The urinal is my prayer mat.

Today I followed this dude into a public toilet, and I was like, "Holy shit that chick is walking into the male toilets. Wait, wait. That's a girly looking guy."

Watching this girly-man enter the bathroom ahead of me left me with a dilemma. The toilets aren't very big, and I value my privacy whenever I have my wang out. The fact that I'd paid attention to his features meant that, even if he was in a stall, I would have a really clear mental picture of him grunting and straining the entire time I was in there.

I hadn't actually entered the toilets yet, so I figured I could just abort the whole operation and pretend that I needed something nearby. That way I could return when conditions were more favorable.

On the other hand I needed to piss like a racehorse. I'd been holding onto my bladder for so long it felt like there was a little surgeon's scalpel trying for force its way down my urethra.

I went for it.

When the toilets are empty I usually find peeing quite relaxing. It's the one point in the day when no-one can expect you to do any work. You can literally feel your day getting better.


When there's someone else in the room with you the atmosphere is entirely different. It's like a Mexican standoff, where no-one is wearing pants. You no longer feel the stress draining out of you and painting the urinal wall, instead it increases exponentially with every passing instant. Your only concern becomes getting out of there as soon as possible. Every second you spend peeing seems like a century, and you begin to become concerned that the other people will think you're playing with yourself when you go in for the follow-up jingle.

During the highly stressful times when there's someone else in the room I find myself looking down at my junk, cursing it for not going faster. Thankfully, when I entered the toilets, the girly-man had gone into a stall.

Maybe that really was a girl who needed to pee and misread the sign, I thought. Or a guy who needs to take a dump. Actually, it's probably the second one. Ooh, yup. There we go. The payload is in the water.

There's a strange forced intimacy in a small public toilet. You can each hear every noise that the other person makes. Every clothing movement sounds like the rustle of a hurricane through a forest, and every biological noise is amplified like it's being played through a vuvuzela. The only way I could have had a more intimate connection to this guy's bowel movements would be if I was physically hiding in the toilet bowl beneath him, listening in wonder to the peeling-back noise of his anus preparing to paint my face.

Eventually I emptied my noodle, but there was no joy in it. I left the bathrooms empty, both physically and spiritually.

Of course, you could look at it from the perspective of the other guy. He was followed into the toilet by this distressed looking wierdo, who kept staring at him in confusion, then walked up to the urinal and began quietly cursing his genitals as he peed.