Take Pepto-Bismol or Something

In one of the history department meetings my father attended in the early 1990's, one of the items on the agenda was the problem of keeping students there to complete the four-year BA. One of my father's colleagues suggested that the department appoint a Dean of Retention to address the matter. My father reportedly replied immediately, quite seriously and with all due respect, "Perhaps we should also appoint a Dean of Incontinence." I believe the idea fell flat.

I was reminded of that brief anecdote while considering how much I've been posting here lately; I've been taking so many mental dumps that I'm surprised I've not been cut off. Captain Corky has said that writing here has its cathartic element; I'm just happy to be able to drop a deuce now and then here. While I'm on the subject of deuces, I'd like to share my idea of what a sign of the impending apocalypse might look like.

From May 2002 through November 2005, I had a job working maintenance and cashiering at a truck stop in southwest Louisiana. The men's bathroom was the site of some of the most disgusting failures of long-haul truckers to exercise complete control of the human body I have had the misfortune to witness. There were times they'd leave their tighty-whitey drawers in the commode along with their usual deposit, having ruined them somewhere between their last stop and our truck-stop bathroom. Sometimes it looked like whoever left the mess had not even tried to get it in. I try not to remember further details of these events; my stomach is only so strong.

One of the worst ones (one I can't forget) inspired this idea for the worst reality TV show ever, "The world's nastiest truck-stop bathroom shits," or maybe something like it that flows better.

The idea came to me upon considering the ubiquity of uselessness in the form of reality TV. Most shows that I have heard of or have seen ads for seem to lack any discernible redeeming quality; I won't list them here; most of us know of which ones I speak. They are crap; my goal became to come up with the ultimate crappy reality TV show, bar none. How low can we go?

I imagined a contest wherein truckers would compete to see how many of the dozen or so bowl-cams (pat. pend.) they could cover in one sitting. They would earn extra points for breaking bowl-cams, for overflows, clogs or overshooting the pot (the world record hit a nine-foot ceiling).

Here is what some of the show's commentary might sound like: "On commode number one we have Zeke 'The White Blackout' Jones. He's five foot-seven, two hundred and twenty-three pounds of butt-coffee percolatin' he-man. Zeke drove here nonstop in a black and red 1999 Peterbilt all the way from San Antone. For breakfast he had two grand slams, two pots of coffee and three apple danishes. He snacked on Doritos with bean dip and Slim Jims that he warshed down with Mountain Dew during his five hundred mile haul." The rest would be television history.

I submit that there is still hope for us; we haven't sunk nearly so low (Jersey Shore comes close; are those people really real? Really??? Even at my most worthless I was never wasted occupied space like them.)

One more poop story, then I'll get away from my apparent fecal fixation. Back in DC in the late 1990's, the painting company I worked for had a job spray-painting a chain-link fence. There were two dogs that stayed in the back yard; their business was everywhere. We had our laborer, Boo, go around the yard and mark the piles with sticks. There were so many that Boo ran out of sticks; he then had one of the most brilliant ideas of his life (it ranks up there with his decision to become a crackhead). Boo took a can of the silver spray-paint we were using and proceeded to coat the remaining mounds of dogshit in it. There were dozens of silvery piles scattered throughout the yard. The sight was beyond belief, and it inspired me to update an old saying: "You can't polish a turd, but you sure can give it a shiny coat of paint..."