Bathroom Monologue: Dead Strangers

"It’s interesting that we view people snapping as revealing their true selves. A politician makes one racist comment, and especially if you’re opposite his party, you declare this is his true personality. It’s mostly interesting because it runs explicitly contrary to evidence. The majority of a person’s actions are apparently false; it’s only this outlier event that defines them. And who does it define them for? Not themselves. They can explain they’d just had back surgery and were on pills, or hadn’t slept in three days, or were quoted out of context, and strangers will judge them anyway as secretly base and awful. The cynic supports the hypothesis saying it’s impossible to be perpetually kind, but easy to be selfish and base. The notion of a basic human, stripped of civility and society, semantics and sympathy, exposing their private selves, the celebrity would be one long indiscretion all the time. That rancid self is allegedly sustainable. With minimal evidence for their case, the strangers judge the celebrity’s sustainable persona. That’s most interesting because there’s only one thing anybody can sustainably be forever: dead."

Bathroom Monologue: The Ring of the Lord

The Red King seemed permanent. He had so many waterways, and his army was so vast, so motivated by fear and malice. Some skirmishes, it seemed like the sky obeyed him, raining down hill on his foes. He was even gifted a ring by the very Devil himself that granted immortality, an everlasting contract to walk the earth and do his damnations.

It took all the High Houses, all the fleets of the world, and quite a few bribes just to turn it into a fair fight. All those war machines, and all those regimens, and the biggest port city in the world in flames. It’s funny, devilishly funny, that it only took one man to cut off the Red King’s hand. Brave Hixon, the foot soldier who would become a commander and a prime minister, lopped it off with a bayonet. I watched it fall into the surf. It looked like a diving blackbird and the ring was its eye.

His hand plummeted between sailors treading water and sharks tasting men. It made a gory morsel, and was swallowed by a thirteen-foot great white. All the maelstrom had attracted all manner of predators, and a giant squid soon snagged the shark. She remained on the upper levels of sea for all the fresh hunting, and so the squid was harpooned and netted by the victors of the Red War. In the belly of a shark, in the belly of a squid, in the hold of a privateer vessel, the ring came back to land.

The squid’s guts were sold to the High Houses that now ruled. It was part of a buffet celebrating great commanders, and one bit found its way to the plate of the most notorious defector. Without his opening the westerly gates, the High Houses never would have had their second front. He was gloating when the ring passed through his colon. It managed to pass through him entirely before he realized his bowels were not merely straining from the feast, but bleeding.

The ring travelled through the sewers as he travelled to his family crypt. There were state honors. There were rumors, too, that the Red King had cursed his betrayers. Silly talk. His remains were rotting in a second-grade tomb in a tourist backwater.

You may not know it, but sewer runoff was one of the sources of water used to mix cement for all the new High House buildings. By high misfortune, the ring was sucked into the foundations of the first free court house in the region. In its annals law was handed over to the juries, and populist justice would overturn all the evils of the Red King’s reign. For twenty-two years lawyers and summoned free peoples debated our rights, and signed quite a few dubious concessions.

Then, in the twenty-second year, anarchists bombed the city. They hit the magistrate’s mansion, two postal offices, and the court house. The memory is acrid, for that was the day Brave Hixon spoke on the steps. He was very inspirational until everything exploded. It was only part of a civil war.

Rescue workers shuttled in from around the region. Brave men and women were coughing up the dust for months afterward. Bits of the rubble got everywhere, including in-between the treads of boots. The ring travelled halfway across the continent before its shine was spotted on the bottom of one such boot. The rescue worker was trying to pry it out when his shuttle derailed. Awful mess. Probably the anarchists again.

The boot was pulled from the wreckage ten hours before its owner. Brigands showed up before aid, and they pillaged the luggage and bodies. One particular brigand absconded with four sets of boots and a designer rucksack. He didn’t even notice the embedded jewelry; he actually wore that pair of boots when he went grave robbing that night.

Grave robbing was endemic back then. With the High Houses building up the world, old and superstitious things like crypts went untended. And with all these attacks around the continent, the High Houses couldn’t be asked to care. They might even have been happy to see the Red King’s hole desecrated.

They might have been happy to see this grave robber prying open the lid of the largest sarcophagus. It was stacked on top of three other boxes. They jostled as he worried the lid. They creaked, and slumped, and one of his feet slipped. The sarcophagus came down on top of him. Crushed his skull just as the ring popped loose from his boot. It rolled up the slate floor, wobbled around his knee, then down through the broken lid. It came to rest in the Red King’s palm, for he still had one hand.

Bathroom Monologue: I Am Not a Chauvinist

My career in politics began in ninth grade Health Class. Every Thursday we got a visitor, and our third visitor was very important to me. She was a specialist. This specialist asked our class a question to gauge how sexist we were. The premise alone had most of us stiff in our chairs.

I clutched my little fingers into a fist as she asked, “How do you prevent rape?”

The distressing answers, more from girls than boys, flew up with every hand.

“Stay away from alleys.”

“Don’t dress like a slut.”

“My mom keeps a knife in her purse.”

These answers disgusted me; how dare they put the onus on the victims? And these answers disgusted our specialist, who frowned with increasing severity. Hands fell pre-emptively, leaving me with hope that maybe I did have a good idea. It was the most reliable way to stop such crimes. I held up my arm at the same time as Ashley Harding. Ashley got called on first.

“Don’t rape anybody,” she said.

The specialist nodded a sanitary nod. This was what she wanted, and she launched into an explanation of why. As she began explaining the differences between a patriarchal and a feminist point of view, I sank in my chair. I was crushed. My idea didn’t fit either of these categories.

In retrospect, it was a blessing she didn't call on me. She would have quashed a revolution politics. If called upon, I'd have told the class: “Put cameras everywhere. Shoot people as necessary.”

Listening to her lecture, I realized while I wasn’t a feminist, I also wasn’t a chauvinist: I was a totalitarian.

