The Bathroom Door of Town

The people of Town had a broken door.
The door wouldn't open.
Normally, this wouldn't be a huge problem.
Except this door was the only entry point, and for that matter exitry point, to the bathroom.
And the people of Town were going into the ocean to pee and poop.
It was getting to be a hassle.
Plus, Greg said "Hey, after a while of us peeing and pooping in the ocean, won't we stop wading out into the ocean to pee and poop and just be wading out in other people's pee and poop?" 
No, not exactly, Greg, but that thought was enough to light a fire under the people to get the broken door fixed.

Pete was mayor of Town.
He looked at the door.
And he made speeches to the people.
"My Fellow Townies," he said, "this door blah blah blah," and other words that politicians say when they want people to believe something is being done.

Pete and his advisers looked at the door.
They tried to open the door.
It opened just a little bit, but then stopped.
"Well I'm stumped," Pete said.

Pete got the people of Town to vote on a tax that would pay for a new door.
Obviously the door was broken, and a new one would open unlike this old door.
The people, eager to stop wading in their own waste, agreed to the tax.
This would allow the bathroom door to open, and then the People of Town could stop standing in ocean-watery shit all the time.

The people were taxed.
Workers were hired to replace the door.
And, after turning the five-lane highway into a one-lane highway for 8 months during peak driving times without any sign of work being done, one day, seemingly overnight, the door was replaced with a new door.
It had that New Door smell.
And the People of Town rejoiced.

Pete addressed them.
"Today, is a day that will yadda yadda yadda."
And the people pushed on the door.
It opened a little, but then stopped.
Just like the old door.
What?
The door had been fixed.
It had been replaced.
We were all going to be able to go to the bathroom, the people of Town collectively seemed to think together.
Well, apparently not.  This door worked as unwell as the last door.
And the People of Town had to continue to wade out into the ocean of excrement to do their business.

Pete was voted out of office.
Sheila was voted into office.
Sheila made speeches about fixing the door.
She didn't need to visit the door.
We all knew it was broken, and it needed fixing.
She proposed another tax to pay for another door from a different door construction corporation.
That, Sheila promised, would fix our door problem.

The people of Town voted for the tax.
They paid for a different corporation to block traffic for 8 years.
And at the end of it, they had not only forgotten that a tax had been imposed on them, but they also saw a brand new door on the bathroom of Town.
Hooray, they all said, and they even spelled it "hooray" rather than "hurray" because "hooray" is the better way to spell it and "hurray" just looks stupid and only dumb people spell it that way.  But nobody was really hopeful.
It had been so long since the door had actually worked nobody really remembered what it was like to pee and poop in the bathroom.  Nobody really remembered what the bathroom looked like.  Fewer and fewer people were around who could remember what it was like to actually have access to the bathroom.  And with every passing year that the bathroom wasn't accessible, hope for a functioning door faded.  At this point, years had passed, and hope was just an old man, sitting in the corner, having overstayed his welcome at the party, having consumed too many drinks, and now the hosts of the party were left wondering why Hope was still around and how the hell do we get him out of the kitchen so we can feel comfortable going to sleep?  Didn't this party end a long time ago?  Why does he still have a bottle of whiskey?  And why the hell is Hope drinking whiskey?  Seems out of character.

So, at last, the new door was there.
And Sheila said words that, essentially, reduced to Elect Me Again.
And a semi-big ceremony happened where they drank cheap champagne and wore rented tuxedos.
And a genuine ribbon made out of imitation, processed ribbon spread was used and cut with oversized novelty scissors.
And then Sheila pushed on the door.
It opened a little, and then stopped.

And the people weren't really surprised.
They had been through it before.
And Sheila blamed the other political party.
They were to blame.
And somehow children were involved.  They needed to be educated so that doors could be fixed.
And somehow evil people were trying to hurt the people of Town.  Terrorists, or maybe immigrants.  Certainly the atheists were to blame, they want chaos.
And somehow it all tied into the broken bathroom door.
Which still didn't work.

And the People of Town kinda gave up on having a working door.
What was the point?  It wasn't going to work, and nobody was going to get it fixed.
Let's focus on more positive things, things we actually have control over.
Like... oh, I dunno... videos of cats jumping off bookshelves, or the latest episode of According To Jim.
And they did.
Did you see that one where Larry Joe sat down and farted, but he blamed it on the pleather couch?  Hysterical!


Brandon was just a boy when he found himself in the bathroom of Town.
He had been playing hide and seek with his friends, and he found this super good crack in the wall, and, of course, he crawled into it.
And just beyond the reach of the outside light, inside this crack, Brandon found The Bathroom.
He had sorta heard his legal guardian/step-something talk about it with her new lover/insurance salesman, but he didn't really listen to them much.  They didn't have much to say that was important ("Did you see the one where Larry Joe was fat and did something fatty?  Hysterical!").  And he didn't really care too much about current events, like bathrooms.
But here he was.
In the Bathroom of Town.
It was kinda dusty and dark in the bathroom.  It hadn't been used for a very, very long time.
It sorta looked dated, like it was built in a different time with a different mindset.
When people put thought into things like faucets.
And shapes of toilet seats.
And making things strong so that they don't break.
Break... wasn't there something broken in here?
Oh... maybe the door?  Is the door broken?
Brandon went over to the door.

