So...here's the kind of state I moved to.
For lack of any better reading material like emails or snail mails from friends, family or even bill collectors, I was perusing The Smoking Gun's website. (Hey, it beats soap operas!) The following is highly paraphrased and Reader's Digested so as to save on my fingers.
It seems that in a New Hampshire Rest Stop, somewhere around Conway, a woman reported to the ranger there that when she went to the bathroom, a man was staring at her from the "vault". Now, if you're a nice little mid-western kid like me, you may not know what a "vault" is. It seems that these toilets are more like the ones my Gramma in Northern Missouri had in her outhouse. They are plastic, removeable and have a large base and hole that leads directly into a "vault" where the sewage is kept. The ranger came to investigate and saw "a wake" in the fluid of the vault, but no person. He called the police. The policeman interviewed the woman, and then had the rangers give him access to the vault from a manhole cover. When shining his flashlight into the vault, he discovered a man pressed up against the farthest corner, trying to be as invisible as Bert on the old sitcom "Soap". The policeman asked the man to come to the opening twice and arrested him only after he had been "decontaminated". Dude, I so do not blame you. Anyway, when questioned, the suspect - a 45 year old Maine man named Gerald Moody - told police that he had been changing clothes in the women's restroom when he dropped his wedding ring down the toilet. It was a very expensive ring, he explained, and he would be in serious trouble if he went home without it (but I'm sure she'd be understanding of this, right?). So he crawled through the toilet into the vault to retrieve it. The police asked why he hadn't used the men's room and he told them it was busy at the time (I have never figured out how come men have only half the amount of stalls we do - don't they have bashful bladders, too? Who wants to pee in front of others? Then again, they write their name in snow, so...). Later, when EMT's were looking over Mr. Moody (they waited until his decontamination, too), they pointed out that he had a cut on his foot. He waved them away saying "It's all right, I was wearing waders." At this point, Mr. Observant Policeman pointed out to ol' Gerry there that he wasn't wearing waders when he came out of the vault. Gerry said he left them in there. But where did the waders come from, Mr. Observant-why-me-Lord?-Policeman asked. Well, apparently after he dropped his ring, he went to his truck and got out his waders, water shoes and an extra shirt. Why didn't he use that opportunity to report the lost ring to the ranger on duty, Mr. Observant-the-guys-aren't-gonna-believe-this-one Policeman asked? Ol' Murky Moody had no answer.
The vault was pumped a day or two later so that the Policeman who should get hazard pay could collect evidence. Waders, water shoes, an extra shirt and some socks were found. No wedding ring was ever recovered.
So I wanna know...at any point during his arrest, interview and subsequent booking, did this guy ever, just once to the great glee and amusement of the entire force of State Troopers, mutter "Oh, shit."?
And if you're gonna go to the trouble of having waders, water shoes and a really disgusting "special area of interest", couldn't you at least have brought a better story along, too?
I used to live in a cosmopolitan city where I would sit in Polish coffee shops where the bathroom walls had grafiti by Columbia students hypothesizing Sartre-esque theories and notating geometric equations which I still don't know what they were supposed to be. Now, I live in a state where men carry waders and hang out in Rest Stop Vaults.
Rain, rain, go away
Come again after a really long delay (shall we say...March?)
I swear that I
will poke my eye (with a pointy stick)
if I have to stay locked up in this house with a toddler and Elmo one moe single day!
