It's Normal to Die a Little When You Visit the Public Restroom

Look, I don’t like public restrooms. I’m not going to pretend I do. I realize it’s cooler to be the overly laid back guy and get juiced about having a place to squirt my shit on the go. But I never was overly laid back guy, and I never reveled in staking out a public location to drop body garbage.

I know it's an unpopular stance. I probably sound a lot like someone from 1820 right now. And if you were to coax a scientist into taking five minutes away from designing new patterns for a Fruit Roll-Ups commercial to actually put in some work and build you a time machine, and you flashed in a man from that year, he’d probably throw his arm around my shoulder and reminisce about how much better it was when public excretion was handled much more simply. By squatting down and laying one out on the sidewalk. Tell me where to sign up.

"Hey, where's the nearest public restroom facility?"

Yes, public restrooms probably save lives (and make lives, bow chicka bow). It’s where gross people get hand jobs, where overworked Wall Street junkies find motivation to live, and where fat girls go to cry whenever something this shade of negative happens to them. Seriously, fat girls, get over it. And without the establishment of a public restroom, where would all the homeless people have their tea parties?

But here are the facts. We as a society have definitively proven we can’t handle the responsibility of maintenance in a public forum. Ever seen a highly trafficked public trash can? You understand this. The next time that you find a living or recently living thing disposed in a public trash receptacle, your synapses will spark a connection with the dead part of your brain and suddenly, it'll start to make sense. So who in the name of little boys everywhere thought that we would be able to handle pissing and shitting in a public arena?

Now imagine the public restroom equivalent.

Personally, I can’t stand the public restroom experience. Maybe it’s the failing lighting, the wandering eyes at the urinal, the stale hue of piss steam that’s lingered uninterrupted in that tile cavern of a room since the Kennedy administration, the sound of a fart so violent and throaty you have to stop yourself from offering help, the blood on the stall lock, the urinal with a baby-sized shit in it, the guy pissing onto your foot from the next stall, the surely Nobel prize-winning air blower invention, you know, for those times when you’ve got just under 3 1/2 hours to dry your hands, the scruffy guy posing as a restroom attendant who turns on your faucet, the pantless children that follow you and call you daddy, the puddles, the hair stuck to the tampon stuck to the handicap men’s room stall, the backed up toilet that contains all the telltale features of a recent abortion, the broken lock that triggers the door to open as soon as you squat, that man that waits in the doorway for you to finish, the prostate problem three urinals down whose tragically slow trickle magically convinces your dick to copy, the limitless skyward reach of bodily fluids, the used condom by your foot that reminds you what quality of toilet water just shot up your ass, the waterproof brown paper towels, the masturbating homeless people, or of course, the distinct smell of cigarettes, porcelain, and intestinal wall. And while I can’t seem to put my finger on what it is that makes the public restroom the clusterfuck of disaster that it is, there is one thing we can all agree on.

This is somehow the scientists' fault.

Fat Kids Stand in the Way of Your Dreams More Than You Realize

You can go ahead and call me a humanitarian for saying this, but fat kids are absolutely ridiculous. Our society is supposed to stand for something. It’s supposed to mean something great. Something flowery. Like honesty. Or integrity. One of those abstract multi-syllible words that sounds abundant. If aliens from another planet were to fly over here tomorrow morning, we’re supposed to have something to show them that would impress them. Something that would make the aliens say, “Well goddamn, Xerxiex-11, their buildings are pathetically primitive beyond description, and they get their light source from equilibrated photons of all things, but that sense of justice their society exudes is downright impressive.”

You know why this scenario could never, ever happen? Because of all the fat kids that would be standing on our front lawns, staring up at the spacecraft with their mouths agape, drooling Twinkie cream all over their shoes. How exactly is our society supposed to stand for something multi-syllibical when our wife’s bruises are visible for everyone to see? You’re starting to see my point. And it doesn’t make you a bad person yet.

