The Grossest Thing You've Ever Witnessed Happening in Public

Welcome to Pissing Contest, a weekly story sharing circle for the the ass-draggiest time of the afternoon on the ass-draggiest time of the last day between you and the weekend. Every week, we’ll ask a question, you’ll share stories, and we’ll pick a winner that’s featured in the next week’s post. It’s like a pyramid scheme of outdoing each other!

When I was a baby adult living in Chicago, I once found myself waiting for a bus at an intersection that used to be adjacent to an abandoned public housing project that was in the process of being torn down. As I sat and waited for the number 8 Halsted bus, an elderly woman hobbled past, urgently, to a stretch of wooden fence across the street. She leaned back against the fence to face me, flashed a winning smile, waved, pulled down her pants, and began to take a shit while we were making eye contact. Big smile still on her face.

The reason I was thinking about that particular incident this week is because that’s the first time I realized that cities are places where there aren’t enough private spaces for all of the private things that people do. There aren’t enough places to shit. There aren’t enough places to do vomit. There aren’t enough places to sleep. There aren’t enough places for the junkies who used to live in the park down the street from my apartment every summer to do heroin. And, if the half-filled, defeated-looking condoms that accumulate near the base of the Manhattan bridge on weekends are any indicator, there aren’t enough places to fuck (another case in point: Guyism’s Chris Illuminati writing this week of how he witnessed a hand job being given on a New York City sidewalk in broad daylight.)

So, dear readers, today I want to hear from you about the time you saw private stuff being done in public. The weirder and more inappropriate, the better.

But before we get to the story sharing, here are the winners of last week’s Pissing Contest, Weird Shit Found Whilst Creeping Online Edition. There were so many short and incredibly great items that I couldn’t pick just one.

Here’s vanessakeeplosingherburnerss with a strong entry:

My dad’s Youtube channel. He makes tribute videos to ‘fallen soldiers’ (people he plays video games with online who have died or have stopped playing) and then adds really sappy music to it. It’s the saddest/most unintentionally hilarious thing I’ve ever seen.

And here’s thesporkgirl on discovering butts aplenty:

a new guy started at work, and he was a very odd character. bipolar, divisive. so i poked around a tiny bit online, a kind of “who hired this guy?” search, starting with linkedin and moving out from there. within 3 link-clicks, i was on his pinterest, which was all shots of himself, or rather, of his butt. i closed my browser and went for a walk and yet i still see them every time i close my eyes. all the butts. or rather, the same butt, in every position and from every angle

And, last but not least, Schweeps:

A female coworker of mine, who is really sweet and kind (and even knowing this, I think she is the bee’s knees), writes m/m erotica under a pseudonym that may or may not the name of her basset hound. So that’s a thing.

It was the basset hound bit that really won me over.

Now, readers, onto things you witnessed in public that you were never supposed to see. Let the pissing contest commence!