This has been the longest time between posts on this blog in its entire history but I really did need quite a long time to process the events of this summer. As far as public toilets go, the past two months have been quite a rollercoaster. I have seen the extreme ends of the toilet universe and frankly, I believe I'm a stronger man because of it.
When I arrived in Washington DC, I was expecting a vast landscape of top notch toilets as far as the eye can see. DC reportedly has a current population of about 700,000 people and is visited by about 20 million tourists each year. With such vast numbers in such a small city limit, one would think that there would be a huge number of public bathrooms to accommodate. Well, in certain cases one would be right and in others, not so much. A quick look at Google Maps will show you that there is a handful of public restrooms around the National Mall, which makes sense. That is statistically the most trafficked location in the city. However, there are absolute no public restrooms in the Northeast section of the city. None. Unfortunately I discovered this one day while stranded in that area with no way to get home and no way to relieve myself.
I know that I have probably bored my readers to death with how much I talk about the quality of public toilets, but I have realized that I don't always touch on the quantity of public toilets. It's kind of a shame because my mission here is to touch on all aspects of the toilets and make the reader feel like they are using the toilet as they read the review. I promise I will start looking into the quantity of toilets in each new location I review because this lack of an even spread of toilets throughout DC was shocking to me. I did eventually end up finding a porta john but that is honestly like serving Gordon Ramsay a saucer with your nuts on it.
As I mentioned, there is no shortage of public restrooms on the National Mall. I took a trip down there to check them out and admire some of our nation's beautiful monuments and memorials. Unfortunately I was actually kind of dismayed by the state of these bathrooms. At first I struggled to find one that didn't have a line of people waiting to use it. Even when I told them who I was and namedropped this blog they wouldn't let me cut. Eventually though I did find a bathroom with no line and when I entered, I realized why this may have been.
I won't even mention the urine-soaked floor or the jaundiced walls or the shameful water pressure or the chips in the paint because those problems were nothing in comparison to the rest of the bathroom. The first thing I noticed was the stall without a door. Where the door went, I do not know but it was definitely not in that bathroom. I still believe that toilets are something to bond over and build community over but the option for privacy is always a good thing for when you just need to kick back for a minute.
There was one urinal in the bathroom but it wasn't even the high quality type. It was one of those urinals that looks like a fish's lips puckering to accept your waste. I always get splashback with those no matter how hard I try to avoid it.
When I had finished doing my business I noticed the two biggest problems. First, the sink had almost entirely detached from the wall and was just hanging on by the plumbing pipes. It still functioned but was unsightly and unnerving.
The second problem was that there was no handle on the inside of the door of the bathroom. This meant I had to wait inside until someone else cam to let me out. Unbelievable. If our founding fathers knew this was happening on their turf they would kill us all.
I thought that surely this could not be the state of all the bathrooms on the National Mall, but from what I could see, it was. I tried 3 other bathrooms in the vicinity and they were all in slightly varied states of decay. This was day 1 of my trip and it did not bode well for the remaining weeks.
Fortunately that feeling passed when I visited the bathroom at Meridian Hill Park. The park itself was beautiful. It looked like a jungle had sprouted in the middle of a downtown urban area. There were statues, sculptures, water fixtures, and above all else: a monument commemorating the life of my favorite president, James Buchanan. I was in heaven and I hadn't even used the toilet yet.
The bathroom reminded me of something you would see in a dive bar. It was a single-occupancy bathroom with checkerboard tiling with graffiti everywhere and pretty standard fixtures. The coolest thing about it though was the locker. For some reason they had a school locker that you could leave your things in while you did your business. I am not entirely sure what the purpose of this was but I imagine it could be useful if you had a child with you and didn't want them to see you use the bathroom.
I am not going to go through the process of giving a detailed review for every single public restroom I used while in DC. Frankly, I think this city is gross and I have been counting down the days until I am able to leave. What I will do, however, is leave the city with a few short recommendations on what they can do to improve the conditions.
