Maybe it’s my stage and I’m in the process of amazing a sea of adoring fans (see also: toilet paper dispenser) with my heroic air-guitar performance of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”. Or perhaps it’s my locker room, and I’m getting my game face on before I go and hail-mary some assholes back to the stone age. Maybe it’s December 7th, 1941 and the handicap stall is actually the tarmac of some balmy Hawaiian airfield, the Japanese are incoming, and it’s up to me to change history. The point is that room and all those square feet that are grossly wasted on me are my own personal Matrix – and no goddam wheelie is gonna take that away from me.
Sure, I could do all that at home. I certainly have the space for it now that I’ve moved (I picked up Street Fighter 4 today and have been doing karate / teaching myself to throw fireballs inside since this afternoon). But that isn’t going to cater to my masturbatory need to do incredibly strange and childlike things alone and in public where no one can see me, now would it? So again, I need all that space. And again, wheelie’s aren’t the rulers of the Handicap Stall Kingdom, I am.
Or at least that’s the mentality I had up until up about 5pm today when a wheelie rolled into the bathroom at McDonalds sputtering like a 1978 Ford Pinto. I was stoked when I heard this because you could safely hypothesize that loud sputterings upon entering a public bathroom are probably indicative of some manner of crazy. And I know I love it when I’m tucked away in my stall kingdom and some crazoid decides to interject himself into the bathroom and unknowingly subject me to all manner of batty declarations, whether some grumbled insight to a personal insecurity or a wild and berating vituperation which considers perhaps the world or maybe black people.
Bathroom stalls are like ley lines for totally nuts, usually useless, and always entertaining information
So there I sat waiting to be favored with some morsel of forbidden eldritch knowledge from the depths of insanity when I saw them. The half-circle of wheelchair wheels parked accusingly at the gap below the stall door.
“hey! You almost done?!” came the croaking voice from beyond.
At this point two things happened simultaneously. The first was that I was suddenly very done shitting. Second, I began to panic, because I didn’t think this day would ever actually come. I thought that handicap stalls existed for the same reasons that Braille existed on things like ATMs, to satiate some semantically-anal “politically correct” notion. I didn’t realize that wheelies ACTUALLY went to the bathroom, and what’s more; in public!
“Hey!”
Oh, right – Wheel-tron asked me a question, hadn’t he?
“yeah….. I got this thing, and I, it’s about just done with” that’s a close approximation to the nonsense that came out of my mouth. The tables, like the wheels of Croaky’s creepy conveyance (that’s a little alliteration for your ass, btw), had turned and now I was the sputtering one. Evidently, my capacious vocabulary, staggering intellect and boundless wit quit me when faced with a handicap person who really speaks.
“Okay, good. I don’t stand up so good.”
Before my brain could staunch the flow, I said: “Really?” and I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that I actually said that shit out loud or the fact that that wasn’t the most inconsiderate thing I said today.
So I finished the paperwork, took a deep breath and steeled myself, then walked out and to my credit somehow managed to resist the urge to fucking STARE at Croaky as I left.
So in addition to any other lesson life may or may not have taught me today I’ve been graced with this knowledge: they are among us. So keep that in mind next time you pass up the closet-stall for the stage/airfield/locker room/whatever because you never know when a wheeled out Croaky might roll up on you.
*this is an old one, sorry nothing new and finished yet*
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