Neanderpundit

it looks like I’m gonna do 100,000 hits today. Anyone snapshots a pic of that, send me a copy. I’ll send you a cute picture of my dog licking it’s balls, or something.

Is wandering off into territory I’ve flogged about before.

While I’m not in the habit of having conversations with fictional characters, I have to address this one squarely at Jan: If you are pregnant, what is inside you is a human child. Not a waste product. Before you whine about choice, consider that you already MADE the choice, when you engaged in sex. The moment to choose not to have a child is the moment before conception. There are a few infallible methods of contraception, and many nearly infallible ones. (before anyone cracks wise in comments, abstinence, oral sex, and anal sex are infallible methods of contraception, to name but a few)

There’s a restaurant in Chicago called Charlie Trotter’s. Charlie has travelled the world and worked with the world’s finest chefs, including, for instance, Gordon Sinclair. Eating at Trotter’s is like having sex with a 23 year old Audrey Hepburn. let’s say you go there and eat, but for some reason, decide that you don’t want to pay for the meal (the meal is expensive, no doubt about that!) Is it OK to just go into the bathroom and take a shit? “Well, the food is still here. Why should I pay for it?” As any fine restaurantier will tell you, pay up. As any nun will tell you, the cost of that couple minutes ecstacy is a lifetime of service. And joy. Pay up, Jan.

When i took my first factory job, putting together railcars for Pullman Standard (we were making Amtrak Superliners at the time) I noticed there were a large faction of morning crappers.

These guys would wait till they got to work, and have their first coffee around eight thirty, which usually brought on the morning crap around nine (breaktime) Whistle blew, and something like a hundred guys backed into stalls with the racing form or the Sun Times crossword. Whistle bows again, and as if on cue, the boys would all flush and exit their stalls, come back to work. One of my coworkers and I would always do our best Phil Georgeff imitation as all the stall doors opened at once “Here they come spinning out of the turn!!”.

Now, by way of explanation, these men, to a man, were in their fifties. THey ALL lived in what was Old Pullman or in Bridgeport. I visited several of them, and they lived in almost identical homes- one up, one down brownstones, built before public septic systems, built in the days of outhouses. My own home, though not a brownstone, is of the same vintage.

Anyway, I now understand why those men always chose to do their business at work.

It was the only place they could achieve 15 minutes of quiet.

Those old brownstones were built in a day when a bathroom consisted of a bathtub, a toilet, and a sink. If they were really fancy, they had robin’s egg blue or pepto-bismol pink accents. But one per home was enough.

Maybe back then.

I live in a house where the humans are women two to one. So I feel a kinship with those guys, as I grab my palm pilot and head for the can. Fifteen minutes of unadulterated freedom from interruption? It’s what I live for.