Bathroom Break
About The Newsletter, And An Excerpt From Razorback (With Discussion)
To begin, I want to issue a firm thank you to everyone who has already subscribed to what is still the early building blocks of this newsletter. I have always had a wonderful network of friends and collaborators, and it is great to reconnect with people when it is time to roll out a new project or venture!
For my new followers and old friends alike, I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to Carter Ettore’s Agitarius, and set some expectations for things to come. My flagship goal for this outlet is to release my new work, Carter Ettore’s Agitarius: Unabridged 12 Month Astrological Guidance as a free, serialized novel living on Substack. The final paperback physical version will probably vary slightly, but the incentive for those who enjoy a little absurd, humorous release from the punishing agitations of their day-to-day life will be seeing this story evolve and climax over the course of a number of months. The name of the newsletter is Agitarius, but I have a lot of other arms warming up in the bullpen that aren’t strictly related to that particular project.
One of those arms is an ongoing discussion about, and sharing excerpts from my first novel, Razorback (2021). Again, huge thanks to so many of you who have already picked up the book on paperback or Kindle! For new followers or anyone who has not fully paddled their way through the yellowwater rapids of Razorback, of course, I encourage you to snare yourself a copy on the double. Every Kindle page-read and small paperback royalty helps this independent writer keep his fingers tapping away.
There will be more background on the Agitarius farcical horoscope project, short stories, and conversations regarding unpacking the symbolism (and real life inspiration) in Razorback to come. But for now, I will leave you with some commentary—and an excerpt from—chapter four, “Bursting Urethra” (page 25) of Razorback.
The quick background on Part Two of the book, is that Leon goes on what is supposed to be a nice, calm, enjoyable trip to an aquarium with his wife, who he calls “Pickle”. Leon—a ritualistic day-drinker, and habitual “over-analyzer”—finds himself unable to urinate after an uncomfortable encounter with a dolphin in this first chapter. Later he is delighted to discover a well-spring of preposterously underpriced beer at 10am in a cafeteria that is overrun by children, is tormented by a plenteous population of non-marine invasive species and dragonflies, and gets sucked into a philosophical whirlpool of questioning the nature of nipples and mermaids.
“Bursting Urethra” doesn’t really expose much of the recurring symbolism in Razorback that will help you determine what Leon’s true fate might be upon the conclusion (how’s that for a teaser), but it strikes on a few basics of the structure of Leon, and the book. For one, Leon is somewhat childish and immature—and, so too may be the author himself. You will see it here in Leon’s paralyzing obsession with his penis, and bladder, and piss, as well as the kid at the end gleefully celebrating what is sure to be an exciting poop. Yeah, it’s supposed to be silly and slightly off-putting, but here’s the uncomfortable truth folks are hesitant to admit in a hypersensitive post-Millennial world: guys are fascinated, entertained, tormented, and traumatized with that bizarre extension of… our selves (?) that is buried in our trousers. And poop. Which, hopefully isn’t also buried in our trousers. But, Razorback is much less about poop than pee. Just to clear that up and make you more comfortable.
The inspiration for this section of the book certainly comes from… the real world, shall we say. For one, as just mentioned, “highbrow bathroom humor” is highly relatable to a lot of people—men and women—though they may never admit it in polite company. And, more specifically, when you are a booze-hound, the bathroom becomes a much more relevant part of your life than to a lot of other people. It is tormenting, and sometimes an embarrassment, but it can also lead to a lot of funny self-deprecating stories of failure and suffering to be enjoyed later with like-minded friends. Toilet humor is not remotely my goal; but, dumb-as-nails, honest, humorous real-world life experiences are. Finally, I did go to an aquarium once where the bathrooms had a glass wall that looked into the enormous shark tank. But it was over the sink, and not nearly as enormous as the one in Leon’s world. Personally, I would relish the opportunity to urinate while staring at a dolphin!
Enough said! Enjoy chapter four of Razorback, “Bursting Urethra”.
Razorback, Bursting Urethra (page 25)
The long, pale white proboscis aimed straight toward Leon as he unzipped his fly and revealed himself, warily, to the two beady black eyes level with his return gaze. Floating anonymously in quiet judgment, those squinty little perpendicularly mounted marbles were unflinching, as if to say, I know what you are doing.
Leon wondered if the dolphin was trying to urinate as well but was finding it difficult because some bleary-eyed terrestrial cousin was staring at him, holding its penis. Leon paid money for this. The dolphin, captive though he may have been, had not. Leon couldn’t figure out which of them was the most humiliated and taken advantage of. He hoped his wife was doing alright with all this madness in her own bathroom, given a woman’s tendency to acquire “urinary tract infections” at the mere gaze upon a freshly revealed, glistening proboscis.
The restroom was of average size for a public men’s room, with three stalls in the rear corner, and four urinals next to them along the same wall. The main difference was that very nearly the entirety of the toilet and urinal wall was not any typical wall at all, but, in fact, it was floor to ceiling—nearly one entire side of the thirty-foot-deep dolphin tank. The overall effect was rather marvelous; the entire bathroom bathed in a soft blue glow, with the glimmer of light flickering from the surface, one story above the bathroom in the tank itself. Standing at the urinals, looking straight into the aquatic abyss, had a remarkably diuretic effect on the human body. Prior to walking into this particular restroom, Leon felt a remote, but not critical, sensation in his bladder. Upon walking into this particular restroom, Leon felt an onrushing surge of floodwater that needed to be addressed with great haste. It was a shockingly fast tidal change. Indeed, surprising. The added effect of gurgles and trickles and bubbles, from an audio loop emanating from hidden speakers in the bathroom, did not help to dike the onrush of nature’s imminent flow.
