A Farewell to the Tree that was on Our Property but Fell on Theirs, and a Further Farewell to the Insurance Company That Wouldn't Cover It

I'll miss you most of all, stump. You never hurt nobody. When the rest of the tree was all, "Let's fall on their roof!" You was all, "I think I'll stay in the ground and mind my own business." Would have kept you around but the workmen said it was nothing extra to have you hauled away with the trunk. That's fuzzy logic, having an innocent bystander carted off with the criminals just because it's free, but honestly looking at you brought back a lot of bad memories. Actually, just one - the time I had to pay five hundred bucks because my tree fell on somebody else's fucking house.

Bathroom Monologue: Hot House Honey

[GRUFF STOVER sits on one side of the booth in camo gear with a sniper rifle over one shoulder; DARKLOSS SOULRIPPER VON ALUCARDIA sits across from GRUFF in Renaissance-era clothing and a massive, puffy cape; GARY sits next to DARKLOSS, almost falling out of the booth thanks to the cape. GRUFF is making a point and waving his fork.]

Gruff: She's a hot house flower. Won't last in the real world.
Gary: What the Hell is that?
Darkloss: The analogy of the hot house flower is something or someone who can't survive outside a special environment. The flower can't thrive in the wild. It will wilt. It's not really strong in humanless nature. Same goes for certain people, especially the innocent and naïve. They either change or die in the real world. There's no defense for them. They have to change.
Gary: We build a Hell of a lot of hot houses, don't we?
Gruff: Yeah, but--
Gary: If we do it for flowers we like, shouldn't we shell out for decent people?
Gruff: It's not a matter of money.
Darkloss: Then what?
Gary: Just be nice to them? That seems easier than building green houses. And I like nice people better than flowers. In fact, they're kind of the people I buy flowers for.
Darkloss: Them, and the really naughty people.
Gary: Can we grow those in greenhouses, too?

Bathroom Monologue: The P.P.G.

The Pantheon Poker Group meets every third Thursday. They wanted to do it on Wednesdays, but Odin claimed some sort of holiday, and he gets his way since he provides the hall. Sometimes they put off poker altogether and get drunk on the rainbow bridge, but mostly they play. Apollo is in because he's the god of poker (according to him, anyway). Obatala always sits in to complain – a would-be creator god never gets over those cosmic blue balls.

Complaining is as much a part of the deal as the dealer, because poker is a crutch for the Pantheon Poker Group. It's a means to converse without their respective worshipers going to war. In the case of poker only little chips need to be sacrificed, and if those mattered at all the game would be canceled on account of Raven’s perpetual cheating. Yet Odin is fond of Raven – he likes that type of bird and that type of deity, even if Raven refuses to fly himself and demanded first class airfare to the game. Apollo always springs for the airfare since he was the first to claim being god of cheaptickets.com. Apollo's newest divine franchises make up most of his chatter.

Odin likes to talk about what’s on TV, or how there should be more positive one-eyed characters in modern media. It’s humble, fraternal chat laced with the vernacular swears of three continents, becoming more voluminous as the night goes, on and Apollo and Odin argue whether the Norselands were on a separate continent from Europe. The drunker you are, the more confusing continental shelves become. When the discussion gets violent, Raven calls a random Celt for an unbiased opinion. The resulting opinion is always disqualified on value of it coming from yet another European aisle. Raven calls anyway. Two lords of the sky arguing technicalities always cracks the group up. Then Obatala opines how he would have made the islands part of the continent if only he’d gotten the job of creating the world. And while Odin and Apollo try to shut him up and console his highly intelligent design of the human body, Raven comes up with a royal straight flush.

Why, it must have been a miracle.

They’d pluck and cook him if it mattered, but the game is about the chatter, and the company.

