Peter over at Bayou Renaissance man, posts a list of odd book titles. The one that sticks with me is “How to poo on a date”. This hits a nerve because I have been- several times- faced with this proposition.

Once upon a time, in my lush rolling youth, I had a phillipino girlfriend some nine years my junior. I was broke and she was loaded so usually she bought dinner and we retired to some secluded place to play variations on hide-the-salami. Oh, sometimes I could spring for a room but when the weather was fine we preferred the great outdoors. And one of the great outdoor places we liked a lot were industrial parks.

See, at the time, nobody could afford security cameras, and big box industrial units all had loading docks, so I would park my Probe down in the loading dock, invisible from the street, and we would get busy.

One night, after a particularly large meal, I was hiding my sausage with some vigor when I discovered I needed to drop the kids off at the pool. RIGHT NOW. So I excused myself, hurriedly grabbing the roll of blue shoptowels out of the back of the car, leaving her spread-eagled on a blanket next to the car. I ran as fast as my clenched cheeks would let me, and as I crested the ramp and crossed the lot into the shrubbery, I noticed there was a lake. “Oh, look, a lake!” I said as I squatted, I had hoped out of sight, and began to do my business.

My ladyfriend, possessed of a wicked sense of humor, turned on the car’s headlights, beaming my squatting silhouette onto the side of the adjacent building in a shadow easily thirty feet tall.

What could I do? I finished what I was doing, hoping the police wouldn’t be drawn to this unholy squatting batsignal, got the paperwork done, and returned to finish where I had started.

From that moment on, all she had to do was say “Oh, look, a lake” (Usually in front of her parents) and I turned red as a fire engine.