We'll Leave Jenny Out Of This

Okay, I'm back into a more reasonable emotional state today, which is good because any more of that and I would have had to get an emo haircut and start shopping at Hot Topic. Not cool. So today we can instead focus on a disappearing art form, a loss of American culture that causes me concern. Seriously, when did we completely eliminate bathroom graffiti?


Some people come here to take a *$&#, so I left one.


There was once a time when being forced to use a public restroom, which let's face it isn't anyone's favorite thing to do, at least meant you could count on some kind of entertainment in the form of well though out prose, pithy sayings and the occasional poem. It seems like these days, everything is sanitized to the point of this simply not being true anymore. Now you are faced with clean walls and sometimes even an advertisement.


They paint the walls but all in vain.
The *$#%house poet has struck again.


This is no good. I liked the graffiti. It was funny. It was inappropriate. It made me happy. Did we really need to protect people from filth scratched into the walls of a stall? Is our society becoming so sterilized that we can't have something inappropriate in the one place where you're absolutely guaranteed to be doing something inappropriate?


I *&$%ed your mother.

Go home dad, you're drunk.


Now I understand that the idea of sending your kid into a bathroom only to be exposed to a crude drawing of genitalia isn't something every parent wants to think about, but you know what, there are a lot of things I have to protect my kids from, and this really doesn't rate. Seriously, when I was a kid, these were just a curiosity. I never called a number that promised a good time. I merely wondered at the audacity of the person who thought to bring a pen with them when duty called. Sometimes I giggled. Worry about what your kids look at on the internet, not what they'll see written on a wall. In fact if you're a kid reading this, go reprimand your parents right now for their poor monitoring skills, and then do your homework. Punk.


Here I sit, broken hearted.
Paid my nickel, only farted.


This last one is important, too. There is a historical context being lost to the newest generation. That's right, kiddies, when I was a tot some people had the nerve to put a *&$%ing coin slot on the door of the stall. Talk about cruel. Once on a family vacation, I actually ran into one of these. I chose to crawl under the door rather than return to the restaurant and request change, not because I was dishonest, but because I didn't know what the #$*% I was looking at.


Flush twice, it's a long way to the kitchen.


If I had my way, every bathroom stall would be equipped with dry erase markers, and the creativity would flow freely. Each night, instead of trying to scrub off pen marks, you could just go in with a dry towel and wipe, ready to receive more nuggets of wisdom the next day. For now, we'll have to start a movement to preserve these bits of culture elsewhere. It will probably get dumped on to the internet, the last bastion of free thought and poor taste in our ever homogenized society, perhaps even plopped into the comments of this very post.

We can only hope. (Warning: Comments in this case will go through unfiltered to retain the original quality.)