Arrogance Served On A Urinal Cake

Every person should, at some point in their lives, have to clean a public bathroom.

Some of us have.

Most? Who knows? Probably not.

But some of us have.

We plunged the clogged shit can at the Winn-Dixie. We mopped the pubic hairs from the bathroom floor in Big Lots. We Windexed the zit juice from the mirror in Burger King.

And, yes, we fished out the gum nestled -- just so -- atop the piss-filled urinal cake.

Shit cans clog; pubic hairs fall; people have acne and have to put on a good face to impress the cute little cashier.

But nothing screams arrogance like spitting gum into a urinal.

Where does the chewer think this gum will go? Will it melt through the porous holes of the urinal cover that's put in place to keep just such things from blocking the plumbing? Is there a urinal fairy (and is she the same mystical being who magically and improbably places pubic hairs on TOP of the urinal)?

"Someone" has to pick it out of there. That "someone" will do it.

It is a symbol of elitism, of a disrespect for those who carry out a necessary task. Spitting the gum into a pool of piss is but a delayed, unconfrontational spit to the face.

For some of us, it is a "we" proposition. So, too, is it for those of us who remember such monuments to human foulness as a teenage right of passage.

More often than not -- particularly in today's society where we castigate immigrants for crossing our borders yet fully yield our claim on the jobs that no one wants to do -- it is a matter of "they."

We/They/Somebody don't ask you to stop stinking up the joint or stop carving "Trisha Sux" on the stall or stop leaving the sports section on the floor.

We/They/Somebody only ask that you show respect for those who keep society from being nothing more than a pack of animals rooting through our own feces.

No icing needed.