Toilet Bowl Quotes

It's the mortal cup Jace, not the mortal toilet bowl.

I don't know you. The only thing I know about you is, you're reading this. I don't know if your happy or not; I don't know whether you're young or not. I sort of hope you're young and sad. If you're old and happy, I can imagine that you'll smile to yourself when you hear me going, he broke my heart. You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, Oh yes, i remember how that feels. But you can't, you smug old git. Oh you'll remember feeling sort of plesantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again?

Clary wasn't sure what she'd expected -exclamations of delight, perhaps a smattering of applause. Instead there was silence, broken only when Jace said, "Somehow, I thought it would be bigger." Clary looked at the Cup in her hand. It was the size, perhaps, of an ordinary wineglass, only much heavier. Power thrummed through it, like blood through living veins. "It's a perfectly nice size," she said indignantly. "Oh, it's big enough," he said patronizingly, "but somehow I was expecting something… you know." He gestured with his hands, indicating something roughly the size of a house cat. "It's the Mortal Cup, Jace, not the Mortal Toilet Bowl," said Isabelle.

And so the dentist says 'Rinse.' So you lean over, and you're lookin' at this miniature toilet bowl.

Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.

And of course, when you see your brother in the toilet bowl...there's a little voice that say, 'I wonder where he would go...'...if it hadn't been for his head...

Oh, its big enough,” he said patronizingly, “but somehow I was expecting…you know.” He gestured with his hands, indicating something roughly the size of a house cat. “It’s the Mortal Cup, Jace, not the Mortal Toilet Bowl,” said Isabelle. -Jace & Isabelle, pg.349-

And there’s vodka. In the bathroom.” “In the bathroom?” Simon raises his eyebrows. “Yeah. It’s, uh. Don’t tell my parents. It’s under the sink behind the toilet bowl cleaner. It’s the one in the vodka bottle. Don’t drink the toilet bowl cleaner.

The most work he did on [the urinals] was to run a brush once or twice apiece, singing some song as loud as he could in time to the swishing brush; then he'd splash in some Clorox and he'd be through. ... And when the Big Nurse...came in to check McMurphy's cleaning assignment personally, she brought a little compact mirror and she held it under the rim of the bowls. She walked along shaking her head and saying, "Why, this is an outrage... an outrage..." at every bowl. McMurphy sidled right along beside her, winking down his nose and saying in answer, "No; that's a toilet bowl...a TOILET bowl.

My robust lexicon notwithstanding, I struggle to find the right words to describe just how much I despise, hate, abhor, revile, detest and categorically abominate anything to do with home maintenance. While cooking strikes me as an essentially creative act, cleaning seems little more than an exercise in decay management, enough to trigger an existential crisis each time the ring around the toilet bowl reappears.

Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning.

crying, and go in the toilet bowl

Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine. If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it. Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control. Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering. By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.

Perhaps the greatest strike against philosophical pessimism is that its only theme is human suffering. This is the last item on the list of our species’ obsessions and detracts from everything that matters to us, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and a Sparking Clean Toilet Bowl. For the pessimist, everything considered in isolation from human suffering or any cognition that does not have as its motive the origins, nature, and elimination of human suffering is at base recreational, whether it takes the form of conceptual probing or physical action in the world—for example, delving into game theory or traveling in outer space, respectively. And by “human suffering,” the pessimist is not thinking of particular sufferings and their relief, but of suffering itself. Remedies may be discovered for certain diseases and sociopolitical barbarities may be amended. But those are only stopgaps. Human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist. The one truly effective solution for suffering is that spoken of in Zapffe’s “Last Messiah.” It may not be a welcome solution for a stopgap world, but it would forever put an end to suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real.

It's never a good day when an ancient demon shows up on your toilet bowl.

The Paradox of Progress We live in an interesting time in that, materially, things are arguably better than they have ever been before, yet we all seem to be losing our minds thinking the world is one giant toilet bowl about to be flushed. An irrational sense of hopelessness is spreading across the rich, developed world. It’s a paradox of progress: the better things get, the more anxious and desperate we all seem to feel.

silence falls. i open my eyes and ready myself to move, glancing down at me feet bridging the toilet bowl. it's gross that i haven't been able to flush, but if it's yellow, let it mellow...and run like hell-o. i have to make a move for the door, and fast--undead Kirsty Mckay

He is looking down into the toilet bowl. He sees a bright shiny red ball, about the size of his fist, covered with blood and bobbing jauntily in the yellowed water. It throbs in time with Ernest’s pulse. It is his heart.

