The Older Gent's GPS System

If you hang around men over sixty - and sometimes younger - you will hear the word "prostate" at some point in the conversation, and you probably won't have to wait to long. You are too young to read this if you think I intended to write the word "prostrate."

Invariably the conversation skips over one of the recurring challenges in the male geezgeist, and that has to do with what the doctors like to call "voiding," but the rest of us use more accessible words and phrases - among them - peeing, whizzing, spending a penny, seeing a man about a dog, a cruise ticket, or almost anything else which has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

For many years I did not acquire a full refined GPS (Geographical Peeing System). It was at a performance of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. I had enjoyed a couple of glasses of something before the performance and failed to complete my preparations for the play with what we call a "pit stop." I didn't know that Act One was one hour and fifty-two minutes long, not including applause.

I still hold the intergalactic record for the "loo dash" in that theatre, and that experience taught me what my elders already knew: you have to do a continual assessment of your bladder, your present and immediate future locations, and the distance to an appropriate porcelain appliance.

With a well designed GPS system, along with tending to one's intake and observing the royal custom of always stopping when the opportunity is presented, one can avoid the need to cross one's legs, to bite the lip, to think of the desert, and so on. Such defensive strategies just do in whatever you are doing which keeps you from going down the hall. At the play, I kept thinking, "Why in hell didn't he call it Second Night, why in such flowerly Elizabethan language, doesn't the audience know that laughter delays the onset of my relief, why didn't they break after the scene just ended, why are thirty five year old directors with really healthy bladders putting their male elders through the hell of a such a long first act?" and not about the wonderful performance I was, on the surface, enjoying.

Crossing the trail of the sixties and beyond makes us better planners, and that is probably a good thing.