Bathroom Monologue: Hole in One

He is The Pro, the most annoying fencer alive. Even apostates pray they don’t get killed by this pretentious asshole; even in death, they’d never live it down. He has fencing gloves, a customized mask, and always wears the newest athletic shoes. He carries a golf bag full of swords, each fitted to his grip, cast in titanium, optimized for the proper swing: a fencing foil, a rapier, a cutlass, a scimitar, a katana, and his “driver,” a claymore. I say, “he carries” quite loosely because, really, it’s his caddy that carries it. He employs an orphan as his caddy, since they don’t complain. If they get mouthy, he ditches them and buys a new one. The Pro jokes he should start buying them in bulk.

Bathroom Monologue: Seven Crystal Stars

Okay, if I had to scatter seven sacred relics to prevent some mastermind from collecting them and ruling the world, I wouldn’t stash them in seven really obvious huge dungeons. Firstly, those don’t exist. Secondly, it makes them very easy for him to find. After about the third dungeon this supervillain is bound to realize where the other four are.

1) The first one goes down the Mariana Trench. It’s the deepest hole in the known world, under so many atmospheres of water that it would kill anyone who tried to reach it. In fact, we’ve barely explored the place with robotics. A tiny crystal star would be darn near impossible to find in that abyss.
2) Drop one of them into the cement foundation of a Parliament building, preferably deep into it. You would thus have to demolish a government building and clear all the rubble just to look for it, and even then you probably wouldn’t have destroyed the foundations holding it. We also get free security, as a Parliament building should have a lot of that lying around.
3) To be a total dick, I’ll stow one of them on the next space probe headed for the outer reaches of the universe. It’s cheap, but considering this explorer pod is headed further out into space than we’ll probably ever send humans, it will be really hard to retrieve.
4) In the middle of the arctic storm zones, where despite global warming there is a constant subzero blizzard with zero visibility. Preferably we’ll drill a hundred-foot hole in the ice and drop it down there, then cover it up. Within minutes you’ll have no idea where we drilled the hole in all the hundreds of miles of tempestuous storm.
5) In classic Lord of the Rings fashion, we’ll drop one into the mouth of an active volcano. True, the indestructible relic won’t combust like Sauron’s jewelry, but hopefully it will sink a miles under the surface of the earth, cradled in boiling lava. Most volcanoes don’t erupt like a geyser, but spit up and drool down the slopes. However this hot lava will be lighter and flow easier than the relic, so it will be more likely to sink while the lava rises. If the sucker ever erupts so badly that the relic is coughed up, it will be hidden in the cooling magma, and even we won’t know where it is.
6) Drop the sixth into the deepest stretch of the wide Yangtze in China, a river so horribly polluted that humans won’t enter it, and all the wildlife has either died out or mutated. We’ll weight this relic down in a tungsten container that will be too thick to fully corrode, and dig into the riverbed. Maybe we’ll even attached a self-propelling drill to the bottom so that it can dig a huge hole behind it. With a few days of current you won’t be able to see where it went down. That is, if you could see in the Yangtze.
7) One I’m just going to bury somewhere. It will be a chaotically chosen spot of no importance. Not a national park or a wonder of the world. I’m just going to bury out in the middle of nowhere.

In the mean time, let’s go build some huge dungeons as decoys. Perhaps one can have an exact replica of one of the relics to fool the bastard.

Bathroom Monologue: Came for the Sand

Our family vacationed in Egypt this year. The kids were excited for the Sphinx and the Nile up until they realized “bazaar” is foreign for “elaborate gift shop,” at which point it was a pain to get them to go anywhere but the souvenir stands.

Such is the way of children, but Uncle Frank was even worse. Some men stare into the eyes of the Sphinx, but he glared. He wouldn’t climb the pyramids with us, even after I explained how much this spiritual privilege was costing. He wouldn’t even look at them. Just sulked and trudged around the outskirts, mostly in the shade.

“Did you really fly all this way to look away from one of the wonders of the world?” I asked.

He spat, “It’s not a wonder of the world. It’s a testament to slavery. I didn’t come to see what thousands of servants died to build. I came to see some of the sand they walked on, is all.”

