It was a good day for lunch. Maybe a little too good.
Early this morning I was hit with a familiar yet slightly unpleasant pang of hunger for the addictive spices and odors of the far east. Not the ravenous hunger of a man starving to death, and yet not a mild pique of appetite a gourmet experiences when presented with a unique new taste or dish. This was a craving, and that means trouble.
After eating more than my fair share of spiced beef and shrimp, my stomach happily gurgling it’s satisfaction, I was jerked to wakefulness from my food coma with a sensation. It was my new food friends, making acquaintences with my older food friends, and they did not get along. An evacuation was planned, but I foolishly though that like the Oslo Accords, I’d make them sit at the table and solve their problems for a little while longer, at least until I can make it home.
Not unlike the fighting in the Middle East, however, they were having none of that, and desperation drove me 8 floors in search for a pristine porcelein throne in which to make a deposite.
You see, I, like many people I know, find it uncomfortable, maybe even embarassing, to be rolling the logs while someone else is within earshot. You may say it’s normal and every human does it, so is being naked and I have no desire to do that in front of an audience.
The basement’s restroom was occupied, however, and I dragged the feuding foodstuffs back to the top floor. My best bet was the basement. It’s dingy, cold, and filled with ghosts (allegedly). It’s also the least traveled floor in the building, and many a times I have worshipped in my own way within those stainless steel stalls and welcoming porceline god. Today was not to be, however, and my rites would have to delay.
I sprinted back to the elevator, the fighting intensifying every step of the way. I thought that if I could make it back up, the management floor and infrequent shitting from the ass (as opposed to from the mouth) would provide the second best opportunity for me to whip out my black hole and create anamolies.
Drats! An older gentleman of the decaying type steps onboard on the second floor, teeth flashing cruelly like a mother hen does when she cock blocks, only it is the other side that’s being blocked. I smile back and my stomach gurgles it’s contempt, and if I could have jumped out of the elevator and up 5 floors I would have, letting him plummet to this death while pretending to care. This was more important!
Finally we reach the top, and I briskly take the lead out instead of offering my chivalry. This was no time to be altruistic! Yet horror of horrors befalls me as the ancient crone drags mummified feet behind and follows me. I pray to the gods I don’t believe to make him turn right, but he turns left, and as I step through the threshold my wonder is amazment and fear and anger because soon it was to be occupied by 2, BY TWO!, not one!
Wearily, I fight off the urge to slam the door in his face and a urinal ripped out of the walls between the door and the opposing wall. I make for the best stall (the one at the end of course) and it was only after my pants fell to the ground that an evil laughter or cackling demon informs me that he too has installed himself as a worshipper in the same temple!
Seconds pass, then minutes. I can imagine the dust and cobwebs slowly oozing themselves out of his archeological pit of an anus as my lunch exits in a non-orderly fashion out of my supple rectum. It eased into the water like an old man into a hot bath. The flesh of too much ass muffled the splashdown, silence and stench the only thing shared that would have notified a passerby of any activity.
I am not a conspiracy theorist. I laugh and shake my head at those whose cleverness seems wasted on finding the invisible lines between providence and luck. Yet what could I have suspected was happening when a third figure, laughing as he entered as I imagined him, plopped down in the stall between the fossil and myself and diligently professed his love for the same god??
We sat there, fearing as I imagined from the additional silence, of judgement, of mockery, of what perhaps worse I don’t know. Smells that ought not to be smelled wafted through the open air like vultures circling a dying animal, and coughs of distraction made for the only sounds in that tomb-like atmosphere.
For countless eons, time passed. Then, out of nowhere, or perhaps time was ready to deliver him from this mortal coil, the old man and the shit shifted, flushed, and departed, chased not by a bear but the collective disgusted and embarassment of 2 men channeling millions.
That left only me and the interloper. This was to be a war of attrition.
Because I began my battle earlier and, having already survived the mummy’s curse, I was cocky, overconfident. Half of the army laid dead at the ass end of some pipes, the other only awaiting word before they could march out and slaughter what fresh air still cowered in the corner of that bathroom.
Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen. The army was getting restless. Who was this that swooped in like FDR and cleaned up the mess made by the uncivil wars of the Old World? Did he not recognize I had planted my flag and laid claim? “Get out!”, I screamed to myself! But as if answering, he merely shifted in his seat, taunting me with his existence.
More minutes passed, and time and reason told me that I had been gone far too long. This was an unwinnable war, and he had gotten the better of me. I could overstay my welcome, become one of those who lived on remote islands and fling poo decades after the war’s end, or acknowledge that sometimes you just can’t win them all. I had gotten half the survivors out and the other half will just have to wait for rescue later.
Silently, I whispered my surrender and admitted defeat. I had lost a poop face-off. He will reign as king and I will have to wait until I get home.
