It’s a little crude, (I apologize mom) but I was sitting in the bathroom stall at the Buckingham Golf Club, located off the western shore of Clearlake. It is a small bathroom and the latch on the stall door is broken. That always makes me nervous and I am trying to take care of business quickly before someone comes barging in on me. I can’t help but notice the graffiti written on the stall door. What possess people to leave their mark on the wall of a public restroom? While I’m thinking on this I realize it might be why I write. I am leaving my mark, an indelible idea, scratched on the mind of the reader. The bathroom author wrote at eye level, “Beware of limbo dancers.” I did glance down just to assure myself no one was limboing nearby, and they wrote at the bottom of the door, “LOL made you look.” It kept me amused for a moment, until I started thinking about what I might write, on a bathroom stall? Maybe something short but inspirational. “Life is like toilet paper, finite, use sparingly.” 
So I make a mental agreement to pay attention to the bathroom graffiti I come across in my travels. A week or so later I find myself at Aldo’s in Capitola; the bathroom graffiti artist drew a large circle, inside the circle it instructed, “Bang head here when out of paper!” Not that I tried, but you could bang your head in the circle, from the seated position. At the gas station in Napa I found a short notation, “I’m out of gas.” (Get it?) Then I noticed in the facilities at the Outback Steakhouse, a sophisticated eatery in the Pruneyard, someone wrote, “If bored, text a random number, I hid the body…what next?” The best one had to be in the restroom at the dog beach along highway 1. “Friendship is like peeing on yourself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings.” Dog people will understand. Or my favorite of all time, “I’ll be right back…Jesus.” My only advice to any future bathroom graffiti artist is to be responsible and use washable markers.
What have you seen on the walls of a bathroom stall? Share in the comments…
Living in the Gap 