Toilets

Toilets are beautiful!  They are symmetrical and asymmetrical.  They have soft curved edges.  Most are white.  Can’t say I care for the off-tan ones. 
         
You’ll need a toilet every day, for the rest of your life.  Once a year or so, I piss outside somewhere.  It makes me feel like an outlaw.  After the last few drops come out, or even just before (!) I am quickly zipping up.  The belt can be fastened while on the run.  Law-abiding citizens piss into the toilet.
         
The toilet has 3 major parts: the base, the bowl and the tank.  The whole thing is a work of art.  The base forms a rectangle, but each of the edges juts out slightly, almost like a pyramid.  The base then neatly morphs into the bowl.  The bowl has its own special features.  The bowl isn’t circular, no, it’s more ovular.  Must have taken some real math geniuses to get the curve just right.  Usually, at the top of the bowl, there is a rim, and it extends to inside of the toilet.  The rim accentuates its ovular shape.  The bowl isn’t ovular.  It’s more like an oval attached to a square at the back.  The tank houses all of the mechanical components essential to the flushing mechanism.  How great it is to flush your waste away!  You’ll never see it, smell it or hear it ever again. 
         
The toilet seat is an animal all its own.  Boy, I sure hate sitting on a toilet right after someone else!  That’s body contact, for all intensive purposes.  At the midpoint on the back of my toilet seat, there is a very light brown stain.  It is permanent.  I guess I wipe my asshole on the seat before or after I shit.  Never meant to, of course.  Seats have many varieties.  Back in the day, you saw padded ones.  I guess that went off the toilet radar.  If you sit on a toilet seat that’s padded, they need renovation. 

There are two schools of toilet seat:  the round seat and the one that looks like two legs, bowed.  The two legged seat is found in institutions and schools.  The round seat is found at home.  I guess the toilet company figured that if they could cut out some of the materials of the seat, they could reduce its cost, and pass the savings on.  Whole assembly lines are dedicated to one type of seat or the other.  For some reason, the two legged seat never was marketed to the home consumer.  Marketing?  The toilet sells itself.  I’d put it up there with water, food, shelter, sex and HBO. 
         
Despite the throngs of people that stay at hotels, their toilets are always clean, new-like.  A satisfying bowel movement happens when you first get to the hotel.  A satisfying bowel movement will not happen on the plane.  If you’re a man, you’re lucky to hit that pitiful excuse of a toilet in a plane when pissing in mid-air.  Takes a few minutes to search for the toilet paper on an airplane bathroom.
I would like to put to rest the firestorm of ongoing controversy about toilet paper.  No, you don’t have to put the toilet paper in the toilet paper dispenser.  If you want to leave it out of the dispenser, and have to manually unroll it for use each time, that is your business.  If smoking involves freedom of choice, how much more my manner of toilet paper use. 

The right amount of toilet paper, for any given wipe, is crucial.  Too much and there’s more waste in your waste.  Too little could lead to an inconclusive wipe.  Yes, I’ve had to go back and correct the job.  Corrections have not always been caused by a bad wipe however.  Three panels are the minimum.  Five for the ultra-cheap paper.  My average is probably three panels above the minimum.  It used to be 8-10.  What a toilet paper-wasting bastard I was!  You could say I had to mature to do the same with less. 

Do they have to strip the jungles of the Amazon of older trees to make toilet paper?  Then how is it possible that we have any jungle left?  God, do I hate to see a tree come down.  How many decades will it take to regrow another?  It’s unfortunate, yes, even scary how willing people are to cut down trees. 
My uncle bragged about how much money he made when they logged his land.  I just couldn’t tell him how much shame he deserved.  Gone are the trees, probably the money too.  The FAA was going to take that land through eminent domain.  They haven’t yet. 

A very intense and fearful moment happens after the flush.  The waste goes down and the bowl, slowly fills up.  The high-pitched sound of the refill can be heard throughout our condo.  The sound is cymbolic.  It starts to fill.  It should be fine, I assure myself.  It keeps filling.  This has to be normal.  It keeps filling.  Will it stop?  It keeps filling?  OH GOD WILL THERE EVER BE AN END?  Usually the high-pitched filling sound begins to change frequency.  W I L L  I T  E    N    D?!?!?!?!?!  It makes one last gasp, then stops.  WHEW….. 

Sometimes it continues to fill.  I enter into madness.  I must fix the toilet.  It always means taking the lid off of the tank.  A handle jiggle does the trick.  I watch the stopper fall in place to be sure.  For more assurance, I watch the water level start to rise.  I pick a fixed point, like the top of the rubber on the stopper, which isn’t submerged, and wait for it to become submerged.  It does.  I may then replace the lid, which is heavy and may crack if replaced with too much force.  I’ve had to TOUCH the rubber stopper before.  It left a white, slimy goo on my hand. 

Why is that goo colored white?  If it was algae from the water, it would have been black.  Most likely green would have been its color had it been mold.  Maybe this type of mold/algae is local to the rubber stopper community.  Water does flow regularly through the tank, however.  There should be neither mold nor algae, which do not seem to build up inside the tank.  It could be calcium deposits but they too are not found on the walls inside the tank.  Something strange about that rubber stopper, I tell you.

I hate removing the lid.  To me the lid is a bookshelf.  On the back of my lid, I have the following: a copy of National Geographic, Sweetwater Musicians’ Catalogue, Knut Hamsun Hunger, Charles Bukowski Factotum, John-Paul Tratnau A One Man Show?, Charles Bukowski Post Office, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff (blah on that last one).  As a stack of books gets taller, it looses stability.  I’m always afraid the top book will slide off of the lid as I remove it, and into the tank.  What would I do with a book that’s been submerged?  Surely it can be dried and reread.  I could hang it on my shower curtain rail for as many days as necessary.  If the ink runs after submersion, I’ll have no choice but to throw it away.  $15, down the tube. 

I have an embarrassing confession.  I dropped my ipod in the toilet.  Please, let me explain.  My ipod speakers needed 4 new, triple A batteries.  I installed the new batteries.  I set the ipod on the shelf above the toilet.  I set the ipod speakers on the edge of the sink.  My mission was to take the ipod off of the shelf, reconnect it with the speakers, and then set the whole apparatus back on the shelf.  I reached up for the ipod with my left hand.  Over handed, I used my first two fingers to “flick gently” the ipod forward where my thumb would catch it.  Then my whole hand would take the ipod into a holding position.  As my first two fingers began the “gentile flick” the thumb’s starting position was behind.  It would desperately try, during that next millisecond, to get into position, but it could not make it.  The ipod began to go over the edge.  In the next millisecond it fell directly into the toilet.  I could not catch it.  If only I had batted it away from the toilet, it would have survived the fall.  Submersion is an unforgivable sin to an ipod.  They will attempt to go on living, but in the end, they just can’t.  “I’m so sorry ipod,” I wept aloud, “OH GOD I’M SO SORRY.  Please don’t die.  JUST HANG ON!”  I rushed it to its equivalent of the emergency room, the hair dryer.  During the trauma, all it would say was “For service on your ipod, go to http://www.apple.com/service.”  “COME BACK IPOD!  STAY WITH ME!”  I applied the hair dryer at full blast, with full heat, at all angles.  “IT DIDN’T MAKE IT!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”  Visitation is held Tuesday, February 1 from 7-9 pm, the service will be held on Wednesday February 2.  Unnatural causes and all that.  I would carry the guilt for the rest of my life. 

Didn’t Crocodile Dundee think the boudoir was a drinking fountain?  I may try a boudoir sometime during my life, but I don’t really see the point.  You still have to wipe.