so today i was talking about this time my mom threw a massive party and like, took some doors off their hinges to create a ~walkthrough space~ from one side of the house to the other, and it reminded me of this time i hulked out as a youth. i don’t think i’ve told you guys this story yet but the world has been such a bummer lately that i figured maybe it was time we all laughed at me for a while.
growing up, for the most part, i really liked school and didn’t mind getting up in the morning to attend it. which is not to say that school really liked me, because i was actually…kind of a monster child in elementary school.
two of my siblings and i had the same fourth grade teacher and at the end of the year i asked her who her favorite was and she slow-blinked at me for a really, really long time before saying carefully, “well, you caused more havoc than both your brother and sister combined,” which i took to mean, “NOT YOU.”
anyway, for some reason i woke up one particular morning and just decided that i didn’t want to go. i don’t remember there being any particular reason for it, like a test or a pre-scheduled rumble in the schoolyard. i didn’t even bother coming up with an excuse, like being sick; i just straight up told my dad that i wasn’t going to go. my father, obviously, thought that was a stupid idea and kept insisting that i “had to go” because it “wasn’t optional” and “you’re eight, you don’t get to make these decisions.”
this logic did not sit well with me.
my sweet father, the Patron Saint of Leaving It To Beaver, tried first to explain calmly and reasonably that as a young woman in a global capitalist society the best thing i could do for myself was to invest in my education, and also my brain was too sharp to waste all its potential, and double also, i didn’t have a choice because school was mandatory. not just in our house but by united states law.
my dad is very I’m Not Mad I’m Just Disappointed Dad, and my mom is very Oh, No I Am Definitely Mad Mom and i fall somewhere around, “MY DISAPPOINTMENT ENRAGES ME AND NOW I’M CRYING.”
do you cry when you get mad, because i do, and then i get mad that i’m crying, which makes me cry harder, which makes me more mad, which–
“I’M NOT GETTING DRESSED, YOU CAN’T MAKE ME, I’LL RUN AWAY FIRST,” i shouted, very confidently for someone who had no savings, no life skills, and a very limited understanding of geography. i threatened to run away a lot in those days, and actually did one time, but almost immediately returned home to demand a sleeping bag, tent, and some petty cash for groceries.
what did they expect me to do, “fend” for “myself”??? survive on my own???
hahahaha. no.
hand over a hundy, dad. i have a lavish nine-year-old lifestyle of juice boxes and american girl dolls to maintain.
it should be noted here that at eight-ish, i was in that period of every child’s life where they’ve had their first growth spurt, but only in like…some parts of their body. growth does not happen uniformly, which is why some kids have weird torsos and others can scrape the ground with their knuckles when they walk. pretty much every child in a third-grade classroom looks a little like the product of an affair their mom had with jack skellington.
i was in my prime Heir to Halloween Town years, with freakishly long limbs but not great fine motor control, which meant i knew i had elbows but i couldn’t quite get a hang of where they would be at any given moment. my legs grew so fast that my knees are, to this day, what a real live medical professional once described as, “janky.” i ran into a lot of door frames.
okay. i still run into a lot of door frames. depth perception is not my strong suit. how about you let me live, Todd the Data Scientist?
in hindsight, you can’t really blame me for not wanting to go through the farce of disguising my badly proportioned pipe cleaner skeleton in order to learn simple division or counting without using your fingers or whatever kids learn in third-grade math.
“I’D RATHER DIE THAN GET DRESSED FOR SCHOOL!!!!”
haha remember when we were kids and we didn’t really know what death was and we weren’t constantly saying things like, “YOLO,” and “screw it, death comes for everybody,” in order to disguise our paralyzing terror of the reality that you and everyone you know is going to inevitably succumb to death’s cold embrace?
SO TAKE THAT VACATION, NANCY!!!