The reason why women think men should spend a lot of money on an engagement ring is because women are the ones who get to clean up all the poop (stains and toilet bowl swirls included) that is provided by every family member living in the house until they die.

Love is like a toilet bowl. One touch and you too could be in deep shit.

The reason is that even in a fantasy there is nothing even remotely erotic about a toilet bowl. In fact, considered as an accoutrement to a sexual encounter, a toilet bowl is a real cold shower.

We can deeply love our poison. We can love the taste of it, the scent of it, the comforting weight of it in our belly and find ourselves woken in the night with stabbing cramps, arms around porcelain toilet bowls, hurling every last bit until collapsing on bathroom tile, limp from dehydration. Sometimes parting with love is essential for survival. I’ve found the most tragic aspect of losing loved ones wasn’t the big boom of the fallout, but realizing later how much healthier I was without them.

In Japan, people believe that things like cleaning your room and keeping your bathroom spick-and-span bring good luck, but if your house is cluttered, the effect of polishing the toilet bowl is going to be limited.

Inside, I gagged. The floor was awash with excrement. Blocked toilet bowls brimmed with sewage. The place looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Nobody had noticed, because nobody who mattered ever went in there.

I actually got so drunk I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl of the Scollay Square Cafe and got pissed and puked on all night long by a thousand sailors and seamen and when I woke up in the morning and found myself all covered and caked and unspeakably dirty I just like a good old Boston man walked down to the Atlantic Avenue docks and jumped into the sea.

Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It's not that you get better ideas, the old ones just get tired. After a while you see that even dollars and cents are just an idea. Finally the only thing that masters is putting some turds in the toilet bowl once a day. They stay real, somehow. Somebody came up to me and said, 'I'm God,' I'd say, 'Show me your badge.

All those posters and PSAs and health class presentations on body image and the way you can burst blood vessels in your face and rupture your esophagus if you can’t stop ramming those sno balls down your throat every night, knowing they’ll have to come back up again, you sad weak girl. Because of all this, Coach surely can’t tell a girl, a sensitive, body-conscious teenage girl, to get rid of the tender little tuck around her waist, can she? She can. Coach can say anything. And there’s Emily, keening over the toilet bowl after practice, begging me to kick her in the gut so she can expel the rest, all that cookie dough and cool ranch, the smell making me roil. Emily, a girl made entirely of donut sticks, cheese powder, and haribo. I kick, I do. She would do the same for me.

I open the toilet door and step out, my internal fire re-stoked, ready to face my demons, fight if need be and win. I’m raging, focused like a jungle warrior after his second bowl of tiger-cock soup.

After about half an hour I give up, thinking he must have stumbled home, when I find him. I'm in the girls' toilets, washing my hands, and I hear drunken poetry being recited from the end stall. I walk down to it, push open the door, and there he is, lying on the ground, his head between the wall and the bowl. "Do you mind? I'm having a private moment here, Rachel." I crouch on the floor beside him. "Here's a tip for a private moment: don't have it on the floor of the girls' toilets." "The girls?" he asks. "The added extras didn't give it away?" He lifts his head and squints at the unit in the opposite corner. "Not a mailbox?" "Not a mailbox, Henry," I say as I try, unsuccessfully, to haul him into a standing position.

We’ve been through all this a thousand times. I won’t subject myself to the indignities of pregnancy. I won’t swish crap-laden diapers around in a toilet bowl ten times a day. Let someone else populate the earth. I’m not about to split off my soul, like some damned amoeba.

the toilet is an intimacy only shared with parents when you are young and once again when they are older and with lovers when say on a Sunday morning stretching into the bathroom you wake to the sound of stream into bowl and go to hug the naked body stood with its back to you and kiss the neck and taste the whole of the night on there and smell the morning’s pale yellow loss and take the whole of him in your hand and feel the water moving through him and knowing that this is love the prone flesh what we expel from the body and what we let inside

Normal people hadn’t been molested or reared by a clinically psychotic mother, an alcoholic father, or a perversely mad psychiatrist who wore a Santa hat and performed toilet bowl readings. These were normal people, and I lived among them now. I thought, This must be what I want.

