Medical News: Greater Lamont Metropolitan Area (GLMA) Leads Nation In Thankfully Rare And Profoundly Disturbing ‘Commode-a-phobia’!!

The GLMA, a forlorn and decidedly isolated area nestled right smack dab in the middle of the Scablands (Oh, who in tarnation came up with that name! Obviously they did not have a marketing orientation! Whoa!) and somehow on the very edge of the quite beautiful and robust Palouse (Sure, the Palouse is some name that comes from one of those foreign languages with all the subsequent negatives associated with foreigners, but at least it doesn’t have the word ‘Scab’ in there. Oh yeah, naming your area after dried blood caused by some injury or another is guaranteed to bring the tourists flocking to the place! What were those people thinking, for Pete’s sake!) – anyway, the GLMA made the national news again, at least in the medical community, when a ground breaking article was published in the ‘Journal of Abnormal Sociology’ that highlights the particulars of a cluster of unexplained and quite troubling instances of a rare and disturbing psychosis normally found in the very young or the very, very old – the quite profound and paralyzing fear of public toilets. This condition, known by medical experts as ‘Commode-a-phobia’ is best described as a quite irrational fear of and aversion to putting in public ‘restroom facilities’ in public buildings – usually in very small town settings, where town employees, guests and citizens can ‘answer the call of nature’ without going out behind the fire trucks when it is -23 F – not even factoring in the wind chill factor!

“Well, what in the dern heck do them fancy-pants planners and building code people know about what we need out here in the Lamont area?” screeched the red-faced Festus Festoon, 63, an area farmer/rancher. ‘Lamont has survived very nicely for over 100 years with no public restroom, and people just made do as best they could and it didn’t seem to hurt us none!” he gasped while attempting to stifle that pronounced facial tic he sometimes gets when faced with social injustice of any kind! “Sure, our way that we have fought so hard for for over 100 years is unsanitary, violates any number of laws, unfairly and illegally limits citizen attendance at town meetings and is basically barbaric and disgusting, but hey, this is Lamont and we don’t need any know-it-all outsiders with their ‘big city ways’ coming in here telling us that there is a better way to live and all! It took a lot of work from a lot of people to transform the once thriving Lamont into a dead-end backwater that doesn’t even have a store, and I for one will be dadburned if I am going to let all those years of gallant effort in turning the town into some Medieval hovel just go down the drain because a group of outsiders who don’t even own cows think that our ways are primitive, dysfunctional and uncivilized!” he fumed, turning even more purple, even though that seemed like a metaphysical impossibility just a moment or two ago!

“Well, it is always fascinating to discover a statistically improbable grouping of truly bizarre and quite inappropriate behaviors – what we call ‘clusters’, in a given area” said Dr. Martin Brickman, one of America’s leading experts on small town mental illness. “So when word began to trickle in about a small town that doesn’t have a public restroom after 100 years and where farmers/ranchers for miles around form themselves into mindless, seething mobs to fight against one, I immediately booked an airline flight into Spokane, rented a truck, outfitted it with a ‘Porta-Potty’ and ventured into the epicenter of the dysfunction – hoping to find the root cause of this obviously disadvantageous social and municipal phenomenon” he said bravely. “Sure, when I got there I found a small, forlorn, yet committed group who was ‘pro-toilet’ and they were fighting valiantly against a seemingly immovable wall of opposition, mostly from people with cow manure on their boots (at least we hope it was cow manure! Yikes!) Anyway, I was not there for 5 minutes when a malodorous mob of people in overalls with big belt buckles (both men and women! What ever happened to dresses, anyway?) surrounded my vehicle and began insanely rocking it – shouting “down with all them big city ways!!” and “If God wanted us to use a toilet we would have been born with one attached!!” and some other choice expressions best not repeated here! Oh, it was like being transported to some remote European village in the 11th century, except that Century West Engineering (CWE) had put in some really beautiful roads (thank you TIB!) and they had a new, quite awesome water system with some of the best water in the State (thank you CWE, USDA-RD and Dept of Commerce!) – oh yeah, and they were putting in the new fantastic library courtesy of the quite excellent Whitman County Commissioners – the library is where the town’s first public flush toilet will be, by the way! Oh, it was just so interesting to see that many people that “time forgot” all nestled in one little town right smack dab in the middle of 21st century America! It is instances like this that make all those years of struggle in graduate school so worthwhile!” he beamed proudly! "My job is like turning over a rock or whatever - you just never know what you will find squirming underneath there" he stammered excitedly!