The Coprokomodia, Dept.

So, this episode contains allusive content that may prove distressing to those with sensitive nerves or vivid imaginations.  Let that serve as my only warning.  Which reminds me, how's your mom, Ed?

I'm at work.  I'm in the bathroom, I enter a stall.  Someone is already in the far stall, the handicapable stall.  As I ponder, let my thoughts meander, freely wander, the occupant of the far stall begins to make noises.  The noises a very unfit man makes walking uphill in the summer.  The hard breaths, the grunts.  Should I intervene?  Is the occupant in distress?  Is the occupant about to gaochao?  Is the four-alarm chili doing a Sherman through his Georgia?

The noise continues.  It ends.  The hoarse roar of his flush masks other ejaculations.  I can see a sliver of the sinks through the crack between my stall door and the stall frame.  The heavy breather--I recognize him, a morbidly obese dude in his early 30s I've seen on my floor--stops at a sink only long enough to trigger the motion-sensor water flow with a swipe of a hand, then walks to the paper dispenser to grab a length and out the door.

I can understand many trespasses and forgive some.  Situation and circumstance can force men and women to do things that they might not have chosen to do, or they can offer men and women the opportunity to do things that they oughtn't.  But the pro forma automatic sink swipe to convince whom? Me? Jesus? Ceiling cat? that you had washed your hands as thoroughly as anyone who's just finished a hot toilet grunt session might do, i.e., as thoroughly as if about to perform open thoracic surgery.  That I shall not forgive or *gaak* forget.

You don't know me, and I don't know you.  But, entre nous, in Tom Cruise's words from Magnolia, I'm quietly judging you.  The judgment? You are one fa schifo motherfucker.

And I hope the maintenance guy scalds the bathroom door handles every night.