Go ahead and look at the fat kids. More than half are fat, so it shouldn’t be a groan worthy field trip assignment. In the event that there’s not one in sight right now though, here:

Now this is exactly what I’m talking about. Look how fat you are, kid. Exactly how many umbilical cords did you have? I mean, do you just eat double QPC's all day and then never move? And can you possibly fit any more chins into your fat-faced frame? You're almost perfectly round for chrissakes. Eugh, just looking at you makes me sick. Your insides are probably ravaged. Blood vessels lodged from a few dozen experimental Fuddruckers burgers you crammed down at 2am one night when your buddies were stoned and needed to gorge on a lot of gross food fast. And now look at you. Just a huge yellow tub of lard sitting out in the backyard, steaming and growing a stench; Grandma says not too get too close to it, but you do anyway and vomit red chunks all over the place. Turns out you have a sinus infection that went undetected for months and now it’s spread to your lungs.

Well you’re probably still better off than sausage fingers here. This one's yawning because merely living has become an exhaustive physical activity. I'm sorry, has our lethargic society worn you out already? That's what happens when your body fat percentage is higher than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man's marshmallow percentage. What’s your poison? Barbecue Hot Pockets drizzled with ranch dressing? And then you remember: you're looking at the youth of America. Our hope for the future, and this is what we get to look forward to. A group of moist, lumpy, fat-faced, continuously sweating grown ups that aren’t even remotely prepared to look good in front of the aliens.

Well if everyone else is too afraid to stand up and say something about it, consider this the first stone. I’m ready to tackle child obesity at its roots. Let's stop pumping babies full of breast milk till they're literally crawling everywhere, their cheeks puffed out like a Ugandan boy's stomach. Maybe then we'll have a chance to impress the universe.

Hey Science, Thanks for the Segway

I like to get on science’s ass a lot. Some might say, lay off the guys in labcoats, Joey, they make differences to our everyday lives in imperceptible ways. I say suck my dick, hypothetical asshole. We’ve been subjected to nothing but cop-out inventions over the last twenty years, most of which seem to only consist of music and cameras. Know what, scientists? I could live out the rest of my life without encountering a new device to store pictures of people I don't care about, and I still wouldn't complain. Meanwhile, they haven’t even had to change any of the goddamn inventions in Disney’s World of Tomorrow since the fifties, and I don’t think anyone cares.

So why would it surprise us that when science unveiled its latest and greatest transportation device it turned out to be… the Segway.

It's okay, now erectile dysfunction doesn't have to be the most disappointing thing about you.

Now look. If I wanted to look like an idiot, I could take yoga for three years and learn the backwards pile driver so I could shit in my mouth at the park. This being a slightly more convenient way to accomplish the same goal. So let me get this straight, science. We don’t get to teleport anything, and we still have to open our own refrigerator doors, but OOHHHH in the event we want to ride around in a stupid big-wheeled scooter that looks like it runs on nothing, hey we’re all set.

There comes that time in the life of a divorce child’s life, when the estranged father makes that hard final push for a shot at his son’s affection. The boy has lost a lot of respect for his father since he lost his job and stopped trying to hide the Asian teen porno mags in the passenger seat footspace of his Chrysler LeBaron. But the wily father at least still knows his son’s interests. And that’s why on his thirteenth birthday, when all he really wants is a remote controlled helicopter, and dad walks in on visitation weekend with his newspaper-wrapped gift, and a stale layer of weasel dust in his bushy mustache, that boy knows exactly what’s inside that box. It’s an old balsa wood glider kit off the discount rack at that seedy Korean corner store downtown. And just like that, dad is dead to him.

You know, if science had just pretended to forget our birthday instead of trying, it would probably still have some of its photos up in the house.

I Have a Fucking Hammer

I have very little to say about this subject. In general I feel that paying attention to the bored kid who enacted a real life shoot-em-up defeats the whole purpose of ignoring him in the first place.

But in this case, I really just couldn't help myself. Look at this picture. Seriously, look at it. Mister Seung-Hoo Chop sent this picture as a part of a package to NBC in between murderous outbursts on the Virginia Tech campus on April 16. The rest of the package included various different poses with guns, knives, and a threatening video pushing his resentment for the fact that he was a thoroughly disappointing human. But what... what's the deal with this photo? Can someone tap him on the shoulder and inform him that he's thinking of scaring us with a picture of himself holding a weapon that would take more than 15 swings to do any sort of significant damage? You mean to tell me that you're composing a cryptic message from the grave and what I assume to be intentions to conjure a sensation of intimidation, and the natural instinct was to raid the toolbox? Did you run out of weapons on the checklist? And how did the shot of you strangling yourself with a tape measure not make the cut? I personally think even a picture of you with a calculator would have been more frightening than this brainchild. Everyone would be talking about what this dead Asian guy could possibly have been calculating. Way to think it through, asshole.

