THIS HAPPENED TO ME

To the list of delayed gratification fantasies-cum-hilarious nightmares, please add getting stuck in an elevator while having to take a crap. This happened to me. Or I thought that’s what was going to happen when the elevator took its time delivering me to my floor. It hung up a little along the way for no reason, giving me a chance to panic and stretch time . This stretched-taffy time was long enough for an elaborate rescue scenario to unfold. It went like this:

Fireman-“OK we’re coming in [door forced open] aw man what a revolting and ultimately sad tableaux!” meaning me in one corner, flattened in hunched shame, while what I couldn’t hold in is piled monumental, proudly stinky in the other.

Cinematically clear scenario over, my head switched to how I could make this situation better:

Well, if things unfold as that panic-movie predicts, there’s not much I can do but move out. But let’s say they rescue me before the dam breaks (or, more aptly, before the buckwheat flapjack battering ram I built with this morning’s breakfast bests the castle door). After some abbreviated thank-yous all around that I can explain later (me to firefighter: “dude, sorry I just ran away when you got me out of there- I had to use the bathroom real bad!”), I’ll make for my apartment. Execute a precise undoing of belt and pants as I turn the corner into the long home-hall stretch towards my door. Dropping pants completely would impede my stride, so they hang on my hips as I find my keys, select the two for my door, and form a key-turning grip with them in my right hand. When I make it to my apartment this preemptive grip assumption assures I don’t BM before I actually get in my place. A last-minute hallway collapse would be a disaster; brutally ironic for me and shocking/funny for the curious rescue crew peeking around the corner, wondering why I took off so quick.. With the door open I drop everything and sprint the fifteen feet to the can, dropping pants and raising seat in a motion I’d been mentally choreographing to be as efficient as possible.

And it would be the best (crap) ever
Besides actual splash-back from the log-drop that I would feel cool on the back of my thighs, there would an invisible misting of relief. That feeling would hang over the rest of my week like a drunken, benign haze that would make me feel lush and heavy. (Which is weird because you’d think the afterglow would be characterized by a lightness since what happened was all about dropping ballast).


Thinking about this inspires me to market the principles involved as a kind of mood management. A high derived from the sudden absence of pain and waiting.

I’ll bet pioneers, frontier farmers, or other gritty groups of the past never experienced what we describe today as depression. Folks grinding out a living in the Chinese countryside today aren’t a part of the prescription chemical culture. They may feel despair, hunger, fear, all of these in extremes. But for the most part they’re working too hard all the time, waiting for the pain of that to end, to elevate to the vain space of modern depression.

For people of the 19th century American frontier, a grueling routine and survival distractions provided “coverage” for any inherent chemical imbalances or melancholy bents they might have indulged with more free, neutral time.

So: how to simulate this “coverage” today ? Hold an open call for depressed folks, saying you’ll provide free counseling . Have a reception in the lobby, serving people those new high-fiber Kashi cereals (which I’m a fan of anyway- they’ve got lots of protein; they actually sold me on the cereal by plastering the protein/fiber stats on the front of the box in big bubbles ), make them drink a quart each of watery coffee, and put them in an elevator. (Since you’ve told them your office is on the 8th floor, none of these unmotivated sacks is going to take the stairs. If they do they’ll get a mood-lift of another kind from the endorphin rush of pumping calves and thighs- but that’s another issue). Make sure you can monitor people with a camera concealed in the elevator to make sure that if anybody looks like they are going to give up and let loose right there, the doors come open. Finally, after an interval determined to be the maximum stress period on a primed subject pre-involuntary colon blow, open the doors, right into a hallway of private sound-sealed bathrooms with Eno’s Music for Airports playing inside.

Ask whoever comes out of that routine if they’re still depressed.