Humor.

For the newly formed Family Love Union, the rational argument against incest ended with the creation of the condom.

“Really, the only logical reason against incest is birth defects,” says Barnie Hownson. “The genes don’t match up, so you have an increased risk of mental or physical defects.” But today, his group claims, this argument doesn’t work. “We’ve got birth control pills, morning after pills, diaphragms, condoms, and a woman’s right to choose. Consenting brothers and sisters who want to try it don’t run that risk anymore.”

Drawn into a debate, incest-lobbyists ask for other potential objections. “It always boils down to ickyness. Me kissing my dad gives you the willies,” says Sally Hownson, Barnie’s sister. “Well lesbianism makes me gag, but I don’t have the right to stop them unless they’re doing it in public. What me, my brother and cousin do behind closed doors is every bit as private as what the president does with a hooker.”

Incest-lobbyists are also looking to file lawsuits on behalf of the government against all non-incestual couples who have children with genetically-caused disabilities, stating they are placing the same burden on the world as incestual parents, but doing it with much greater frequency. “There are perfectly healthy children born of intra-family marriages,” says one protestor. “It’s all a crapshoot. If we can’t play craps, then neither can they.”

The Family Love Union’s stance on fecalphilia is neutral.

The lobby recently threw down the gauntlet saying that if their lifestyle really was immoral, they demanded Congress pass a bill outlawing mothers kissing their children goodnight. One poster at a protest read, “No partial-birth abortions, no kisses good night!”

If the Hownsons and their hundreds of incestuous friends have one message, they want it to be this: “We don’t pass judgment on you for marrying strangers. Don’t judge us for being more practical.”

Bathroom Monologue: Highly Improbable

“The scientist that does not believe in miracles does not believe in probability. The scientist who does not believe in probability does not believe in mathematics or physics. The scientist who does not believe in mathematics or physics can get the fuck out of my lab. Miracles are the rare positive things, low in probability, still occurring. Get out of my lab and look around at the world. Then look through a telescope, and see if there are any observatories looking back at you from any of the planets you can see. When you've realized what it is to be a scientist, you can come back to my lab.”

Bathroom Monologue: Geniuses fall in love too, Frankie Lymon

[GARY in a pink pinstripe suit, SPIDER in a spandex superhero costume, and ARYANA, dressed in fur-lined Valkyrie armor. ARYANA’s broadsword is propped up against the restaurant window. SPIDER’s mask is pulled up to his nose, and he is sipping a strawberry milkshake through a curly straw.]

Aryana: Why are men such fools?
Gary: Because otherwise, we'd never fall in love with you.

[ARYANA punches GARY, knocking him out of the booth]

Spider: We’re not all so bad.
Aryana: I’m unconvinced.
Spider: It’s not like I haven’t had my heart broken.
Aryana: Yeah?
Spider: It feels like they tear it right through the ribs. You can feel the emotional hole bleeding.

[GARY climbs back into the booth]

Gary: Your girlfriend was dropped off a bridge by a maniac in bionic armor. It’s not like your breakup was anything like hers.
Aryana: Actually that’s frighteningly close to mine.

[ARYANA shoves GARY out of the booth again, then leans towards SPIDER]

Aryana: What was her name?
Spider: “Wind Rider,” ironically enough.
Aryana: That’s terrible.
Gary: [From off screen] On multiple levels.

Comments Not Censored

Comments are currently set to only appear once I approve them. I approve all of them, and have only chosen this setting so that I can be alerted when I get new comments. With over three hundred Bathroom Monologues posted it’s very difficult to keep up with where new comments appear. I promise not to censor anyone. I appreciate anything you wish to say.

Bathroom Monologue: Gift Certificates, OR, Monologue at a GAP Bathroom

Stores love gift certificates. To you they’re goofy fun: $50 for $50? Maybe you get it on sale, and now it’s five bucks off. It’s free money! But it’s not free money to us, the stores. It’s not because you might lose it - then we got $45 for a tiny piece of plastic. Or maybe you’ll move to a place that doesn’t have our store. Or (check the fine print) maybe it’ll expire. Again, $45 for us. It’s free money that you’re giving freely to us. They make great gifts because half the time your friends and loved ones hate our store and won’t spend them. On the occasions when they (or you) spend that whopping $20 gift certificate, they’re guaranteed to be spending it on our goods, which we’re already selling at marked up prices. Even everyday low priced items are sold at a profit. Plus you never spend $20 even. If you buy an $80 shirt with your $50 certificate, you had to drop $30 out of pocket, and if you spend it at the same store, that store nets $80. If not, it splits it $30/$50 with the other store in the same franchise. We win.