John is a Versatile Blogger Once More

Marianne Su has become the most recent person to grant me The Versatile Blogger Award. This is still one of the most flattering things that happens to the Bathroom Monologues, since versatility is one of the things in prose that I value the most. Marianne also decided that her “seven admissions” would be seven wishes. For this edition of John Wiswell: Versatile Blogger, I’m following her variation. Time to rub the lamp.

1. I wish to write and edit faster. Right now at least eight of my professional friends are cursing me because they think I’m some paragon of productivity, but there wasn't a day writing my novel that I didn’t think this was taking me too long. This desire will never abate.

2. Neither will my wish to be able to simultaneously read and write at high volumes abate. At present I am a wretchedly close-minded writer, obsessing over my own manuscript for most of the waking hours of the day, and so am unable to enjoy almost anything with a cover while in such throes. This is an awful habit for a novelist. We need to consume lots of prose to keep our minds nimble and our attentions acute to what’s going on in the market.

3. I wish some of my readers would buy me stuff off my wish list linked to the right. Eh? No? Nobody? Yeah, that's probably fair.

4. I often wish I liked everything that was popular. Life would just be easier, and society significantly easier, if I could just enjoy the works of William Shakespeare, The Beatles, Radiohead, Watchmen, Mark Wahlberg, Rockstar Games, cell phones, and all the other overblown nonsense my fellow primates seem to gorge their life-hours upon. There’s an honest relief when I consume something hugely popular and find I actually like it, and it's not the relief of a satisfying work. At these times I feel like I've made a little in-road with my culture. And I do like some very popular works and artists (I adore Pixar, worship at the altar of Stephen King, and was as hooked on Lost as anybody); just not enough of them to feel like I'm doing it right.

5. Like every time I get the power of wishes, I wish to be able to solve all my problems with blunt, unthinking violence. I would gladly trade any intelligence I had for Hulk powers (not that Hulk’s powers ever solve his problems).

6. An equally neurotic and equally frequent wish is to be able to suffer for others. My syndrome has made me very accustomed to pain and strife, and often I see friends not handling their physical problems and earnestly desire that I could take it for them. It’s a sort of whipping-boy effect. Now, if I was smart I’d just wish to get rid of their suffering, but I traded my intelligence for Hulk powers in the previous wish.

7. This one is another everyday wish: that my works entertain people the way great writers entertained me when I needed them most. There were very dark nights in my bedridden teens when getting to the next page of a Mark Twain or Michael Crichton novel was as close as I got to the will to live. This is the sort of goal I think a person can work towards, and strive and struggle to be worthy of, but isn’t something you can actually achieve. The author wishes it. The reader achieves it.

Thanks to Marianne, and here's to another year of posting daily for everyone's amusement.

Bathroom Monologue: The Carnivore of Crime

One of the most dangerous masterminds in the world, with a rap sheet over sixty five million years long. The Carnivore’s villainy has withstood all of evolution’s attempts to wipe him out; though his fellow dinosaurs are fossils, this lizard is the tyrant of the underworld. His underlings, the Filet Minions, are as highly-trained a themed gang as could be found in the civilized world. He was the only major villain in America with no lasting arch-nemesis, on account of his penchant for devouring them. These days his prime targets are vegans, whom he calls the “modern day herbivores.” He has only one exploitable weakness: his peanut-sized brain cannot resist any form of word play.

True Stories of John 18: Suicide Jumper

This isn’t a true story about me. I was just party to one awful night for this man. He’s a fast friend of mine and wishes to remain anonymous, so we’ll call him Quan.

Quan was driving back from the Chinese restaurant when the man stepped into the road. It was just after dusk, leaving the winding road very dim. He was driving ten miles under the speed limit, but still too fast to see the man as he jumped. Before he knew it the hood crumpled and his windshield shattered. It’s a minor miracle that the jumper didn’t pass all the way through and kill Quan. Blood splashed his clothes.

Whatever it says about me, after he got home, I was the first person Quan contacted. I actually thought he was joking when he said he was shaken up and needed to talk. We sat there for hours as I tried to ask the most polite questions possible and ease his jangled mind.

A minivan had been coming in the opposing lane, he told me. It screeched to a stop. Quan and the other driver called 911 almost simultaneously, and they were only minutes from a police station. Flashing lights arrived shortly.

Quan’s car was impounded as evidence. He was kept at the station for hours trying to prove his innocence to people who was too shaken to read. It turned out the man had been suicidal and chose that method to end it. Without a car, Quan’s parents had to pick him up. What a call that must have been to make.

When his Asperger’s flared up under the stress, Quan preferred to type instead of talk. Most of our conversation was in instant messages. After half an hour his spelling and punctuation evened out, and his details grew. You could almost watch him calm down through syntax. I latched onto any mildly promising details, like his estimated speed and the lack of a crosswalk, swearing he had a defense if this went to court, and Quan seemed to register that I cared. I think that’s why he said what he did, something that in almost a decade I never would have thought could come from inside him.

He said he was glad he hit the jumper.

I asked why.

Quan remembered the minivan. That driver hadn’t been alone: he had a little kid in the front passenger seat. If Quan hadn’t hit him, then the jumper would have crossed the double yellow line, and that kid would have seen a man go through his windshield. In all his turmoil and shock, part of him was glad he’d suffered this instead of that father and son.

It was hearsay, but nothing stuck out to me last year like that. At no time this year have I been sadder for a friend, but in my perverse way, at no time have I been prouder. Whatever that says about me.

Bathroom Monologue: Town of Voice

The continent chastised her young islet, "Don't you take that town with me!"

