Low Brow

When you use a shared bathroom with the same people 5 days a week (and a large group of people), you start to understand the high traffic times for restroom usage, and whom to avoid in a restroom tete-a-tete if at all possible. I know not to use the bathroom between 12:30 and 2, as it’ll likely be crowded and/or smelly, with few or no stalls available. All the shit I'm about to talk about relates directly to experiences in the Men's bathroom, as I have very little experience in the Women's arena, except when I'm drunk at a bar, the Men's room is full, and I really have to go. I’m of the disposition to prefer a certain extent of restroom solitude (this does not necessarily mean that I have to be alone), especially in the case of the dreaded Number 2. I don’t want to share that type of anguish/embarrassment with another in the same situation in close proximity, and I don’t find the restroom a good place to bond for any reason imaginable.

There are certain people that I’ve learned to avoid in the restroom, based solely on their interior etiquette. These are all people that I have no problems dealing with outside of the lavatory, but once inside they change drastically into vulgar, insensitive, classless weirdos who have no regard for the fact that others are also relieving themselves. I’ll provide a few situations and examples. A small wiry man, who resembles actor Wallace Shawn from The Princess Bride (the one that was in cohoots with Andre the Giant, see pic), does this thing where he goes to pee (and this guy probably pees about once every 45 minutes so you kind of have to time your pee around his, since he’s always in there), and performs this odd ritual. He always uses the urinal against the wall, and then while peeing, puts his arm up on the little wall that divides the urinals and stares down the line at the other three urinals, which breaks every rule in the fictional urinal etiquette handbook (I think there was a Curb your Enthusiasm episode that got into this territory once). You are not allowed to make eye contact and stare at anyone else’s dick or face while you are peeing. Additionally, you can’t enter another man’s stall/personal space, and the arm over the divider breaks that contract. Plus, if you are looking at me, that means you are not looking at your dick and monitoring where your pee is going. So you could potentially be peeing on the wall, your pants, or your shoes.

Another couple of guys like to have conversations with me and others in the bathroom. I find this to be a very grey territory, and I’ll try to illustrate what is okay and what is not. Two friends or acquaintances enter the bathroom talking, pull up at the urinal (still talking), and they both piss and continue their conversation. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that this is okay, and I don’t really know why. It just feels okay, and why let piss get in the way of your stream of consciousness or flow. Piss is flow; just let it combine with the overall flow of the convo (rhymes!). New example: one guy is pissing, the other friend or acquaintance enters during the guys’ piss and starts talking to him and starts pissing as well, in an adjacent urinal. Whether or not this situation is valid depends on the depth of their friendship. You have to be pretty close with someone to talk to them mid-piss (literally as well; you cannot pull up to a urinal and talk to someone over the head of someone else pissing in between); exemptions being a bizarre event just occurring, an emergency, or maybe you are strangers both drunk at a baseball game (and even that is iffy). What is completely off limits, is talking to someone mid-piss that you know but have not achieved a friendship-type of relation with. Not Fucking Allowed! Even worse, giving out work assignments or even talking about work in a manner where one has to pay attention mid-piss, is un-fucking-warranted. What do you want me to do, write it down with my dick in cursive? This has happened to me multiple times in the bathroom and by the same two offenders that just don’t seem to get that this kinda shit should not go down ever, for any reason. One guy even pulled up to piss, farted, and then instructed me to put something together for him. Because of people like this, I need to be spry and alert when I enter the bathroom, and use all of my faculties (literally, waka waka waka) to be quick and avoid any awkward relation.

I don’t think that people really talk to each other in a public restroom while shitting. I haven’t witnessed it recently, and I don’t even want to get into it. It’s always rude and wrong, but it has the potential to be way funnier in certain contexts (the last one I can remember is two drunk idiots in an airport restroom yelling at each other, with some poor unrelated guy was trapped in the middle of their two stalls). On the contrary, if you have to use a urinal trough, all rules are null and void and guerilla tactics can be applied. You can talk, yell, eat, text someone, talk on the phone, stare at someone’s dick, pee on others, and even take a shit into it if you please. The trough is the one of the lowest of the civilized male human bathroom experiences (other than being the janitor that cleans and maintains it, and at least he/she gets paid), so it can therefore be treated with the most low brow behavior possible: either to enact revenge on the bastards that cheaped out and installed a trough in the first place, or as a haven for all the creeps that already break all the aforementioned public restroom rules.
Omni feat. Conni Draper - Out of my Hands
Kebekelektrik - War Dance (Greg Wilson Edit)