I’m not sure who was angrier, the grandparents or the tour guide. Neither minded when the local water gave him violent diarrhea and forced him to miss a museum trip. He probably would have complained about the mummies on display.

We returned to the hotel to find him chugging electrolyte drinks and claiming that this visit had kindled a love of his heritage, which apparently ran through every oppressed North African people known to human history.

He’s the most militant minority I know. And Uncle Frank’s white.

Bathroom Monologue: Sixth Senses, OR, “We know prior to birth that we will have only five physical senses.” –Robert Schwartz, Courageous Souls

-Sense of sight
-Sense of touch
-Sense of hunger/fullness
-Sense of distances and sizes
-Sense of smell
-Sense of balance
-Sense of breathing/inhaling/exhaling
-Sense of taste
-Sense of sound/hearing
-Sense of internal pressures (bowels, bladder, etc.)
-Sense of fatigue/drowsiness
-Sense of cognition, what you're thinking and how to control your thoughts
-Sense of emotion
-Sense of time (enormously faulty)
-Sense of amounts/numbers

Know any other senses? Please illuminate me in the Comments section.

Bathroom Monologue: Time to Worship the Goat Skull

"I only ate two meals yesterday, walked three miles, and I gained three pounds? Oh, that’s it. Screw you, science. I’m not listening to you anymore. I’m listening to the goat skull. It lets me eat whatever I want, and it’s thin! It’s my friend. Wise and mighty goat skull, please tell your loyal servant how to get rid of these love handles.

…

Any time now."

Bathroom Monologue: Narration 2, OR, The Accidental Epilogue of the John's Tale

This one's a true story, no assuming ironic voices here - just assuming a Middle English voice. I took this class in Geoffrey Chaucer in college, partially because I thought we were going to find his corpse and huddle inside of it, and partially because he's one of the funniest writers to get admitted to the English canon. Comedy is sorely underrepresented in academia. We worked with a $100 hardcover that contained the original Middle English works of Chaucer, including every scrap of The Canterbury Tales that's excluded from lesser versions. There was no modern translation. We were forwarded to several scholarly websites to listen to clips and practice how the 'y' sounded when it followed an 'r' sound – this confederate consonant had at least four different vowel noises it could make given context. “He” sounded like “Hay,” and 'k' was only a silent letter when you thought it wasn't. You were expected to know how every vowel sounded naturally from the dialects of centuries ago, and to independently research the thousands of outdated words. Otherwise you wouldn't know what you'd just read for class.

This was particularly difficult for me, as I'd been calling him “Chow-sir” for the last decade. I'd even gotten his name wrong, and now we were reading aloud from his works every class, in proper pronunciation. To get even one syllable wrong meant the knowing gazes of your peers and public correction by the professor – a normally wonderful woman who hardened up on the spot, especially if you were still screwing up by Week 7. I was. I was mortified to learn we'd have to read a minimum of ten continuous lines aloud at the end of term, and that it would seriously effect our report.

I knew what I wanted to read, though. The accidental and untitled epilogue to The Pardoner's Tale, when he ended his didactic story and went straight into a sales pitch for fake relics and premium absolution. The “Hoste” got so pissed that he threatened to cut off the Pardoner's testicles and enshrine them in pig crap. Classic literature. The Knight (“Knyght,” or “kin-neecht”) had to step in and keep them from fighting. I loved it because it reminded me of photos of then-President Bill Clinton at Camp David with leaders of Palestine and Israel. He was taller and broader than both of them, and would put his arms around their shoulders, at once as though to make peace and to smilingly threaten to throttle the bastards if they weren't nice. A Jewish friend reproached me for besmirching the best time in Israeli-Palestinian relations. I put an arm around his shoulder.