The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble.

Bekka treated her role has Frankenstein's bride more like an audition to be Brett's bride. Every part of her body had been colored bright kelly green - even parts that her mother had stressed were 'not to be seen by anyone except God and the inside of a toilet bowl.' Instead of wearing a wig, Bekka had teased and then shellacked her own hair into a windblown cone and she'd used female-mustache bleach to create white streaks. Her seams, made of real suture thread, had been attached to her neck and wrists with clear double-sided costume tape because drawing them on with kohl would not have been 'honoring the character.' Her Costume Castle dress had been exchanged for something 'more authentic' from the Bridal Barn. If Brett didn't see his future in her heavily black-shadowed eyes tonight, he never would. Or so she believed.

From the pit of his stomach a violent spasm of nausea rose up and seized his throat. He ran to the bathroom, barely able to stand, knelt down in front of the toilet and started to vomit. He vomited the whiskey he'd just drunk, vomited what he'd eaten that day as well as what he'd eaten the day before, and the day before that, and he felt, with his sweaty head now entirely inside the toilet bowl and a sharp pain in his side, as if he were endlessly vomiting up the entire time of his life on earth, going all the way back to the pap he was given as a baby, and when, at last, he'd expelled his own mother's milk, he kept vomiting poison bitterness, bile, pure hatred.

Maya, novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story. Master the short story and you’ll have mastered the world, he thinks just before he drifts off to sleep. I should write this down, he thinks. He reaches for a pen, but there isn’t one anywhere near the toilet bowl he is resting against.

If you see a toilet bowl without a ring, she thought, you know there’s a woman somewhere in the vicinity.

I missed him like pissing dudes miss the toilet bowl.

Hey,’ I yell, through the closed door. ‘Why is the water in your toilet bowl blue?’ ‘Because orange stripes are so last year,’ she yells back.

I’m aware that New York is a toilet bowl–but an expensive porcelain one.

The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud above the toilet bowl, and then flush them away.

There’s a TV turned low, directly in her line of sight, that now shows an advertisement featuring a smiling woman who appears to be in love with her toilet bowl cleanser.

From the outside looking in, trying to decipher Google’s search algorithms is like reading tea leaves in a toilet bowl…as it’s flushing. With the lights off.

The dark place with the lousy color TV that unshaven and unemployed men spend the day watching game shows on? Where the piss in the men’s room smells two thousand years old and there’s always a sodden Camel butt unraveling in the toilet bowl? Where the beer is thirty cents a glass and you cut it with salt and the jukebox is loaded with seventy country oldies?

Have you ever met a slave, Luke?" she asked. The question took me aback, coming from a black person. I stammered out a no. She said, "Really? You've never been to a mall? You've never watched shoppers with their carts piled with soda and microwaveable food? You've never stayed in a hotel where a fifty-year-old Mexican mother of six scrubs your shit stains off the toilet bowl? You've never watched TV for five hours straight?

Early on, Zinkoff's mother impressed upon her son the etiquette of throwing up: That is, do not throw up at random, but throw up into something, preferably a toilet or bucket. Since toilets or buckets are not always handy, Zinkoff has learned to reach for the nearest container. Thus, at one time or another he has thrown up into soup bowls, flowerpots, wastebaskets, trash bins, shopping bags, winter boots, kitchen sinks and, once, a clown's hat. But never his father's mailbag.

Sometimes it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by looking at his relationships with women, or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners. It’s easy enough to be nice to your mates. You can buy them a drink, make them a tape, ring them up to see if they’re OK … there are any number of quick and painless methods of turning yourself into a Good Bloke. When it comes to girlfriends, though, it’s much trickier to be consistently honorable. One moment you’re ticking along, cleaning the toilet bowl, and expressing your feelings and doing all the other things that a modern chap is supposed to do; the next, you’re manipulating and sulking and double-dealing and fibbing with the best of them. I can’t work it out.

