o, the toilette

I travel quite a bit. I wish I could say I am jetting off to fantastic and romantic locations across the globe, but I'm really just going to the same, boringly familiar location about 1 1/2 - 2 weeks a month. It blows. Well, not entirely. I'm saving up the miles for a sick vacation, when I have the income to fund the rest of the components necessary for a sick vacation to be realized.

Anyway, a large part of travel involves being in unfamiliar spaces, many of which involve highly personal activities, such as.....ahem....relieving oneself. It's unavoidable to anyone who has any sort of experience outside their immediate domestic location. There are public restroom experiences to be had no matter what your socioeconomic status, though seemingly, the higher your bracket in that case, the better chances you have of clean(er) facilities.

Seemingly.....but, I have noticed some interesting things over my many years of public facility usage and observation. People seem to act as if it is acceptable not only to do disgusting things in the confines of these stalls, but they feel perfectly okay about leaving the evidence for all who come after to discover. Why? If you were to go to the homes of these individuals, I doubt you would see toilet paper strewn all over the floor or shit smeared across the walls. Probably no pads or tampons left partially exposed, either. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the occupants of that home would object outright to that kind of behavior. So why, o why, do these same people feel that it is acceptable to do this in public?

I won't disgust my reader with the images of which I speak, because you can surely scroll the files of your own experiences for that. But, this is where the socioeconomic part comes into play. I notice that high end bathrooms have the very same problems as your basic stadium or airport, just with fewer stalls and brass fixtures. This takes away the "rich people are cleaner" argument, which leaves pooping, once again free to be the eternal regulator. So since this question can be cast to everyone....

Citizens of the world, why the abhorrent hygiene and general lack of cleanliness?

I've yet to meet a person who says:

"Public bathrooms? LOVE em. They are the one place I feel comfortable, away from home."

More often, I'll hear an in-depth conversation interrupted by "Ohhhh gross."

When you're in the back of the line and you have the threat of pee running down your leg, it is a totally disconcerting pair of words to hear. It sort of goes without saying and I know this is a problem that is so epic in scale that I could never plead all of the public bathrooms of the world clean; especially not with drunks out there.

It's called the throne, though. The place where mighty men and women sit and are admired, if only by themselves. If you call anyone in the world - with the possible exception of a couple dozen people who have real ones - and tell them you were on the throne, they know where you've been. You, my friend, have been on the shitter; that pristine, white, porcelain god who catches your treasures and flushes them away to the safety of the treatment plant and then the ocean.

With all of that joyous, cleansing activity going on, shouldn't there be more effort put in by us all to keep it happy and clean, no matter where we are? I say and maintain, this issue needs some lungs. If people are talking about it, well, perhaps they will be spurred to think of their fellow people and of how nice it was to have a clean bowl for those two minutes. Flush that paper, lady, it will be good for us all.