Over the Line

(July 29, 2007)

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention a traumatic incident from the bowling outing on Saturday night: I accidentally sat down on a toilet seat that turned out to be totally fucking wet.

The irony here? Oh you know there's always irony. I have my own bowling shoes, not because I actually bowl a lot, and not because I'm any good. You see a person walk in with her own bowling shoes, you assume "she must be good." I absolutely suck, in fact.

No, I have my own shoes because for the one or two times a year that I do bowl, I can't bear to put my feet into shoes that thousands of other feet have been in before mine. I just can't do it. Unfortunately I have friends who bowl from time to time, and bowling birthday parties and whatnot, and at one point I had to either stop accepting bowling invites or I had to get my own shoes, so I got my own shoes.

So there I was, in the smelly stall, fully focused on the need to change my tampon, with horrible rap music beating my eardrums six feet into my skull, when I sat down and, two seconds later realized with horror "My ass is wet."

So while my sock-covered feet in my own shoes were protected from foreign fungal foulness of public shoes, my bare, vulnerable ass was well-spritzed with the pee of some bimb who'd stood there spraying directly onto the seat in some wayward, mis-informed attempt at self-preservation.

(A moment to rant at the bimb: Hey, you brainless gash. Doesn't everyone know that there wouldn't BE wet sticky seats if YOU would just please SIT DOWN? You're THE ONE making it gross in there! If there is no seat protector, then just use a little TP and sit on that, it's fine! You have to stand up and pee all over the seat that I want to use next? And that helps how?)

I dried off as completely as I could with the cheap toilet paper (my one drink was eleven goddamn dollars, you'd think King's could afford something more absorbent) and went back to the lane in time to bowl my turn, but it was all grapefruits after that -- I couldn't concentrate on anything else but getting home to my bathtub.

After the last frame, Brinlin made some gesture towards doing something else with "You guys going home?" Of the whole group, only her and Mojo and Joe and I live in the city proper and had arrived by walking or the train, everyone else had cars and live elsewhere. So we could've hung out more. Instead I made some plausible excuse. I didn't want to lie to the girl, but I had to, because I couldn't imagine saying "I sat in stranger pee and I'm about to die!"

Later I consoled myself with the thought that it might not have been pee. A lot of toilets flush so hard they spray the seat with flush force. But then I thought, well how is that better? I don't know which is worse -- full-strength stranger pee, or the multi-person fecal-tinged bacteria frappe that is bowling alley toilet water.

I've taken like five hot showers since but I'm still not over it.