Bathroom Monologue: Artistic House Cleaning

It was her artistic statement. She was young enough to be able to work all day, and young enough to still want to, which was rare in the house cleaning industry. But she came from a long line of people who did damned fine work or they didn’t eat, and the better half of that lineage stuck with her. She vacuumed every crack in the floor, eradicated every spot on every wall, plucked every stray fiber from every overpriced carpet, and left thirty-year-old windows looking freshly installed. In the clergy they sanctified people who did her level of work. Every time, she thought, she’d leave just one scrap of paper behind by the door: a beauty mark on the house she’d face-lifted. It was always in the same place, always easy to dispose of, typically put somewhere near the worst stain had been. It depressed her, then, to find no one saw this as artistic cleaning. They trampled right over her errant trash and complained the drapes looked dusty, or the sink had a grime ring, or that the bathroom smelled funny. They were all false charges, low thoughts from people who didn’t know what lilies smelled like. It just about ruined cleaning other people’s houses for her. Some day, she might not have the strength of will to leave behind a beauty mark of trash. All the other cleaners said so.

Bathroom Monologue: Peggy

In the rear of the taxi, his fingers kept breaking and cleaning an imaginary M4. At the hospital, as his half-senile mother explained how it had happened, all he could think of were all the unsecured rooms. Even walking to hers, he imagined Bull Ridge. Its stink, and its birds that sounded like rocket screeches, and its casualty rate. Bull Fucking Ridge, which he’d been praying to leave for three months.

He stood at first. It felt right, to remain standing if Peggy couldn’t sit up. His sister looked so thin in that big bed. They didn’t have mattresses like that in Afghanistan. Nor did his unit have anyone who’d know how to stick tubes up your nose like that, or any of all the blinking, beeping and line-charting machines that kept her bed company. On Bull Ridge, all they really had was glorified tourniquet training.

Suddenly he had to sit. He only knew it when the chair creaked under him. They had chairs that bowed and creaked like this in Afghanistan. That felt too much like home. He leaned over her, as though to prostrate in apology. Her sheets were thin enough that he could feel her warmth through them.

They didn’t have kitty pajamas in Afghanistan. He was a little surprised they’d changed her into them, surprised enough that he reached out and pinched the terrycloth to convince himself it was there. Either Mom had put them on her, or the aneurism had hit while she was in bed. He guessed they could hit you while you were asleep. A lot of things could, which was why he slept with his back to walls now.

As he pinched the pajamas, her wrist rolled and bumped into his knuckles. It sent sparks through him; they didn’t have women in Afghanistan, or family. Well, a lot of people had family there. Afghanis, certainly. Just not him.

He ran his fingertips over her hand in the misplaced hope that she’d react. She didn’t. He wrapped his right hand around hers, then brought up his other hand and added it for good measure. It was a sort of wishful thinking he hadn’t felt in months.

Peggy’s face had never looked so narrow. She was a moon-faced woman, thanks to Dad’s genes. Here and now, something about the aneurism had robbed her of that shape. Her face’s curvature was stolen by sallow flatness. The closed eyes, the smoothness where there should have been feature: these they had in Afghanistan. In O’Hara, and Menendez, and Jesus Christ, the raw pink and the little blood around her nostrils could have been Windham’s as he’d slipped away. But Peggy here had not taken three to the chest at the wheel of a Humvee that should have been armor-plated.

They had armor-plated Humvees in the United States.

He couldn’t stop his eyes from following her tubes, climbing up to the sighing apparatus that helped her breathe. His breathing hitched. Still folding her one miniscule hand in both of his, he apologized. He apologized for thinking about what the Bull Ridge guys didn’t have, and for not being a neurosurgeon right now, and not knowing what aneurisms were, and for still envying everything she had, and for these tears, and for a moment, he apologized for fearing that his unit would materialize and kick his ass for showing those tears. He leaned so far forward that his forehead pressed into her sheets, and he couldn’t help but loathe himself for thinking those sheets felt nicer than anything they got on Bull Ridge. He mouthed this all to the woman who had once been a girl who had laced him wreathes of flowers.

He was so occupied mouthing apologies that he couldn’t see her lips moving, too.

National Novel Reading Month is January

January will be National Novel Reading Month. We’ve all got at least one classic book we think we ought to read and have put off too long. I have more than a dozen of them, and the literary guilt may actually be killing me. Check your shelf. Check your conscience. Isn’t there something long removed from the Bestseller’s List you think you ought to read? Be it for craft, for history, or some gap in your personal English canon. #NaNoReMo is about catching up with the classics.

One thing that bothers me about National Novel Writing Month is it isn’t located in a country. “National” is a poor word choice for a program that’s clearly international. Yet it’s popular, so #NaNoReMo will double the dubiousness. Not only can you read it in any nation of your choice, but your classic doesn’t have to be a novel. Want to brush up on Virgil or Ovid? Go for it. The rule is to read a classic.

We’re using a personal sliding scale for "classics." Some people don’t think Jules Verne is a classic author. I don’t like to talk to those people, but they exist, and so they can read someone else. But if you do think he’s a classic writer who deserves your time, then it’s your choice.

Hop on Twitter in the next couple of days to chat about your potential choices using the hashtag #NaNoReMo. Then join us throughout the month of January as we discuss our progress through our chosen classics. If it works the cross-pollination of encouragement will increase our reading lists as well as encourage us to finish reading great works.

Right now mine is a toss-up between Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (a heavyweight contender with five failed starts in my lifetime) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (a rookie challenger to my shelf with a siren song of a premise: Satan in Soviet Russia). Which do you think I should open in 2012?

#bestreads2011 Blog Hop

Welcome to #bestreads2011! This blog hop invites anyone to play along by making their own lists of the books they've enjoyed most this year. Not what was written, not what was published, but what you specifically read that struck you the hardest. You can write them up however you like, and list as many as you like. Just post about them on your blog, and then share the URL of your post in the Linky below.



My reading schedule was terrible in 2011. I spent nine months writing my own novel almost every day, often for between 6-10 hours, and so my literary desires were meek. It's something I've got to work on. Yet as soon as I finished up the rough draft, I began pounding books, and by December I'd read some amazing works of fiction. It took some effort to trim it down to just four books, though these have stuck with me the most this year. I'm giving each book a paragraph, but you can click below them for my full reviews over at Goodreads.