In classic John Wiswell fashion, I decided to read the whole damned thing – some thirty or forty lines where ten were acceptable. Not that I could read one line properly. But I had to redeem myself – God holpen, to get a Pardon. I returned to the scholarly websites and listened to each vowel and special pronunciation over and over again, then began translating the page from Middle English to phonetic. It took to 1:00 AM, and then I got to practicing, ten lines at a go. I got up early every day that week, and made sure to go to bed late. For an hour I could do anything – play a videogame, watch anime, stare at the clouds, but every five minutes I would have to glance at the phonetic translation and read the first ten lines I saw aloud. By Wednesday I was glancing at the Middle English manuscript and doing the same. By Thursday I was going a little nuts, and started to put personality into the Pardoner, Hoost and Knyght. The Pardoner had showmanship, and the Hoost somehow became a stereotypical Italian. Doing a bad Italian accent in modern English is offensive, but especially at 7:30 AM, a bad Italian accent in a Middle English threat to cut off your testicles is hilarious. To this day I will screech, “shul be shryned in an hogges toord” for no apparent reason.

The brave Knyght sounded a little Russian, though his syllables were technically sound.

I remember three things from my recital. I remember the professor exclaiming, “Oh God!” when she realized I wasn't stopping at the end of the first stanza. I remember my Jewish friend laughing and asking how I'd fit Latin in there. And I remember receiving the only round of applause of anyone the entire semester. One out of three isn't bad. The Knyght was my favorite.

I still love Geoffrey Chaucer. He's undeniably one of the greats in our language, profane beyond belief back before profanity was overdone, and a deep thinker of nuanced characters who could make each of dozens of tales questionable and interpretable. I wrote a modernization of his Monk's Tale, wherein his Monk delivered awful Cliff's Notes versions of classic stories like the fall of Satan and the death of Achilles. Mine took a pick-axe to nearly a hundred pieces of classic literature, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Kafka's Metamorphosis. The Canterbury Tales was included. It was all to express my deep admiration for Chaucer. I still get his name wrong, though.

Heere is ended The John's Tale.

Bathroom Monologue: TV Show Ideas

-John Wiswell's Celebrity Skiing
-John Wiswell's Celebrity Parachuting
-John Wiswell's Celebrity Shark Hunting
-More Ways John Wiswell Tricks Celebrities into Hurting Themselves
-A well-animated cartoon drama that doesn't rip off anime

Bathroom Monologue: “Is that the subject of Elizabeth Bishop?” –Jim Lehrer, News Hour

What is the subject matter of a woman? Or of a man? Might a woman’s subject be a man? Or a woman, if she were a lesbian? Or herself, if she were a narcissist? Or might she have more than one subject, if she were a real person like the rest of us, complex beyond words? Ms. Bishop wrote a mere ninety poems in her life, few for a popular poet in our time, yet to have all ninety be preoccupied with the same words or subject would be redundancy on a level beyond even Gertrude Stein’s tolerance. No, couldn’t a poet, shouldn’t a woman have as many subject matters as her mind and soul could absorb? Could not love and loss cohabitate in her synaptic pathways? In her meager (and mighty) ninety compositions, could not patriotism and prejudice, geology and epistemology, the universe and an acorn all be subject matters a mind might say to matter, to truly matter, beyond a trite explanation that they were all related to the same subject, to some holistic subject matter, like a human condition or an everything? Please don’t tell me a woman was interested in everything just for the sake of a little oversimplification of her mental lifetime. It would sell a woman short, and sell everything far shorter.

Bathroom Monologue: Narration

Getting me to read Chaucer aloud with proper Middle English pronunciation is like getting Godzilla to follow the traffic laws in Tokyo. He can’t even fit both feet on one side of the double yellow line.

Bathroom Monologue: All That’s Old…

In comparison to the New Age movement, the Old Age movement gets little attention. Everyone’s heard of the New Age infatuation with crystals, healing vibes and postmodern concepts of the divine. The New Agers even have sections in bookstores. The Old Agers? It’s a cruel joke that they share shelf space with the Mythology section. Patrons of the Old Age movement have shaggy hair and crazy beards similar to New Agers, but they wear togas with their Birkenstocks, and that funky smell on them isn’t B.O. It’s slaughtered goats.