~Posters with torn edges hanging from rotten walls~ The doctor told me something once she said STOP DRINKING I slapped her across the face with this NO I walked right out of that office went right down to the hole I told the bartender WHISKEY, MOTHERFUCKER he poured and he poured and I slapped my money down on that bar the man I had been driving around with he just sort of sat there next to this hooker she probably had something rotten way down there between her legs her eyes told of no soul I emptied the bottle down my throat and ordered some chips the bartender told me THEY'RE STALE and I give him a I DON'T FUCKIN' CARE, GIVE ME SOMETHIN' He slid me a ham sandwich dripping with cheap low-fat mayo and said ENJOY I went back to my room and talked all night so much conversation it turned the toilet bowl pale

In 1941 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Cafe on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seaman and assorted civillians came in and cast their sentient debouchments on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? - anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind.

THE BILL FOR DARRELL BOB HOUSTON THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The onion has as many pages as War and Peace, every one of which is poignant enough to make a strong man weep, but the various ivory parchments of the onion and the stinging green bookmark of the onion are quickly charred by belly juices and bowel bacteria. Only the beet departs the body the same color as it went in. Beets consumed at dinner will, come morning, stock a toilet bowl with crimson fish, their hue attesting to beet's chromatic immunity to the powerful digestive acids and thoroughgoing microbes that can turn the reddest pimento, the orangest carrot, the yellowest squash into a single disgusting shade of brown.

When Nathaniel arrived at his aunt’s house on Pinnacle Lane, carrying all of his belongings in one tiny suitcase, he arrived as a man many believed had never used his hands to point his genitals toward the toilet bowl, had never glanced down the cashier’s shirt as she made change, had never become angry at a traffic light, and never wanted more than what was given to him.

Space Shuttle toilets have always been mounted on the floor, but you would not call them normal. The original shuttle toilet bowl featured a set of 1,200 rpm Waring blender blades positioned a brief 6 inches below the sitter’s anatomy. The macerator would pulp the feces and tissue—meaning, if all went well, the paper, not the scrotal, variety—and fling it to the sides of a holding tank.

I'm the bathroom master I'm a real bowl blaster Don't mess with me 'Cause I can mess it up faster With just one flush I can make a toilet gush When my sister cleans it up I just turn her to mush!

Things I Used to Get Hit For: Talking back. Being smart. Acting stupid. Not listening. Not answering the first time. Not doing what I’m told. Not doing it the second time I’m told. Running, jumping, yelling, laughing, falling down, skipping stairs, lying in the snow, rolling in the grass, playing in the dirt, walking in mud, not wiping my feet, not taking my shoes off. Sliding down the banister, acting like a wild Indian in the hallway. Making a mess and leaving it. Pissing my pants, just a little. Peeing the bed, hardly at all. Sleeping with a butter knife under my pillow. Shitting the bed because I was sick and it just ran out of me, but still my fault because I’m old enough to know better. Saying shit instead of crap or poop or number two. Not knowing better. Knowing something and doing it wrong anyway. Lying. Not confessing the truth even when I don’t know it. Telling white lies, even little ones, because fibbing isn’t fooling and not the least bit funny. Laughing at anything that’s not funny, especially cripples and retards. Covering up my white lies with more lies, black lies. Not coming the exact second I’m called. Getting out of bed too early, sometimes before the birds, and turning on the TV, which is one reason the picture tube died. Wearing out the cheap plastic hole on the channel selector by turning it so fast it sounds like a machine gun. Playing flip-and-catch with the TV’s volume button then losing it down the hole next to the radiator pipe. Vomiting. Gagging like I’m going to vomit. Saying puke instead of vomit. Throwing up anyplace but in the toilet or in a designated throw-up bucket. Using scissors on my hair. Cutting Kelly’s doll’s hair really short. Pinching Kelly. Punching Kelly even though she kicked me first. Tickling her too hard. Taking food without asking. Eating sugar from the sugar bowl. Not sharing. Not remembering to say please and thank you. Mumbling like an idiot. Using the emergency flashlight to read a comic book in bed because batteries don’t grow on trees. Splashing in puddles, even the puddles I don’t see until it’s too late. Giving my mother’s good rhinestone earrings to the teacher for Valentine’s Day. Splashing in the bathtub and getting the floor wet. Using the good towels. Leaving the good towels on the floor, though sometimes they fall all by themselves. Eating crackers in bed. Staining my shirt, tearing the knee in my pants, ruining my good clothes. Not changing into old clothes that don’t fit the minute I get home. Wasting food. Not eating everything on my plate. Hiding lumpy mashed potatoes and butternut squash and rubbery string beans or any food I don’t like under the vinyl seat cushions Mom bought for the wooden kitchen chairs. Leaving the butter dish out in summer and ruining the tablecloth. Making bubbles in my milk. Using a straw like a pee shooter. Throwing tooth picks at my sister. Wasting toothpicks and glue making junky little things that no one wants. School papers. Notes from the teacher. Report cards. Whispering in church. Sleeping in church. Notes from the assistant principal. Being late for anything. Walking out of Woolworth’s eating a candy bar I didn’t pay for. Riding my bike in the street. Leaving my bike out in the rain. Getting my bike stolen while visiting Grandpa Rudy at the hospital because I didn’t put a lock on it. Not washing my feet. Spitting. Getting a nosebleed in church. Embarrassing my mother in any way, anywhere, anytime, especially in public. Being a jerk. Acting shy. Being impolite. Forgetting what good manners are for. Being alive in all the wrong places with all the wrong people at all the wrong times.

