The Writing on the Stalls in the Library’s Bathroom
“I jerk off in this stall…seriously.”
There is, next to this brave confession, a small arrow pointing to the words “me too!” These words, it should be noted, are in the same handwriting as the initial confession, meaning I guess that whoever outed themselves as the kind of person who not only masturbates in public but also makes sure to do it under the grossest conditions imaginable figured he’d seem less weird if someone else came out too, thereby maybe hastening a chorale of scrawled affirmation.
[underneath above comment]: “Let’s all meet here at the same time?”
Hard to tell if this is a joke or an earnest suggestion—someone saying “ha, I mean, that would be like us getting together” to the platonic best friend they’re secretly in love with comes to mind.
[underneath above suggestion] “Gay!”
Given that bathroom stalls are the original YouTube comments sections—i.e. a place where atmosphere and anonymity lead to all sorts of despicable hate, hate in this case made all the more disturbing by the fact that you can see what the penmanship of prejudice looks like, and also by the realization that the people making these horrible generalizations are also plausibly the people studying for economics tests just a few feet away from you on the library’s first floor—given all that, I’m shocked that the response to the prior suggestion wasn’t more virulently homophobic, was in fact in this case almost elegant, given that suggesting that a bunch of men meet up in an enclosed space to masturbate together is, objectively, ‘gay,’ although obviously the ideal response to the above suggestion would be ‘not writing anything,’ because notice that you don’t see the word ‘straight!’ written next to the bold and almost certainly untrue ‘I fucked —— —— in here, 11/4/09’ scrawls, the same way I guess that (it seems) a lot of white novelists and essay-writers write under the assumption that their audience perceives everyone else is white, and then feels the need to point out when someone is black. You guys noticed this?
[picture of a woman on all fours]
It probably means something that this (impressively sketched, comically proportioned) woman’s face is obscured by hair, and that the penis gently prodding her backside is literally disembodied, just a penis floating of its own accord; sexual attitudes in bathroom stalls are not only regressive but sort of adorably childish, like an 11-year-old who’s too scared to talk to the girl he carpools with but watches porn on his dad’s laptop after school, confused as to what it all means and getting some truly weird ideas.
“Got here at 11pm
Left at “
The implication being I guess that either a) a part of you never actually leaves the third floor stall or b) whoever wrote this is a ghost who’s chosen a bizarre (but, by its private, behind-closed-half-door nature, probably revealing of some small part of the human condition, presuming that as a ghost you can’t smell anything) location to hang out unnoticed.
