Urine Nation

I’ll just come out and say it… “pee” has more of a place in the story of my childhood than it really should. It’s not that I lived in squalor or had some strange obsession with it. There’s just multiple stories I have related to it. They’re not gross or disturbing stories really, but it’s weird that I have so many. Here’s a few examples.

#1 – THE LOVE SEAT

When I was young I had a hard time with wetting the bed. I finally stopped when I was 12. Yes, 12. If you feel sorry for me, thank you. If you’re laughing, you are a sadistic monster in danger of hell fire! Nah, I’m just kidding. But back to the story… 

My mother would get me up late at night (like 11 pm or midnight) to go to the bathroom so that the chances of me wetting the bed would be much lower. She did this with my brother too, but don’t worry, I’m not outing him here. He had a normal childhood of bed wetting from time to time that lots of kids go through. He likely stopped at 8 or something like that. He wasn’t soaking mattresses with shocking amount of pee-pee like I seemed to be able to do. We’re talking litres and litres!

Anyway, one night she got us both up and took my brother in first. We were both still very much asleep, walking like drunk zombies with our eyes shut. Plus we were guided by our mom who dreamed of just one morning with all dry sheets in the house. (Man, I put her through a lot.) She takes Jamie to the bathroom first and tells me to wait where I was, which was next to the living room. I was more than willing to get off my feet and wait, so immediately sat down on the living room love seat. And wet myself. Right there in the plush chair as I snored and dreamed of waterfalls.

The next morning I came downstairs and sat in that seat. “Ahhh! Frig, who got this seat wet?!” My mother was so exasperated from the mess she had to deal with the night before that she came running from the next room to tell me, and she was going to enjoy it! “You wanna know who did? YOU did!”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I did??”

“Yes, you did. You PEED in it!” Now to that point in my life I couldn’t remember ever peeing any other way than the way I knew. So I instantly had a picture in my mind of me standing before the love seat like it was a toilet and peeing on the cushion. “What the heck?? What was wrong with me? This couldn’t possibly have happened!”

Mom clarified, which helped a little. I was still concerned that I had done this with no memory of it.

#2 – THE TOILET SEAT

Again, sometimes there is a loss in translation between adults and kids. For example, when I was a kid, someone would warn me not to do something by telling me a story of another little boy who did it, fell, and “split his head open.” Maybe you can hear that now as an adult and you know it means they got a little cut or something and drew some blood. But for children, words and phrases have one meaning until they see or hear it in another way. When I pictured someone with their “head split open,” it was a horrifying picture. To this day I make no use of this phrase.

So when my mother said to me one day, “Troy, we need to talk about your aim,” I was perplexed just as I was in the previous story. Again, we can understand what she was saying and how she was half-jokingly bringing the subject up. Simply put, she had found that when I used the facilities I would inevitably get some… wet spots… left pooled somewhere around the rim of the seat. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Now I understood what she meant as far as what she was finding on the toilet, but I took her ‘aim’ accusation seriously. And that word only had one meaning.

“The toilet is RIGHT THERE. The hole is at least the size of a watermelon… how am I missing it?? She must have me confused with someone else. I am definitely hitting the target.” I mean I was a kid. Not only was it a large target, but the distance between me and that target at that age was really freaking close!

I did learn on my own over time to watch for certain things. There are times at a young age that a kid can make a misstep or get distracted and… you know… veer to the side. Then there’s the times where it splashes. But before I figured that all out, a funny side story happened when my mom was asked to fill in at our church to lead a midweek children’s program. She would be in front of us reading a story, leading us in prayer, etc. From the very moment I learned she was doing this, I was instantly afraid that she would bring this up and tell every kid there that I kept peeing on the seat. It’s weird the things that kids think about.

Or maybe it was just this kid.

#3 – THE CLASSROOM

Having a bed wetting problem can be embarrassing. I shared a tent with my cousin and he woke up in the morning shocked that at some point in the night I had managed to make our tent floor into a waterbed. Then there were the times going to a sleepover, praying hard that my friend wouldn’t notice the plastic his mom put under my sheets.

I also soaked my grandfather one night. There were too many people in one house and someone had the bright idea of putting “all the boys” in the same room: my brother, me, and our grandfather. I don’t know, maybe my parents were upset with him and this was all part of a scheme to get back at him. Maybe they got me up at 11 and gave me a Gatorade, rubbing their hands together in anticipation.  For many reasons I wish I’d known him longer as he passed when I was only 8, but I can tell you that had I been able to talk to him when I was, say 21 or so, there would definitely have been a time when I would say, “Hey Grampy… sorry for whizzing on you that one time.”

But I think the most embarrassing times were at school. Sometimes I’d need to go to the bathroom and the teacher would ignore my raised hand. I guess sometimes they were just tired of putting up with my crap and now I was paying for it. But this would cause me to wet myself a little, then be too embarrassed to ask to go at all, because then people would see the wet spot. This would lead to a bigger wet spot. It would be like the Blob movie. It gets scarier the bigger it gets. I remember one day having a small pool under my seat and being utterly horrified. I wasn’t the only one that this happened to. I remember other kids going through this.

When I was in high school I would remember this and fantasize about going back in time, getting out of my seat, pissing on my teacher’s shoes and saying, “Ignore my raised hand or anyone other kids’ hand in here and I’ll do it again!”

So yeah. It played too big of a role in my life story. There is one big benefit: Today I am very deliberate in keeping a bathroom clean after I’ve used it. I don’t even like leaving suds in the sink. And when someone pees in a toilet and doesn’t flush it (something my gender does a lot), I lose my mind. I want to yell out to them, “Hey! You raised on a raft? Flush the friggin’ toilet you assclown!”

I bring this up because we are in the season of scary movies, the kind that might just make you wet your pants. So with that…

Congratulations A Quiet Place. This is your week.

And the Oscar goes to…

Best Actress:

Abigail Breslin as Bo in Signs

Best Actor: Jesse “the Body” Ventura as Blain, who ain’t got time to bleed, in Predator

Best Quote: “                     ” — every character in A Quiet Place

My top 10 favourite horror movies: (I made this list in 2018 and the order is definitely different.

T

he Blair Witch Project

• (1999)
  

• Paranormal Activity (2007)
  

• Midsommar (2019)
  

• Coherence (2013)
  

• Cloverfield (2008)
  

• The Shining (1980)
  

• Get Out (2017)
  

• Signs (2002)
  

• Psycho (1960)
  

• Jaws (1975)

I would have included The Sixth Sense (1999), but wasn’t completely sure if it fit the “horror” genre. I do think it does, but just in case… I also love The Blair Witch Project (1999), Alien (1979), It (2017) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).