Bathroom Monologue: Oh yes I did

“Hey, what’s it when you write like through your own perspective instead of detached and stuff?”
“Who was Adam supposed to be?”
“What?”
“First person.”

Bathroom Monologue: Rorschark Attack

An anonymous Washington D.C. Rationalist Think Tank was on holiday at the undisclosed beach that day. Three rationalists saw it break the surface. Tammy saw a deck of playing cards. Guido saw a platter of fried shrimp. Ironically only one of the rationalists, Virginia Welsley saw that it was a shark fin. Even more ironically, she was the only one of them in the water.

She swam like Hell. Tammy would attest that the shark went straight after Virginia, while Guido swears it swam in the opposite direction. Other beach-goers looked when they heard the screams, but the majority said they didn’t see a shark at all (while three saw an ice cream truck treading water behind Virginia).

When Virginia looked over her shoulder mid-breaststroke, she saw the gaping jaws of her third grade Math teacher – the one who always put impossible bonus questions at the end of his quizzes, presumably just to watch his pupils struggle and fail. That pungent memory felt apt as she swam for her life, and even more apt when she was seized in the middle-aged Math teacher’s jaws.

She was fortunate enough to awake, alive, in the local ICU. Apparently the shark had nearly ripped her in half. After much fighting with her doctors she was allowed to see the damage the shark had done to her torso. When the medical technician removed the bandages so that she could see the marks he instantly stepped back and crossed himself.

“It’s the Blessed Mother!” he exclaimed, looking at the bizarre shape of her bite wounds. She frowned at him and looked down.

“No it isn’t.” she said disdainfully. Then she squinted at the sutures. “Is… is that a Ferris wheel?”

Bathroom Monologue: Very difficult to believe in oneself, but not in the oncoming S.U.V. doing 75 MPH in a school zone

Solipsism is a very difficult concept to politicize since any given solipsist doesn’t believe others exist. Very difficult to get people who don’t believe in each other to take numbers, stand in line or wait their turns to speak. But the National Solipsist Party is made up of liberal solipsists who are at least willing to tolerate the delusion of reality all around them. The National Solipsist Party rejects any applicants who are only minor solipsists, believing consciousness originates in the mind but that the rest of the world is still knowable to some degree. They want as devoted a crew as can still function. The N.S.P. is an understandably anarchistic group, with positions against all forms of government that directly affect them, such as selective service and the I.R.S. They claim to be against social security as well, as it anticipates a future that none of them is certain will come, but the party heads are willing to admit that, “it’s a little lower on our list of priorities.”

Bathroom Monologue: Backed Up

Bakton was a city of some one thousand and five hundred people with two sheriffs. Considering Bakton was a brewery town, the sheriffs were overworked, and hence they were liberal to dub people deputies. Their first, Gene, was deputized on the sheriffs' first day on the job when they were giving him a friendly ride to his flophouse and stumbled across a robbery. They went in and foiled the robbers, but had Gene not been waiting outside blocking the door, the gunman would have gotten away. Instead he ran away without looking and rammed full-speed into him, knocking the wind out of Gene, and just plain knocking himself out. When Gene caught his breath, he was handed a badge. Most of his career was spent guarding an exit and helping old ladies across the street, but it was still powerfully nice of him. He saved on bills by sleeping in the empty cells at the jail instead of renting a room; on the nights when there were no free cells, he was too busy to sleep anyway. He was the first at the station when they needed help, the first they called into the car for an emergency, and the first they handed a beer to on Friday. He was the first to save a sheriff's life when he jumped on a bandit's pistol. He was the first the sheriff's department recommended to the academy, and the first to turn the academy down. Why? He didn't think the job would suit him.

