Meditations on a toilet seat

I burnt my arse again the other day.
My own stupid fault I know – and my poor eyesight. Lord knows the cleaner tends to do a good job during the week, but I sometimes have ‘accidents’ as you can imagine at my age (or maybe you don’t want to.)
Nothing too serious, just a dribble or an over enthusiastic turd springing forth before the cheek hits the seat.

Anyway, in my emotional and physical turmoil I tend to attack the evidence of my disloyal bowel with a complete bottle of Domestos and a toilet roll.
I should elaborate a little lest I give the wrong impression – I attack the toilet itself NOT my arse, well not deliberately anyway.
The problem is, in my haste I sometimes leave an invisible residue of neat bleach lying on the plastic perch.

Unwittingly on my rather speedy and irregular return to the faecal throne a few hours later… I am bitten by this covert chemical Cobra!
Lo, do my already cottage cheese buttocks now bear the hideous stigmata of this errant bowel/bleach conspiracy.
Is there to be no peace.
Just another sling and arrow of outrageous misfortune that assails this old man in his autumnal decline into the cold dark winter of becoming a rotten vegetable.

Ironic though really.
I, of all people should know better. Has it not been my life’s work to stare shit in the face? To lift the plastic lid on the stained toilet bowl of humanity? To emancipate the skid marks of truth from the totalitarian bleach of the moral majority?
Yet here I am like a deranged Stepford wife, neurotically scrubbing away any evidence of my very human/animal nature.

‘The toilet’, ‘the bathroom’, ‘the powder room’, ‘the loo’, ‘the John’, ‘the can’, ‘the lavatory’, ‘the crapper’, ‘the bog’…’the shit house’.
What a shameful place this room occupies in our physical life and imagination. That quiet little sanctuary where we sit like naughty schoolchildren, alone with the irrefutable evidence of our embarrassing bodies.
Whether pauper or king, we are reduced to a pathetic defecating animal in our little vestibules, before the flush and wipe of forgetting enables a rapprochement with our more comfortable spiritual selves.

In my youth I executed a series of self- portraits to illustrate the existential profundity of what I call the ‘little death’ – the defecatory moment of shame and vulnerability where we are prematurely imprisoned and objectified by the demands of this traitorous body, like a corpse on a marble slab.
Alas, the art world was unprepared and so were the general public for my investigation into this darker and more pungent realm of human activity.

Now, its time to get my shit together and make tea, tatty bye.