These backwards-compatible spiritualists are significantly forward-thinking. They point out that Hera was a pioneer of women’s rights long before Susan B. Anthony or Saint Joan. Regardless, the National Organization of Women has voiced concern over some of the rights they espouse for women (including the primary right “to walk in on their husbands mid-adultery,” also called “The Medea Clause”).

Other organizations are synergizing with the movement. McDonalds intends to market on-site vomitoriums, similar to how they introduced in-door playgrounds. While the Independent Film Channel has denied Old Agers' request to play Jason and the Argonauts during Documentary Month, they say they will invest in more ancient Greek-oriented programming. Old Agers also own significant stock in several “green” energy companies, and are fast at work on channeling the north wind to reduce our need for oil. The Old Agers are very sensitive to our conflicts with the Middle East thanks to something about “the Peloponnesian War.”

Bathroom Monologue: Quite Human

Their grandmother makes the best snack, a combination of Cheez-Its, herbs and some type of oil. All her grandkids love it every time they visit. Every couple of years one will ask for the recipe, yet they never make them when they go home. Like seasonal dishes, part of the attraction is their rarity (and like seasonal dishes, part of the attraction is someone else doing the work). Her grandkids will miss them when she passes. Her grandkids will miss a lot, and miss these, but won’t realize they miss these and all the moments this snack is connected to until a week after the funeral, when her oldest granddaughter breaks down crying in the supermarket cracker aisle.

Bathroom Monologue: Political Hat Trick #3

1. Survey the general desires of the nation. Doesn’t matter if they are rational, realistic, or if you share them.
2. Promise something huge relating to these desires, which you probably can’t accomplish and have no serious intent of pursuing (end a war, reverse damage to the environment).
3. Attack the most a) unpopular and/or b) famous incumbent politicians who in any way disagree with the aim of your promise. If they are not earnestly opposed to it, portray them as such. If possible, vilify them entirely.
4. Balance a perception of being “outside” the system with the perception of being effective within it.
5. Dodge queries on any other political issues, or tie them into your central promise and/or the general vilification of your rivals.
6. Ride the promise to victory and public office.
7. Have ad firms and public relations jockeys divert attention from the matter with which your promise was concerned. At this stage you may have to make a small concession to the perception of the promise (give a little money to that cause, bring a couple of “our boys” home – be sure to be photographed with them if you do).
8. As years pass without good coming of the promise, hire pundits to blame he voters for being dumb enough to vote for something so unrealistic or implausible. Simultaneously sift into the background of politics, only surfacing to be seen near to (or thought of as related to) something generally positive within politics, whether or not you worked on it. It doesn't even have to be related to your branch of government.
9. In case someone might catch up to you as a new anti-incumbent, tout your a) record and/or b) experience from time in office. Vilify their a) lack of a record or b) record. If all else fails, find or create a new issue to make a promise about (immigration, globalization, robot invasion).

Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Monologue to a Present

“This is what’s best for you. I realize that you are a teddy bear and cannot think, but I can’t help anthropomorphizing you. I am a human with a little human brain, and all it does is looks at things, remembers things and makes little models of itself in everything it sees and remembers. Fortunately if you are a little me then you should like your new owner, my aunt. She loves stuffed animals. Has bushels of them. You’ll have plenty of company. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be owned by her… She’s nice, but slavery? That’s a bit much. And Lord knows what your little button eyes will see over the years if she keeps you in her bedroom. Alternatively, you could spend eternity in a box in her attic. How can I do this to you? I’m a monster… Oops. Now you’ve accidentally been bumped against the toilet. Unsanitary. It would be disgusting to give you to her now. I’ll her a card instead. One with a bear on it.”

Bathroom Monologue: “Minds are like parachutes: they only work when they are open.” –Thomas Dewar

So apparently minds only go down, and once they hit the ground they need to be dragged and are a pain to bring anywhere. In fact once your mind has saved you from certain death (if you’d used it before, maybe you wouldn’t have out of a plane), it’s probably wisest to detach it and walk away. Alternatively, you can stuff it back in its container and wait for the next time you’re dumb enough to fall to certain death, and which point you can yank the cord. Until then, carry it around and don’t touch it. You might activate it by mistake.