Bathroom Monologue: Whatever Works

"The human gets tired when he works? Why? That makes no sense. Why would his evolution let that happen? Being tired is not fun, and certainly a poor reward for labor. He needs to do more labor to out-compete his competition. And mental fatigue is dangerous when you are working. To get weaker and more wandery of mind as you do physical tasks goes against practicality. You should get stronger the more you do something, like us! You should get more perceptive. That would be an incentive for productivity. What does the human do when he works and works and works? ...He sleeps? But it’s such a waste of time. Kills a third of a day. We sleep when we don’t work enough, and we find work in order to avoid it. Why would sleep be an effective incentive? He… dreams? What’s a ‘dream?’"

Bathroom Monologue: 'Till Armageddon do you Part

The Golden Emperor and the Jade Empress weren't the first human beings to be elevated to godly status after death, but a thousand years later they would be the most famous. This was because they were the best at projecting images. Each only had one rival: the other. No one but the Jade Empress would contradict the Golden Emperor. No one would remain seated when the Jade Empress entered a room, save the Golden Emperor. Their feisty marriage was one of the quirks that turned them from mortal people to immortal legends.

Their empire stretching from sea-to-sea helped a little.

They tapped into the knowledge of the time; theirs was the first culture to discover pollination in plants. Theirs was a culture that exploded the importance of male and female elements of nature and society. The Golden Emperor and Jade Empress quickly came to embody the two halves of nature: the father and the mother. Even the materials of their namesakes symbolized the two great aspects of life. Gold represented the sun, the source of life energy. Jade represented flora, in the grass and trees of the country that fed the livestock, which in turn fed all humanity. One gave life unto the other, and the other grew life unto the former.

They were infallible. They never lost face to anyone else in a debate, or fencing practice. There was no record of dissidence within the capital. The few insurrections in the country went down as villainous, but this was because insurrections were vilified. Dissidents were dissuaded or assassinated. Keeping their reputations spotless in the time and historical record was hard work – not for the two rulers, but for their gaggles of supporters.

Jangs, a court retainer so portly one poet referred to him as “The Sphere,” was in charge of the Golden Emperor’s reputation. He was followed everywhere by highly trained ninja who could strangle a disobedient warlord without even becoming visible. They were, by and large, Jangs’ political leverage. They were necessary leverage, for Jangs’ work wasn’t all strong-arming rogue philosophers and flower arrangement. Often he was dispatched to the wilderness to retrieve an imperial stamp, or to keep three hundred barbaric nutcases from turning a narrow pass in the mountains into a bloody embarrassment to the throne. The Golden Emperor’s immortal reputation is testament to how good Jangs was. All of his deeds went unsung, but those who knew him know he worked very hard – especially against the plots of the Jade Empress. She was a conniving, vindictive wife, and worse, she had better staff.

Bathroom Monologue: Have you ever been so tired that you...?

-Dropped your keys in the toilet, reached down to get then, then midway decided to close the lid instead to keep them safe?
-Opened the medicine cabinet, and seconds later looked inside for your reflection?
-Drove five miles with your left blinker on?
-Drove ten miles with your left blinker on?
-Argued with the police officer that your left blinker was not on?
-Daydreamed about napping?
-Put the ice cream in the cupboard and the crackers in the freezer, and when you sensed something was amiss you switched the boxes of baking soda?
-Were prepared to retire and give up all your worldly possessions to lead a life of sitting in this wonderful recliner?
-Stared at a tree out the window, trying to mentally chart how it could have grown such that its limbs looked exactly like that, rather than go through the effort of finding the remote for the TV?
-Remained in bed hoping to fall back asleep despite you bladder threatening to burst like a water balloon in the grip of an ADD-addled preschooler?
-Smelled dinner burning, and elected to give the taste of char a chance?
-Took an unbiased view of sex and concluded the pursuit was needlessly complicated, degrading, expensive, and otherwise not worth the pleasure of the squirt?
-Actually sat through the nightly news?

Bathroom Monologues: The Product of Three Trips to the Bathroom

One of many clichés in need of obliteration is that of the sheep. The sheep is the person who follows something without question, which is rather unkind to shepherds, whose jobs can be a lot harder than this analogy gives them credit. Politicians are rarely fired when a couple of their voters stray away from the ideology and are mauled by mountain lions.

