Posts Tagged ‘ocd’

Liquid ass fire

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

For someone who's a control freak with a few other proclivities, there are a few things that make trips stressful.

First, just staying in someone else's home isn't really that fun. Even if they have a comfortable house, it's still not your home. At least with a hotel, you have your own place that you're paying for. And when your room contains a full-size bed which needs to house one normal person, one large gorilla, and a medium-sized dog, it's hard to get a good night's sleep. But that's okay, because your snoring, which sounds like fourteen thousand rusty industrial saws cutting down fourteen thousand chain link fences, manages to keep everyone else up. Even if everyone has earplugs in. Until, of course, you get banished to the loft on the other side of the house where you get to sleep on an air mattress in a huge empty room with lots of little crawlspace doors and you keep dreaming that there are evil trolls behind those doors who are going to quietly open them up and stab you to death while you sleep.

Secondly, you're at the mercy of the owner's technological failings. For example, a large house that only has DSL in one room without any wireless possibilities presents serious obstacles to someone like myself who likes to stay online all day long. This issue is easily resolved by purchasing a Wireless Router for $80 and setting it up for free for the owners. Even if you don't really tell them that you're doing it. And even if their Mac stops working as a result and you have to work on it for a while just to get them back to the caveman-way of life to which they are accustomed.

Finally, as someone who refuses to use public bathrooms at all, I dread using one in someone else's home. It's almost as bad, but I'm able to handle it. I know, I'm quite the adventurous soul.

But you know what makes it all that much worse?

Liquid fire pouring from your ass every hour.

Am I home yet?

The Throne Room

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

It all started with the shorts.

A few years ago, I went to the bathroom in my house immediately after someone else had been in there. I sat down on the toilet, with my shorts down around my ankles, and proceeded to read a few books, do a jigsaw puzzle, and solve Fermat's last theorem while ensconced on my throne.

When I got up and pulled my shorts back on, I realized that the back of my shorts was wet. Upon further inspection, it was PEE! From the front of the toilet! That's when I figured out that it's not bad enough that men who go to the bathroom spray everywhere when they pee, but even men and women sitting down on the toilet may occasionally shoot pee out of the space between the seat and the toilet, which will drip down the front of the bowl and collect at the front of the toilet. The toilet is a nasty, nasty place, and I was forced to burn my shorts and bathe my hands in bleach and scalding water.

It was just about that point that I decided to start taking my shorts off when sitting on the toilet. I'll strip down from the waist down and hang them on the hook on the door or put them on the floor close to the door, away from the peeing, and enjoy my 45-60 minutes of solitude bottomless.

This has lasted for a few years now and has worked very nicely. On the very rare occasion that I have to use a bathroom at someone else's house, I just hang my shorts and underwear up and do my business. If, on the even rarer occasion, I have to use a public bathroom, I just use the handicap stall and do the same thing.

Then, one hot summer day, I was sweaty and feeling sticky and nasty, so I took off my shirt, too. And the undershirt. And you know what? It was awesome! It was like some type of regression – I flashed back to being a baby again. Sitting there, bare-ass naked – it's liberating and everyone should do it!

This has developed into a routine. My bathroom routine. If I'm going to be in there for the long haul, I'll go in, strip down, and enjoy my throne room in all of my naked splendor.

And, in typical Avitable fashion, the too-much-information does not end there with a happy ending. Today, after my weekly order of comics arrived, I walked into the bathroom, comics in hand. Put them on the counter. Dropped my shorts and underwear. Pulled my shirt and undershirt off simultaneously over my head.

And watched dumbfounded as my iPhone flew out of my shirt pocket and arced, in slow motion, directly for the bowl. The dirty, nasty, germy bowl.

"Noooooooooo," my voice echoed with deep resonance. I tried to dive for the phone, but my feet got caught in my shorts and underwear. My left hand managed to knock the phone over to the bathroom counter, but the result was that I lost my balance completely.

And by lose my balance completely, I mean that I landed, hard, on all fours, face down in the toilet bowl with my beautiful visage less than an inch away from that horrible, horrible toilet water.

And that's how I almost gave myself a swirly.