It was far away from the window, in the darkest part of the bathroom, and Brandon had to wait for his eyes to adjust before he could make out the door and it's silvery handle.
He pulled on the handle.
The door opened a little.
And then stopped.
And he heard a very slight crunch.
He looked to where the crunch was heard, and he noticed another shiny something.
It looked like a zipper pull?
As his eyes adjusted more, he could tell that the zipper pull belonged to a zipper, which belonged to a hoodie, which was hung on the back of the bathroom door.
The zipper pull had fallen in between the door and the inside door jamb, and was getting stuck in that space in such a way that it was preventing the door from opening completely.
Brandon removed the hoodie.
He pulled on the silvery bathroom door handle.
The door opened a little.
Then the door opened completely.

Brandon smiled as he put together what he knew about the history of this door.
The door had worked at one time.
Then the door didn't work.
And Brandon guessed it stopped working when the owner of the hoodie very honestly forgot the hoodie on the back of the bathroom door.
Sometimes things can get intense in a bathroom, and it was very possible that somebody had taken off the hoodie in haste in order to properly take care of business, and then when the relief of Business Taken Care Of arrived, it was equally as possible that the hoodie had been completely forgotten, hanging on the back of the door.
Where the zipper fell into the space between the door and the jamb.
And the hoodie zipper caused the door not to work.
And workers had been hired to fix the door.
The door had been replaced several times.
And each time, Brandon guessed, the workers had simply replaced the hoodie back on the new door because it had been there when they arrived so it must belong there.  The workers hadn't been hired to create a working door, after all, they had only been hired to replace the old door, which they did.  Making the door actually work wasn't their job.

Brandon was kinda excited, because he was certain he had just done a good thing.
People had lost hope about the bathroom door for so long, maybe now it would be cool to stop swimming in their own waste and actually use the bathroom like it had been designed to function.
Maybe the People of Town could have hope again.
But mostly Brandon felt good because it feels good to actually solve problems and be self-sufficient.
Brandon was smart and good and felt good about himself for helping others.

When Brandon got home, he told his guardian-salespeople/step-whatevers about what had happened to him today.
They grounded him for breaking and entering into a public building.
They grounded him double for taking a hoodie that didn't belong to him (oh yeah, Brandon had taken the hoodie from the bathroom hoping to return it to its owner, making him a theif in the eyes of step-insurance salesguardians).
Then, the female authority figure shamed him for being bad and thoughtless.
Then, the male authority figure pushed him down and around for being dumb.
They then reported what Brandon told them to the police so that they proper authority figures could take care of this issue.
The Hoodie was made an example of, and political commentators said that the hoodie was just as much to blame for the broken door as the broken door itself.
Just look what happens when you wear a Hoodie!
And people took sides, for the Hoodie or against the Hoodie.
Black Hoodies Matter, after all.
And some people wanted to find the owner of the Hoodie, and they set up charities so that people could give money to blah blah blah and assuage their guilt about not doing anything actually helpful.
And the police told the new mayor of Town about the bathroom and the door and the hoodie and the crack in the wall and... Braden?  Brenden?  Something like that.  He's just a kid.
And the mayor realized there was a crack problem.
Children were playing with crack, and a War on Crack was declared.
And the first step was to remove the crack.
So the wall and everything around the wall was demolished.
And secretly, the mayor was thankful that nobody realized that the crack was actually surrounded by the bathroom that no politician or adult could find a way to get into.  The mayor was thankful that nobody remembered the bathroom was a good thing for the town and the people.  The mayor was thankful they didn't remember that no solution was discovered for the problem-- the problem of a hoodie zipper getting in the way of opening to door-- by the people who had been elected, hired and promoted to fix the problem.  It was embarrassed that tax money had been spent on something that didn't actually work, and then thing that did actually work was a child playing a child game. 

A child who didn't care about politics or money.
A child who just wanted to fix a problem.

Well thank Christ that child was no more.
Was it legal to burn children anymore?  No?
Well, can we incarcerate him?  Maybe?  He is, obviously, smart.  Surely we can use that to say that he should be tried as an adult, right?
And then we can lock him up for a long time, yeah?
Oh good.
That'll work.

And the mayor of Town told the people that a new tax had to be paid in order to properly prosecute Brecken, the black boy... he isn't black?  He's half Hispanic, half Russian?  That's kinda black, isn't it?  And definitely communist... Blappen, the Black Communist boy who played with crack and illegally crossed our borders in order to steal our jobs away from us good, hard-working tax-payers of Town. 
There are real problems, People.
And your tax dollars will fix these real problems.
And the people weren't even given the option of voting for the tax increase anymore.
Because taxes are needed to pay for goods and services that help the people of Town.
They were just told taxes were going to happen.
And it happened.
Please focus on what you can control, like backyard wrestling videos and Angry Birds.

And Brandon sat in a jail cell for years while people tried to figure out how to prosecute him.  Can you prosecute a communist in a free-market society?  Nobody could remember from their economics class if that was something you could do or not, and nobody had kept their textbooks past the end of the semester, so there was no way to check if that was even a possibility.
And the long-forgotten bathroom and its long-forgotten broken/fixed door were something almost nobody thought about.
And when they did, it was sorta like remembering the Ed Sullivan Show, or Walter Cronkite and Integrity in Journalism, and television quiz programs that actually awarded knowledge rather than awarding grown-ass adults who are willing to eat a handful of maggots in order to win a stainless steel juicer, and walking to school, and exercise, and reasonable portions of food, and spending time with your family, and valuing education, and working toward the good of everyone in the country rather than the profit of the individual's bank account.  It was a dusty thought, an old thought.  A thought that really had no place in today's world.  A thought of times past.  Like Rome.  It wasn't really even worth thinking about.
There were real problems, People.
Thinking thoughts wouldn't help fix those problems, People.

But I know how to fix your problems.
My Fellow Townies,
I am just a simple blogger
I come from humble beginnings
And blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda.