Toilet Humor

I'm not talking about us laughing at them. I'm talking about them laughing at us. Or am I the only one who's noticed? Every place that I've worked has had toilet issues. I'm deeply suspicious.

The first place I worked out of college was in one of those industrial strip malls that invariably congregate near freeways. For the entire three years I worked there they were constantly doing some sort of ductwork. That meant that there were workmen crawling around in the ceiling, and it happened more than once that you would be in the stall attending to business only to have plaster drop on your head, followed by a voice from above saying "Oh, excuse me."

Another company I've worked at had an entirely different phenomenon for the men's room as for the ladies' room. In the ladies' room, about once a month, the water in the toilets was boiling hot. I'm talking about coming into the room and immediately feeling the change in both termperature and humidity. The minute you sat down, you could feel the tingle of your pores opening up. I'm sure it was very therapeutic. In a really disquieting way.

In the men's room, usually at the same time as the ladies' butt sauna was going on, there would be the men's cattle-call. Every time someone flushed a toilet in the men's room, the sound of a 100-foot cow mooing at the top of its cow lungs could be heard all over the building. If I saw one of my male cow-orkers heading in the direction of the restroom, I would know to brace myself for the coming roar. On the other hand, several times a day I would be jolted out of my concentration by a sound alarming enough to precipitate a trip to the butt sauna.

In the place I work at now, they squirt some sort of lemony liquid in the toilets when they clean at night and then just leave it there. By morning, the toilet is fresh-smelling, lemony yellow, will foam when flushed, and is full of flies who have dived to their death, attracted by the lemon smell. So, you come in after your first few cups of tea and you have a choice. You can either waste a bunch of water flushing these guys away, or you can endure that skeevy feeling knowing that you are, in fact, pissing on someone's grave.

A person just shouldn't have to deal with this kind of thing at work.

I Finished!

Yesterday, I finished the short story I've been working on for the past few weeks. I'm very pleased with how it's turned out, although I know that when I give it over to someone for editing, I'll become deeply self-conscious about my choices. The Pirate read it and told me that he thought it was every bit as good as "A Poor Aunt Story." High praise.

Monster

I wish that I had a tiny little monster that went with me everywhere I went.
And that monster would be my friend and fetch me a cup of tea and maybe a biscuit and bite people on the ankles when they pissed me off.
And he would have shiny scales of all different colors and needle-sharp teeth and a forked tongue, and he would tickle my neck with it as he rode on my shoulder. And buggy eyes and blood-red claws.
I wish that I had a monster. Everyone needs a monster.

Oh, The Things You'll See!

This morning, I was suited up and ready to go, but I needed gas first. I stopped at the light right before the gas station as a Buddhist monk wearing a leather baseball jacket over his saffron robes crossed the light. I've seen a few in this neighborhood before. I don't know where they live.
As I pulled the bike up to the pump, a little old lady clutching a big vinyl purse walked across the blacktop. As I turned from the ATM kiosk, she was walking back because the doors of the mini-mart weren't open yet. She proceeded to station herself in front of the tattoo place next door, pacing back and forth in front of the door and clutching her big vinyl purse. I looked up, and the monk was pacing back and forth in front of the dry cleaner's place. They were both walking back and forth and stopping occasionally to look up and down the street.
As I left, they were both walking down the same little side street in the same direction. Toward my street.

Stepping Into the Void

I've been kinda down lately. For six weeks, I've been watching what I eat and running most days. On the days I don't go running, I ride my bike or do other things. And yet, the pounds refuse to budge. I feel that all of the effort is being wasted, and it's depressing.
Similarly, every night, I sit down at my computer and I write. I write articles, essays, short stories, etc. I am currently being published in an online magazine, but it's not paying anything. I'm waiting for the day when I receive an actual check for something I've done. In the meantime, I feel that I'm just putting all this energy into the void.

