collaborative storytelling that is equal parts critical and creative

The sort of nice thing about an unlidded pee jar is that you don’t have to wait long before it develops its own fuzzy, blue-grey lid of mold.

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I’d like to tell you it started innocently enough, just one jar, dutifully emptied. Then maybe a couple little jolly jars. Of course, sometimes it was one really big mason jar, a composite blend of different bladders, different nights. Once, it was in fact a la croix can. In the end, the only thing that really mattered was that it was too many, too big, too much cold yellow pee capped with this all-to familiar grey mold.

 

The summer it started, the porch roof outside of my room was the perfect place to drink a sweaty Hamm’s and watch the slow street stretch into dusk. Coincidentally, it was also the perfect place to pop a squat. Depending on the angle of your pelvis vis-a-vis the slope of the roof, you could get it so that your pee would trickle down the roof and fall two stories to the ground right into the storm drain. 

 

But, summer slipped away, and I adopted a pee jar which I would pour out the window come morning— day by day caring less and less about the angle of the pour vis-a-vis the slope of the roof, until the front stoop was stained and smelling of piss. When this became intolerable to my roommates (very quickly), I took to following the pee with soapy water in a half-hearted attempt to wash away my shame. And when snow drifts made even opening the window an impossibility, the pee jars started congregating by the door, conspiring amongst themselves until they were muted by mold.

 

We called our house the Infantorium, and my room, the unheated attic perch with sloped walls, we called the Princess Room. It had one tiny window that faced East, so when the sun rose, light flooded the Princess Room. At that moment, through the silhouetted trees you could just see a church’s steeple cross perfectly framed by the window. I would huddle into the blankets and peek out at the squat pee jars, cloudy and golden and altogether holy with trapped sunlight, glowing from within. The looked like specimen jars just waiting for a tiny fetal alligator or rare seed pod or diseased organ sample to take up residence inside the glass walls. It was abject but fascinating.

 

I moved out of the Infantorium before the end of winter, and I’ve never had a pee jar since. Needless to say, I don’t trust myself. But the story of the pee-stained-stoop and the Princess Room has since been told till it has become  worn and well-lodged into the lore of the Infantorium. And, along with the shock of seeing your own pee grow a coat of mold, nothing will ever quite compare to that room, decorated with warm jars of soft gradient yellow, illuminated by the morning light.

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