So I'm minding my own business at the Whitney on Sunday, looking at arts, buying a pewter pretzel from the Art-O-Mat, basking in the soft, unsettling glow of Jenny Holzer's LEDs, doing other important things, when I had to pee. Maybe 4 years of going to a school that's attached to some of the least offensive museum bathrooms ever warped me, or softened me, or something, but WOW was I unprepared for the dystopian wasteland that is the Whitney Museum of American Art's ladies' room. It's like, one minute I'm staring at a stack of vacuums that Jeff Koons transformed into over 11 million dollars, the next minute I'm standing in a centimeter of toilet water in a decrepit highway rest stop. It's like some kind of really messed up portal that transports you from highbrow to sewer rat in under a second. Poof! Restroom of the post-apocalypse! But the shock of entering this damp hell isn't the important part of my rambling story. You see, I'm not one of those people who starts at the first stall right by the door. I like to pee in seclusion. So I was in the stall NEXT to the first stall, and I heard a steady-ish stream of ladies (I assume they were ladies) enter the first stall, make some sort of declaration or sound indicating disgust/repulsion, and then quickly find another stall. I was washing my hands (this brings me to the question as to why some women feel totally justified in spraying their urine all over a toilet seat and then have the balls to not even pretend to wash their hands, but that's another story for another day) when I saw an older woman open the stall and literally jump back. At this point, the restroom attendant, who had previously been chattering away on a headset while wiping up the sink area, entered the stall and stopped cold. "Hold on," she said, presumably to whomever was on the other end of her headset, "Oh, hell no. OH, HEEEEELLLLL NO." Then she burst into laughter, and exited the restroom. I had to look! I had to. This restroom was a wet, urine-soaked nightmare, what could possibly shock a woman who casually hangs out in a centimeter of piss-water all day? Let me tell you, friends, and I am not exaggerating: that log was the size of my forearm. It floated blissfully at the top of the bowl, the water just at that "oh no, please don't overflow, please please surface tension" level. The weirdest part? The water was clear. Like, no pee, no toilet paper. How did I have time to soak in all this detail, you ask? This image is seared into my brain. I could probably start a support group for the other ladies who walked in on Terror Log that day, I'm sure some of them are experiencing flashbacks, too. But I digress. So... it was just this single, gigantor-log, floating in a pristine, full to capacity bowl of toilet water. So here's my question: was this some weird neo-Dada thing? Some kind of weird reference to Chris Ofili's work - because that thing could have DEFINITELY come out of an elephant... All I know is this: ladies' rooms are nasty enough without people leaving gigantic mystery logs on display for all to witness (I'm talking to you, non-hand-washing seat-pissers). The Whitney bathrooms do NOT need help in the nastification department. They were doing quite well without your help, log lady (no no no, not that log lady). The best part of the story, in my opinion, is the follow up: my sister-in-law went to the restroom of horror a while later, not knowing my harrowing tale of repulsion and arm-sized excrement, and reported that "the first stall had caution tape across the door in an X." That's right, the log won. It claimed the stall for the country of crap. Poop FTW.
