Stall Worthy

Tell me, what do you think of when you see this image?




If you're honest with me, and with yourself, no doubt some seriously disturbing thoughts and scenarios flash before your eyes. Looks to me like the Zombies that used to entertain all of us on Facebook before Farmville and Happy Aquarium were invented have risen, and they want pure, unfettered brains.

Warning: Defenseless Babies Will Be Eaten.

Now, fine, this is just a picture of an emblem for a baby-changing station that I took with my cameraphone in the bathroom of a Borders in the Poconos, but, seriously, if I hadn't cropped out the words "Diaper Depot," you'd have thought the polygon people had seriously gone ape and were out to eviscerate all babies who are left lying on their backs on flat surfaces.

This image, and indeed the fact of well-dressed gentlemen using cameraphones in public lavatories simply underscores the inherent yuckiness that we all must face in bathrooms that are not our own.

I don't have to tell you that I'm a paranoid person. This is like telling you that you should be watering the ferns instead of reading this asscandy. But I heart and respect you and, therefore, I'll allow you to make your own (dubious) choices, especially if they're ones that fluff my ego.

Anyway, I'm a paranoid freak, though I used to be a lot worse.

I think.

I'm especially paranoid when it comes to a public bathroom. I'm more at home skipping barefoot through a needle-strewn alley or a refereeing a Jamaican pud-wrestling championship. I wasn't always this way, but, like lots of people who go off the deep end, the watershed event in my life was something relatively innocuous.

I was urinating in the school bathroom one afternoon when Jacky, one of the retarded boys who was inexplicably and constantly attired in striped shirts and knee pads entered the bathroom and took up residence at the stall next to me. My stream immediately ceased. Then, just as I had convinced myself that I was being stupid and I started to let it flow a little bit, I heard Jacky clear his throat and say,

"I like your watch!"

And that was that.

In high school, I would only use the bathroom before or after normal school hours. That's right, from 7:15am-2:25pm, Mondays-Fridays, from September-June, I didn't poop or pee. For four years.

When fresh-faced, lithe little Apron went off to college, he obviously didn't have a choice in the matter, seeing as his freshman dorm room was, well, a freshman dorm room. One day on the second week of classes, I walked into the bathroom and found that it stunk to high heaven of shit. The existence of the odor didn't surprise me, but the fact that its milky, copious source was located in the sink.

I tried to train myself to contain my bodily functions to the bathrooms contained within the academic buildings, hoping that these facilities would be more, well, academic. And they were. At least, I never found shit rivers resembling Nestle Quick in the sinks of the theatre or the science building.

Unfortunately, while taking a most philosophical shit while my philosophy class was in session, my proclivity for lavs in academic buildings took a wrong turn when the toilet upon which I was s(h)itting exploded on me.

In a cruel instant, I at once felt like I was porpoise at Sea World and a Saran-wrapped prostitute on a date with R. Kelly.

But that was college. I was crazy back then-- I even dated a Catholic girl. Now, I'm much better. I settled down, married a nice Jewish girl (my dead allergist would have been thrilled) and I can go into virtually any rest stop bathroom on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

However...

I still think that, while standing at the urinal, my face two inches away from the cold tile wall, that some crazy bastard is going to walk up behind me and donkey-punch me, slamming my face into the wall. Either that or he'll shoot me in the back of the head, spraying the admittedly shallow and perverse contents of my cranium all over the place for the toothless, mop-manning Manolo to squeegee.

God. I should never have seen "American Beauty." Every time I pee at a rest-stop, I picture Kevin Spacey getting his head blown off in his lily-white kitchen. And, every time I see a fucking plastic bag blowing in the wind, I make that joke. And every time I take a shower...

No, just kidding. Not every time....

Oh, I'm also afraid I'm going to see somebody's penis at a rest stop which, if you can believe it, has never happened to me yet. It's pretty surprising, considering most dudes are already fidgeting with their widgets as they're rounding the corner by Sbarros. Like seeing some poor bastard's slop-sausage should be my biggest problem in life.

Obviously, you who read my blog every day know that it's most definitely not.

However, after hitting the bathroom in the Bartonsville Borders, baby-attacking zombie mommies, though, are up there on the list.