1. Hire janitorial staff who are experienced in not only the maintenance of public toilets, but the use of them as well. If I see one more scrawny pencil-necked janitor in a public restroom I will lose it. My tolerance for skinny people, much like my tolerance for the short, is at an all time low. Speaking of the short, I think we need to remove all of the lower urinals in public restrooms. If you are over 13 years old and under 5'8", stay home. You are not welcome here. I take great pride in the fact that this blog is a unifying force where people from all walks of life can come together over the common interest of high quality public restrooms but the possibility of a short person being able to read this blog and have their own opinions on public toilets really does not sit well with me. My grandfather passed away long before I was born and as a child I always wished I had been able to meet him. Well, one day my mother revealed to me that my grandfather was a measly 5'6" tall. I felt ill for weeks. This man who I had so much respect and admiration for wasn't even able to achieve the basic task of reaching the top shelf at the grocery store. I have said it before and I will say it again: if you are short, please stop.
2. If you want to go the extra mile and satisfy more people, treat them to thicker toilet paper. This half-ply garbage is insulting to the anus. Some of us were unfortunately born will more delicate anuses than most, so please consider that there are people with this sort of disability who require more care and attention to their anuses.
3. Wherever possible, have some sort of a communal area towards the front of the restroom where people can mingle and socialize. I have made some of my closest friends loitering around public bathrooms and I encourage others to do the same.
4. Provide ways for citizens to care for the bathroom so that some of the burden can be lifted from the janitorial staff. This can include more trash cans, wet wipes, and maybe even toilet tools like plungers. Unfortunately, plungers can be stolen, misplaced, and misused. In fact, I was 16 years old before I realized a plunger was something you used on a toilet bowl and not your rear end.
It's simple things like these that may seem insignificant on their own, but when they are combined they make for a drastically more enjoyable and fulfilling experience. Bathrooms are a necessity and seeing them uncared for makes me very upset. Imagine if you used a water fountain in the park on a sweltering day and you could taste little organisms swimming around in the water. That is kind of how I feel when I use a public bathroom with a janitorial staff who has seemingly given up.
The bright side of all of this is that I also had the opportunity to use some of the bathrooms in various Maryland highway rest stops. My last post on this blog was about how all rest stops are exactly the same, but that was before I visited the Old Line State. All of the rest stops that I encountered were huge with enough seating and food courts to hold a Sunday mass. The bathrooms were always well kept and I found myself in a trance counting how many urinals they had. One bathroom I was in had 30! If only I had enough time to use every one of them. A trip to Maryland is entirely worth it just to use their rest stop bathrooms. Bring some pocket change though for the food courts.
Overall I would summarize my experience in Washington DC as underwhelming. It wasn't all bad, but the federal government apparently does not respect its constituents enough to provide them with an adequate amount of decent public toilets. Honestly, in some bathrooms I used this summer I wouldn't have been surprised if instead of a toilet in a stall there was a man squatting and holding a paper cup in a cardboard box.
I have realized that sometimes familiarity is what I need to keep myself sane. All I want to do now is go back to the Charleston Visitor Center, burst into the bathroom, walk into my favorite stall, and give my go-to toilet a giant hug. I can taste the feeling now like comfort food from my childhood. I can't explain why but that toilet reminds me of my mother. Maybe it's the lack of pigment and emotion. I think she would be proud of how far I've brought this blog.
This trip has made me realize that where I need to be at this point in my is Charleston. I cannot leave Charleston until my work is done. I cannot leave Charleston until I have reviewed every public toilet in the city. God has placed me on this planet to do one thing and I must not rest until that thing is done.
Before I close out this blog post, I do have something that I would like to run by my readers. Ever since I started this blog, people have suggested monetizing it and I am a little conflicted by this. On one hand, the whole purpose of this blog is to bring attention to the fact that people should never have to pay to use the bathroom. Free public restrooms keep this country grounded in the values that make it what it is and I feel that this blog should be contributing to that cause by remaining free to read. On the other hand, I am broke. It's been a while since I held down a steady job and collecting loose change in parking lots only gets me so far some days. I could really use a roof over my head that isn't the roof of my mini van. Please let me know what your thoughts on this are as the audience. I am a man of principle so if you want this to remain totally free with no advertisements or paywalls, I will honor that. However, if you want me to stop sleeping in Walmart parking lots, I would appreciate that greatly.
Also, please do not ask me why I was in Washington DC. That is a painful topic in its own right that is between me and my journal.
God bless.
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