I've seen people changing their clothes and performing other acts of hygiene in various public areas. Once, while leaving through the front door of 166 West 75th Street, an obese fellow muttering some nonsense made eye contact and then dropped his pants, loudly defecating onto the sidewalk. It was an angry act, and if you think about how an angry bowel movement might sound then maybe you will see and hear him in your mind as vividly as do I right now.

Some people shit in anger. Others do it quietly, with a subtle panic that someone might hear them.

Once, at Philadelphia's 30th Street train station, I went in to the men's room. Normally, there is no particular sense of community in any given public restroom. But when entering this particular restroom there were strangers making long and mystified eye contact, staring into each other's faces with stern befuddlement. After a moment I realized why there was such concern. Someone in a stall was shitting in anger, making a most gut-wrenching, apocalyptic racket through his throat and ass. It sounded like someone was taking a chain-saw to the recipient of a non-anesthetized limb amputation.

He made earnest grunts and wheezes through his throat, and he smacked the walls of the stall with his fist, all while unleashing a wild, savage yawp of gastrointestinal orgasm.

I experienced about 15 seconds of the whole strange event. Then the cavernous bathroom of 30th Street Station fell into a profound silence, I for one wondering if the guy had emptied himself so clean that his whole body was sucked into its own vacuum. A hideous specter of dehydration and evacuation raged through my mind, and I decided I did not really need to use the bathroom just then.

It was October, 1990. That event passes through my mind every time I see someone shit onto a public walkway or street. Thought of it at 2:00 in the afternoon a few weeks ago, when a high-school-age kid at 50th Street and Seventh Avenue pissed all over the window of Roy Rogers.

Thought of it last year at Park Avenue and 54th Street, when a fidgeting, well-dressed woman waiting to cross the street lifted her dress and let splatter onto the Avenue every turgid fluid she had.

Thought of it in 1992 on the A train going up to 207th Street, when a guy burst into the subway car shouting "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I AM STINKING! I AM PUTRID! I AM FILTHY AND HAVE NO HOME!" He said all this through a thick Oceanic accent, then he fucking farted so goddam loudly I thought the whole New York City subway system would drop dead. Then the subway car suddenly stank of his bitter urine.

I've made people so angry in my life that I sometimes wonder what it would be like for them to murder me. What conversation occurs at such a moment? How much of it is fear, and how much of it is simple acknowledgment that "Hey, he's stabbing me." "Hey, that hurts." "Hey, that's not very nice." "Hey, I'm cold. I can't breath. I'm gonna die soon."

In 1992, someone on 2nd Avenue threatened me with death. This was because I no longer wanted to play 4-hand piano music with him, and was not very tactful in telling him so. He left the message on my answering machine ("...if I don't hear from you I will have to take your life...") at 6:30pm one night, so petrifying me that the sun came up before I could even summon the strength to move from my chair. He might hear me moving, I thought, and that might further fuel his anger, somehow making the state of my own death that much worse.

So maybe it is these experiences which account for my nonchalance in posting all this pithy nonsense. These outbursts and threats of death are as provocative and meaningful as math flashcards or diagramming sentences in the 7th grade.