I have a long commute to my work office – approximately 45 miles.  With that distance, and with traffic, sometimes I run into a problem that requires finding a rest stop of some kind.  I’ve written before about the challenges of eating on the road, but a related, and equally vexing challenge is relieving oneself on the road.  Not literally on the road.  Unless you’re in the remote backwoods. 
I hear giggling in the back row.  We’re all adults here, right?  RIGHT?  Okay, thank you.
One of the things I try to do with this forum is to pass on my learned wisdom, including trade secrets and my own intellectual property.  I try to impart practical, useful advice.  During the many years I was in the truck, motoring willy-nilly all over town, I often found myself looking for a temporary place of refuge.  Of course, there is the obvious:  gas stations and fast-food joints.  Many of these locales have locked their restroom doors, however, to all but paying customers.  And who can blame them?  I’m not a big fan of these options.  You’ve noticed the condition of these facilities, right?  Every once in awhile you’ll enter a restroom in a fast-food establishment somewhere, and it will be clean and have an air freshener.  This is certainly the exception, not the rule.  Most of the time, it’s just not pretty.
I have two general solutions:  one, a quick no-frills option; and two, the deluxe Primadonna option.
Option 1 is the plastic port-a-potty, known by many names:  the Schulzie, the Honey Wagon, the Kool-Aid Box, etc.  These facilities are literally all over town, notably at or near construction sites.  If you just envision what one of these looks like, and open your eyes to your surroundings, you’ll find one.  The neat thing about this option is you’ll find them in residential areas, as well as business areas.  Yes, sometimes they are padlocked shut, but I bet I’ve run across that in maybe 5% of my efforts.  You can find them at sports fields, outdoor events, and on farms with agricultural workers.
It is option two that I really prefer, however:  the non-public public restroom in an office building.  Most office buildings nowadays are home to multiple businesses which lease space.  Many of them have vacant space most of the time.  I’m not talking about a high-rise downtown full of legal offices – those are usually monitored by doormen and security personnel, and the restrooms are usually not accessible from the lobby.  I’m talking about medium-sized buildings, maybe four stories, where you walk into the lobby and there are elevators and a few hallways, and you could pitch a tent in the lobby and roast a few hot dogs before you see another human being stroll by.  If you find a building like this, especially if it’s new, you walk into the restroom and it’s like you’re the first one who’s ever used it.  I presume that the people working in the building are using the restroom closest to their office, so the one closest to the lobby just doesn’t get much traffic.  And the building owner probably has a cleaning service come through once a week to polish and shine, regardless of how much use the restrooms get.
Now there’s always the possibility you’ll be discovered and cornered by some patriot who thinks he’s protecting the building from undesirables.  If anyone stops you and inquires about your quest, just tell them, “Job interview, third floor.”  That explains why they’ve never seen you there.  If you’re wearing an orange safety vest and work attire, they’ll probably just think you are very strange for dressing like that for a job interview, and they’ll separate and disperse. 
 
Oh, there are other venues, such as public libraries, colleges, hospitals, police stations, City Halls – but if you identify a network of pristine, new office buildings, you’ll occupy a whole different strata of society.  You’ll get used to the odor of disinfectant, and you’ll never use a gas station restroom again.

Do you ever experience coincidence that seems just a little too coincidental?  It interests me, and maybe it’s because I’m attuned to it that I notice some of the coincidences taking place around me. 
A couple years back, I read a review of a documentary.  The documentary was about how people can watch a movie over and over and divine some kind of hidden message or agenda from the director that has nothing to do with the plot or story.  The documentary details five different theories about Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”  I’m a fan of Kubrick’s work, and I like “The Shining,” so I read the review with interest and watched some clips detailing the obsession of one viewer who believes that Kubrick was really trying to tell viewers, through clues and visuals and references, that during the production of “2001:  A Space Odyssey” he was paid by the US Government to “produce” the Apollo moon landing, that the landing was a fake, and Kubrick was enlisted to make it look real on TV.  This is kind of a controversial stance, I am thinking, but I have heard of conspiracy theorists who think that this actually happened, and as I watched clips from “The Shining” with this theorist’s voice explaining the clues and visuals and references, I have to admit I was fascinated.  When the kid in the movie is playing with some toy cars on a section of carpeting that has shapes similar to the launch site, as viewed from the sky, and then he stands up and he is wearing a sweater with the Apollo 11 rocket ship sewn on the front, it’s kind of eerie.  When the theorist postulates that the sentence that Jack Nicholson’s character types over and over again while writing his “novel”:  “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy;” that “All” is really “A 1 1” (Apollo 11), it makes you wonder.

I always like to add my own unique twist on conspiracy theories, though.  In this case, I watched the clips and read the review on my laptop, and then I switched on the TV, and a rerun of Seinfeld was just starting, and I love Seinfeld, so I turned it up to watch, and Jerry starts out the show with a clip from a stand-up routine, and he starts with, “You know, I don’t think we ever should have landed a man on the moon.” 

NOW I believe.  Kubrick was sending me a message from the Great Beyond.

The next coincidence episode happened shortly thereafter, during the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.  On a Saturday night, I watched the movie “Heat,” which stars Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Val Kilmer, Jon Voight, and, among others, Ashley Judd.  Sunday morning I was driving one of my kids somewhere, and we were listening to “Car Talk” on NPR, and Ashley Judd actually called into the show.  She wanted Tom and Ray to help settle a dispute between her and her husband Dario Franchitti, the race car driver.  I thought to myself, “Hmmm, that’s weird.  I just watched her in a movie.”  Later that day, we were watching one of the NCAA tournament games, involving Kentucky, and they were INTERVIEWING ASHLEY JUDD.  She was everywhere!  Apparently she is a Kentucky Alumnus, and she was at the game, so hey, why not interview her?  To cap it off, that evening I flipped through channels and settled on the movie, “A Time To Kill,” which I’d never watched but always wanted to.  Starring Matthew McConaughey, Samuel L Jackson, Sandra Bullock, and – you guessed it – Ashley Judd.  I wasn’t even surprised at this point.  I immediately got on Twitter and started following Ms. Judd, who, as it turns out, it quite a prodigious tweeter.  “Ashley Judd” is now a code term in our household for strange coincidences.  “Apollo 11” may replace it.
 
Kubrick has passed on, of course (probably rubbed out by NASA), so there’s no chance of Ms. Judd showing up in one of his movies, but if anyone ever decides to make a movie about the Kubrick/fake moon landing conspiracy theory, and Ms. Judd is cast as his wife (who supposedly tried to get him to separate himself from the sordid task), I might just freak out.