The Quest

I spent the majority of my adolescence pissing into a mayonnaise jar.

There were two reasons for this. First, I was raised in the frugal “babushka” culture. The American babushkas, primarily of eastern European extraction, were the earliest recyclers, long before recycling was fashionable. Thus we reuse everything that can be reused until we reuse it to death. But we do it not for environmental but for economic reasons. So if after you eat all your mayonnaise you then put the perfectly good and sturdy jar to work as a urinal, you can then take the money you would have otherwise spent on a urinal and spend it on something else or, better yet, put it in the bank! That's the babushka way!

But the other reason I pissed into a mayonnaise jar was because even if I did have money to burn purchasing frivolous things like urinals, it was hard to find a person or place to purchase one from. They didn’t even sell them at drug stores. You almost had to turn to the black market. For some reason urinals were among the most unmentionable of the unmentionables. I don’t know why. They’re just cripple chamber pots.

A good pisser was hard to find. This is not the case today. Today’s cripples have it soft. If they need a urinal, they can find a wide variety of them on Amazon. And unlike many items on Amazon, none of the urinals are used.

This has done a lot to improve the quality of life of the modern cripple. We no longer have to devote a large portion of our time and energy embarking on the great pisser quest. Finding a pisser used to be like finding the holy grail. Once, not too long ago, my wife came home and proclaimed that she had a special gift for me. She proudly presented me a urinal she found at a drug store. She knew I’d be thrilled. It was still in the box and everything! It had that brand new urinal smell!

And a few years before that, still not long ago, I was extra excited on the day I was to visit the FDR memorial in Washington, D.C.  Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I might get lucky and find a pisser at the cripple-themed FDR memorial gift shop! Of course by the end of the day I came to the brutal realization of just how naïve I was to believe that the gift shop would stock souvenir pissers. FDR was the leader of the free world so he must have felt great pressure to stand up and piss like a man.

I admit that even I used to feel uneasy about gratuitous displays of pissers. There was this guy who always went around with his pisser hanging right there plain as day on the back of his wheelchair. He rolled around the state capitol with his pisser on the back of his chair, shaking hands with Senators. He’d put on a suit testify at committee hearings: “Because of this state program I am able live with dignity!” And there was his pisser. It made me cringe, but what a hypocrite I was. Would confirming that cripples had bodily functions really ruin our credibility with the Senators?

 I’m glad I got over it.