Too-quiet restrooms
Whizzed all over January 5, 2025.
The old year had come and gone. Then, the new year had come and gone. I was nonplussed. How did this one go so quickly? How did 2026 get here 364 days in advance? Then I realized Becasue had torn the page out of my calendar to use as a fish wrap. It’s only 2025. Then I wondered where she put that fish. I hope it was wrapped well.
Nonplussification notwithstanding, I was a happy camper today! I found the diaeresis I lost weeks ago! I gingerly reattached it where it belonged. Satisfied, I went looking for my new friend, the grog frog, but didn’t find him. Then I schronked on down to my town’s downtown—which is actually up a bit, not down—to see where the gurning competition was to be held in three-&-½ weeks.
I beheld what I was looking for, then I had to go. So, I went looking for a loo.
The room was completely silent. There was not even the soothing sound of a ventilation system whirring away in the background. I could hear a pin drop—or a clown fart. I wondered how many public restrooms around the world were dead silent like this. How many public restrooms were so quiet that one could hear each and every single noise every other restroom-goer made—from the slightest bowel movement to the raucous swipe of a sheet of toilet paper?
This is why when I use the public restroom, I make blowing-fan noises with my lips. Loudly. Then no one can hear me whiz—or worse! Phpbphpbphpbphphbthpbthpbthththbpbpththth!!!
Right then the clown in the next stall over farted—loudly.
Upon arriving back at my fortress of solitude on Bouillabaisse Boulevard, I cracked open Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that no one can edit anymore without being subject to a torrent of abuse, searching for a list of public restrooms. They have lists of everything. But not that! There was none. I was crestfallen. I need to find a new public restroom to desecrate. The clowns in that one are simply too much to bear.
I crawled out of the cardboard box pile in my back yard and went inside my actual house.
Chlöë’s blonde feet popped into my head right then, toes asplay. I lost my train of thought and sat around meeping to myself for a good ten—no, eleven!—minutes. Then I thought about how my sciurine little town will be holding the world’s biggest gurning competition in 3 + a-ha’week. I couldn’t wait! (And there—now I’m plussed again!)
My eye turrets narrowed, enslittified: Out beyond my upper-lower-middle kitchen-stove window, I could see a passer-by. He was passing by. Clearly he was up to no good, wherever he was going. No upstanding person would be out at this hour! What to do? Becasue had abandoned me to my own devices again, so I called for Nurdlebutt. That damnable cat was even better at clawing people’s faces off than my big little redheaded huzzey-muffet was!
Then something else narrowed, enshittified. Public restrooms driven from my mind like a long-tail cat fleeing a violin maker, I fled up to my own private bathroom—to engage in a clamorous farting spree safely contained where prying eyes could not see (nor prying noses could smell). Much stupendous blasphemy rang out, emerging from multiple orifices. Then, I flushed. I attempted the long journey back downstairs (which is actually up a bit, not down) but tripped over a tube of Crest on the bathroom floor. I broke my coccyx.
Jada Fire’s two-tone feet popped into my head right then, toes asplay. I lost my train of thought—and that tube of toothpaste—and sat around meeping to myself for a good eleven—no, twelve!—minutes. Then I remembered that gurning competition coming in III½ weeks. I couldn’t wait!
This meanderous journey through a garden path of word salad nearing completion, I rested. Things strange and surreal intruded into my beady little mind. Like Lakshadweep. And, the Venerable Bede. Was he really that venerable? Even being venerable, did people actually venerate him—or was it all just pomp and flattery? Whatever it was, this seriously had to stop.
“Behold! A pale horse,” someone once said to me. Indeed I beheld a pale horse. I wanted a zebra but all I had was this damnable pale horse. I did have some black paint. But it was house paint, not horse paint. So, I couldn’t use it to make me a zebra.