Monday, April 30, 2007

Bumrush!

Coffee on my mind, urine in my bladder, and what looks to be a transient just closing the bathroom-door behind him at my local coffee-shop. Here, I ponder this daunting choice:
Do I get in the lunch-hour rush-rush line for my eagerly-anticipated java?
-or-
Do I stay in the line for the can?
Both lines are coagulating rapidly; my crackhead-like one-step, two-step is telling me to use the facilitiesbefore I order my coffee...less because of imminent urination, and more because I then avoid the stilted, demanding tone that accompanies asking for a diuretic with a throbbing urinary-tract.
Bad choice.
It’s twenty-five fucking minutes later, and whatever is going on in the bathroom has not yet ceased; the fact that the line to procure coffee snakes out of the storefront and on to the sidewalk comes a very distant second in my mind to not if but when I'm going to spew pee down both pant-legs, like a firehose wedged into the open-mouth of a crocodile. I’m going apeshit over the sheer number of times the hand-dryer has been clicked when he emerges...and he is, by any description, a bum - a bum who is nonchalantly shaking out what looks to be a damp denim vest.
After I blast into the john and, similarly, blast the roof off of it with a torrent of urination that could only be properly conveyed with the word “devastating,” I come out intending to verbally tear-into this bum with all the righteous-indignation that I can muster.
Now, I’m in University-area Hammertown, surrounded by button-up-shirted, bespectacled philosophy-majors...who were absolutely beside themselves when I began to query the bum as to what, in the fuck, he was doing washing himself as though he was in the locker-room of the YMCA. One aforementioned think-tanker, aghast, tells me to leave it alone; another tells me to back off; a third puffs out his chest and asks me what my problem is.
Let me finish, I say.
I stop into this coffee-shop to let loose the liquid-demons of my previous coffee while remaining in close-contact with those who will supply another, I explain. There is a glorious, shining, spit-polished Bathroom of the Gods at the Burger King literally a block away, I say, where this myopic clod could treat himself to just about anything short of a fucking pedicure, and I have to hop on one leg for twenty-five minutes for what will be, at most, a forty-five-second piss?
That is fucking ridiculous, I continue, and if anyone sees a flaw in my reasoning, please, let me know.
There was no response; I could see in everyone‘s eyes, bum included, that they knew this thing was air tight, and I walked outside carrying my customary strut and glowing with all the light that comes with coffee-shop-silencing glory.

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