ME

If you’ve made it this far, that is, past the home page and have even glanced at some of the content here, then you know this Web site deals with shit. Well, actually, the places where we shit. And pee. And puke. And shower. And chill. And, for the lucky ones, occasionally fuck. This site is mostly a diary of the various places I find myself, in the parlance of our times, “using the bathroom” and sometimes the situations that have brought me to that particular spot.

I have been cursed with the bladder of a one-year-old. On top of that, I’m a social drinker, which means I find myself out on the town often during a typical week. And with vodka coursing through my veins, I spend a lot of time in bathrooms — some exciting and stimulating, others disgusting and depressing, some just, well, functional rooms to dispense bodily waste. Through all of these many, many rooms, the act of finding bathrooms and just generally “going” has become, to me, a bit of a non-fetish fascination. Somewhere, most likely standing frozen in fear at a urinal trying to squeeze out pee while the guy next to me pummels his own urinal with a stream not unlike a fire hose, I realized that I spend far too much time in bathrooms. As I write this, I’ve just returned from the bathroom in my favorite coffee shop in Chicago.

Once I became aware of the amount of time I spent in bathrooms, which was aided by the onslaught of comments from friends and co-workers about my small bladder, and also in part by an alarmist mother who begged me to see a doctor for this problem, the issue became clearer. Hey, I thought, I really do go to the bathroom a lot. I looked into the possible ailments online, the various prescriptions available to those who are constantly going, such as Enablex or Ditropan XL, but I really thought — and continue to think — that my issue (notice the refusal to say problem) is just a small bladder. Had one all my life in fact. My younger brother, a sophomore in college at this point, goes once in the morning, gets home from school, and goes again. Apparently, according to him, and I believe him because I’ve spent full days with him where he didn’t go all day, he used the high school bathroom twice in his four years there. Twice. A medium-sized latte is going to send me to the can at least twice in one fifteen-minute sit at a coffee shop. I go a lot.

By reading what I have to say within the pages of this Website, I hope you’ll at least agree with me that much. But, even more, I hope you get a sense that, no matter how obsolete they seem in our day-to-day goings on, bathrooms play a huge part in our lives, even for people with normal-sized bladders. What I hope to achieve is a sort of inundation of toilets. I want the reader to recognize the importance of bathrooms in our daily lives and to pay a little more attention to them and what makes them good or bad, calming or disgusting, or worthy of our apathy. I also hope to inspire people like you to tell me about bathrooms you like or loathe, experiences that have made you cringe or laugh, and I want to see pictures — lots and lots of pictures — and I want to hear stories, as disgusting or funny as you want them to be.

This site may be run by me, but that’s only because I’m the only one I know like me. Maybe I am alone. But maybe not. I certainly hope not. This project started out as the working of a book, something I would try to publish after one calendar year. As the end-date approached, though, I realized I’d not found The Great Bathroom yet — good or bad. I also realized I kind of like taking pictures of bathrooms. The more I saw, the more excited I got. Thus the non-fetish fascination.

Lastly, I just want to point out that I’ve gone two more times while writing this introduction. Granted, you know as well as I do that this thing will go through revisions and edits and the like, but the crux was put on paper tonight and I peed three times while writing it.