Don’t pee on my leg…at all

I don’t care if it’s raining or not.

(This is a re-print from the archives. I’m an equal opportunity writer so I had to follow up my ‘poop’ headline from yesterday with a pee disclaimer. You can probably see why I was nightmare for my editors when I had guardrails and roools. Remember, paid subs have access to the archives for more pontification on politics, bra sizes and pilling cats. I’m a wealth of information about weird shit. Join us. We have fun and there’s usually music involved.)

This is probably not the introduction I’d make for those who may be reading for the first time. Buy the ticket, take the ride, kids. You may as well be baptized by fire. Welcome aboard and here we go.

As a nurse and a person who has traveled extensively in a commercial vehicle, I have a lot of experience with bathrooms, both public and private. I also have a lot of stories about pee and inadvertently being peed on, not all of which occurred in a medical setting. (I know you want to hang out with me now. Let me check my calendar and I’ll get back to you. We’ll go lick sinks at The Petro and really live an alternative lifestyle.)

Traveling in a commercial vehicle with 80,000 pounds of something flammable behind you really does put a crimp in the options of places you can stop to relieve yourself. Once you get there, I can promise you it won’t matter to you who has what between their legs in the room with the (insert heavenly strains of harp music) toilets. At least it never did to me. All I wanted to do was make sure the number of days between incidents in which I soiled myself continued to rise and never fall. Someone could have been sporting four raccoons and a marmot in their pants and I would have had zero fucks to give.

I have two rules in public bathrooms and neither of them has to do with whether or not you have sticks and berries or bushes.

One: Do not speak to me under the stall unless I gave birth to you or there is a national emergency in which we need to flee for our lives that I am unaware of. The only exception to this is asking for toilet paper, because I will absolutely help a fellow human out in that regard. And again, I won’t care if you’re packing or stacking, it is really none of my business at all and I’d really like to keep it that way. I can’t even tell you how much that thought never enters my mind. I like it that way. It seems correct to me. So unless you’re in a bind from behind, please, leave me alone in the bathroom.

Two: Don’t pee on my leg. It’s very simple and straightforward. I cannot afford that level of party favor, nor do I care for it. If that’s your thing, cool. Leave me out, I will not be mad. I once had a resident at a long term care facility ask me if he could pee on my leg. By the time I had patiently explained to him why that was inappropriate as hell, I realized he’d peed on the wall and it wasn’t so much a weird request as a cry for help and I was a shitty nurse who needed to pay better attention. Nursing is hard, y’all.

Beyond those rules, I care not about the bathroom attendees. I know there are people who fear for their lives at the thought of having a bowel movement in the same room with a penis and just writing that makes me once again question my abilities as a nurse because I can’t recall the name of the particular phobia pertaining to it beyond, “Why?” followed quickly by, “Never mind, I don’t want to know.” I may need a few continuing education credits. More on that later.

I wrote a lot about public facilities when we were on the road. It was kind of my schtick for a while. I had a lot of weird things happen to me in bathrooms along the way but I was never once hindered, molested, folded or spindled by a trans person. As a matter of fact, I can’t tell you if I was ever even in a bathroom with a trans person because I don’t do genitalia checks at the door. It’s a courtesy I learned in kindergarten. Other people’s no-no squares are their business. (Thank you Miss Bruce.)

Until next time, pee in silence my fellow humans. If you can’t, away with you. Here come the Toadies…