THE PORCELAIN AIN’T PRETTY

A dispatch from the restroom at the end of the republic

We don’t write from the bathroom. We write until the bathroom becomes necessary.

That’s the rhythm now — a sentence, a heave. A paragraph, a sprint. A headline, a full-body purge into whatever receptacle isn’t already bubbling with the acidic runoff of national collapse.

We used to be journalists. Now we’re janitors with press passes.

The newsroom smells like fear, Lysol, and microwaved chili. The air hangs heavy with the haunted musk of processed despair. Our carpets are trauma-absorbent. The fly population has unionized. Someone named a cockroach “Greg” and honestly, Greg’s been pulling his weight more than Congress.

This isn’t burnout. This is biological warfare with a byline.

You can’t unsee what we read every day. You can’t unread the sludge that passes for policy. We come in ready to write — eyes open, sitting upright, holding coffee — and within fifteen minutes we’re bent over a trashcan labeled “Editorial Integrity,” praying for unconsciousness while crying.

The bathroom is where we gather. Not for meetings, but for mercy.

The main stall looks like it lost a bet. The toilet screams when you flush it. The seat is permanently tilted, like even the porcelain itself is trying to escape. We’ve installed a second plunger out of respect. The original plunger retired. It left a note.

There’s a chart on the wall tracking who’s vomited the most that week. Spoiler: it’s always Rook. He’s seen things. He’s typed things. Once he dry-heaved so hard during a draft, the space bar shattered. We keep it in a trophy case now — right next to the bottle of Pepto that’s never not empty.

And you, dear reader, you know this feeling. You’re not above it. You’ve read the news, clenched your gut, and muttered, “Nope. No thank you. Not today.” But today is today. And today is every grotesque headline crammed into one room-temperature burrito of existential reflux.

We’ve tried every anti-nausea remedy known to man. Ginger chews. Antiemetics. Mindfulness. One staffer built a sensory-deprivation closet out of printer boxes. Another tried praying. The nausea laughed. The nausea always laughs.

Sometimes the only relief is to write until the barf comes out as prose. These stories don’t edit — they ferment. They fester. They gurgle up from the sewer of the body politic and explode across our screens with all the grace of a meat balloon in a microwave.

You want hope? So do we. You want change? So does the urinal cake. But hope can’t unclog a nation. Change doesn’t pay the plumbing bill. And the pipe that bursts next might be metaphor or might be literal. We won’t know until it’s too late.

The restroom is not a breakroom. It is a battlefield. The walls echo with despair and retching and dark, wet laughter.

Because once you realize what this country has become, there are only two reactions left:

Laugh hard enough to breathe or puke hard enough to forget.

Most days, we do both.

So excuse us while we flush.

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