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

My first exposure to Pynchon, and before finishing I was already looking up prices and library availability on Gravity’s Rainbow. This reads like the work of a cosmopolitan Garrison Keillor, able to tug on any loose string of culture rather than those that dangle into Wisconsin. Presenting anarchism and Freudianism as failed religions, treating the Postal Service as a sinister agency, or simply the idea of Strip Botticelli were all hilarious and fascinating. Pynchon seemed able to write unique sentences, paragraphs, chapters, characters and ideas without ever requiring pause. I’m eager to see what else Pynchon came up with given he remarks this book was the one “in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until” he wrote it.
Full Review of The Crying of Lot 49.

Ethan Coen's The Gates of Eden

This wound up as a Christmas present for the two Coen fans in my life. It’s an obscene and obscenely funny collection of short stories, evidencing that the Coens’ talent for voice doesn’t only come from great actors. Ethan Coen delivered story after story that thrived on earthy narration, be it a twice-baked parody of Mafiosos, or a racist detective, or a Jewish boy utterly uncomprehending of the cultures he’s being raised into. Coen seemed to get off by embarrassing his characters, particularly the proud, in ways you wouldn’t imagine fitting into their respective worlds. But for those already under the heel, the humor turns against those who are empowered, or evaporates into worries about how we humans function at all. The collection is in search of equilibrium, humiliation hammering down and humility elevating us a little. The circumstances are raw for everyone, but the way the players emerge, with quirks and concerns and shortcomings, validates the entire exercise.

Full Review of Gates of Eden.

Jeff Smith's Bone

It’s not that I don’t like any YA works – it’s that what is marketed as YA is clearly not for me. And despite being called “a grump,” “an old man” and “a YA Nazi,” this MG comic book was as involving a read as I had all year. It takes a special book to keep you up to midnight when you have no electricity, it’s ten degrees and you’re going on candlelight. Part was Smith’s masterful art style, blending Charles Schultz, Walt Disney, classic illustrations and more esoteric art styles into the same panels without making a single character appear out of place. But part of it was the irreverent humor, always willing to snap at the heels of the drama, and characters that mingled cuteness and motivation in infinitely consumable concoctions. Smith knew how to make things goofy, but also dire (one character loses an arm and is left to die in the wilderness), and surreal (the Moby Dick allusions go mental by the end). Unlike all the MG or YA prose I’ve consumed, I continuously wanted more of everything Smith was selling, be it cow races or the hierarchies of shadow assassins. Certainly that he created a world where those sorts of things coexist helped, and I wondered if I wasn’t getting into the spirits of this the way others got into Harry Potter. The Complete Bone is a doorstop, but upon completion I would have happily forked over cash for another bludgeon-sized volume.

Full Review of Bone.

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

Of everything, this is the item I’m most ashamed of having put off for thirty years. What a play. It’s quotable and tragic, but so is most of theatre. It’s the way Miller damningly captured certain human behaviors, including a few of my own less desirable traits. Consider how Willie will be working out a divisive issue, and then his wife or another character will pipe up with a separate topic, and he’ll explode out of proportion, because the conflict of both topics suddenly swallows him with the interruption. I’ve done this far too many times in the last year, and to read exactly how it functions stings. The meta-theatrical elements are inspiring even without seeing them acted, though since reading I’ve begun seeking out productions to watch.
Full Review of Death of a Salesman.

Bathroom Monologue: The New Anti-Science

It was the new anti-science, worse than the old anti-science because it knew a little and used the perch of knowledge to condescend. It was meaner than the jokes about teaching apes Math instead of building flying cars. Now they ragged on the role science played in so many old wars, and in every new one.

These folks got into every community, and so both legitimate and conspiracy theories abounded on where HIV and the mammal-ready super-flus came from. If someone designed meth and cocaine, where did he learn it?  Suddenly everyone who defended Global Warming’s existence was met on the other side of the argument with a hipster blaming chemists and engineers for the problem occurring in the first place.

An index of such things showed jokes about Marie Curie’s demise quadrupled in one year. At some point a generation grew up swearing, “We’re empirical, not scientific.” There was a righteous demand for the separation of Lab and State, on both funding and less comprehensible levels.

“GO TO THE MOON,” protest signs instructed, “NOBODY WANTS YOU HERE.”

It was not a good time for science, but then the contrarian mind never thinks it’s a good day until everyone else thinks it isn’t.

John Interviewed at Webfiction World

I was a guest on Anna Harte's Webfiction World podcast this past week. We discussed the origins of The Bathroom Monologues, the strengths and weaknesses of flash fiction, and I interviewed Angie Capozello on one minute's notice for both of us. It was very fun; I somehow managed to ramble about both Eudora Welty and F. Scott Fitzgerald in a conversation about flash fiction. Please drop by and give it a listen and a comment.

You can listen to John on Webfiction World by clicking here.

The Answers to the Christmas Book Contest

 Yesterday I posted the clues to deciphering my brother's annual book gift. Today I'm going to give the answer away. If you want to puzzle it out yourself, skip to yesterday's post and try your hand.

For the first year nobody guessed the entire thing, leaving me a little proud and a little sad. Our game was to extract ten letters from the clues to spell the author's name, and figure out which letter was a ruse.

1. According to Groucho Marx, this kind of person is a critic. The letter that occurs three times in this kind of person might be the first letter in his name.Attributed to Marx and many others, the famous line goes, "Everyone's a critic." Marx even showed up on magazine covers with the quote as a tag line. 'E' shows up three times in "Everyone."
 
2. Three Stooges. Marx Brothers. Beatles. Such different acts, yet when we talk about them, their names all begin with the same letter. If Clue #1 is a fake, then this letter is the first in his name. If not, it’s the second.Rarely do you call them "Beatles," right? It's "The Beatles." "The Three Stooges." "The Marx Brothers." That leaves this number a 'T.'
 
3. According to Norm MacDonald, this organ only understands violence. One day, he says, it will attack and kill you. Today, its first letter is probably the third letter in our mystery.Cassie Nichols correctly pegged this as "heart." That'd mean our letter is "H.'
 
