MARKS OF BRILLIANCE

I spent an hour on the toilet, reading all the graffiti that the avid coffee-drinking bohemians scribbled onto the stall walls. Hundreds of people who think to whip out a pen while pissing or shitting and play Shakespeare, scrawling rhyme and reason onto a filthy, germ-addled divider. Wonderful stuff. So much to learn. College, sans debt and debauchery.
I almost wished I had a tape recorder with me, so I could read it all aloud and listen to it later, when in need of life-guiding wisdom. Especially in love. You’d think with everyone divorcing and breaking up and cheating on one another and sinking into deep depressions because their hearts are tattered and torn-- that there would be a significant lack of romantic wisdom. You’d be wrong. Apparently, all the good ones are lonely. Most likely because they spend all their goddamn time in bathroom stalls talking about loving correctly instead of actually doing it. "Love not, lest ye be loved yourself" was my favorite.
Political statements battled for space next to informative revelations about local figures: "End Dubya’s Tyranny"; "Jimmy sucks it hard"; "Politicians are domestic terrorists"; "Mandy takes it in the (someone scribbled over the last word, but I have a pretty solid idea of where exactly she takes it)"; "White man got a God complex"; "Jody is a slut". I found myself torn between wanting to right the social and political injustices inflicted upon we, the people, and finding this “Mandy” to see if she’d let a curious girl like me put something in her scribbled-over locale.
The last thing to take in was the artwork: most of it terrible, most of it crude drawings of genitalia. “Big ones”, as the artists would write next to them, arrows leading you to the drawing, in case you had somehow missed the enormous outlined penis dripping little permanent marker drops of something down the wall. There were nude women laying on dice and martini glasses, smiley faces and odd, random portraits, doodles of devils and astrological symbols, and, of course, an untrained hand’s rendition of Bart Simpson telling me to eat his underwear.
"I want to be a part of this culture," I tell myself, "this Berlin Wall in the bathroom."” I want to leave a legacy behind for future toilet readers. I want to communicate with the rest of the world as anonymously as the rest of these aspiring geniuses. I lift my pants from my ankles and start digging into my pockets, looking for a pen of my own. I feel obligated to leave something. No dice. No pen. No wisdom. I get up, wipe twice, and walk out the same unpublished author I was when I walked in.