I'd only gotten about four blocks from the greasy spoon of a cafe by Emily's apartment in Logan Square when it hit me like a knife in the stomach. I literally had to stop waling, for even the slightest move would have let something dangerous loose. Anybody paying close attention to me surely got a laugh while I leaned up against the wall with my ass cheeks clinched as tightly as possible, grimacing in pain.

I looked around, but didn't see a safe place to go rid of this disaster in my stomach.

Now, this is quite possibly one of the worst things about being in a big city; the lack of readily available public restrooms. Hardly any gas stations, fast food restaurants and drug stores offer easily-accessible bathrooms. This has a lot to do with them being abused by homeless people (damn homeless people, they totally ruin the public restroom concept for everybody else). The only exception being Starbucks, which universally offer bathrooms that are perfect for public use. They're never locked, usually pretty well-kept, and Starbucks' are usually so busy that nobody ever notices you walk in, use the bathroom, then walk right back out without buying anything. But the neighborhood I'm in is just outside the Starbucks-every-two-blocks section of Chicago, so I'm screwed.

It should be noted that I have qualms with being noticed during my serial restroom usage. Call me old fashioned, but I still feel a little guilty/awkward going into a place like of which I'm not a patron — a restaurant, bar or coffee shop — just to take a shit. It's kind of a standard I live by. I usually just hold it until I get home. Because you know what? People know what you're up to when you do such a thing. They notice. Hell, I notice when people do it. It's like this big taboo, though. We never acknowledge it. We all kind of just go about our business when it happens. When people walk into a place, go directly to the bathroom, stay in there for five minutes, then walk right back out without even pretending to buy anything. Sure, nobody walks out of the bathroom and says "hey everybody, I just took a huge smelly dump in there and most of you are going to have to smell for the next 10 to 15 minutes." But we all know that's pretty much what went down.

Well, as I was standing on the sidewalk in agonizing pain looking for an easy place to quickly dump my intestinal garbage, I noticed I was leaning up against a semi-dirty Mexican joint (the type of which there is about 4,000 in Logan Square) and thought "well, fuck the rules. This shit's gotta come out."

So I barge confidently into the joint, locate the men's bathroom, and head directly for it. Out of the corners of my eyes, I notice lots of innocent women and children eyeballing me. They see me utterly disregard the hostess, they recognize that I have not taken my coat off and surely understand that my presence at 2 Amigos will be felt (or smelt) for a much longer period of time than I was actually there.

Once I get to the pint sized john, I let loose, and let me tell you, it was glorious...a glory one can only feel when they release three pounds excrement from their bodies in less an a minute. At first I'm semi-impatient and consider trying to pull off one of those quickie dumps that you can be easily confused with really long pees, but the damage has already been done, so I decide to make myself comfortable and really let everything out.

After about five minutes it was all done, I cleaned myself up, collected my composure, and headed back out to face the crowd. Each of them (or so it seemed) took a break from their bean eating and chatting and looked right at me with chagrin.

They knew.

I almost wanted to say sorry, but what good what that have done? None. So I just kept my head down, headed for the door and hoped nobody recognized me.