Bathroom Monologues: Signs of a Man Who was Broke at Some Point

-Tears tissues in half at the fold so he can use one item twice
-Orders a plain hamburger because, “I can remember the taste of cheese while I eat”
-Compliments the aroma of your pet food
-Always counts his change before pocketing it
-Not only tells you to put cans in the recycling bin, but will pick them out of the garbage can if you forget
-Doesn’t destroy cobwebs immediately because, “I want to see what she’s doing with this one first”
-Knows how long the food in your freezer will stay fresh if the power goes out, or if it’s unplugged
-Knows the figure you’ll save per week if you quit smoking (and has a questionable algorithm that shows how much you’ll save into the next year as the addiction grows stronger)
-Nothing is ever broken, just in need of duct tape

Holding it because I don’t trust that smell in the Metro car’s bathroom Monologue

He’s got a textbook. He’s got a thick paperback, something about Ireland. He’s got a newspaper. Looks like everyone is letting someone else do their writing and thinking today. Here’s another guy with a newspaper. Here’s a woman with a romance. He’s napping, and the rest are staring into blank space. I’ve got a marble composition book, in which I’m writing rather reading. Would the world be a better place if people wrote more on trains than they read, or am I just feeling defensive? Funny are the things that make me feel like a freak. Oh, wait! She’s coming along with a pen and paper… round paper… a paper cup. Of coffee. And it’s a straw, not a pen. Wait, wait, that girl has a book. Something called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is too thick to be brief at all… and which she is safely stowing overhead so that she won’t have to read a line of it. At least Ireland Guy was actually reading.

Bathroom Monologue: Cube Earthers

For all the crap flat earthers catch, you'd think cube earthers would at least get some attention. These cutting edge conspiracy theorists believe photos of the round earth are the result of round camera lenses, and have been demanding a space program take their special quadrilateralcams (TM) for an unbiased view. Critics point out that each camera costs several hundred million euros despite parts running at a few hundred euros in total, and that the entire belief system is a ploy for cash. When asked, cube earthers will generally change the subject to explain how crossing the edges of the earth is the leading cause of turbulence, or how the supposedly circular sun is an optical illusion caused largely by social pressures.

Bathroom Monologue: Crap Logic

If: Socrates was a man.
And: All men are mortal.
Then: Socrates was a woman?

Bathroom Monologue: Something About Magnets

Following his third book on the literary canon, the one about magnetic fiction, Ken Redder was heralded as “the Einstein of English.” Mr. Redder sniffed at the accolade, refusing to have it printed on his paperback covers, even though it would have attracted readers. A couple of years later a journalist finally asked him why he disliked such a generous comparison. He responded, “Albert Einstein didn’t think his universe was expanding.”

Bathroom Monologue: It’s funnier when you take into account that the author is human

When humanity finally grabbed control of time and propelled itself backwards to indulge in physical anachronism, they appeared. They were blindingly brilliant, and they stopped humanity with a push to the chest.

"Hold there."

"Are you... God?" The humans asked, suddenly wishing they’d solved world hunger instead of creating time travel.

"No, no. Well, part of what you call 'God.' But you are, too. We're simply a better part."

"What part are we?"

"Do you know what toenails are?"

"We are not God's toenails!"

"No, no. You're the stuff that turns them yellow."

Bathroom Monologue: Keyboard Psychology

There is a new (and highly dubious) intellectual pursuit of psychoanalyzing the dead based on biographical information. As we read their letters or find signs of syphilis in their bones, specialists pretend to know more about the truth of their minds. Sometimes it’s hilarious, such as the modern revelation that Aesop (of Fables fame) wasn’t a real person. We seem to know more about the ancient world as we get further away from it by looking at things the ancient world had but didn’t care about. If an psycho-anthropologist finds your shoes in a thousand years, she may divine more about your personality than your current neighbors.