This quick foray onto the toilet has been no different an endeavor than any other time I’ve used the restroom in my adult life. Try then to imagine my surprise when instead of the waste going down the u-bend like the thousands of times previous, the bowl’s contents go not gentle into that good night. Instead, they shoot directly up at me . . . at approximately 80 miles an hour. As I leap backward, slamming into the glass shower door, the only thought going through my now-banged head is, When did I eat corn?" Pretty in Plaid: A Life, a Witch, and a Wardrobe, or, the Wonder Years Before the Condescending, Egomanical, Self-Centered Smart-Ass Phase

Clarisse’s friends were all laughing, and I was trying to find the strength I’d used to fight the Minotaur, but it just wasn’t there. “Like he’s ‘Big Three’ material,” Clarisse said as she pushed me toward one of the toilets. “Yeah, right. Minotaur probably fell over laughing, he was so stupid looking.” Her friends snickered. Annabeth stood in the corner, watching through her fingers. Clarisse bent me over on my knees and started pushing my head toward the toilet bowl. It reeked like rusted pipes and, well, like what goes into toilets. I strained to keep my head up. I was looking at the scummy water, thinking, I will not go into that. I won’t. Then something happened. I felt a tug in the pit of my stomach. I heard the plumbing rumble, the pipes shudder. Clarisse’s grip on my hair loosened. Water shot out of the toilet, making an arc straight over my head, and the next thing I knew, I was sprawled on the bathroom tiles with Clarisse screaming behind me. I turned just as water blasted out of the toilet again, hitting Clarisse straight in the face so hard it pushed her down onto her butt. The water stayed on her like the spray from a fire hose, pushing her backward into a shower stall. She struggled, gasping, and her friends started coming toward her. But then the other toilets exploded, too, and six more streams of toilet water blasted them back. The showers acted up, too, and together all the fixtures sprayed the camouflage girls right out of the bathroom, spinning them around like pieces of garbage being washed away. As soon as they were out the door, I felt the tug in my gut lessen, and the water shut off as quickly as it had started. The entire bathroom was flooded. Annabeth hadn’t been spared. She was dripping wet, but she hadn’t been pushed out the door. She was standing in exactly the same place, staring at me in shock.

Most of us are living here because we like the idea of being able to walk out our front doors and smile at what we see. On my own front porch I have a palm tree growing in a blue toilet bowl . . . and on occasion I like to wander outside, stark naked, and fire my .44 Magnum at various gongs I’ve mounted on the nearby hillside. I like to load up on mescaline and turn my amplifier up to 110 decibels for a taste of “White Rabbit” while the sun comes up on the snow-peaks along the Continental Divide. Which is not entirely the point.

