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.
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.To do what? To go where? To find who? Learn more after the break . . .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 . . .
. . . for quick Bible study during regular school hours.I don't know what's more fun here.Some argue that the Bible release time is crossing the line between separation of church and state, however, a [state] statute gives schools the discretion whether to allow the bus to park and let students attend.
Is it . . .
"They're being lured in with candy."Thing here.
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:
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.
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?
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.
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*Yes, sands can be foggy. Look it up!