Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Although the swell of this book's popularity has passed, I was inspired to respond to a chapter from it while I was going to the bathroom. I am referring to the chapter in which David goes to the bathroom in a house where there is a party. To his horror, he discovers that there is a huge terd in the toilet that somebody left behind. The humor of the situation lies in the fact that David cannot get the terd to flush down the toilet. He panics and gets stressed out, worrying that he will get the blame if he chooses to leave the terd there for somebody else to discover. I can't help but think of this scene when I go to the bathroom and find the remnants of somebody else's bathroom doings. Sedaris has inspired me to write the following reflection on bathroom tidiness.

I have this weird thing about leaving toilets cleaner than they were before I used them. I don’t think that I’m obsessive-compulsive. You should see my kitchen. It’s terribly filthy. If the government finds out about how long it has been since I cleaned the dishes, they might quarantine my kitchen so as to protect any rare or undiscovered species of bacteria. My focus for obsessive cleanliness is limited to toilets.

I don’t know where I got it. My mom might have influenced me—she seems to tell me to clean everything else in my house. One related thing that I remember came from Kathy who lived down the street from me when I was in the early teens. One time I asked to use her bathroom, and she said, “If you sprinkle while you tinkle, please be neat, and wipe the seat.” At the time I was wowed by her cleverness and her use of apt quotations—only later discovering that it wasn’t an original saying (I had a similar such revelation with “In this land of fun and sun, we do not flush on number one” that first time I visited our friends’ cabin on Zukey Lake). That day at Kathy’s may be the first time that I ever considered what happened to my urine splashings.

Lately, in the new high school where I work, I have been confronting the remnants of others’ bathroom excursions (both fecal and urinal). Somebody has bad aim. If I’m only going to go pee (yep, this man pees standing!), I lift up the toilet seat with my shoe (Maybe I am obsessive-compulsive). As far as I can remember, this only backfired on me once. On that occasion, unbeknownst to me, a prior toilet user had had some serious soupy yucky that had splattered onto the underside of the toilet seat. It got on part of my leather loafer. This created an entirely separate cleaning fiasco that resulted in extensive shoe cleaning—I saved the shoes, although I realize, knowing something about molecular science, that some poop molecules are still in the leather of that shoe (but then any time I touch the toilet, I get poop molecules on me; any time I enter a bathroom, I breathe poop molecules; and any time I brush my teeth, I spread poop molecules over my teeth and gums).

Article Author: Dirtgrain

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