4. What’s the difference between “then” and “than”? One of them has a letter to share with us.Naturally, it's either an 'E' or an 'A.' On Twitter @tokidokizenzen got the vowel correctly as 'A.'
 
5. This famous comedian refused to receive the Mark Twain Prize for several years because of the kind of language that was used at the event. He eventually accepted. The third letter in his last name might go here.Bill Cosby is the comedian who spent an infuriatingly long time not taking the honors. That'd leave us with 'S,' except this one was the bogus unclue. In fact, @tokidokizenzen figured that out in piecing together the next letter to form the author's first name.
 
6. The seventh element on the Periodic Table, and something you’re inhaling right now, might be helpful here.Nitrogen is the seventh element, with the symbol 'N.' Excluding Mr. Cosby, our author is "Ethan."
 
7. If we’re not talking about Bob Dylan’s Modern Times, then we must be talking about this man’s movie. His first and last names match, making this clue so obvious it seems like it must be the unclue.How do they match? The same first letter: Charlie Chaplin. So it's a C-man.

8. Your mouth can speak any letter, but this is the only one your lips can spell. Enjoy not snickering over this joke in front of Grandpa.By the way, both my brother and sister failed to not snicker over #8 in front of Grandpa. The letter any pair of lips can form is 'O.' As my brother struggled over this clue I actually managed to say "Oh" and make the shape right in front of him three times. It felt a little too good.
 
9. This letter is redundant. It’s occurred somewhere in the name already, and occurs for the second time here. Is it the last letter?This could have been any letter that already showed up. It's actually an 'E.' That might seem obtuse, but not if you know who directed #10.


10. If this is the last letter in his name, then it’s the first in the title of the movie that beat your beloved There Will Be Blood for Best Picture at the Oscars in February, 2008.No Country For Old Men was the winner that year, directed by the Coen Brothers. The first letter 'N,' which coincidentally spells out "Ethan Coen." He wrote the excellent short story collection, The Gates of Eden, which I gave to two people this holiday season, including my brother.

Merry Christmas, everyone, and thanks to everyone who played!

Can You Guess The Author Before David?

Every Christmas I get my brother a book and give him clues to guess what it is.
And for the past few Christmas Eves I've invited my readers to decipher the clues along with him.
Know the answer to #3? Then post it in the Comments!
Together perhaps you'll figure out what's in his present before David does.
The rules are no Googling, rather only offering the answers you know and pooling mental resources with other readers.
Below is the text of his card:

There is no way you can guess this year’s book title. However, you definitely know its author. The following are nine clues as to the letters in his name, and one unclue which will only throw you off. You’ll have to figure out which isn’t actually a clue.

1. According to Groucho Marx, this kind of person is a critic. The letter that occurs three times in this kind of person might be the first letter in his name.

2. Three Stooges. Marx Brothers. Beatles. Such different acts, yet when we talk about them, their names all begin with the same letter. If Clue #1 is a fake, then this letter is the first in his name. If not, it’s the second.

3. According to Norm MacDonald, this organ only understands violence. One day, he says, it will attack and kill you. Today, its first letter is probably the third letter in our mystery.

4. What’s the difference between “then” and “than”? One of them has a letter to share with us.

5. This famous comedian refused to receive the Mark Twain Prize for several years because of the kind of language that was used at the event. He eventually accepted. The third letter in his last name might go here.

6. The seventh element on the Periodic Table, and something you’re inhaling right now, might be helpful here.

7. If we’re not talking about Bob Dylan’s Modern Times, then we must be talking about this man’s movie. His first and last names match, making this clue so obvious it seems like it must be the unclue.

8. Your mouth can speak any letter, but this is the only one your lips can spell. Enjoy not snickering over this joke in front of Grandpa.

9. This letter is redundant. It’s occurred somewhere in the name already, and occurs for the second time here. Is it the last letter?

10. If this is the last letter in his name, then it’s the first in the title of the movie that beat your beloved There Will Be Blood for Best Picture at the Oscars in February, 2008.

Figure any of them out? Or the author's name? Feel free to guess below!

Bathroom Monologue: Santa Drops the Truth Bomb

Timmy balled his hands into fists, then bawled his face into them. When the jolly fat man tried to console him, the boy wriggled from his lap and fell to the candy-cane-colored floor.

“Why?” Timmy hollered so loud all the department store elves scuttled away. They formed a wall of placation around the other kids standing in line, waiting to tell Santa their wishes.

Santa leaned from his red felt throne, extending a white glove in peace. “Here, here, Timothy. It’s not that bad.”

“You lied to me! You hate liars!”

“Well, I never give myself presents this time of year,” Santa said with a laugh, though mid-ho-ho the boy punched him in the crotch. He reeled his body, eyes pleading with his parents to tell him this wasn’t the real Santa. Yet both Mom and Dad stood stock still, eyes glazed over, expressions of adoration rigid.

“They’re robots,” said Santa, remaining on the elevated throne for now, safely out of further yam-punching range. “Your bed time is seven o’clock every night because their battery life is low.”

“They love me!”

“They look like they do. My elves are industry leaders. Whenever Mrs. Claus goes out of town, I have as robot of her to keep me from getting lonely.”

When his parents didn’t hitch to life at this absurdity, Timmy turned to face the rosy-cheeked monster.

“And Nana?”

Santa clasped his hands together. “She didn’t really die, Timothy. Your robot grandma is actually in a box in your attic. You can take her out and play with her whenever you want.”

“What about King Snuffles?”

Santa hissed and drew back as though burning his fingers on the truth. “Unfortunately, the dog was real…”

Timmy burst into a new bout of hysterics. He thrashed, the flashing lights in his sneakers kicking at Santa’s shins. The irony that Santa had brought him those sneakers last year was entirely lost on him.

“I don’t believe you!”

Santa took him by the collar, tugging him away from the more impressionable crowd. The kids beyond the helper-elves were all much younger than him.

