Since I became an adult I haven't sworn on purpose once. I'm one of those goody two shoes who tries to not jay walk and hold the door open for people. But there are times when something so stressful and just world-endingly bad that take place in the blink of an eye that it's pretty hard not to let something slip. I had one of those moments today.
It'd been a pretty good day for me considering how most go. I was tired, sure, but I was hanging out with friends, one of them a lovely young lady who just happened to take a shine to me, and we'd had a fun time swimming in an indoor pool. We'd worked up a good appetite and went to the nearby grocery store. We needed snacks, but for some reason I have the bladder the size of a annorexic peanut and had to hit the bathroom.
It is important to note that I didn't switch my swim shorts out for my usual attire, as I wanted to save on space, and had my pocket knife clipped on the brim. I wouldn't be caught dead outside the house without at least one knife, and the pool was no exception. However, it's more used to being clipped in a pocket, and not the elastic band of a slippery and still moist swimsuit.
So I finally manage to find the bathroom after searching high and low, and discovered that it was cunningly tucked away near the front without any signs to attract attention and stuff obscuring the entrance rather effectively. It wasn't enough to escape my gaze however and I soon found myself on the path to bladder relief.
I selected a stall and went about my business of getting in the proper position when I heard an unusual sound. Cla-tunk! I looked down. Yeah, you know where this is going.
To my absolute horror I found that my beloved pocket knife had felt left out of the earlier festivities and decided to take a dive into the porcelain altar. It was at that point that I struggled to keep an absolute typhoon of foul vocabulary that I'd accumulated over a period of years of scanning the internet and endured the haunts of high school. I consider it a credit to myself that not one actual swearword passed my lips, but it was only with the kind of self control that one uses to lift a car off of a baby or sawing off your arm to free yourself from the entrapment of a boulder pinning your arm.
Could it have been somewhere convenient like the floor? Nope! It had to be a public toilet, one of the most foul places in existence this side of Chernobyl. Thank Odin whoever had used it last had the courtesy to actually flush, and didn't have to watch a speared turd cloud the water. Yuck.
I still had a problem though. I had no rubber gloves, a full bladder, and one of my most prized possessions laying in what intimidated me more than a nest of rattlesnakes. For a moment I considered leaving the thing, but I couldn't do that. We'd spent too much blood and tears together, and I couldn't leave it just sitting there. It'd also have been a nasty surprise to whatever employee drew the short straw and had to clean out the stalls.
I bit my lip, preferring I had a rawhide stick, got some toilet paper wrapped around my hand as if it might actually help, and plunged my arm wrist deep into the cold water. I tried not to think too much as I rested my prize on the paper dispenser and relieved myself, pulled up my short, and hustled over to the sink. Thankfully no one else was there to question what the heck I was doing. I proceeded to wash the almighty crap out of my hand and knife with a generous application of soap until I felt that my presence wouldn't spread some sort of disease.
I sheepishly walked over to my friends and asked hopefully if any of them had any hand sanatizer. They gave me a worried look and asked why. I declined to answer specifically and said I'd explain in the car. Thank Shiva, the lady behind the register had some sanatizer on hand and I again rubbed it all over my infected hand. And yet it still felt retched.
The way I was acting had my pals thoroughly worried and wondered if I should even be allowed in the car. Through clenched teeth I told them all would be revealed once no one else was listening. I can only imagine what horrors passed through their heads as we walked back to the car, all the while I had some wipes soaked in the wonderful purging substance known as alcohol, vigorously rubbing my hand. Thankfully the object of my affections had seen pretty weird stuff and wasn't about to leave me stranded.
I had to learn how to eat later with only my left hand, and by the time I got home I soaked my hand and knife in bleach, hoping that it would be an unstoppable scourge on the forces of bacterial colonies. I'm a bit worried about rust forming considering the bathing I gave it, but I'd rather deal with rust than some sort of toilet-born mutation struggling to gain sentience. Only time will tell.
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