Reid About It

I'm a pretty open-minded guy. I understand that bad things happen in the world, and they don't always make sense. I don't mind traffic, occasional problems with my cable, or rain on my days off.

The one thing that bothers me is not being able to take a crap in my own house without being looked upon as a leper.

Quick explanation. In our house, we have a bath and a half, right next to each other. There is a wall there, it's not like I bought Chuck Barry's old house or anything. But the two are very close. The front bathroom is usually used by my mother-in-law, the second one by my wife.

If you've done the math on that one, it correctly indicates the best place for me to go to the bathroom is the back yard.

And so, being an adult male with a diet roughly equivalent to a puma, there are occasions where I need to have a seat and read a few hundred pages of something. Since I'm pretty much banned from the front, "company's-coming" toilet, I'm invariably on the second when I hear the voice at the door.

"Are you taking a poop in there?"

Uh, yes. It's a bathroom. That should be okay. If you were asking me that, and I was sitting in the kitchen, there would be a problem. This should be fine.

Apparently, I'm not supposed to have a movement ever. It's common knowledge that I eat a lot of red meat, you would think they'd be able to cut me some slack.

"It always smells in there." Of course. It's poop. Doctors will tell you it's far better to expel something from your body that smells like that and flush it away, than it is to hang on to that substance inside of you until you can reach a predesignated "safe house" to relieve yourself.

It's the same way when you are at Sam's, and you buy the giant wheelbarrow-sized block of toilet paper, and people look at you funny. Hey, it's an easy financial decision. Toilet paper doesn't spoil.

And everybody craps.