I remember being ten years old, hanging out in my friend Mike’s back yard, when he posed a typical Mike question. “If you had to do all the peeing you’ve ever done in your life over again, how long would it take?”

         He was always coming up with questions like that. He’s a programmer now. He probably forgot all about it, but I still occasionally do the math, particularly on long drives with no rest stop in sight. I’m up to 500 straight hours-about three weeks.

         Mike came up with the question after peeing down the access hole of an ant colony living under an oak tree. The ants swarmed out, probably for the umpteenth time, carrying their eggs high overhead. After a bit, being ants and having limited situational analysis skills, they marched back in and forgot about the whole thing until Mike found occasion to flood them again.

         Guys have a definite advantage over gals when it comes to the inherent entertainment value of taking a whiz out of doors. Besides casting Thor-like liquid lightning bolts upon the minor members of the animal kingdom, we can write our name in the snow. Or even the name of our date. You can’t tell me there’s a more touching gesture than that. “This one’s for you, baby.”

         “You’re spelling it wrong.”

         Anyone who thinks the world is ruled by men will have to answer this for me: Given the amusement potential of male whizzilation, why is the urinal experience so damn boring?

         I figure that I’ve spent 6 of my 21 draining days standing before these porcelain models of brute efficiency, my face just eighteen inches from the wall. It’s as boring as peeing outside is interesting. No cobwebs to obliterate, no dust to knock off the leaves of a bush.

         At the urinal, you have to look straight ahead, especially if somebody’s next to you. The Code dictates that you act like they’re not there. You take care of your business and don’t get into theirs. There are some jokes going around, most of which seem to feature a man from Jamaica, in which one guy at a urinal looks down at the other man’s business and makes a comment. But you never look to the side- it’s a major invasion of privacy. Instead, you just pretend the wall is the most fascinating thing you’ve ever seen and try not to compare stream intensity. You can’t look up or even close your eyes, because that makes you look like you’re having an especially ecstatic experience. You can’t look down for more than a second or you will give the impression that you’ve spotted some sort of problem, or maybe your narcissism has gotten out of control.

         In some bathrooms at bars, the management will post the sports pages on the wall. It’s a strange idea to go to the bathroom to read hockey scores, and I don’t care about hockey scores, but it’s better than staring at nothing. At the Seabright Brewery, they have a collage of pages from dude-oriented magazines like Maxim, featuring babes in bikinis and the sort jokes that make this column seem tasteful. Women are often surprised to hear about what’s going on in there. “Let me get this straight,” one said, “You’re there in a room full of strange men, wazoo in hand, looking at half-naked women? At some bars you have to pay a cover charge for that.”

         Even graffiti is a welcome diversion from the blank wall. But many restrooms now have tiles from floor to ceiling which make graffiti easy to wipe off. This has given rise to “grout jokes,” which are tiny puns written on the grouting between the tiles. 

         “For A Grout Time Call 555-4567.” “Grout, damned spot!” “God is Grout.” “Groutful Dead.” And the STD special, “Grout Balls of Fire.”

         There are other distractions that appear from time to time. In finer establishments, they may dump stale bar ice in there. You tell me why, but I do know that at 98.6 degrees, you can target and annihilate one cube after another. In an environment fairly devoid of fun, this is about as good as it gets. Even better than the spinner.

         In less fine establishments, some advertiser may put a spinner at the bottom of the urinal. Hydraulic action makes the arrow spins around, eventually stopping at a pie-shaped section that reads, “Have Another Guinness!” or “Only Losers Use Drugs!”

         So the potential for an interesting urinal experience is there; it’s just rarely explored. I think that when I’m crazy rich and having my dream house built, I’m going to get one in my private bathroom. Maybe I’ll attach some sort of shooting gallery and have Mike come over. I’m not sure who else will appreciate it.