Taking Dumps In LA

Today I’m down in Los Angeles, where I’ll be for a couple days editing a commercial.

(I might be in Santa Monica. I’m not sure.)

Production services operate in a buyer’s market. The various editorial and music houses are sleepy cocoons designed for maximum comfort for ad agency douchebags like myself. Snacks, food, soda and beer are always at the offing. Masseuses are called in. X-Box consoles litter the low slung coffee tables. Muted colors.

Lunches are served at a group table and everyone is ever so joshing and friendly, likes it’s the best Youth Group meeting ever!!!! The people are all super friendly, they positively gleam and laugh at your jokes, even if you are an unpleasant fat man with halitosis. They chatter among themselves and there are always like five people just hanging with no apparent jobs other than to be toothy and slender. It’s like a cosmetics counter for dopy pasty guys.

They really want to make you feel at home. Which is a problem when you want to take a dump (particularly a trumpety moist one)

The bathrooms are usually temples of coziness, with magazines, cool tiles, scented shit, and fluffy towels. They are only lacking in some genetically modified hamster octopus hybrid that will gentle massage your colon until it descends and deposit its loamy contents without a wink of effort on your part. All fine and great if you are applying a beauty mark. But I’m usually looking to facilitate an entirely different process.

So, today, I’m in one of these womb toilets. All that separates me from the outer hallway is a fogged glass door, one that shows a good half an inch of daylight at the bottom. And I just know I am going to sound like Sousaphone solo in there, never mind the smell. And all these enormously friendly cute LA broads are tee-heeing in the hallway outside, petting the Golden Retriever or some such fucking LA thing. (Seriously, what the hell do they do for a job?)

It’s like taking a dump at a dinner party. I hate that, especially because I am technically at work and so should not feel panicky when taking a dump. Give me the front section of the paper and the anonymity of a stall and I’m in heaven.

And I can’t hold it because I’m going to be here like six more hours. So I Toilet Paper mute as best as I can, I do breathing exercises, I sing softly to myself, I don’t force ANYTHING just in case a high pressure sulphur front is waiting to burst out with a roar. So I’m in there a good fifteen minutes, doing a job that should take all of five, and come out smelling like some new age crap lilac air freshener, LIKE THAT IS GOING TO TRICK ANYBODY.

In fact it maybe worse than a regular old poo smell, because at least poo is honest and hardworking. And now I am a man that had a smelly dump AND I smell like lilacs. It is the poo-equivalent of a boob job: everyone KNOWS I wasn’t romping in Lilacs, just like they know the cantilevered D-Cups of the 65 year old at the bar came out of a caulking gun.

I hate LA.