“You’re getting older,” said Santa. “It’s time you knew that pretty much everyone you’ll ever meet is fake in one way or another. If you’re good, next year I’m giving you the complete works of Carl Jung.”

“But evolution!”

“Timothy, don’t be naughty. Which makes more sense: a bacteria becomes a fish becomes a monkey, or I built your parents? Think about it.”

“I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about anything.”

“You don’t even want to think about a Playstation 3?”

Timmy’s fists parted as gradually as the Red Sea, revealing the dawn of his puffy face. He hiccuped out a question.

“The slim?”

Santa’s jowls jiggled in his nod. “The three-hundred-and-twenty gigabyte model, bundled with Uncharted 3.”

“But Mom and Dad couldn’t afford that.”

“But they aren’t real, Timothy.”

Timmy’s fists fell away from his face entirely. His tears detoured around his gaping mouth. The anxiety wasn’t over, but it was the first step towards realizing that, all things considered, this was the grown-up he wanted - just like every other child.

Notice: #bestreads2011 Next Week

Next week we'll be doing a little community chat between The Bathroom Monologues and Twitter. #bestreads2011 will be all about your favorite books from the last year.

The blog hop will start here on Wednesday, December 28th. The same day at a time we'll arrange by community, anyone on Twitter is invited to an open chat about their favorite books of the year using the hashtag #bestreads2011. For those without blogs or Twitter, you're still welcome to mention your favorites in the Comments section. Everyone is invited, readers and authors alike.

So think on it. What are your favorite books that you read this year? Not what was written or published in 2011, but that you personally read and loved. Fiction, non-fiction, prose, poetry and sequential art is all welcome. I guarantee you a comic book will show up on my list. It's a middlegrade comic, too. My list will be about 4-5 books long, with a paragraph a-piece on what I got out of them. You can handle the number and format as you like.

Feel free to launch questions below. We'll field them together.

Bathroom Monologue: Vampires are Addicts

“I can’t help thinking of him as an addict. There are, what? A hundred people in Snowberg? And he’s eaten fifteen in a week. If a human’s a blood pack to him, then that’s a two-pack-a-day habit. That can’t be normal, even for the really old vampires. Definitely not normal for a guy that haunts this valley, who’d run out of snacks entirely soon enough. Either he’s betting he’ll eat CIA and X-Files detectives for the rest of his life, or he’s got an irrational craving. My dad was an alcoholic. Some nights, when he couldn’t find the remote and was heavy on the belt, I guess it would have felt nice to pound a stake through his heart and leave him to dawn. But the more you know addicts, the harder it is to hate them. I pity this guy. Get him into a twelve step program. One not held in church basements, I guess.”

Bathroom Monologue: Fate Worse Than Death

“This one I call the 'Afterlife Spell.' A lot of people can threaten you with death. A knife, a gun, slathering you in gravy and tossing you to wolves. But death doesn’t last long enough.

“What the Afterlife Spell does is sustains your consciousness after your body quits. After your neurons cease firing, you’ll keep feeling everything. The maggots pushing into you. The skin drying and tearing. The ligaments rotting. You’ll feel the aching decay of your entire body over the course of months. The truly special part is that your selfishness remains; you’ll want to not end, and so desperately hold onto your consciousness as that physical real estate dries up. Eventually you’ll be one flickering microbe, begging to hurt a little longer.

“I save this spell for people who hurt my daughter. I hear you’re taking her to Arby’s?”

Bathroom Monologue: Mother-in-Law Versus Mother of her Granddaughter, OR, Fresh out of Bed Monologue

“Oh God, can we just leave? I can’t take the stares. It's like I'm meat.”

"You look great, honey."

"You think?”

“For a human wheelbarrow? Yes! You should be proud.”

“…for a what?”

“It’s your body. You should be proud of your decisions, like the one to put on more pounds here and there.”

“I’m carrying a child!”

“Not in your thighs, deary. But don’t make excuses. Own it.”

“I haven’t even gained that much weight. My doctor says I’m at the dead-on average for seven months.”

“Dead-on average for the McDonalds generation, sure. But when I was carrying your husband? I was tight as a deer. Almost sinewy.”

“You have that look in your eyes sometimes.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing. Can we go?”

“We need to get dinner for Christmas, don’t we? Got to feed that fetus. And the rest of you.”

“Oh my God, you’re making more people stare.”

“If you can’t take the stares, then maybe you should take the stairs more often.”

“What the hell? That’s bad for the baby.”

“According to whom? When I was carrying Tim I lived on the seventh floor of a tenement with no elevator. The super always said I was very tight. When she stared, it was out of admiration. Those stares would have been grounds for divorce in six states.”

“This explains so much about Tim.”

“What was that? I can’t hear a thing in here. You'd think shoppers would use their in-door voices.”

“I said you’re not going to see this baby until she’s got her Masters degree.”

“Goodness, it’s noisy in here. Maybe we should leave. Want me to push the cart? We know how you feel about exercise.”

“…That’d be great. That’d be great.”

Eulogy for Irene Sabo Corcoran

This is how I eulogize, folks. Many people approached after the funeral, asking for a copy. I actually never wrote it down; I performed it from my head. It didn't feel proper to write it down for the first year. Since this weekend is about Rene, it's felt more natural to put it on screen and share it. She'd approve, of course, of something that glamorized her. So here's saying farewell.

Here's an audio edition for everyone who requested one.

I want to tell you something about my grandmother.

On August 23rd an Allstate Agency appeared in Ireland. No one thought it was odd because only one lady saw it, and she was quite used to Allstate Agencies. That woman was Irene Corcoran.

She walked inside. There was Roland Maynard, Joe Richardson, and a host of people who absolutely did not work at Allstate anymore. They buzzed about the office, trying to sell insurance.

Rene asked them, "What's going on here?"

One muffled the phone to his shoulder and said, "You put a lot of yourself into this place. Work has to be done. Money to be made."