If I died tomorrow, I wonder how someone would psychoanalyze this keyboard. There are certain letters I use far more than others – I can tell because several of the keys are almost worn blank. The ‘N’ key is completely blank, and the ‘O’ is almost completely gone, which leaves me thinking I’m a very negative person who’s typed “No” far more than “Yes.”

Of ‘Y,’ ‘E,’ and, ‘S,’ only the ‘S’ is fading, and it’s still in identifiable shape. Its neighbor, the ‘A’ key, has faded to one slanted line, heading northeast. Similarly, the ‘N’ key’s neighbor, ‘M,’ is just a vertical line now. I guess those two regions have high activity. Perhaps my hands rest on the periphery of the board. The ‘L’ key is also coming apart, which supports this pre-posthumous theory. But what doesn’t explain why the ‘H’ key is going to Hell. Oh… right, “H-E-L-L.”

Well, that explains that mystery. Frankly, I’m surprised the ‘F,’ ‘U,’ ‘C,’ and, ‘K’ keys haven’t broken off yet.

Bathroom Monologue: Excerpts from Prometheus' Help Column

-"If your wife doesn't mind you hanging out late with your friends, you've picked the wrong friends."
-"Point scientific developments away from the hands and face."
-"If you want good advice, don't ask the guy whose life decisions had him pinned down and pecked at by birds for eternity."
-"Leaders should be chosen on an alcoholic scale. At the apex of the scale is whether you'd like to have a drink with him. At the bottom of the scale is your desire to drink at his funeral. Aim for the middle, straying a little towards the side where he's paying the tab."
-"When is Hercules getting here?"
-"Life is a trilogy... long, drawn out, and the worst part seeming to be whichever third of it you're reading. Also, Gandalf doesn't really die. He, representing your insecurities since he rides the fastest horse, comes back in the middle and is with you to the end. Bet you've never thought of your self-esteem as a Balrog before."
-"The movie is never like the book because if the author had any sense, he'd be a director."
-"If you're going to defy the gods, learn lock picking first."
-"A light saber is neither a saber, nor is it made out of light. Discuss amongst yourselves."

Bathroom Monologue: "Too hot for the internet!" -stupid ad

There is nothing too hot for the internet. They put the ingredients for napalm and dirty bombs on geocities! The first time a guy got the idea to cornhole a puppy, he got that idea from photos he saw on the internet. Interracial threeways where one of the races is Uruk'Hai are on the internet. People blame Jews for the Holocaust on the internet. People post the inane crap they rambled in the bathroom on the internet! This is the home of journalism without accountability and free seven-day trial periods in beastiality websites. There is nothing too hot for it. You could install an energy converter that would cause the radiance of the sun to blast from the monitors of anyone who visited your site, frying all your customers to a crisp. And the web? It would laugh at them for not getting the right spyware protection.

Bathroom Monologue: Personally, I'm praying for a 360

Contrary to common sense of uncommon people, Prometheus did give fire to humanity. However, his fire did not go to great use. He descended from the clouds and handed to a man. The man was so excited that he slipped, fell and burned to death in that very fire. With no one else around, the fire burned itself out. It was several hundred years later that humanity discovered fire on its own. It didn't invent it, but found it in the middle of the wilderness. The gods offered to let Prometheus take credit for this one, too, but he couldn't be bothered. He was working on the Nintendo DS at the time. Seeing how they'd handled fire, Prometheus was going to play with this one for a while before he gave it away.

Bathroom Monologue: Good, Hard Man

Goro Kusowa is a good man. Used to be a hard man.

He was en route to being a police officer. He went through the whole five weeks at the slaughterhouse, smashing skulls and slitting throats. The point was to desensitize a potential officer, so that when they had to kill they wouldn’t hesitate so much.

Well, part of the point. The other part was giving the slaughterhouse five weeks of free labor, and the kickbacks it earned the police chief.

Regardless, the ritual separated the men from the meek. People quit. Strong men, men who could survive a riot, made it five weeks cutting bovine throats.

