Running Out Of Toilet Paper When You Still Need Some Toilet Paper

WHAT WOULD YOU DO!?!?

Crapping My Pants In Public

Now, before I get into this, I would like to just make it clear that this has never happened to me before. Not once have I ever lost control of my bowels in public.

There are certain things that one can do in order to complete destroy any semblance of dignity that they have. These are the events in your life that destroy friendships and reputations beyond repair. I am not one to embarrass too easily, and I am very lucky that I have a group of friends that are both understanding and forgiving of any sort of lapse in character I may have, as I am with them. Sure we make fun of each other, like my one friend's disgusting maggot farm that is her bedroom, or the fact that another friend somehow managed to get poop on the toilet seat and didn't clean it up, or the various times various friends have gotten so drunk that they either fell in a lake pantsless or fell off a roof, but these are pretty forgivable lapses and are genuinely hilarious aspects of my groups of friends that I would not do without. Behaviour that many people would find reprehensible is accepted with glee among my crew. None of us has yet to do anything forgivable.

However, there are peripheral characters who pop up ev

ery once in a while to challenge what we find acceptable. Golden Boy is one such character. One night, six or so years ago, this guy came to a party hosted by my friends. He proceeded to chug a 26er of Canadian Club, and although he was a bigger guy, he quickly became unmanageably drunk. After accosting my friend's sister, he pissed himself and fell down in the middle of the room. Laying there face down, he puked quite a bit and passed out.

Obviously we should have tried to get him to a hospital to treat his alcohol poisoning, but we...uh...didn't. We just kind of left him there and continued to party around him. Someone cleaned him up a little and made sure he wasn't choking on his own vomit, but really, he just was there on the floor while we all continued on.

This would have been forgivable. Whatever, it happens. Sometimes young people drink too much.

However, later in the night he woke up. I don't know if you'd exactly call him conscious at this point, but he was standing and moving and stuff. Everyone was happy that he was not dead. that is, everyone was happy until he decided he needed to use the washroom but was too drunk to comprehend that he was, in fact, in a bedroom. He just whipped it out right there, in a room full of about 12 people, and peed all over my friend's desk and computer chair while everyone left the room as though it was on fire. He then sat down at the computer, and I'm not sure what happened next (I had seen enough) I always presumed he looked up some porn or something, as he was a skeezy perv. Some time later we checked in on him to find him rolled up in my friend's bed, still wearing his soiled clothing.

Again, this may have been forgivable. It would have taken a while for him to live it down, but, hey, he was drunk. Bad things happen.

My friend slept in my out of town roommate's bed in my dorm that night, his bed obvious being used in the worst way. In the morning, we decided to check to see if Golden Boy, as he was now affectionately known since he had such a golden night, had made it make to his room in the dorm. He came to the door when we knocked and he looked awful, understandably. My friend began grilling him about the previous night, being rather friendly about it, until he learned that the guy hadn't cleaned up anything and had no intention of doing so. Golden Boy then said with a sigh, "Real mature guys" and shut the door in our faces.

This was the unforgivable part. That guy was a dick, and we made sure that his dickery was well known (perhaps too much so, but that's another story.)

This is just a round about way of saying that crapping yourself in public is one of those things that you cannot expect to be forgiven for. It is the lowest of the low. If it ever happened to me, especially if it happened around my wonderful friends, I can say with confidence that I would no longer have those wonderful friends. It is the most embarrassing thing an adult can do.

Obviously there are certain situations where it is acceptable. You're super sick and in need of hospitalization (like, sick with a disease, not with alcohol...you should know not to drink that much by now.) You're giving birth in public by accident. You...actually, I think those are the only two. Crazy old person who is losing control of their body, I guess. For the most part, it should never, ever happen. And if it does happen for any reason not in the above, you deserve scorn.

Now, why would I be worried about this? I'm a reasonably healthy adult who has never had this problem before. Well, I'll tell you why.

One, I have digestive issues. Without going into too much detail, they get kind of weird sometimes. The only real effect this has on my public life is that I'm crazy gassy sometimes. But this is why it makes me worry. How far away from farting a lot is pooping a lot? Not very far.

Two, I don't ever want it to happen. I can be kind of paranoid sometimes, and when this gets the better of me I really start to think that only bad things can happen. Since this is the baddest thing, it's probably going to happen. that's how the world works when I'm paranoid.

Three, It's not like you just poop yourself at, say, work and then that's the end of the story. No. There is like, a whole other chapter that happens afterwards where you have to somehow deal with your poopy pants in public. You would have to walk from work to the subway with poopy pants, be on the subway with poppy pants, walk from the subway to your home with poopy pants. Walk through your building with poopy pants and then find a new job because you'd never be able to show your face in that place again. Oh, and kiss that reference good bye, because you crapped yourself in the presence of your boss. If you crap yourself in public, at the very least you are going to have to walk by 500 people and sever any and all relationships that you have with those that witness. Some people search for life changing experiences, forgetting that one is waiting for them in there bowels. And that's the worst part, that's the part that scares me.

Public pants pooping is akin to, like, hitting a girl or verbally abusing a child. You can't live it down because it changes forever the way people look at you. The other part that scares me is that it could just happen. It's improbable, but possible. I could just randomly loose control one day and BOOM, life is over and there is nothing I could do about it. I know I'll never hit a girl or berate a child because that stuff would happen in my brain first and my reasoning ability would never allow me to go through with it because I'm not a crazy person. But my ability to reason has no control over the mysterious inner workings of the body, and just like that twitch I get in my left knee that sometimes last for hours, or whenever I get hiccups, my bowels could decide to do something unpredictable and uncontrollable and there isn't a damn thing my powerful brain could do to stop it.

Curse this body, curse all it's disgusting features.

