I S*it You Not

Picture it, I’m at the sink in the restroom, getting my anti-swine-flu precautions on when I hear, “So I don’t know if you got my text message or not, but like Jen has VIP tickets to the Vince Gill concert tonight.” I think to myself, “I love Vince Gill but I don’t have any idea who you are or who Jen is for that matter and frankly, I have no idea where your voice is even coming from.” And thank goodness I did not say it out loud because before I could respond some unheard person beat me to the punch and next I hear, “ok awesome, we can get some beer and meet there at like 5.” And then it hits me. The disembodied voice is coming from the bathroom stall! And the voiceless respondent is on said pooper’s cell phone!

I never in my wildest imagination thought we’d have to address this but the [ahem…subject matter of this post] seems to finally have hit the fan. And while I am all for multi-tasking, we have officially reached the limit, as I will demonstrate with a little hypothetical. You are chatting with your friend on the phone making plans to get burgers after work. In fact, you can picture in your brain the juicy looking slab of ground chuck with just a hint Dijon mustard and grilled onion bunting peeking out the sides. Your mouth starts to water as you choose a time and location for this get together and make the presumptuous decision in your head to order fries AND onion rings for the table. Suddenly a worm hole opens up allowing you to defy the laws of the time-space continuum and actually see your friend as he is talking to you making plans to get hamburgers. Your cell phone drops to the ground and smashes into as many little pieces as the shards of your immortal soul when you discover that your burger buddy is taking care of business while he’s taking care of business. You are thinking of tonight’s tasty nouveau American and he is still working on getting rid of last night’s ill advised Mexican. This latest etiquette abomination has now cost you your love of hamburgers, cell phones, and the auto-flush feature on the American Standard, all in one…uh…sitting.

Of course we hold culprits of such offenses to human decency to account for their actions, but there is another co-conspirator that merits mention, and elimination. I’m going to place the blame squarely on the Real World and its misbegotten step child Big Brother. TMI does not even begin to describe the gaping hole in the floodgates of the participants’ shame. Watching people sitting around at a slumber party playing truth or dare seems harmless enough, just some engaging young people swapping jokes and stories and the occasional venereal disease. But cameras in the bathrooms? I can imagine few things more repulsive than calculating the amount of soap it will require our protagonists to wash off last night’s bad decisions.

At least the television version of the problem we’re discussing affords us the small comfort of clinging to the fourth wall. We can keep a safe distance on the other side of the glass and pretend that it’s all pretend, it’s all a fiction concocted to entertain us, it could never happen in our own existence. That is why it is absolutely soul crushing when we discover individuals like the one profiled above in person. He reminds us of the depths to which our species has sunk and we begin to question whether his life is really worth living. The answer dear-hearts is that in the real “real world”…it’s not. So for the future, I’d suggest hanging up the phone when you cross the forbidden threshold or else the disease you pick up from that toilet seat will be the least of your worries.