"Yes,” she said, “but I don't want to do it now."

He said, "You don't have to. We just thought you should remember. In fact, you can’t stay here."

He directed her to her office. She walked down the hall, past all her awards and certificates, and through the familiar door frame. Except it wasn't her office.

Inside was the cramped Sabo family living room. Her father stood by the wall, admiring a framed photograph. It was her graduation picture from Sarah Lawrence, just a couple years ago, decades after he’d passed. Her mother came to his side.

"I can't believe you did that," her father said, shaking his head.

Rene came over to them. They touched hands and admired it.

She remarked, as she often did, "I look better in the other photos."

"I like this one," said her mother. "By the way, your room is taken tonight. I’m afraid you can’t stay here. "

It had been decades since she'd had to give up her bed for immigrants, but she remembered the drill. Families came across the Atlantic and needed a break. In such cases, the Sabo family’s daughter broke. She nodded.

Her mother asked, "Can you get something from the kitchen for me?"

"What?"

"Just something we thought you should remember."

So Rene went into the kitchen, looking around for the parcel. Except it wasn't a kitchen. It was a ballroom, full of noisy people. Across the floor she saw a familiar man. A decorated World War II hero, captain of the football team, and a scholar. She put a hand to her cheek.

“Damn, I did well.”

When her once and future husband stepped out through the double doors, she followed. She found herself in the corridor of a hospital. She looked through each door. In the first, she saw herself delivering her first daughter, Mary. In the next she was cradling the newborn Christine. Then their son, Jodi, and then littlest Deirdre. Through further doors she saw all her grandchildren, a parade of babies. She sped up, loving them all, but not that enamored with reliving childbirth.

She left the corridor for another kitchen. Jodi's kitchen, now all grown up. Her daughter in law Bean was busy cooking, cleaning fruit and piling dishes in the sink. There were so many people: Doug, Bernie and Susan, and friends from the local church. Outside were still more familiar voices, including her husband’s laughter. Her grandchildren were everywhere. Christine’s daughter, another Deirdre, carried a cake, a stream of Rene’s friends following behind and offering to cut it. Her oldest grandson, John, was there too. He almost never visited, but there he was, talking to Jodi about stocks.

She felt tired, so she sat in a corner, listening to her husband and friends chatting outside, and stared at John. Eventually he noticed and looked back, still chatting with family. Gradually, Rene smiled. It was more sincere a smile than he'd seen in a decade of holiday visits, and it left him guilty, wishing he'd come much more often, to see that expression, if not to cause it.

Rene didn't talk to anyone. Instead she watched this loving family buzz around the house for a while. Then she stood up and walked through the glass door, outside. It was bright out there.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to tell you about my grandmother. Thank you.

True Stories of John 17: Fairy Tales from Grandma Rene

It’s one of my earliest memories of being away from home. Rene, my maternal grandmother, was ecstatic to be in possession of a grandchild for the first time. I was the first of the grandkids, though from reports of my cousins, she was as good to each of us in our time. Some folks are simply best with babies and kids.

Her bed sat in the center of her room, which struck me as odd, coming from a home where beds sat in corners. Corners were good. Monsters could not get behind you if there was a wall in the way.

Rene knew every monster. Her mother came from Europe, which is where all the monsters came from. Well, they lived in Europe and Russia, but, “you’ll understand the difference when you’re older.”

Not only did she know about giants, but she knew how the mean ones had died. Huddled under her blankets, with an old hand stroking my shoulder, she explained how Jack had tricked one into falling off his cloud.

Mom and Dad had never told me that one. I asked if she knew any others. When she mentioned a candy house in the woods, I got a little less sleepy.

After Hansel and Gretel baked the evil witch, I said the woods were scary. She said they were fine, and told me about Little Red Riding Hood, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and the Three Little Pigs. You see, the woods and wolves weren’t so scary. The bad ones had been taken care of.

She was incredible. How was she making all of these stories up so quickly? I couldn’t even manufacture an explanation for cookies missing in the kitchen. And she was good at it, both at making up neat things and in telling them in this soothing, loving voice, like she adored all the carnivores of folklore. She was surprised when the heroes were surprised, and proud when they survived or were victorious. I couldn’t figure out if these things really happened, or if she was making them up now. And in truth to the way children experience faith, I didn’t care either. I just wanted more stories from this endless mind.

I’d never manipulated an adult like this, or so I recall. Every time she finished a story, I only had to ask her to tell me another. This being her first shot with her first grandson, she never said ‘No.’ Somewhere around Cinderella meeting her Fairy Godmother, I faded out.

I was disappointed the next morning to find her more interested in the newspaper than telling more fairy tales. Even more disappointed with discovering what a “grape nuts” was. But those things were trivial. The old lady with an entire culture in her head and at her command has stuck with me for the archetype of the storyteller.

"Wolf Slayer" at Enchanted Conversation, dedicated to Grandma Rene

I'm proud to announce that "Wolf Slayer" was bought and published by Enchanted Conversation this week. While it's sad to see the zine close, I'm happy to have contributed to a strong line-up. Their final theme is Little Red Riding Hood. My story was inspired by her woodsman, who has a crossover with another figure from folklore. I don't want to spoil it for you, but she requires his special skills. It's a bit of Noir and a bit of Comedy, and so it takes a pretty special place to publish it. You can read it here.

This story is dedicated to Irene "Rene" Corcoran, my maternal grandmother. She passed away from cancer last year. It's her that I remember introducing me to fairy tales, and she did so in a way that's stuck with me as a writer. I first composed "Wolf Slayer" to amuse her, and when she was diagnosed, set about finishing it. On Saturday I'll post about her knack for fairy tales, and on Sunday I'm going to share something that's been much requested but that I didn't feel like sharing until now. These three days are for Rene.

Click here to read "Wolf Slayer."