Wednesday's Abortion does not in any way endorse killing innocent and promising people because of your inability to be remotely noticeable. But if that day comes for you and you find yourself at the post office paying postage to rush a posthumous photo of you grimacing while aggressively holding toolbelt contents for a major TV network... hey, looks like you're about as good at scaring people as you were getting them to like you.

Logan's Run had the Right Idea

[Editor's note: This article is old people friendly for your convenience.]

Okay. It's time somebody told them. It's fun that they don't know yet, and it's cute how easy it is too keep things from them like it's high school volunteering time all over again and we're doing fun experiments at the assisted living home to see what happens when they get the yellow pills without the red ones, but...

Old people. All right. You've been great... you tell us those same stories, over and over; we can't get over how easily impressed you are, especially when we lift things; and that physical decline, boy, what a warning for us. But look ... You are completely useless. It's really time to wrap it up.

Calm down. I expected this. Relax. Pretend it's 1946 or something. Comfortable? Okay. I'm not an old person hater. I'm simply speaking on behalf of the rest of us. I'm just gonna spell it out here. You walk too damn slow. You take too long thinking when I ask you questions. You tire way too easily, and I'm sure you couldn't even withstand more than three punches to the abdomen. You eat the damn flavor of Jell-O pudding that I don't like, taking Jell-O's money and efforts away from creating new damn flavors of Jell-O pudding. You poop and pee in your drawers. None of us were really ever cool with that.

We could do this the easy way, or we could just stop feeding you soft things.

Mentally and physically, it's pretty much a disaster all across the board. Everything has passed you by and it's really becoming a pain in the ass to keep you up to speed. Teaching you WordPerfect in 1995 was a weekend from hell that I'll never have back, but now cell phones? PDAs? Mp3s?

I think it's starting to become clear now. We're in the age of the now, and you're so a thousand years ago. Your old age might have meant wise stories for people like myself back during the Taft administration, but I got Wikipedia, motherfucker. We're educating ourselves just fine without you, and I think we're all feeling a little like that person at the library when the smelly guy sits way too close. Well we're sticking our elbows way the fuck out and you're not catching on, wrinkles.

So here's my proposal. Everyone grab a shovel and kill an old person. That's right: it's time to go Barbaro on them. No no, it's not cruel. Barbaro was killed because he was experiencing weight-shifting levels of pain. Think about that the next time an 83-year old picks up a nickel in the middle of a crosswalk on your green light. When your weight shifts, the shovel will find its way to their temple. It's the natural way.

Fergie Wants You to Think She's Sexy

I'd like to start off by reminding everybody what year it is. This is a big theme for this topic. It's 2007. We're seven years into the time that everybody was supposed to have hovercars. By the way, still waiting on that one, science. Can we please take a day off from inventing new Hot Pocket breading textures to give that a go? We don't ask for much from you. We just want to drive in the air. Thanks.

The reason for emphasizing the year is simple. We've come to a point as a culture where the complexities of basic health needs, simple diseases, and hygiene have been medically solved and easily remedied. Basic concerns such as "How do I keep my ass from itching after I poop?" are a thing of the past. We now have the ability to focus on improving outward appearance, being healthy, fit, attractive. We appoint our most beautiful people as the spokespeople of humanity, granting them celebrity status, to allow them to take in fame and camera time so that they can reflect to the world just how impressive our species can be.

So what in the name of sweet sweeping Christ in a vacuum cleaner is the story behind Fergie? Did I miss a day of school, because I don't remember it ever, ever being okay to be ugly. In fact, a lot of school time in my heyday was spent ridiculing and harassing the ugliest kid in class until they either had an emotional breakdown or started having sex with everyone by the sixth grade. It was like Survivor before its time.

