shotgun blast in the men's room

My coworker M has seen some shit in his day. No, literally: as in shit on the floor, shit smeared on a toilet-bowl rim, etc. Today, M came into the office and warned us that, if we were planning to use the second-floor men's room, we'd need to "watch [our] step." As it turned out, the problem was worse than implied: not only did we need to watch our step to avoid the unpleasant redecoration of the restroom's floor tiles, but we also needed to avoid the only sit-down toilet cubicle in that restroom, for it turned out to be covered in haphazardly smeared shit.

Much later in the day, as M was leaving, he told me he'd actually seen the culprit. "I felt sorry for the guy," M said, and he described a desperate old man who had probably already started shitting his pants even as he was trying to make it to the restroom. Once he was there, I can only imagine him frantically fumbling at his belt, trying to get at least some shit into the toilet as it poured out of him with no mercy and no sign of stopping. End result: I'm pretty sure he blasted out his load everywhere but the toilet. Poor bastard.

Continence lessens with age. John McCrarey is only 64 (yes?), but he's written some funny/horrifying shit-the-bed stories over at Long Time Gone. The angel of intestinal relaxation comes for us all, and we're never ready for the resultant flushing-away of our dignity. I hope nanotechnology eventually creates "continence bands" that can be wrapped around the end of the anus and controlled via brain-driven signals so that, even in our senescence, we can take shits on our own terms. For now, all we've got are those goddamn diapers. I'm reminded of the old joke: "Senator Dole! Boxers or briefs?" "Depends."

Anyway, yeah: the second-floor men's room sit-toilet cubicle was unusable today—all day. The Mido building is very old, and the cleaning crew is also very old: people don't swing by several times a day to clean up messes, so the old man's shit just sat there, splattered everywhere and slowly drying in the partly humid summer air. Lovely. I, too, feel sorry for the poor guy, but at the same time, you have to know your own bodily rhythms so as to avoid, well, shit like this. Try not to fuck things up for the general public, eh? Wear two diapers if necessary! And plastic pants that have tight elastic ankles to stop any diarrhetic drippage.