People Haunt Homes

Sweeping, vacuuming and spraying. Scooping used needles and scrubbing vomit. Ripping up the red-stained carpet to lay down hardwood. Rolling paint over the graffiti and gang signs. Paying thousands for a new roof so rain won’t dribble inside anymore. Gingerly picking out splinters of glass, setting in new windows before the exterminators arrive. It’ll need to be airtight before it’s bug-free, and bug-free before it’s occupied, and occupied well if it’s ever going to be a home.

Bathroom Monologue: Consensual Sexual Harassment

"Flirting. How I tire of other people's flirting.

"Definition? Flirting: consensual sexual harassment.

"Ah, now you tell me that, no, harassment can’t be consensual. Flirting is more delicate than that.

"And now I tell you that no, I’ve seen flirting aplenty and there was little delicate about it. If it was delicate, it would have shattered from the sheer barometric pressure of lust.

"Yes, I’ve seen consensual sexual harassment. She teases him, so he teases her, and now they mutually harass with decreasing subtlety until I wish I could sue. It’s the softest of softcore bondage.

"No, I haven’t committed it. I’m ugly; I can’t find anyone to consent, and I tire of restraining orders. That’s just how it looks from the cubicle next to the hottest guy in Accounting."

Bathroom Monologue: Tim is Dead

Tim is dead. His fingers dab the cologne that gives her hives across his collar. His hands ruffle that collar in the way she always fixes when he’s in front of people. His wallet, usually home to a few token twenties, bulges with deceptive singles. Timothy observes Tim’s corpse: dressed a little too crisp, hair a little too mussed, wearing a seven-o’clock shadow that he really ought to shave off before the party. Not a thing about the dearly departed would meet his mother-in-law’s approval. If his mother-in-law would always use his full name to oppress him, then he will give it to her with a smile calculated to be just phony enough to bother her without being able to call him on. It took four of her Christmas Eve Bashes to kill Tim. This Yule, Timothy reigns supreme.

This piece popped into my head reading the first line of Michael Tate's story, "Darkness Surrounding."

Bathroom Monologue: First World Problems

Our problems are different? How can they be different? Our circumstances are the same. I am broke. You are broke. I know you are because you drive the same cab as I do. I make, maybe a little more money, because you frown at everyone. And you are broke, so you have to live with your sisters and parents. And I am rich, so my sisters, brothers, cousins, nephews, uncles and parents will live with me. The same.

You have an apartment with three rooms. You say it has three rooms. You say, “How can five people live in this place? It will be terrible.”

I have an apartment with two rooms, counting the bathroom. I count the bathroom. You do not. You could say, “Mommy dearest, here is a room of your own. It has a sink and a shower.” But you don’t say that.

I have an apartment with two rooms and eleven beloved roommates. I am overjoyed all eleven of my family can live here. Nobody has a room of their own. Nobody has a bowel movement of his own, and we’re grateful. Is it because we’re from elsewhere? Is it because we have crazy primitive values? Is it because we have not watched enough television, used enough Sprint minutes and eaten enough food from wrappers? They are all happy to be there and eat this fast food. Well, except my mother and one of my uncles, but they have had hard lives. They do not know happiness so well anymore.

They do not know happiness so well because they saw children come home without arms. I mean they ate mud to fill their stomachs and never met their father. You are unhappy because your mother and father might have to share the same room in your three-room apartment. Is this what legal divorce does? I don’t understand.

Where we come from, people are divorced by slave trade. Hands are divorced from you for stealing fruit. Here, in one day, I work? And everybody in my two-room apartment eats fruit. No one steals.

I don’t understand you. It must be your realism. Americans are much more realistic than we are. I make some cabby-money and I think, “Oh my nephew can come live on my floor now, and not in that country, and not get sick, or join rebels, or get killed in civil war.” My family is like that. We are unrealistic.

You and your mommy assess how things really are. She thinks, “Oh I have to go live with my son now, and I will not sleep on park benches, but I will have to wait for bathroom, and talk to them when I am tired, and smell their unwiped selves late at night.” A very realistic family you have, concerned on what will be, while we are so happy with what won’t. Funny, though. Unrealistic as we are, we live in the same reality you do. In fewer rooms, too, with fewer complaints.

“THESE DOORS MUST REMAIN CLOSED” –Sign at a hospital

“These doors must remained closed?” Then why didn’t you build a wall? A door that can’t open is scarcely a door at all. This is unfair. Am I not allowed through, but hospital staff are? Because if so, you should have written, “Only medical professionals allowed beyond this point.” As it is, any surgeon is breaking the code every time he goes in there. What if I see a surgeon coming from the other side, and hold it shut so the sign remains honored? Will I get kicked out for enforcing your rules? Is it just a preference, or is there something sinister going on with those doors? Is there radiation and hazardous material back there, which endangers anyone who enters? Is it dangerous to open the doors, or dangerous just to be near them? I mean, if we’re dealing with radiation, that door’s not going to save anybody from cancer. You’d build a wall, with concrete and stuff. Certainly not with plexiglass windows. I can see through there! How did everybody in there get in if these doors must remain closed? Medical heathens.

Bathroom Haiku: Living Cities

take arable land

sprinkle people across it

and watch buildings grow

Bathroom Monologue: Petra’s Ghost

Petra’s ghost? I hate when living people talk like that. I am not Petra’s ghost. My parents were never around for weekends. I was a virgin until twenty-seven. I went into Marine Biology because sharks are awesome, and I was on my way to the interview of a lifetime when a semi jumped the divider and plowed into my cab, killing me 'instantly.' That’s what the doctor said to my parents. “She died instantly. She never felt a thing.” He was wrong.

This is all mine. My doctors, my parents, my wrongs. I am not Petra’s ghost. I am Petra.

I’m your ghost, I’m this highway’s ghost, I’m the ghost of curiosity for the ocean. But I will never be Petra’s possession. I will possess concrete and sea breeze. I’ll be their ghosts, and that’ll be fine, because it’s what I decide to do. It’s what Petra Nebrich does. I’m all I ever was, and I am all Petra Nebrich ever will be. And if that’s a tragedy, then it’s my tragedy.