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Now, in Other News…The Other Shoe

By Susan Bankston

I have decided that our new president is like a bass drum—he makes lots of noise, but there ain’t much inside. We’re just gonna have to hold on for dear life for the next four years and sleep with one eye open and the other on alert. (By the way, quit reading his tweets—those suckers can take on a life of their own and put your eye out.)

While all you guys are watching Donald Trump set up a GoFundMe campaign to pay for his damn border wall, replace Obamacare with Trump doesn’t, and watch Alec Baldwin get arrested on the set of Saturday Night Live and taken to Guantanamo, let me remind you about some real problems we have right here in Texas. The problem is that even though we have a mess of problems, Republicans in Austin only have one solution: Bathroom Police. They want enforced potty-training.

I know it’s been hard to take your cute, flirty eyes off Washington DeeCee. (Sweetie, on Inauguration Day, I sat there just waiting for Donald Trump to replace the oath of office with “Hey Bubba, hold my beer and watch this!”) But now it’s time to focus on the circus going on up in Austin: we are last in education, our bridges and roadways are falling apart, a quarter of our children live in poverty, 9,000 Texans die every year because they can’t get healthcare, we have a $5 billion budget shortfall this year because tax breaks for the rich didn’t work and we’re fixing that by cutting off therapy for disabled children, and there are still people in America who put beans in their chili, dammit.

And Lt. Governor Dan Patrick’s response to this mess is to take a sudden interest in our private parts. He doesn’t think they should be so private. With a sudden burst of “damned if I know,” Patrick introduced Senate Bill 6, which would prevent or repeal local laws and policies requiring bathroom accommodations for transgender Texans, and require public schools, universities, and government buildings to force people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex.

Holy damn frisky milking cow. How in the fool tarnation do you enforce something like that?

If this passes, I have worn my last damn dress. If Dan Patrick wants people to look at my hoochy every time I enter the ladies’ room, I ain’t gonna make it easy for them. Either that or I’m gonna go bottomless and make some government official in the capitol sign a statement that verifies which bathroom I should use. Heaven forbid I should carry my woo-woo into a waa-waa zone.

I don’t mean to be indelicate here, but you know how it is when you arrive home needing to pee and the urge keeps getting worse as you get out of your car and through the back door, leaving you tight-kneed and duck-promenading for the last 25 feet to the bathroom? Honey, I have seen people enter a restaurant and walk over tables looking like an ambulatory centerpiece trying to get to the bathroom. When you gotta go . . .

So when I gotta pee, do not stop me at the bathroom door asking to see what I’m gonna pee with. First off, it ain’t any of your business. Second off, IT AIN’T ANY OF YOUR BUSINESS.

One of the most despicable things that they want to put into this bill is that local governments won’t be allowed to make their own rules. That means you’re not safe in liberal Houston, because Dan Patrick wants all of Texas to live under Lufkin’s rules. (For the two people reading this who don’t know Texas very well, Lufkin is in east Texas and you can’t live there unless (1) you’re a holy-roller Baptist preacher, or (2) you’re willing to sleep with one.)

Dan Patrick thinks we big-city folks are incapable of deciding our gender. I guess that’s okay, because most big-city folks think Dan Patrick is incapable of deciding which finger to use when he picks his nose.

North Carolina lost $395 million in commerce when they passed their bathroom bill. If you figure that six North Carolinas would fit into Texas, we could be toying with over $2 billion down the sewer. But Dan Patrick sees it as his duty to keep the Belles of Heaven Republican Women’s Club so outraged that you’d think the cutest stripper in Dallas is dancing on their front porch and preventing them from attending a six-buggy prayer meeting.

This bathroom stuff ain’t the only really bad idea folded up in hundred-dollar bills and hidden in a Bible before being touted to the Texas legislature. But this is the one I am pissed off with right now.

I hope your Valentine’s Day is filled with love, teddy bears, glitter, and Godiva chocolate. You can take that one day off this month, before you get back to fighting for your right to pee with what you got.

Susan Bankston lives in Richmond, Texas, where she writes about her hairdresser at The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc., at juanitajean.com.

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Susan Bankston

Susan Bankston lives in Richmond, Texas, where she writes about her hairdresser at The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc., at juanitajean.com.
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