Urgent Elbow Reveals Mr. Brown

It’s been hot. It’s been even hotter in our house. It’s been unbearable in our second floor bathroom. It’s been excruciating in the second floor bathroom with the door closed. And what do you do in the bathroom with the door closed? That’s right. You think. You read. You do what you do while you doo. Why waste passing time when you have the time to pass waste?

Well it’s difficult to think, or read, or do anything you’re so hot that your eyebrows are dripping into your eyes. Why is it that the only room in the house that you absolutely cannot leave immediately once you realize it’s uncomfortable has to feel like the kitchen of a brick oven pizzeria if someone had built it inside a locked car parked in the middle of the desert? Like you’re trapped in a phone booth with a claustrophobic pyromaniac while it re-enters the atmosphere? Like you’re doing the backstroke in melted butter around the rim of a volcano in Saudi Arabia under a magnifying glass?

Alright it’s not that hot in my bathroom. But it’s really warm. Warm enough to make me sweat like an ice cold glass of lemonade on the veranda in July…if it were mixed with kerosene, smashed on the patio, and set ablaze in the noonday sun. And it’s because of all of this sweaty crap (pun intended) that I’ve gotten into the habit of disrobing before assuming the throne. Yes it’s weird. Yes I recommend it. After all, if you have to be a captive audience to the act, you might as well be in a theater with some climate control. You know, rather than oozing brine from every pore on your body.

That was my logic, recently, as I hurriedly tried to avoid ruining a pair of shorts when my bowels decided it was go time. Now, a mudslide is a fantastic drink, but it’s no way to prematurely end a trip to the bathroom. This is what was racing through my mind as I began to perform the aforementioned strip tease for my toilet. Imagine Vegas if they turned off the A/C and it were run by women with a fetish for heavier men.

Now that this terrible image is emblazoned on your memory, imagine a sweaty man racing against the clock, lifting his perspiring arms over his head in an effort to free himself from a cotton prison like Harry Houdini pulling of a straight jacket. Only instead of breaking loose and hearing a round of applause, one of his arms slams against the towel bar, ripping it off the wall. Take that you god damn bathroom accessory.

My finely tuned martial arts skills finally came in handy. If it weren’t for my unstoppable, yet carefully controlled strength, I might have just hurt my elbow. Instead, I have a hole in the wall that looks like some demented bathroom Rorschach. So not only did I get rid of that pesky towel bar, but now I get to feel like my privacy is being violated by my childhood memories of holiday TV specials. Bonus!

As an epilogue to this sophisticated tale I’ll let you rest easy knowing that I made it to the toilet without recreating the demise of Augustus Gloop. As for the creepy mug of Charlie Brown staring at me while I perform life’s unspeakable business, that’s growing on me.