Saturday, November 22, 2008
Although the annual, official celebration of toilets occurred earlier this week, now seems the best time to reflect on how drastically different life would be had I never sat upon or viewed one, for after what I ate for dinner this evening, tomorrow will be a day spent intimately with that which receives the feasts of my bowels.
The non-existence of such receptacles as toilets would necessarily have precluded the existence of my neurotic fear that an over-sized spider will crawl out of one, bite a chunk out of my ass, and bring about an agonizing and premature, though somewhat comic, death. I saw Arachnephobia when I was six or seven, and never since have I failed to check under, over, around, down, into, and through for spiders or other potential death-causing beasts.
Were the world bereft of toilets, I would not be as well-versed in English poetry, for the toilet has been where I tend to read such material: poetry differs in density, as does a cheeseburger or a blueberry that has passed through my digestive system. With a poetry anthology, therefore, one may consume it in one sitting, or interrupt it and return later without completely severing the flow of thoughts required for reading the entire text. Prose literature-reading on the toilet hardly ever works.
To discuss this further would be to digress farther from the task of gathering research material for a paper I am supposed to have been writing all semester.
Labels: anxiety, Arachnephobia, beasts, bowels, death, digestion, dinner, literature, poetry, research, spiders, thinking, toilets
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 4:47 PM]