“neat,” said my father, cutting his losses on both the Logic and Reason fronts, “you don’t have to get dressed.” and with that, he scooped me up over his shoulder, nightgown and all, and began carrying me out of the room.
but ol’ Molly Long Arms wasn’t down for the count just yet. i shot my grubby grabbers out like a cowboy cracking a bullwhip and grabbed ahold of the nearest thing i could, which happened to be my closet door. now, the thing about this door is that it was one of those bi-fold shutter doors that open and close on a track, like indoor window shutters.
remember that weird moment in the late 1990s/early 2000s when all interior home decor was designed to look like the outside of a nantucket beach house?
my father kept walking toward the hallway, and i held onto slats on the door with the strength of a wet napkin but the grim determination of a spartan at the the battle of thermopylae.
it’s weird how the moment before Something Terrible happens time kind of stops. i know that sounds really dramatic for someone telling a story about a time they yelled at their dad and had weird arms, but it does. in the ten seconds before something terrible happens to you, it’s like everything slows way down and your brain has exactly enough time to go, “oh, no. ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh no,” but not enough to make any course adjustments whatsoever. it’s just the universe’s little way of saying, hey, you’re about to get slapped right across the face by my whimsy, just giving you a heads up.
“okay,” your brain says, “but what if, instead, we ….. DIDN’T ….. do that?”
“oh, no, sorry, did you think this was up for debate? haha, that’s my bad. it’s for sure gonna happen. i’m just letting you know so that, later, you can relive these events in your mind over and over and over and wonder if you could have avoided them.”
“neat. thanks, universe.”
“anytime, buddy.”
in my head, the universe looks exactly like hades from disney’s hercules. if you were wondering.
anyway, for those ten seconds we were evenly matched, my father and i. i wasn’t letting go of that door and he wasn’t putting me down. my people are a stubborn people. none of us want to be the first to give. my great-great-grandfather on my dad’s side joined the canadian air force, despite not being canadian, because the u.s. hadn’t entered the war yet and he was determined to prove to someone at work that the germans were the bad guys in world war i. that’s right, we’re so stubborn we’ll go to literal war to prove a point.
so what gave was the door.
with a cracking sound that can’t have been as loud as it seemed, the folds ripped off the track. my father, suddenly sans-resistance, stumbled forward, dragging the door behind us. i was too shocked to let go, so our momentum was only stopped when the door got wedged against the wall. the jerk back to a full stop was enough to jolt me into letting go of the door, which clattered to the ground.
my dad put me down.
we stared at the door together. i don’t think either one of us was processing fully what had just happened. this fight had just escalated like, four thousand percent more than either one of us had anticipated. it was like we asked someone to break a tie in an argument we were having and that friend, A Door, responded by launching itself off a roof.
too extreme, door!!!!!! wayyyyyy too extreme!! dial it back, like, 99%!!
i want your opinion with the same gentility that you’d handle glassware in your mom’s kitchen while she’s asleep in the room next door.
“well,” said my dad.
“well,” said i.
look, nobody wants to talk about how we got to this terrible place from the less terrible place we were at ten seconds ago. that’s a horrible conversation, always. if people were meant to handle their problems immediately and responsibly, evolution shouldn’t have given us the power of suppressing emotions.
“i’m just gonna … change into school clothes,” i said. “meet you at the car in ten minutes?”
“yep,” said my dad.
and we never talked about it again.
shout out to anne carson and @sashayed for really setting the tone for this story
So this morning I jumped in the shower and decided to wash my hair. I have very long and curly hair that reaches midway down my back. However, once its wet the curls straighten out and my hair almost reaches my bum.
So hair is wet, shampooing done and I just need to rinse. I tip my head back and flip my hair over my shoulder ala shampoo adverts everywhere. And feel something brush against the top of my bum. Being the mature and logical gal I am, I came to the one and only possible conclusion.
Spider
With a scream a howler monkey would be proud of, boobs flying and looking like some sort of demented mermaid, I attempted to flee the shower stall. And promptly acquired a new skill; the ability to do the splits.
