Joe Hefferon Takes it to the Toilet

Oh yes! We are absolutely running a series on bathroom reading! So long as it's taking place behind the closed  (or open, if that's the way you swing) bathroom door, we want to know what it is. It can be a book, the back of the shampoo bottle, the newspaper, or Twitter on your cell phone - whatever helps you pass the time...


Joe Hefferon, a single dad, father of two, retired police captain, author of two books (a novel: The Sixth Session, and a personal growth manual: The Seventh Level - Designing Your Extraordinary Life), took the potty challenge. This guy wins the internet for Most Creative and Stomach-Churning Euphemisms, pants down!

(Disclaimer: This one's not for the weak-stomached or easily offended. If you fail to find potty humor...well.. humorous, I advise you to skip this one. It's particularly raunchy!)

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So what do I read while in the throes of a bowel movement? To quote my imaginary friend, Colonel Jessup, "I have neither the time, nor the inclination."

The truth is, since you asked, I'm not one to dawdle in the john. It's not a cigar lounge, it's a place of business - doody business. It's a tidy, confined and convenient place to expel excrement, rinse and move on. I don't look at a bathroom visit as an event, just a necessary and noxious evil.

When you bring a book to the bathroom, especially at work, it's an announcement. "Hey everyone, I plan to squeeze, push, kegel, poot, marvel at my accomplishment and then sit in a confined space in my own colon vapors for a long stretch so that's why I'm lugging along this almanac."

And heaven forbid you spend one nanosecond of extra time in a public potty. Can you imagine the audience of lecherous microbes from the last thousand men that are clinging to the walls and leering at your every pinch? If you stall in the stall they jump onto to your back and work their way down into your crevasse where they defile your exit wound with cross-bred fecal gent germs.

How can you even think of bringing a national treasure like a Cormac McCarthy novel into a rump evacuation clinic? I have a hard enough time knowing my kids brush their teeth in there. The human has created an endless list of names for the slippery stool. There's the arse biscuit, butt nugget, doot, loaf, log, shiznot, turd, turtle head, wolf bait and stink weasel. All were fashioned to make light of the cocoa-colored specimen, something which, as early as our precious infancy, can be so vile as to make new dads puke right into their kid's diaper.

Speaking of the kids; don't we have cutesy names for their log to make it palatable (poor word choice) to them? Words like, poopie, poo, number two, stinky, BM and dead-beat dad?

I know I'm not the only one who cringes at the idea of prairie-dogging as evidenced by the long, brown trail of euphemisms we've created to lessen the blow of the daily purge: we drop a deuce, park a custard, drop the kids off at the pool, hang a root, give birth to a sewer bass, cut rope, have a morning grumpy, bake brownies and my personal favorite, barking back at Rumsfeld. OK, I made up the last one.

Read in the bathroom? Well I suppose I have, if I simply must confess, used my smart phone to read texts, check stock quotes, review my calendar and toss a few angry birds, but that's it, I swear. It's just not my thing to equate the bathroom with reading pleasure.

But wait.. Hang on just a hot steamy second. Maybe I'm wrong. Given the amount of time, mental energy and ingenuity that went into creating the toilet lexicon, perhaps I should give the act a higher standing in my day. Maybe I should plan around it, make a pot of coffee, call an old friend, write a letter to Santa, and then waltz in there with time on my hands and Time in my hand.

I'll let you know how it all comes out, wait - I mean the thing about the election. Oh and by the way, spell-check was interesting for this post.

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Dear god, did I really just post this on the blog?! What have I unleashed?! Maybe I'm flushing my BLOG down the toilet......