Goro made it five weeks without a flinch. Even the owner of the factory called his attitude inhuman. Goro made nothing of it, washed his hands, and spent the week vacation helping his dad on the family farm.

Seems his dad had a horrible accident. Cut himself up bad. Goro had to operate on him, with next to no experience. Had to perform surgery on his dad right there on the kitchen table, bleeding into his sister’s peach cobbler. You couldn’t wish that on anyone. And Goro had no experience at it, so Mr. Kusowa died.

Goro couldn’t take much of anything after that. Couldn’t go back to the slaughterhouse. Couldn’t go back to the academy. Couldn’t put a sword in his belt, or keep his hand straight to button his shirt. His sister had to cut his dinner up for him, and holding a fork made him sweat like the summer had come early.

Didn’t talk in his sleep, but muttered much while he was awake. Sister kept catching him calling himself a murderer. He didn’t murder his father, but that failure was every bit as bad as a murder attempt. That did him. Morals didn’t matter. You see, morals are something humans made up. Ain’t no other way about. Dirt’s real. Leather’s real. Morals are in your head and they get twisted like thoughts. Maybe they are thoughts, or they’re the flavors thoughts come in. Convincing somebody of a moral is like convincing them a ghost’s in the oven. What matters is what moves you. What does you. And Goro’s father dying while he was holding the knives did Goro.

Soon as he buried his father he sent in notice, quitting the academy. He became a monk, but wouldn’t even shave his head. His sister had to shave it for him, just as she’d dug the grave and wrote the letter of resignation. She had to hold the razor, the shovel and the pen. All were mightier than he. She’s probably got to butter his bread for him, and you know a man that husky takes butter on his bread.

Instead of police work, that hard, hard man took up basket weaving. Sells them on the side of the road near his house. Near his sister’s house, that is. Don’t think he’s ever traveled more than a hundred miles from it since.

He’s a good man, though. He yokes the oxen for her, and tends to the fields. They seem to like him, and he doesn’t flinch around them.

Bathroom Monologue: Inspired by Diarrhea, the Bathroom Internal Monologue

Alright, clearing my mind. Nothing will be in here, not even a pumpkin. The grey pillars pull back to reveal empty space. Pure white, nothing at -- a pumpkin?!! Oh crap, there's a giant pumpkin in the middle of my zen!

It's okay. I'll just clear my mind again, summon the void and -- the damn pumpkin's back. What would Jung say? Clearly this symbol wants to emerge. What does it represent?

It's grinning at me. Or is it grinning with me? Do the three teeth in its mouth symbolize anything? They're square -- wait, it's not a pumpkin. It's a jack o'lantern that I've been calling by the wrong name. Does that disconnect indicate something? It's a smiling jack o'lantern that I'm calling by the wrong word. A word that represents an undamaged, untampered-with plant, rather than something that has been turned into art.

It's also a fucking jack o'lantern.

Maybe my subconscious is commenting on my obsession with accurate language? Is my subconscious telling me to lighten up? But subconscious, I have a website where I log all the stuff I improvised on the toilet! How could I possibly need to lighten up? Explain yourself, imaginary pumpkin!

Bathroom Monologue: Ogre-Brained, Or, “And chances are that your kids are not getting enough art —in or out of school.” –Americans for the Arts ad

They didn’t know where the ogre came from. Some of the village children said they saw him walk out of a forest from east of the hills, but when the adults went to look, there was no forest to see. What they did see was a fifteen-foote ogre with shale for skin and shite for brains. He could only remember one word at a time, and for the first few weeks all he said was, “Moose.” The village people had no idea why. They had practical ideas, though. Since he was such a docile monster, they put a harness on him, dangled a turnip in front of his face from a fishing line, directed him through the fields. After dozens of man-hours of labor he captured his turnip and one of the village children replaced it with a drawing a moose. It tripled his productivity. He really wanted that drawing. The drawing saved him from being classified as livestock, for one day while chasing it and dragging the plough he changed his favorite word changed from “Moose” to “Paper.”