Leon felt like his penis was about to explode. Not to be confused with the general feeling we all know and recognize—man, woman, or child—of simply being overwhelmed with the urge to urinate. There was a legitimate, measurable difference between having one’s teeth floating and having one’s penis about to spray all over the place. When your teeth are floating, it’s certainly no laughing matter. Basically, it means your insides are about to merge with your outsides. It’s akin to a dam, meant to keep the lake behind it in place, suddenly cracking and being shaken loose from its ample foundation in the deep bedrock below. The dam often shakes and shudders before the break, threatening to release the onrush of its forcibly contained profusion into the unready channels and rivers downstream, eventually leading to its final escape: ocean. However, when your penis is about to explode, it is an entirely different matter altogether. Instead of the dam shaking and cracking slowly, setting off nearby seismometers and warning folks in the surrounding plains to head upland, the sluicing has already more than commenced. The dam has been broken, the surrounding stream has been overwhelmed, and the wall of water is mere moments away from its violent confluence at the river delta; unleashing a drench of muddied ejecta into the stoic, ever-ready sea.
Surprisingly, as uncomfortable as this all was, it was highly fortunate that the place where Leon encountered this bladder overwhelm was, indeed, a bathroom. Except, tragically, for the nature of the bathroom.
The glimmering blue light, the multi-channel digital surround sound glugs, gurgles, and trickles; it was all too much for Leon. He rushed to the urinal to expedite his aqueous evacuation, where he was then confronted with the ultimate mental barricade against the vanquishing of this most primal of all natural instincts.
The dolphin.
The dolphin stared into Leon as he stared back into the eons of superior mammalian evolution, distilled into two sorrowful, squinty black eyeballs. Suddenly, he couldn’t make any juice.
Like a truck jackknifing on the highway in a blizzard.
Like a .45 caliber bullet meeting a Kevlar sheath.
Like a meteor, traveling for millennia, propelled unhindered through the impossibly empty vacuum of space at twenty-five thousand miles per hour, only to be halted in one cataclysmic instant by a hard blue marble a million times its mass.
That was Leon’s bladder in the dolphin can.
Dolphins—as Leon was led to believe from his entire life of public schooling and cable science channel short-program documentaries—were the supreme intelligent species among all species of creature walking, swimming, and/or scuttling across the sublunary world. Humans were, at best, second or (probably) third on the list of smartest and most capable animals if you were to believe B-grade cable programming. As long as Leon could remember, from the diaper to the urinal, the supposed jaw-dropping, unquestionable intelligence of dolphins was hammered into his head. And now, thirty-odd years into his exhausting trudge along the mortal coil, here he was; face-to-face with his arguably evolutionary superior—the dolphin—kinda-sorta in the same room together, separated by a foot-thick wall of ballistic acrylic, with his urethra about to burst open like a liquid shotgun.
If Leon’s urethra did burst, thus forth soiling his pants and shoes with the certain splash back, it would have required an immediate exit and subsequent forfeiture of the damned near eighty dollars Leon and his wife just shelled out to see, essentially, a warehouse full of fish. Luckily, the abysmal stare of King Neptune’s eldest of sons was enough to staunch the piss flow from Leon’s urethra into his bootcut jeans. Unfortunately, the dramatic and abrupt staunching of piss flow came with great sacrifice.
Any guy who has ever commenced a good, hard piss or ejaculation only to abruptly staunch it mid-stream knows the usual result.
Sharp, indescribable, debilitating pain made worse by the overwhelming sensation that you are actually in the process of urinating—or ejaculating—when indeed you are not.
Leon’s stomach cramped; he wrenched his torso and hips in a fight against the pain. He assumed this avalanche of pains and physical distress was how it felt to pass a kidney stone; or be outfitted with a catheter; or swallow a tumbler of kerosene followed by a handful of lit kitchen matches. He knew the moment had passed. If he was going to piss, it was not going to be now, and it was not going to be in this particular restroom, staring into the omniscient eternity of the squinty black dolphin eyeballs. Still, Leon dared not shuffle away from the urinal, frightened that he would quickly, uncontrollably, actually begin pissing down his pant legs. In fact, it felt like he already was pissing, but he was not! Was he at least dribbling? He had to be. How could it possibly feel like this when nothing was actually happening down there?
The dolphin continued to float there on the other side of the acrylic barrier, staring at him like an overly observant bathroom attendant. Son of a bitch, thought Leon. For all this attention, I should at least get a couple loose smokes or a spritz of cologne.
Eventually, Leon pulled up his pants and mustered enough courage to shuffle over to a toilet stall. He yanked out a wad of toilet paper from the dispenser and jammed it into his underwear, the makeshift diaper more or less encompassing his member. At the very least, if he began to drip uncontrollably, there would be something to sop up the mess before he could find a restroom with less intelligent lifeforms staring back at him. Turtles would be good.
The door opened, and a man walked in with a kid, maybe around four or seven years old.
“Whoa, Sammy,” exclaimed the father when they saw the dolphin. “They weren’t kidding!”
“Holy moly,” exclaimed Sammy. “Can I watch him while I poop?”
The father looked up at Leon and laughed, half embarrassed, and gave a shrug.
Leon did not smile, and instead stared back at him with the same stunned, vacant eyes of a man with a softball-sized wad of toilet tissue compressed into his underpants who had just witnessed a vivid vision of how, when, and where he would meet his final demise.