But someone help me connect the dots on this one. Fergie's by no means attractive. Yet, one of her main selling points in her solo vocal career is that she's "hot." So extremely hot in fact, that a derivative descriptor to the English word delicious was spawned to assist in encapsulating the extent to which Fergie is sexually desirable to the potent male in what can only be described as fergalicious.

Okay, so here's where I'm a little hazy. Fergie... is fucking disgusting. I don't care how much chocolate syrup you pour on a young version of Jennifer Coolidge, my penis is going to be March of the Penguins soft. Why are we not more pissed off? I thought the point of our shallow culture was to advance to the point of refinement where we could close the gates of opportunity on the ugly misshapen asses of physical inferiors. Instead, we seem to be regressing back to the days where (gasp) looks didn't really matter, thanks in large part to wall-to-wall music video blocks featuring this Fergie bitch pulling a Dakota Fanning on pop music.

At the 1921 Miss America contest, you'd have been committed to a sanitarium for suggesting that someday the event would be masturbatable.

Where are we going with this? Do we want to end up back at the 1921 Miss America contest? Is that what we want? Do I even need to show the photo of the girl that actually won this brown paper bag festival? I thought we had finally discovered through our ever-growing human wisdom that moving penis = marketability. This Fergie/Dakota shit is an indictment on the male consumer, and I will not stand flaccidly by. So please, celebrity gatekeepers. Let's take out the trash. Either Fergie goes or we get hovercars. I'm not budging.

Wednesday's Child... Ruining Dinner Since 1981

If only someone out there could create some kind of strange cultural staple, that no one wanted or even asked for in the first place, something that's just kind of stuck in our collective face like a tablespoon of Triaminic. Oh wait, that already happened. And we've been enduring it for close to thirty years. Alright, the other six days of the week may have their own hold ups and shortcomings, but there is simply no other event over the course of the week that I dread more than Wednesday's Child.

Why, you might ask? What an astute, timely question to ask. You might say it's the gimmick of it all. And I'm not just talking about the way it does for local news what Katie Couric has done for the national news and period all over it. I'm talking about the blatant, unabashed, shameless way it appeals to the barely important events. If you ask me if it's more important that we learn about the graffiti that was removed from the Elm Street stop sign or little Taylor who now has an elated new barren adopted mother, I'm asking for street coordinates, motherfucker. You mean to tell me you have to fill a 30-minute time slot to give all the relevant news of the day and you spend 10 of those minutes at an adoption agency showing slowly-developing Pernicious shooting a basketball and running in circles in a backyard? What the fuck is going on?

Hey look! Despite not having parents their entire lives, these three children can still feed goats and play with sticks even when on camera! Do you want to adopt them now? Hmm. Well, once the spoonful of Spaghetti O's drop from my lifeless lips like Teri Schiavo's last-ditch forced feeding, I think I'm ready to vomit. Look. I don't want to adopt anyone. You know what? If I was interested in adopting someone, I'd probably have done something more proactive than picking up the remote. In fact, I think I speak for the majority of the local audience when I say that my life is complete enough as is, thanks. Now, is it the 6:30 block where they switch to animals that need homes?

Pick me or I'll ruin dinner for you.

Instead of recognize this demographical fact, however, it seems every network affiliate across the entire country decided years ago that each and every Wednesday evening should be the platform for the most awkward children's pageant of all time. So when I sit down to eat my evening meal, I get to look forward to watching a ten minute segment with an idiotic twerp throwing a baseball to himself while an overjoyed, undersexed social worker pours her heart all over the television screen recounting the three hour court proceedings that gave this boy the infertile parents he never dreamed he could have.

Hey, here's an idea. Let's set up a barren people TV network so that all the unhappy, childproof couples can tune in throughout the day for an endless stream of foster children parading around, begging for their companionship. They can even wear sashes indicating what drug their parents did in front of them, you know, to harken back to the child pageant tradition of Wednesday's Child. Gotta keep tradition.

The bottom line is, people watch the news for depressing life updates on the world. Not to buy a child. I wouldn't turn on Cinemax at 2am to watch Shrek 3 so who thinks I want little Tara's daughter credentials to replace my fix of vengeful men who lit their girlfriends' Brooklyn apartments on fire on the evening news?

At least I can eat.