Unplugged & Unmedicated

Sunday Morning Sleepwalker
Written by David M. Muench


One of my favorite Sunday morning pastimes has been to sit at the kitchen table and read the Sunday paper. Well, okay, just the funnies, TV Guide, and the advertisements. I am quite the aficionado of the funnies and not ashamed to admit it.

Several years ago on one average Sunday morning I crawled out of bed, retrieved the paper from the driveway, and began dissecting the hulking mass of paper for My Sections.

There I sat contentedly amidst a Marmaduke and Dennis the Menace World while my brother snored heavily on the sofa in the living room. Everything else - including the empty laundry basket sitting in the kitchen nearby - was oblivious to me.
I didn’t notice my brother stirring from the living room sofa, and I was vaguely aware of his presence as he shuffled into the kitchen.

What happened next snapped me back from Hagar the Horrible to reality. My brother stood in front of the previously mentioned empty laundry basket and proceeded to urinate in it.
I remember thinking to myself: “There is no way in hell that this is actually happening.” Yet as I sat there with the Sunday paper strewn about upon the kitchen table, there he was. I asked him: “What are you doing?” Which of course was one of those Inane Questions, because I knew very well what he was doing.

He was peeing into the no-longer-empty laundry basket.

The Inane Question apparently wasn’t dumb enough, so I presented a painfully self-evident statement: “You are peeing in the laundry basket!”
That basically elicited a groggy twitch of his head, but he continued purging himself. After what seemed like five minutes he finally finished his task, and instead of returning to the sofa he found his way to his bedroom. Why he couldn’t initially find his way to the Officially Designated Toilet is beyond comprehension.

I just sat there staring at the soiled laundry basket in shock. I could not believe that had happened. I finally broke my “That didn’t really happen” spell and walked to the basket to peer inside. Maybe I thought my brother was favoring me with a really good parlor trick and I had to see for myself. As if the smell alone didn’t alert me of the truth, I also had to bump the basket with my foot to see the liquid ripple around in the basket.
I’m not sure if kicking the laundry basket was a test for viscosity or for the speed of the urine ripple rate. I did everything short of tasting it to ascertain if I actually saw my brother “draining the lizard” into the basket.

Struck by an epiphany, I came to the conclusion that yes, it was indeed pee-pee in the laundry basket. My brother had put it there. No mirrors, smoke, or trap doors were involved. He actually urinated into the laundry basket. I also determined that my brother was experiencing a severe yet embarrassing case of sleepwalking.
Cathy, Shoe, and Blondie were momentarily forgotten, and with teenage fervor I began relishing the idea of telling mom what happened. Hey, screw Family Circus and their strange dashed lines all over the cartoon, this was real entertainment.

My mom finally awoke, and right as soon as she stepped into the kitchen I couldn’t hold it in any longer: “Hey mom, Doug peed in the laundry basket.”
She had the expression on her face I’m sure I had when I first witnessed the Great Laundry Basket Defilement. She replied, “What?” I repeated the statement, and she too gazed into the laundry basket.
After several minutes of deliberation she carefully carried the basket into the garage, where she announced “He’s going to clean this out himself.”

A few hours later my brother had awaken, and as he walked out to the kitchen again both my mother and I became very wary. With suppressed relief, we noted that he was actually awake and coherent. Ah, now came the best part. There is a certain joy a younger brother feels when presented with the opportunity to make the older brother squirm with abject humiliation. Unfortunately he seemed apathetic of the situation, but he did clean the laundry basket.

Much to my chagrin the incident had never been repeated (with anybody, ever…thankfully), but that surreal Sunday morning made me look at laundry baskets in a whole new way.



In Loving Memory of Douglas Muench, 1966-1992.