The Sean Turner Files

THE PROBLEM

One day, I had to use one of the stalls in the basement bathroom of the Leacock building at McGill. Since reading Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, I've been particularly alert to the scribbles in bathroom stalls, which sometimes turn into witty, fascinating conversations.

That day, in my poorly lit stall in the hot, dry basement, I couldn't help but notice that a name kept recurring in the scribbles. I was so intrigued that went to check the other stalls after to see if there was some kind of recurring pattern. There was. People were constantly referring to someone called "Sean Turner" in their messages.

I decided, over the course of a few weeks, to record the evolution of these messages in the bathroom stalls. Call me crazy, but I really needed an idea for heartrape. The idea was to find a pattern, a story, some kind of clue. Anything. I needed to know who Sean Turner was.

THE EVIDENCE

(in response to above)

Are you conversing

on your there bro

or are there two

of you in

HERE?

Sean Turner Supports an Indepen(t)dent Zaharia

Sean Turner

broke my heart and my

sphincter

(Not in that order)

Sean Turner let the dogs out

I fucked Sean Turner's sister

- No, she fucked you with a didlo.

Sean Turner smokes the funny tobacco

Sean Turner is Chuck Norris'

WORST NIGHTMARE

Sean Turner let the dogs out

Sean Turner

is a one man

Wolf Pack

SEAN TURNER

is

God.

Fuck Sean Turner

Sean Turner's old news ------ I agree, Sean Turner's

a fucking twat!

Let's talk about someone

cool... Like [SEAN TURNER]!

SEAN TURNER is where

it's at

THE SEARCH

The evidence was too compelling, I needed to find who this Sean Turner really was. A quick search online gave me the answer I was looking for. First of all, Sean Turner was referenced in the Heard at McGill website. Two guys are washing their hands in the bathroom, one mentions he just wrote a sick Sean Turner joke in the stall wall, the other asks: "Who is Sean Turner?" If this was funny, it implied that Sean Turner was something I should know about. It was an inside joke shared by all McGill students.

Sean Turner, it turns out, also has a facebook page, complete with the juiciest Sean Turner jokes excerpted from the stalls. The facebook page states the Sean Turner stall messages started as a joke among friends started in the basement of Burnside which escalated into a university-wide phenomenon. But who is Sean Turner? Does the real Sean Turner exist?

Well, it turns out he does. In a March 29 article in the McGill daily entitled "Sean knows me!", Daniel Lametti claims to have met the real Sean Turner, "a McGill engineering student (...) shorter than I'd imagined." Article here.

THE NEXT STEP

So Sean Turner exists. The real one, at least. The Sean Turner in the bathroom stalls has become someone else completely. He belongs to the communal imagination, now. He belongs to fiction.

It is our duty, then, to take Sean Turner to the next level. As students, as writers, as young Montréalais, as heart-rapists, it's time we brought Sean Turner to life on the page. He deserves to be written about, to be given flesh and blood and bones, and more importantly, a voice. Sean Turner deserves to eat, sleep, love, have sex, get into rambunctious situations. Sean Turner needs to become a character, a hero (or an anti-hero), a protagonist.

What say you, heart-rapists?