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You might . . .

If you are a regular reader {cough} and you actually know who I am, and you would like to know how my brother is doing, email me and I will supply reports. If you don't know my email, leave a comment and we'll see how it goes.

Yesterday, from reports, he arrived in the shit. He urges all of us to hang up and drive with both hands on the wheel, thereby being statistically as safe as him.

As Promised

Some inane photos to help you understand what my dogs are up to.

Here is probably the most upsetting picture I have of Zuma:

And likewise for Pepper:

Over at Flickr there are some pictures representing a town -->

Also: I have nothing more to say about poo. Promise.

Continued Story

It was right around the time that I realized there was poo on my face that the carpenter starting cutting up the attic with a power saw.

Super. Here I just spent ten tremulous minutes preventing this onslaught from producing any sound above a whisper, and just as I'm done, some cover arrives.

Okay. Okay. So my timing is bad. So there's poo on my face. I am accepting this information. I am moving on. I have things need doing. I need to do them. I need to get out of here, and get back to my desk, and avoid eye contact for the rest of the afternoon.

I stood to wrap up, and, turning to review the latest damage, I found another doodad to add to my shame necklace. Back of the toilet seat done had a tea stain. A tea stain from me.

It was time to remember the triage principles. What needed attending to first?

Step one: sponge down the gentleness. Done.

Step two: wash hands. Done, thoroughly.

Step three: wash the HELL out of my face. Done.

Step four: attend to the tea stain. Aww hell. I wiped it down pretty thorough with a wet paper towel, but I still discerned faint yellowness remaining on the porcelain. FUCK, that was definitely not there when I came in. Now my coworker who just heard everything will instantly connect what she's heard to this stain, and any chance of a smooth working relationship based on mutual respect will, unlike this experience, go smoothly down the toilet.

I cast about the bathroom for a good cleaning product. The closet was packed to the gills with law office supplies, but no cleaners to be found. My eyes fixed upon the air freshener, and a moment several days earlier sprung from my memory:

FLOG's BOSS {leaning in FLOG's office door}: FLOG, what are all these handprint stains on your door jamb? Is it from you leaning in to your office?
FLOG: Why would I lean in the door of my own office?
FLOG'S BOSS: You tell me! Anyway, I'm going to clean them off. Let's see . . . cleaner. {walks away; returns with can of air freshener} Way I see it, if it's in a metal can, it cleans. {scrubs down door jamb with air freshener}

So, I sprayed down the toilet seat with air freshener, and let it sit awhile as I washed my face and hands again, and reset my pants and shirt in a professional-appearing manner. Turning back to the toilet seat, I wiped it down vigorously for 20 seconds or so. The stain faded a bit, but remained. I cursed, shrugged, and left the restroom, taking a course back to my office that would avoid all potential eye contact with anyone.

FIN

Epilogue

The tea stain is still there, kind of. A couple of weeks ago, returning from lunch in a similar manner, I felt a repeat performance brewing. I muttered a lie about going to city hall and fast-walked to a public restroom in a nearby park. Them public restrooms are neat!

This Story Will End When It Needs To, And The Sun Will Shine Again

It felt like I was trying, with my colon, to keep a timpani player from sounding out his most important part in "Also Spracht Zarathustra."

Strike that: it was not merely my colon, or the timpanist, who had a part to play. If you have ever strained to keep an urgent bowel movement silent, you'll know that it involves a total-body tension replete with forehead sweat, shaking, and hoarsely cursed indictments of the lower intestine that simply won't    bow    to      reason.
Nevertheless, and gamely, I played traffic cop on the backup within, passing the clammy time by listening to nearby phone conversations and sneezes.

As soon as it began, it seemed to have run its course, and I set to tidying myself, turning to review and dismiss the damage. It was as I stood thus, that I realized certain precincts had yet to be heard from.

Wrrrplrbufuurrrg, said these precincts, some of them, while another offered PPflyarbggbg.

I sat back down. Crestfallen, I lay my head in my hands.

Then I noticed that the left side of my nose felt . . . wet. I pulled my hands away from my face. My left middle finger was brown.

OH. MY. CRAP.

To be continued!

A Story -- Continuity Time

So there I was, with holiday traffic stacked up on my offramp. I had to make doodoo like hummingbirds fly. It would be like breathing.

Level with me, reader. You have had this feeling. You have known what to do. You have quietly excused yourself and fled, done a quickwalk to the bathroom, slammed the stall door and let go. And then? It was over. You pulled yourself back into shape and you returned to society.