This in itself was a spectacular feat of physics as there isn’t actually enough room in my bathroom for a toddler to do the splits, never-mind a 5’9" half drowned rat. As a result, when my leading foot came into contact with the toilet pedestal my body was launched back along the floor towards the shower. This left me wedged between the toilet and the shower tray.
Where I was abruptly bitch-slapped by the shower door.
One trip to A&E later and I have a sprained ankle, a fractured ankle, two broken toes, a beautiful rainbow of bruises in some interesting places and a partridge in a pear tree.
TL, DR: Upon learning that my hair now reaches my bum I; preformed gymnastics worthy of Rio, made the laws of physics my bitch and took a guided tour of the local hospital.
Public bathrooms are such a godless place. Ppl do the most bizarre stuff
one time i walked into a mcdonalds bathroom and their was shit on the wall with actual hand prints like a scat version of the shining and it took everything i had not to vomit after the immediate 180 i did
Last week I really had to pee walking home from the bus stop so I jumped into the park bathroom a few blocks from my house (in a pretty upscale area) and there was a chick in goth lolita dress smoking crack in the men’s room.
after i saw the remake of annie, i went into the bathroom and this guy at the urinal was whipping his dick back and forth while singing uptown funk and his friend was urinating beside him and laughing the entire time
My dad and I stopped at a truck stop in Northern California (or Southern Oregon, it was a long time ago and I don’t remember) when I was 12 or so and I ended up needing to go to the bathroom while we ate, so I was directed towards the back of the building. I walked in and saw a woman laying in a clawfoot bathtub, immediately shreiked and turned around apologizing, to be greeted with 10-15 truckers, including my dad, laughing their asses off.
…It was a blowup doll.
okay that story beats the ones i had
Let me tell you a story about Dairy Queen and the time I closed an Allsup’s.
With my ass.
Many moons ago, when I was but 14, I, my father, and several others were going on a fishing trip to southern Colorado. Now, like good Texans, we loaded up at 5:00am to make the twelve-hour trip in a single day because, you know, that’s what you do in Texas.
Several hours later, we found ourselves in Childress, the very gateway to the Texas panhandle, a surreal place a thousand Tumblr posts could be written about. There, we had a proper breakfast at Dairy Queen, certainly a Texas institution. I recall quite clearly having a basket of disappointing chicken strips and unpleasantly greasy fries. It was a bland, unsatisfying meal, but I was 14, still sleepy, and really quite hungry, so I ate it regardless.
Not long after, I felt a sensation like one my young body had never felt before.
To say that I was in discomfort would be putting it mildly. I was cramping, I was sweaty, I was fairly sure I was one hard bump in the road away from shitting my pants and forever ruining not just my pants and my pride, but the back seat of my father’s friend’s harvest gold metallic 1999 Ford F350 Super Duty.
This day, the prairie tan upholstery of the harvest gold metallic 1999 Ford F350 Super Duty would be spared.
Mercifully, as we entered one of the many smallish towns on the way through the panhandle, we stopped for gas at an Allsup’s. Then and there, I was making my final stand. Every muscle in my body clenched desperately, holding in the terrible burden foisted upon it by a meal of grease, batter, and regret.
Like all Allsup’ses, it was a liminal space, a place that had no real business in the real world and was, instead, a small, dingy realm within its own flimsy walls, a pocket dimension with a spinning rack of country music cassettes and CDs from artists I’d never heard of and a Blue Bell freezer that was likely only ever 1/3 full no matter how long the early days of that Texas summer might drag on.
It was here, in this space between spaces, an outpost in the first real steps into the panhandle, that I would commit one of the gravest crimes of my life.
Stealthily, as though smuggling some secret only slightly less terrible than the grim truth my life had become, I made my way to the back of the dingy, unpleasant gas station. Thankfully, it had an indoor restroom that didn’t force me to ask for a key, one of the few saving graces of the little mess of a place.
