Adventures in Defecation

I could almost hear the cheesy announcer shout, “Welcome to the bathroom show!” as I left the bathroom this Friday. Almost. Let’s rewind.

It was a normal day in the stall, just like any other, when the bathroom show began. In lumbers this guy who at first I thought was one of the cleaning guys, because he was carrying so much stuff. He swung open the stall door next to me and proceeds to have a fight with the metal garbage bin that’s set into the wall. That’s the place where you dump your used paper towels. After a minute or two, I realized that he wasn’t really doing that — he was just extracting something from his bag. A computer? A SMART car? It was big, whatever it was.

Then he flushes the toilet (the good old initial flush), and sits down, peeling off his pants. So I’m doing my soduko and being a good lavatory citizen, hoping I can escape before he breaks out a wall with his enormous flatulation. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but the bathroom show continued. He gets up and then proceeds to take off his shoes. I’m not kidding, and no, he wasn’t changing clothes as far as I could tell, because he got up and sat down several times. And if he was changing clothes, why flush?

By the time I left, he had at last become comfortable. My gosh, I thought, why don’t you start charging admission? At least that way you can make a buck off your bizarre toilet etiquette. The bathroom show went on, I’m sure, but as my business was done, I had to change the channel.

I find it interesting that romance and the bathroom never meet, not even in the grosser alleyways of tabloid publications or internet news sites. No-one gives a gift of beautifully-wrapped TP to their husband or wife. Christmas doesn’t bring the sound of new toilets or urinals flushing in heavenly harmony. Valentine’s Day never brings sights of the legendary golden dingleberry picker, nor laxatives all daintily arranged, so that you and your love can feed each other the tasty chocolate treats, then excuse yourself later to make your own chocolates.

No-one ever expresses their love by proclaiming with starry eyes, “Baby, I’m pooping for you.” No man brags to his wife that he loves her so much that his bladder is fit to burst. All I want to know is “Why not”? If you think this is silly, the humans have proclaimed any number of silly things to those that they love. If you think it’s gross, what’s grosser than saying that your heart — an organ that distributes blood throughout your body — beats for someone? A beating heart is a gruesome thing to see. And so many people have already compared really awesome things to feces by using that familiar profanity, the s-word. So if you tell your gf that she’s the s***, then what’s wrong with saying that you’ll love your woman as long as you poop?

This is not a throwaway comparison. Pooping takes a lot of effort. You sweat; you strain; you know the drill. Urination isn’t cheap either, from an energy perspective. I mean, this is raw human effort here, especially if you’ve had to hold it for a while. So it is fair to compare deep emotions with things that require a lot of us. That’s why people say that they’d lose an limb for someone, when they’re really head-over-heels for them. And take a look at that last one. Head over heels? You know the first person to do that had to be in quite a bit of pain.

Now all this is just empty talk unless somebody does something. So who’s going to be the first to put this all into practice? I can see some half-drunk guy wandering over a chick in a country-western bar, saying, “Babe, you’re so hot that I could just poop.” Maybe some foxy chick could be telling her thug, “Whenever I turn the water yellow, I’m thinking of you.”