While people are unlikely to stray away from an idea and into the path of wild animals, they do assume many things as part of the herd-mentality of society. All human culture is made up of individuals following patterns that they perceive others are following, sometimes adding variations that may seem radical up close, but are miniscule in the grand scheme. The man who refuses to do anything that everyone else does will have to babble in nonsense, as words no longer mean what we tell him they do. He’ll die of the first harsh ailment that strikes him. Modern medicine and the scientific method are, after all, well-dressed sheep mentality.

Are you a “sheep” for not questioning why 2 + 2 will always equal 4? Are you a “sheep” for thinking that there are seven days in a week? No. True, the week is an arbitrary invention of humans, but all ignoring the existence of Monday will get you is fired.

The sheep label developed in part to avoid having to deal with individuals. Everyone comes to his or her conclusions based on experiences, reasons and intuitions, and even their seemingly most arbitrary decisions can have quite complex origins. However, dealing with everyone who comes to one view as a general crowd avoids the responsibility of dealing with individuals. You don’t have to actually know anything but a few statistics about the person, don’t have to form any kind of relationship or truly care beyond a blind anger directed at strangers - a group, a mass, a glob of people who, you can convince yourself, don't even think. They're barely even people. If dehumanization is possible, this seems like one of the places from which it springs.

Sheephood has little to do with not thinking for yourself and almost everything to do with not coming to the conclusions the speaker desires. If you were smarter, you see, you wouldn’t follow whoever you’re following (even if you’re following your own conscience), and instead would follow the speaker. One political pundit calls the millions of people who hold the opposing view “sheep.” Those who hold her views aren’t sheep. They’re bright chaps. They thought for themselves, even if their thoughts sound spuriously similar to the way the pundit put them. Such smart, unsheeply people, who will never realize they are being sheered because, of course, they aren’t sheep. They are independent, freethinking human beings who are proudly superior to those sheep over there.

(I don’t mean to become such a shepherd-pundit, but I must point out that thinking there are only two sides to anything is highly sheepish)

The loss of the sheep cliché, as a word and as a concept, would be scary for those who rely on it. They couldn’t dismiss blocks of people anymore. It’s very comforting to homogenize those who disagree with you, especially as it allows you to disregard them. It seems almost essential when running things like social sciences or federal politics, at which points you couldn’t possibly have deep personal interactions with all your subjects, least of all with the ones you dislike. But that’s a flaw in their systems, not a virtue.

Every leader follows myriads of other people. Every great original thinker is barely different from his peers, as bold and brave as that slim distance may be. Everyone in society is a sheep, but we’re also other forms of mammals that you might find more interesting. How human beings are like the pachyderm, for instance, I find downright charming.

Bathroom Monologue: Entertainmentalists

They believe earth is a sitcom. The situation for comedy? A planet with life on it. A quick survey of the solar system shows this to be a novel concept. But the lack of other planets with life shows the unpopularity of the sitcom, or so says Margo Quentin of the Entertainmentalist party.

“If we were a good show, more similar planets would be created. Rip-offs, knock-offs, spin-offs, you know. Being alone in the cosmos proves we’re a dull show.”

Entertainmentalists suggest that what we’ve done is boring the audience. What have we done? A lot of famine, and a lot of war. Not much of it is very funny. Perhaps the time Maine declared on Canada is chuckle-worthy in hindsight, but human history is mainly bleak, and so, the Entertainmentalists argue, we don’t have many viewers.

“We’ve got to break out of our rut,” says Ms. Quentin. “We need to be funny in order to pick up the ratings. We need our sense of humor. Consider every empty planet to be a Nielson home that’s watching something else, or worse, has the TV set off. You being so serious about everything is essentially keeping the universe from watching.”

(All "Perspectives" are dedicated to Tim Meadows.)

Bathroom Monologue: Bright Boy

“The boy brought a cheat sheet to an eye exam. Printed it on the inside of his eyelids. An’ he still failed. He figured he’d get bored of looking at A D X R V D the rest of his blinking life, so he had a nekkid girl printed on there to them. Come the eye exam, he got all... distracted. And failed. Became a narcoleptic shortly thereafter, I hear.”

Bathroom Monologue: Intentionally Mishearing Queen's "Princes of the Universe"

I am a portal,
I have within me lots of things,
Yeah! Yeah!
I have no rival,
no man can steal my key code,
I’ll take you to the future of you all!