The Commuter Chronicles, Pt. 1

I walked into work, pretty much as I do every day.

Maybe you are familiar with the sort of daze, or stupor I'm speaking of. It's almost like yesterday and the day before and the day before and the week before and the month before have all somehow begun to co-exist simultaneously in space and time, and for some reason this bizarre cosmic phenomenon is obligatorily accompanied by tiredness, pastiness of the eyes, and a dull headache.

I sat down, as is routine, at my desk. This action is accomplished by a sort of spineless flop backward into my chair (the deluxe, fully-adjustable, stream-lined, articulated office chair belonging to a set that some co-workers and I stole from an adjoining department's vacant offices) and is generally followed by a melodramatic and despair-laden sigh.

Then comes the morning Internet-sing. I have to check my blogo-tubes, my inter-blags, my tubo-spheres, my webo-tubes, my blogo-webs, and my intertubes. Usually nothing significant comes of this. Though occasionally I receive an email or something.

My rounds of the Internet complete, it's now time for my own particular morning constitutional. This is the part of my work day where I head over to the water fountain and refill my empty water bottle from the day before. A fact unbeknown to many--Detroit city water is actually some of the cleanest drinking water in the United States. That's not to say that it's particularly clean by any standard, but apparently we do have some of the most rigorous water treatment and water-fortification schemes of any municipality in the US. This does explain why Detroiters notoriously get diarrhea whenever we drink municipal water on trips. Think back to your own last road trip. Probably a few memorable Imodium moments there.

This leads, quite opportunely, to the next point in my chronological narrative. Water bottle filled with minimally cloudy fountain water, I sit at my desk and take my first 'refreshing' slug of the day. This aquatic gulp serves no other purpose than to grease the gears. I immediately find myself in frantic need of shitting, at which point, I make my way (not too hastily, but none too swaggeringly, either) to the departmental bathroom.

My department, the Comerica Academic Success Center (its full name), is graced with several of the goddamned cleanest bathrooms at all of Wayne State University, a fact we strive to keep secret. This doesn't prevent unaffiliated parties from dropping off their change, so to speak, in our facilities, but the numbers of these advantage-takers hasn't, as yet, reached inconvenient proportions. For my own part, I prefer total isolation and privacy when I am in the act of launching a snake. My heart always flutters slightly as I pull open the wooden bathroom door, in anticipation of a pristine, empty john. Today, the john is occupied.

The occupant (it seems like every other shit-taking person gravitates to the handicapped stall, which always sparks a certain amount of speculation on my part [such as 'which part of crapping requires 5-7' of flailing space for a non-physically-challenged person?']) is wearing sandals with white cotton sport socks. They are not Goldtoe. You can generally surmise an unfortunate amount of information about a person by both footwear and foot posture visible below a stall partition. For instance, I can immediately tell Mr. Sock-Sandal considers himself a man of leisure. From his regal ankle posture I am quick to surmise that he is an upper-eschalon lettered person, probably one of our academic advisers (we share our suite with University Academic Counseling). I can also tell that this person is an inconsiderate asshole, since he chose, of all the hours of the day, the precise moment my bowels begun their grumbling to take up his residence on one of only two porcelain pedestals available to me.

The point where I sit down, knowing someone is shitting next to me, is usually an anxiety-filled moment for me. This anxiety typically centers around my ability to resist the impulse to shake the stall partitions as hard as possible and buck and grunt loudly. I generally feel that the person I am shitting next to should suffer, much, much more than myself. I have to calm myself sufficiently to relax my sphincter. My anger and indignation, though, have hardly abated. In order to best achieve the discomfort of my partner in excretion, I choose the passive-aggressive path. There are a couple of things one could do. One can start talking, leading the other to believe that you are striking up a conversation (a sufficiently disturbing prospect in and of itself), and then ice the cake by making it clear after the other responds that you are actually on your cell phone. Or, you can take the more direct passive-aggressive route: push violently with one's abdominal muscles, causing an audible outrush of poop-air along with the forthcoming turd.

The shit-fart, followed by a subtle exhalation of breath, is generally a sure-fire way of getting your toilet rival to hoist anchor, dredge the canal, and sail off into the fluorescent sunset. In this particular instance, my tactic works and I can sense my adversary stiffen and prepare to depart the commode in haste, and in just a few moments, I am free to enjoy the sights and sounds of a nearly-deserted public restroom.

I tend to take a good fifteen minutes to shit, which serves several functions: one, to ensure the total exclusion of all unwanted matter; second, to fully appreciate the relaxing solitude of the john and enjoy the act of vacating a good clutch of shit-eggs; and last, (some would argue, most important) to maximize the amount of time that I am at work but not actually working.

Returning to my desk after a satisfying flush, and a guilty scrubbing of the hands (guilt always follows pleasure...despite my atheism, I was raised Catholic), I now prepare to begin work in earnest. By now, I have probably thoroughly wasted nearly 40 minutes of work time.

There are days when the banality of work seems to have physical symptoms. The fluorescent lights shrivel my cerebrum slightly, and I feel little rivulets of blood coursing down my cheeks from my distended eye sockets. It usually takes an entire evening of mindlessly violent videogames and unredeeming gore flicks to remedy this boredom-induced-hemorrhaging.

I like to think that my diverse interests, strong will, intelligence, and overall crippling level of immaturity are what save me from succumbing to full adulthood without so much as a half-hearted writhe like my many associates, but maybe it's something else.

Today, I watch as the palpable waves of professional vacuousness course down from the hopelessly uniform light fixtures above the cube area (we call it the 'cube farm'. I think of it as a 'cube factory-farm'). My co-workers seem more distant, more dull and anemic than usual. They generally tend to move in a genuine zombie-like fashion, but today it's more pronounced. Somewhere in my pinging skull, my brain, already besieged by an hundred other trivialities, makes a note, and I return my attention to my scowling work email.