A Mouse Falling Into My Mouth While I Sleep

I know this sounds ridiculous, and this is the most serious of my fears that people make fun of me for, but I assure you I am 100% serious when I say this has caused me many sleepless nights when ever I hear the pitter-patter of disgusting little feet around the apartment.

BACKGROUND
I am afraid of a mouse falling into my mouth while I sleep and curling up and falling asleep itself. Now, I say falling because the origins of this fear stem back to a basement apartment I shared with two close friends from September 2006 to September 2007. This was our fourth year of university and for me personally, not a great year. I was nervous about graduating and not knowing what to do next (there will be a post at some point about my fear of the future) and I was compensating by drinking. A lot. One of my roommates, for whatever his reasons was also drinking quite a bit. The third was simply flat out the dirtiest fucker I've ever known. A good friend, but the single worst roommate I've ever had. One of the more notable features of the apartment was the four foot long, two foot deep hole in my bedroom wall. It was meant for storage, according the landlord, but was quite literally a former window that had plywood placed around it with a piece of insulation on top that, if removed, would have been an open hole out to the backyard.*

Anyway, the place was a mess. I did my best to keep it clean, but failed due to all the drinking. There were cases upon cases of empties everywhere, and the messy roommate had a weird habit of stuffing his used napkins/tissues in between the couch cushions.** The place wasn't the cleanest place in the world, and while we were not overrun by mice, we certainly had some. Much to the chagrin of my roommate's girlfriend, we managed to kill most of them. Every once in a while though, they would come back and run around the place, avoiding our death traps like trained special ops.

Sometimes, while I was never certain, I thought I heard them running around in that hole. It'd be perfectly reasonable for them to be in there, just squeeze through from the backyard. Mice search out the warmest place possible, especially when they're looking to sleep, which is why you see so many in the streets in the summer and so many in your apartment when it starts getting cold.

I'm an idiot, and I placed my bed directly under this hole. One night when I was half drunk I heard a mouse and the thought popped into my head that if I was like, pass-out drunk (which was fairly frequent) a mouse could jump out of that hole, crawl around my bed and crawl into my mouth, which we all know is on average a toasty 98.6 F and logically even more desirable than room temperature for a mouse, and fall asleep and I would never know. I would wake up in the

morning in a hungover stupor and this mouse would jump out of my mouth and I would have no idea what to do.

WHY IT IS A SCARY THING

By this point the numerous diseases the mouse carries would have made their way down my throat via my saliva and would have already been well on their way to killing me. Plus, I would have no way of knowing if the mouse was pregnant and decided to crawl down my throat to birth its babies in my warm tummy. Keep in mind that mice are freaks and they can shift the bones in their skull in order to crawl through a space the size of a dime, making them pretty much able to go any where they want.

In a situation like this I would have no idea what to do. What do you do if you wake up with a mouse in your mouth? You fucking panic! There is nothing else that could be done. One, the mouse is probably going to evade capture, so you therefore can't seek out revenge for the way it wronged you. Two, I don't think there is a shot that you can get from the doctor to just cure you of mouse diseases. Now, I could be wrong and mice could be less diseased than I think they are, but I don't think so. So really, the only thing you can do is die a slow and painful death from the inside out as the mouse diseases/babies tear away at your insides like that scene in the Itchy and Scratchy Fantasia parody. And even if you survive this...I don't think it's worth surviving. I would kill myself. I would never be able to put another thing in my mouth again, because that'd basically be the same as eating off a plate made of rats.

Another possibility is that the mouse could crawl into the confines of my stomach in search of further warmth and comfort and then die due to the inhabitable nature of the human stomach. Just imagine a week later when I poop out a mouse skull! Being a vegetarian, pooping out a skull would be generally confusing, but seeing an identifiable skull in my stool would send me into a panic about what the remaining bones could possibly be doing to the rest of my insides. How did it get there? What have I been doing either in my sleep or in my black out drunkenness? What have the dark recesses of mind mind decided what was appropriate when I lacked consciousness? Again, I wouldn't know what to do.

I think this is why it really scares me. In most situations, I'm confident I would be able to eventually figure out what to do, or at least what to expect if there is no action that can be taken. But not here, man. Not here. I'd be lost in a diseased panic.

Of course, this is all predicated on the idea that the mouse sleeping in my mouth doesn't choke me while I sleep and I do actually wake up from it. That'd be a pretty embarrassing way to go, choking on a mouse in your sleep. Mother would be devastated and confused.

PREVENTION

The only way to prevent this is to either start breathing through my nose when I sleep (impossible) or sleep with my face buried in my pillow and risk suffocating every night. I risk suffocating every night because the alternative scares the shit out of me.

CONCLUSION

This is a completely reasonable fear. It seems logically possible that it could happen, and the consequences of it happening range from mind-blowing, life-changing confusion to actual death and it is reasonable to be afraid of anything that causes death.

It is true that I haven't lived in that apartment for a long time, so this shouldn't really be an issue. But honestly, a quick Google search of “the powers of mice” shows that mice can get to any where they want. Just cause I don't have a hole above me anymore does not mean that they can't crawl up my bed posts or chew a hole in the ceiling of my current bedroom and jump down like a kamikaze pilot in search of the sweet sweet warmth of a human mouth.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but just ask yourself this question: What would you do if you woke up with a mouse in your mouth? You don't have an answer.

NOTES

* We were desperate for a place, and we kind of had to take this one. Surprisingly, the hole in the wall was one of the better things about this apartment. That year and that building provided some of the better/weirder stories I can tell. If you are in Toronto, you can take a walk down Ulster St near Bathurst and find the building that looks not unlike a spaceship to get a sense of how insane and poorly skilled at handy work the landlord was.

** He still does this. He's, like, 26 years old.