Oh yeah, Carnacki? How `bout this?
Being a dad, I found Carnack's diary to be sweet and cute. He found himself in a pretty bad situation for entirely innocent reasons. That hardly describes the nature of our situation.
I thought that you might find this interesting, or maybe more long than it is interesting, or maybe more disgusting than it is long. All that having been said, it goes without saying that I'm a bad person for having written it, but you are a worse one for reading any more of it.
One of my many jobs many years ago was to clean and paint dormitories for a large state university over the summertime. They made great money of off renting campus dorms out to various summer camps, and that greatly offset the price of them for the college students during the regular year.
Each camp had its own set of peculiarities. The tweenager football and soccer camps were reasonably well behaved. There was one exception where one time they drank out of a garden house, which was clearly marked, "do not drink." It was full of fertilizer so they all went back to their dorm and puked in their wastebaskets for a day or two. The cheerleaders we generally well behaved, except that they left stringy, glittery crap everywhere after they left, which took a lot of work to police. By far the worse were the square dancers. They were adults who drank and partied all night, another story.
The bible thumpers had a coed camp. They were easy enough on the cleaning staff, but they consistently took over a nearby graveyard at night for purposes of fornication, and this put a strain on the security resources. A lot of these tweenagers crossed several states to get to this camp, as it was rather large. One unfortunate boy made the whole trip without the benefit of a single bowel movement.
This boy found himself, a day or so after arrival, at the doorstep of a girl's dorm. Entry was strictly forbidden to him by Tracy (I never did know her real name, but odds are better that 50:50 her name was Tracy). Tracy was enforcing the "no boys in the girl's dorm at all" rule. Bear in mind these dorms had public lobbies complete with his and hers rooms. The poor boy was given the option to walk about a mile across campus, where the boy's dorm was waiting to accommodate him. Begging forbearance, he would not budge. After a protracted dispute, Tracy formed a plan with the other female counselors, where an advance team would lead the evacuation of the boy's room they already had, and a guard would be posted to make sure that no girls would enter. They admitted the poor boy.
A half hour later that night, Bill was just sitting down to dinner when he got the call.
"Bill, there's been a terrible accident. Please come right away!"
Bill was the manager of all building and grounds crews. He was a brilliant refrigerator repair man, but an even better union leader, so the suits kicked him upstairs, necessitating his removal from the union. I was told that he was also decorated by Admiral Nimitz for getting some guys threw several flooded and inverted decks, another story. He asked, "What's wrong?"
They would not answer. "Just come right away!" He knew they were afraid of scaring him off the after hours job. Others would ask if they knew who and what Bill was, but Bill's sole concern was for the welfare of his campers. Bill left his dinner on the table and went in immediately.
They took him to the bathroom the boy had used. He stepped in, stepped out, rubbed his eyes and stepped back in again. There was a four foot wide swath of fecal material on the ceiling of the bathroom, and matching fecal material everywhere else, too. Tracey told him the story, and took responsibility.
Normally, Bill would have gotten written up for doing actual cleaning, as he was supposed to make somebody else do it. As there was nobody else, he started with a mop bucket full of water.
Three buckets of water later, Bill called the dorm janitor in from home to help Bill find come rubber gloves. The janitor told him where they were. Every time, when he thought he finished, he would find more little piles of it, in the corners, behind the mirror, throughout the radiator. He just couldn't believe it!
When he finally got home, he couldn't eat his dinner.
Carnacki's diary, perhaps no longer the shittiest ever, reminded me of this even though it happened many, many years ago. That got me to thinking about the general metaphor of shittiness, and how deep is the shit that BushCo has now put us in. I talk to people from other countries frequently, and in turn they get the news more directly from abroad. My Republican friends do seem to have a sense that we are in deep shit, but also seem quite clueless about how deep it is.
Mostly for my Republican friends, and in honor of my Carnacki, my intellectual progenitor, here's the Carnacki Fecality Categorization System. This should my friends understand what a lethal fecality is:
Carnacki Fecality Categorization System
Category 0: A small little accident that can be easily cleaned up or ignored with the resources of a small number of people and is not documented.
Category 1: A major incident requiring a hazardous materials team response from a local area. This kind makes the papers and the blogs. Carnacki's incident is an example.
Category 2: An interstate incident requiring a response from state and local governments from at least two states. A big rain in Milwaukee that makes the people in Chicago complain is such a fecality.
Category 3: An incident of national scope requiring the resources of many states, and, hopefully, coordination by a federal authority to counter the lethal fecality. These are at their worse when no coordination occurs. NOLA, is such an example.
Category 4: An incident of international scope where entire nations are in deathly fear of eventually being found downhill from the fecal avalanche, and it is a certainly that no earthly power can save them. These are usually caused by a plan that is apeshit mental. A response from the International community is required. But most people can only pray.
Category 5: What happens when China stops lending the apeshit mental power money, and begins the repo work.
There is no Category 6 because the platform of fecality breaks up and falls into the sun. Shortly thereafter, Dick "deficits don't matter" Cheney is proven right.
Yes, things are shitty. But shittiness is always a matter of degree, and the degree is currently very high.