But what happened? Were you listening? Were you there? Because it was awful. Damning. If anyone could have heard what happened in that stall in those minutes, you'd be jobless and friendless, or at the very least thoroughly laughed-at. People would Know. In the ensuing years you'd be less quick to smile, or to share an anecdote with people you intended to befriend.

You would wear that doodoo like a badge of shame.

This is what I faced, alone, in a room whose locked door gave no privacy, as the traffic stacked up at the offramp of my personal body.

I sat, and I steeled myself, and I said: Today, I am a traffic policeman. Today, I control access. At my signal, a few cars left the offramp, at a slow and deliberate pace. In slow motion, a bead of sweat ran from my forehead down to the tip of my nose, and then splashed on the tile floor beneath me. From somewhere, carried by the wind, I could hear the opening tom tom drums of "In the Air Tonight".*

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*This is the only fiction in this story.

This can't end well

An excerpted top story from the local weekly:

Five days a week, a school bus can be seen journeying around the community in search of kids.

However, this isn't your average school bus taking kids to school. The old yellow bus with blue stripes has been parking at schools and allowing kids to hop on board . . .

To do what? To go where? To find who? Learn more after the break . . .

Continue reading "This can't end well"

A Story -- Fine, Let Us Continue

There are a number of different ways to poop. I don't know if it's eight or 33 or how many, but it's not a uniform act. Sometimes you're running the ice cream machine at Plaid Pantry. Other times, you're squeezing tennis balls out of a new tube sock. There are a number of different ways to poop. This story is about one of them.

LOOK. This is not going to be a polite story. I will be frank, because only frankness is worthwhile here. Go read Cute Overload, you don't like it.

On a sunny day in January, I popped home for an ordinary lunch of bean and cheese burritos and probably a carrot. After some light digestion over the noontime Perry Mason broadcast, I headed on back to the office, a bit too full but otherwise content.

Returning to the clamor of notes and files on my desk, which I had abandoned mid-flail, Flintstone style, at the sounding of the town's noon bell, I called my brain back to order and picked up my pen, and then the news came.

I had to go doo doo.

Every time this happens right after lunch, I do the following catechism:

• First, Can it wait five hours? {If the answer is NO, continue to}


• Second, Is it worth going right back home for? {If the answer is NO, continue to}


• Third, Duuuuuuuude, AGAIN? {If the answer is YES, go to the bathroom.}

This day, the catechism led me to the bathroom. It was urgent, but didn't seem too threatening. The key to the second question is whether I think the noise can be contained. My sensors were telling me that this was the sort that feels like you're trying to hold a gallon of water in an upside-down trashbag by holding the drawstring taut. Its departure would likely be relatively quick; the key would be to maintain a steady release of pressure while remaining vigilant to potential gas eruptions.

I proceeded to the bathroom. Assuming the position, I sat and listened to the tappity-tap of my coworker typing in her office twenty feet away, and waited.

Question Qorner

Dear FLOG:

Hey, are your pants backwards?

-- Perplexed, Although Not Terribly Surprised

Dear PANTS:

Well . . . yeah. Wouldn't you be if you were my pants?

A Story -- Doing the Continue Dance

Many years ago, across the foggy sands* of time, in a moment of gin-fueled vicarious bravado I advised a wiser man than myself to publish 1200 words under his own name in a well-enough circulated periodical about a sequence of events at an amusement park that no man should live to recount. To give it the three word summary: chili, pants, monorail.

Two things drove me on in urging him to -- sorry -- spill the beans. First, these things are universal. We all have that story to tell, in some form. Second, it's a hilarious story, personal humiliation notwithstanding. (The second derives from the first. Those who don't find these things funny must not do these things. Which means we'll all laugh harder when we learn that they secretly do.)

Well, now the tables have turned. I find myself three installments in to my own water loo, my own chili, pants, monorail. Do I swallow my own advice? Do I finish what I've started, at risk to my reputation and the disgust of those who sit above such filth? Or do I cop out and give you the story about when I was four and only made it halfway from the bathtub to the toilet before the bomb bay doors opened?

Do I do what I have come in here to do, or get up from where I am and go away?

We shall see. In the meantime, learn a little about the fringes of nacho culture.

-----------------------------

*Yes, sands can be foggy. Look it up!

A Story -- As It Continues

I probably drink about four cups of coffee in the course of a work day. Three of these probably I have before lunch.

Being who I am, for lunch I typically head home and fix a burrito or a quesadilla that contains mad beans and probably 11 to 14 pickled jalepeno slices. Most times I head on back to work right after eating.

I do also try to stay hydrated throughout the day.

TO BE CONTINUED