This ain't your typical bathroom reading

Every year at about this time, nature abounds with desperate putzes willing to do anything not to spend the month in solitude. Rams deal out unconscionable abuse to each others' skulls. Cats commit acts that would leave Garfield quailing in terror. Amsterdam's canals echo with the battle quacks of mallards fighting frenzied mating wars. Soon, for every pair of lifeforms spawning cute infant versions of themselves, Mother Nature will leave behind a gaggle of jilted, pathetic loners, huddling separately in mossy glens somewhere and feeling that the sole purpose of the cosmos is to single them out for special humiliation.

The human race has somewhat refined this weeding-out process. Males commit horrendous bloodshed less often, crotch-sniffing now comes several stages later in relationships, and the loveless rarely relieve their spiritual suffering by rubbing up against other people's legs. Plus, we've managed to boil down our period of cosmically mocking the lonely to Valentine's Day. This doesn't make the sight of a smiling, hand-holding couple who share long walks, deep thoughts, and simultaneously-contracted flu symptoms any less painful to the partnerless, but there are less agonizing ways to pass the 24 hours of the 14th than did the original Saint Valentine, who was beaten to death with cudgels.

While there's always alcohol or the misanthropic amusement of wandering the streets imagining that all happy couples are about to burst into flames, this hardly satisfies the basic human need for connection that is the central cause of Valentine's Day despair. Fortunately, Yale's basements, bathrooms, and desks offer plenty of verbal companionship for even the most dejected loner; the graffiti scrawled there may reflect boredom, anger, confusion or a puerile sense of humor, but I'll be damned if it's not all desperate for personal attention. Even if the disembodied voices of Ivy League wall-scrawlers don't measure up to the presence of an actual companion, they're certainly more entertaining than the Valentine's Day episodes of most sitcoms, and some examples at least set forth satisfying reasons for the truly dispirited to mentally immolate everybody.

'Throomescent

"When is the best time to cum here to suck hot cock?"
--basement of Woolsey Hall

If you want a quick booster shot to a Valentine's-addled ego, there's nothing better than a visit to the men's room. Any men's room will do. It's comforting that the men's bathroom in Machine City has about the same level of discourse as did the commodes in the bowling alley on the military base where I went to high school. These kinds of weiner-flapping postings are universally easy to feel superior to, whether their author drove a Humvee or wrote a substandard paper about 19th-century American self-improvement kicks.

Even the missives that don't overtly mention the male organ tend to have a hostile tone, like the multiple-location warning that "as of 1/1/99, Yale Divinity will be Yale Dive-In-Me," or the enigmatic "Dog Meat Yellow Lettuce Puke Scum," from the CCL stalls. The effect is that of half-assed psychological warfare targeted at unseen rivals--reading these provides a brand of amusement that is very similar to watching rejected mountain rams train in the off-season by head-butting trees.

Men's rooms aren't 100 percent Attack of the Genitalia, though. Sometimes inter-male hostility is replaced by extra-gender hostility, as in the second floor of Becton's peppy "Q: What does a cannibal do after dumping his girlfriend? A: Wipes his butt!" Sometimes the violence even stops for a moment, as with lengthy poetic verses that appear in Machine City's bathroom and elsewhere. Of course, they're usually surrounded by comments like,"Where is all the hot sex?"

The writings on the walls of women's bathrooms also display aggression, as in the brief-but-catty, "What's new pussycat?"/ "Shut up I'm just trying to take a shit here!!!" sparring match from the CCL ladies' room. However, they're also home to commiserative exchanges, such as one from the first floor of the A&A building about how having sex with lovers-turned-friends can "ruin the intensity of touch." Impressively, the short conversation isn't appended with others' cheap-shot remarks.

It's here, then, that bathrooms can stop being mere tools to help the miserable feel superior to the rest of the wretched mass of human creation and start bringing people together. For example, whoever inscribed the mysterious "not all dentists are weird" in the Machine City women's bathroom needs to get together with the equally odd Mr. "Dog Meat (etc.)" as soon as possible. Even if comparing bathroom graffiti doesn't reveal specific matches for the lonesome, there's romantic hope for virtually anybody, especially if the jerk who wrote "My girl fucked my asshole with her tongue a week ago" in pink ballpoint in the second floor men's room of Street Hall relates anything remotely resembling a fact.

Weenie weedy weeky

"Can you imagine how happy the world would be if everyone was extremely stupid?" --weenie bin No. 19

For those men who remain driven by their ids even after leaving the toilet stall, CCL's weenie bins provide more time to render elaborate vulgarisms. A reply to bin No. 15's question "What else is worth living for?" contends that one of life's major satisfactions is "donkey-punching bitches." Also witness bin No. 12's meticulously drawn cartoon of the come-hither incantation spread-legged naked female while a hovering disembodied phallus sprays in a rainbow arc above her.

Still, a lot of the writing in weenie bins doesn't want to assault its audience as much as win its sympathy. Most scrawlers cut their genital references way down, opting instead for asexual larval-group epigrammatic squirming, with all hostility directed outward: "MBB 301 is fucking hard," "CPS kicks some prep-school ass," and so forth. Reminiscent of the solidarity among children just before their parents ground them, this kind of stuff can provide a heady trip back to the simpler times of youth, especially after you bang your head against the desk to replicate all of your juvenile head injuries.

The desperate quests of the lovelorn also find a voice in weenie bins. Bin No. 14's "I (heart) Jenny R." goes a long way toward tempering its neighbor's donkey-punch remark. It's not the most eloquent expression of love in the world, but it is more comforting than "I came all over the toilet seat 11-15-98," even if it has less in the way of narrative thrust.

Freaks of the world, unite

"This class sucks big donkey schlong."--Dunham 220

Nothing calls the essential purpose of life into question like being trapped in a really dippy class. Large lecture halls leave ample traces of people who felt so isolated in a room of hundreds that they had to scratch things like "[Insert Professor Here] Blows" into their desks. Each desk contains several substrata of inscriptions, tracking backward through the archaeological record, if you will. Scrawled into the woodwork is almost a decade's worth of graduation years, sports teams, college initials, forgotten crushes, frats, records of now-ancient "hot and wet farts," allegations about who "takes it in the can," and sudden realizations that "LSD works," and, of course, assertions that "God is love, love is blind, Ray Charles is blind, Ray Charles is God."

Together with the restroom insults and the weenie bin doodles, this graffiti points to a vital thing to keep in mind during a lonely Valentine's day: no matter how isolated you're feeling, there are always plenty of bigger freaks out there. Perhaps if four of those freaks, all dealing with different brands of misery, can come together over a period of weeks or months and complete a verse from Pavement's "Range Life," as they do on one of the desks in Dunham 220, then maybe it's possible for the Valentine's Day rejects to survive mentally without downing glass after glass of whiskey sour and stumbling down Broadway looking for happy couples to puke at.

Graphic by Sara Edward-Corbett.

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