[TMI ALERT, READ POST AT OWN RISK] It's Not a Pine Cone
Hey I have an idea, let's start today's DLU with a story about my shit!
I nearly had a panic attack in the bathroom this morning. I produced a turd that was solid enough and big enough that it sort of stood up on one end, leaning against the inside of the toilet bowl like a fallen boulder. And when I flushed, it wouldn't fucking move. Someone else was in the bathroom when I went in, but they left before I did, and at this particular moment I was in there alone. But someone could easily come in, say, while I was still washing my hands. And then walk into the stall I had just used, and find, what, a little gift?
I'm not joking when I say I flushed six or seven times before it started to move at all. Our office toilets have automatic flushers that are triggered as soon as you stand up, but there is a button to the side of the piping between the toilet and the wall you can press to flush again. At one point I just held the button down, so the water flushed constantly for probably a full minute. Still, no progress. What the fuck!
Back in the late nineties, when I lived with Gabriel and Suzy while we were all in college in Pullman and sharing a triplex, I once produced a turd so huge it needed to be broken apart to flush. There was a key difference there: that time, I went out the back door, found a twig, brought it back inside and poked the turd apart. Problem solved. I told Gabriel about it and he thought it was hilarious. It also had a strange influence on a dream he had soon after.
There was no going out anywhere to find a twig today though. If this did not flush, I was going to have no option besides just leaving it and feeling mortified.
Apparently just waiting another minute or so before trying to flush again did the trick. Crisis averted.
For some reason, as you can plainly see, I still have no shame about sharing it with you now. But you know what? As gross as you might think it is to read about it, I'd argue it's nothing compared to what it would be like to literally walk in in someone else's un-flushable pinecone-sized turd. So really, this is the better of the two options.
I realize another option would be not to tell anyone about this at all. But this is me we're talking about. Why the hell would I take that option?
As long as I am oversharing, there's something I totally forgot to mention about my time with Gabriel and Lea at C.C. Attle's on Saturday night, and specifically my run-in with Mitch, with whom I had sung in the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus. It was in the middle of my time in that chorus, which I sang with from 2000 to 2004, that I started my LiveJournal, in 2002. This was several years before any social media site was a thing, so a bunch of other choristers got online around that same time as well. Most of them later migrated to Facebook and just abandoned LiveJournal, which I never did because I was a meticulous journal writer since I was a preteen; this was just an online extension of what I had already been doing for years. But still, back in those days, all the online interaction with my friends was happening on LiveJournal.
In our relatively brief chat on Saturday, Mitch brought up what my chorus friends ultimately dubbed "The A List" -- in a December 2002 entry, I shared a list I entitled "Things That Have Been In My Ass." To say this made a lasting impression would clearly be an understatement. I mean, Mitch just brought it up again 17 years later, after all.
I'm not going to link to the entry. If any reader is dying to know, I can email it to you or something, I guess. Somewhat curiously, that entry on LiveJournal is now locked as "friends only" -- a feature I no longer have here on Squarespace, which has no "follower" or "friends" lists -- and I can't really remember why I locked it down now. I know it was public for years, but it's probably been locked for years now too. I suppose it could have to do with when I got in trouble with Kibby several years ago now regarding something I had shared about her, and it became far more apparent than I had heretofore realized how easily people I know can find this stuff. I perhaps had a bout of paranoia and went back and locked down my history of "TMI ALERT" posts.
So why post publicly today, then? Well, it's sort of tricky. And there is still a distinction here, at least in regards to "The A List" -- in today's entry, I am only writing about having once posted it. I am not posting it again. (Besides, and this was a weird experience: I just looked at the list again, and there are things on it I can no longer remember. Things that now just make me think, What? When was that? Maybe because that post was from well before I lost my virginity and it's been years since I have had to rely on much in the way of inanimate objects.)
And yes, this post you're reading right now is public, but I have another feature here that LiveJournal did not offer: analytics. Do you know how many unique visitors I get here on a given day? On average, about ten. And it's not even this personal blog page that is the landing page -- it's the movie reviews page. You kind of have to work to get to this content, and almost no one does. Now, granted, I do have parents who maybe don't have this at the top of their list of things they'd like to read about, but whatever. Firstly, they don't read everything, so there's maybe a 50% chance they won't even see it; and if they do, I guarantee you that at this point, they have seen far worse than this. I think we're all going to be okay.
I suppose I could also, say, post a controversial tweet that goes viral and prompts self-righteous hordes to go searching for damning content I have posted, and, say, bring unwanted attention to my employer. Well, I have been on Twitter more than a decade and none of my tweets have come close to going viral. I'd say I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, except I don't think that bridge really exists anywhere down the road anyway. Also: believe it or not, today's post notwithstanding, in pretty sharp contrast to my online history, especially on LiveJournal, I actually really moderate what kind of details or personal information I post online anymore. In other words, I have a pretty good understanding of what level of risk I'm taking -- which is to say, at the moment at least, really not much.
[posted 12:20 pm]