In the Virtual Bank Line

In my dream last night, the Pirate and I were going with JeebusGeek to a wedding. JeebusGeek's boss was getting married in a very large, ritzy resort right down the street from my parents' house. Everyone showed up four or five hours before the wedding was to start in order to have cocktails and socialize.
Alcohol was being served, but I had to go down into a small room several floors below where the festivities were taking place. There was a woman at a desk near the door who asked for my name and address. She asked what kind of car I was driving, and if I had a cocktail, how I planned to get home. I told her that I was staying less than a block away, and that I hadn't taken a car, I had walked and planned to get home the same way. I was given a martini, but I had to drink it there in the room where I was then lectured on the evils of drink.
After the ceremony, everyone just lay down on the ground and fell asleep. We woke up the next morning when a grandfatherly-looking man came along in a little trolley and handed out food to all of the children who had attended the wedding. I decided to take a drive with my sister-in-law to go visit my best friend The Third.
Magenta and I were in a car going to see The Third, but we were in a horrible inner-city neighborhood - the kind where everyplace is strewn with garbage and all the doorways have big iron grates across them. We parked several blocks from where The Third lives, and Magenta said "Oh, let's go into this building right here. I have a friend that lives here and he can go with us." So we pushed open the broken security door and found ourselves in a long, dimly-lit hallway with no doors. The walls were not perfectly straight, but broken up by ornamental columns protruding from the wall, and little niches with nothing in them. The whole place was done in a very Moroccan plaster-and-tile sort of way and while nothing was in disrepair, the whole thing was absolutely filthy. We walked down the hallway a little ways and Magenta pushed at one of the niches which turned out to be a hidden door. We went down a dark, narrow hallway into a small plaster-and-tile room with no furniture in it. Two young, bearded men stood as though they were expecting us and led us into another room with a little battered furniture in it.
There were a few other people in the room, including a friend of mine from work, Djibouti. Everyone was going to come out to dinner with us, and it's been decided that we're going to a Moroccan restaurant down the street. "But first," Djibouti says, and he whips out a few filled syringes. Everyone crowds around him and he starts injecting them all. I am feeling vaguely put off and don't want to participate. Djibouti lifts his shirt and then brandishes a knife. He inserts the knife at least a half an inch, parallel to the surface of his skin. He pulls the wound open and then sprinkles cocaine into it. "Are you sure you don't want any?" he says, laughing. I am now officially horrified.
I look up and now the room is full of children ranging in ages from a tiny infant who's in a backpack slung over a chair to a seven- or eight-year-old. They are all staring at the grownups with wary eyes. I ask them their names, but none of them speaks. I ask them where their parents are, and they point to the people who are going to the Moroccan restaurant, who are all filing out the door, unconcerned. "Have you eaten?" I ask the children, who all shake their heads.
I tell them that I'm going to stay and make them something to eat, and they all crowd around me, suddenly excited and chattering. I start opening doors, looking for a kitchen, but all I find is a family living in one of the rooms who looks as damaged and wary as the children. I invite them to join me, and they were coming out of the room as I woke up.
I have to stop watching scary science fiction and reading up on poisons before I go to bed. It's just not a good combination.

Help, I'm Deaf

Went camping this weekend.
It dumped rain, so the entire thing ended up being the Hemingway camping experience where we all stood around the lake with our grim faces and ropey forearms wearing thick sweaters and acting like it didn't bother us that we were wet and cold and being eaten alive by mosquitoes because we were alive and it was more than we could say for the mosquitoes as we swatted them from our ropey forearms with our sinewy hands and looked out over the picnic tables piled high with soggy food and dripping dishes where we had just eaten dutifully but without relish because we had forgotten the relish and the mustard besides. The women kept their strong silent backs to the men while the men stood around the fire ring feeling hopeless because not only could they not get the fire to light but they had forgotten to bring any wood which didn't matter anyway because the wood would have mouldered away with the passage of the time that it took the women with their strong silent backs to finish the dishes and make the coffee which they poured into cups and let go cold before bringing it out to the men who stood in a circle reveling in their shame. And back in the tent we lay in the darkness listening to the rain and the acorns and the squirrel turds hitting the top of the tent and wondered how long it would be before the water began creeping into our sleeping bags and wondered whether the children really did not notice that they were wet and cold or whether they were just trying to put a brave face on it so as not to remind us of our failures and thereby to make us feel them much more acutely even though they were not really our failures so much as the failures of a God who never seems to take into account our vacation plans.
Man, I love camping.