I would, in short order, rob it of even that marginal virtue.
With my stealthy power-waddle into the lav, I locked the door behind me, my body and mind already relaxing, knowing that relief was at hand and soon my suffering would be over though I didn’t know at what could that relief would come, I couldn’t have known. The restroom was not overly dirty, but just the same I mouthed a hushed “fuck” as a churning growl from ominously low in my gut warned me there was no time for the gossamer security of a paper ass gasket, this was happening then and there, the process had already begun, the die had been cast.
Hurriedly fiddling with my belt buckle as I approached the toilet, the promise of relief quickly gave way to desperation. In seeing the finish line so close, my body was quickly losing the will to struggle across. The time of choosing had come, and it was not mine, not my body’s, this was Dairy Queen’s battle; it had been from the moment that overly-dense, overly-greasy shadow of a meal had touched my lips.
With no small desperation, I threw myself at the seat, and it was perhaps in that forced desperation that the morning came to a head. The sound my body made was unreal as a daisycutter of shit blasted out of me, still several inches above the seat. In that moment, time itself lost all meaning, I became part of the liminal space of that Allsup’s and the forsaken dungeon that I had doomed its lavatory to be. I couldn’t bring myself to straighten out enough to actually sit down, in part for knowing the seat had been lost to what had poured out of me and in part because the pain of my cramping gut wouldn’t allow it.
When it was over, I felt a mixture of emotions that seemed wholly fictive, like something no true human could ever experience. In the immediate aftermath, relief ruled over all other sensation, the pain was gone, the fear was gone, I was left purified… And then I saw at what cost.
Indeed, I was purified, but what I was purified of had found its way into the world and found, in turn, terrible purchase. It had not just dominated the toilet. It was on the walls, it was on the floor, it was even on the underside of the sink. The spread was so wide, so even, and so dense that it seemed no human ass could have created it, it seemed the work of evil, and yet there I stood, staring at it in horror, at my creation.
Amazingly, as though shielded by Providence itself, I was saved from a similar fate. Somehow, miraculously, I was no more sullied than had it been a regular, uneventful trip to a restroom. As I transferred every bit of evil within me into that Allsup’s restroom, it lost whatever dignity it had that I might retain my own, something I am grateful for to this day. Careful to avoid touching any, you know, shit, I tidied myself up and debated for a moment trying to clean the restroom with the minimal tools at hand, but I knew it was a lost cause, there was no way a damp bit of single-ply could solve anything I had done.
Leaving that forsaken lavatory to stew in my misdeeds with a similar stealth, I made my way out of the restroom and out of the Allsup’s together, finding my way back to the renewed security of the prairie tan and harvest gold metallic Ford F350 Super Duty. Shortly thereafter, my father found me, asking if I’d gone in to use the restroom yet, if I’d seen its unbelievable horror.
Using my exhaustion to my advantage, I looked up from my book, undoubtedly looking tired and befuddled.
“Nnno? I was gonna go in, but I used the restroom at breakfast and I just want to get through this chapter, why?”
It was an expert lie and, by God, somehow it worked. Somehow.
Other parts of the story go on from there, but they don’t relate to public restrooms, where this story does pick up though is a year later.
By sheer coincidence, my father and I were making another trip through that part of Texas. By sheer coincidence, our journey took us through the same town in the panhandle. As I saw familiar scenery move past the window, I felt a hot wash of guilt work up through me from below.
And that’s when I saw it.
The Allsup’s.
Not just closed, but boarded up, plywood over its windows, black plastic covering its door. My stomach dropped and my eyes went wide.
It was then that I told my father the terrible truth of that day a year before.
He was strangely proud I had closed a gas station with my ass.
that had me enthralled from start to finish and i am determined to get everyone on tumblr to read the story of how your ass is responsible for the closure of a business.
Despite being text, this is a pretty good example of the oral tradition. Storytelling at its folksiest.
Meg's Mumbles 