He rolled and thrashed in his bed, waiting for the dancing blue shadows to come in his window, waiting for the heavy knock on his door, waiting for some bodiless, Kafkaesque voice to call: Okay, open up in there! And when he finally fell asleep he did it without knowing it, because thought continued without a break, shifting from conscious rumination to the skewed world of dreams with hardly a break, like a car going from drive to low. Even in his dreams he thought he was awake, and in his dreams he committed suicide over and over: burned himself; bludgeoned himself by standing under an anvil and pulling a rope; hanged himself; blew out the stove’s pilot lights and then turned on the oven and all four burners; shot himself; defenestrated himself; stepped in front of a moving Greyhound bus; swallowed pills; swallowed Vanish toilet bowl disinfectant; stuck a can of Glade Pine Fresh aerosol in his mouth, pushed the button, and inhaled until his head floated off into the sky like a child’s balloon; committed hara-kiri while kneeling in a confessional at St. Dom’s, confessing his self-murder to a dumbfounded young priest even as his guts accordioned out onto the bench like beef stew, performing an act of contrition in a fading, bemused voice as he lay in his blood and the steaming sausages of his intestines. But most vividly, over and over, he saw himself behind the wheel of the LTD, racing the engine a little in the closed garage, taking deep breaths and leafing through a copy of National Geographic, examining pictures of life in Tahiti and Aukland and the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, turning the pages ever more slowly, until the sound of the engine faded to a faraway sweet hum and the green waters of the South Pacific inundated him in rocking warmth and took him down to a silver fathom.

snuck into the vacant copilot’s room next to our victim, carrying a bucket with the sea cucumber. I crept through the room, being careful not to make any noise. I removed the sea cucumber and slid it into our victim’s toilet, being careful not to splash any water. The sea cucumber looked like a world record, giant turd. It was jet black, about fourteen inches long and thick around as a coke can. Neither of our pilots was a scuba diver and I guessed they would never suspect the giant turd was really a sea creature. The humongous turd impersonator lay motionless in the bottom of the toilet bowl, leaking a faint reddish dye. When they discovered the state of the toilet the pilots began a heated argument, blaming each other for not flushing the disgusting mound of excrement. This was a serious breach of etiquette for an officer and gentleman. The hapless pilots finally tried flushing and the toilet backed up and flooded the bathroom. They had to summon a plumber who immediately recognized the turd for what it was, a sea cucumber, and said it must have somehow crawled up through the pipes. Neither pilot ever guessed they were the victims of a practical joke. The prank was flawless and I still have the picture of the cucumber in their toilet.

In the first bathroom we visited, the shower worked normally, but the toilet was on the ceiling, the water staying in the bowl in defiance of gravity. “What happens if you flush it?” I wondered. Annabeth laughed. “Percy, I’ve seen what happens when you mess with plumbing. If you want to try that, wait until I’m out of the room.

If we go, how long will it be before you find the local hole in Sidewinder? a voice inside him asked. The dark place with the lousy color TV that unshaven and unemployed men spend the day watching game shows on? Where the piss in the men’s room smells two thousand years old and there’s always a sodden Camel butt unraveling in the toilet bowl? Where the beer is thirty cents a glass and you cut it with salt and the jukebox is loaded with seventy country oldies? How long? Oh Christ, he was so afraid it wouldn’t be long at all. “I can’t win,” he said, very softly. That was it. It was like trying to play solitaire with one of the aces missing from the deck.

I knew what I had to do, and I’d even prepared myself when the world’s most magnificent beta fish stopped picking at the multicolored flakes. I swallowed a lump in my throat and, without special words or ceremony, dumped the bowl’s contents into the watery grave. I don’t remember what I had named the fish—only that it missed the bowl and stuck to the back rim of the toilet.

It's an old story," Julia says, leaning back in her chair. "Only for me, it's new. I went to school for industrial design. All my life I've been fascinated by chairs - I know it sounds silly, but it's true. Form meets purpose in a chair. My parents thought I was crazy, but somehow I convinced them to pay my way to California. To study furniture design. I was all excited at first. It was totally unlike me to go so far away from home. But I was sick of the cold and sick of the snow. I figured a little sun might change my life. So I headed down to L.A. and roomed with a friend of an ex-girlfriend of my brother's. She was an aspiring radio actress, which meant she was home a lot. At first, I loved it. I didn't even let the summer go by. I dove right into my classes. Soon enough, I learned I couldn't just focus on chairs. I had to design spoons and toilet-bowl cleaners and thermostats. The math never bothered me, but the professors did. They could demolish you in a second without giving you a clue if how to rebuild. I spent more and more time in the studio, with other crazed students who guarded their projects like toy-jealous kids. I started to go for walks. Long walks. I couldn't go home because my roommate was always there. The sun was too much for me, so I'd stay indoors. I spent hours in supermarkets, walking aisle to aisle, picking up groceries and then putting them back. I went to bowling alleys and pharmacies. I rode buses that kept their lights on all night. I sat in Laundromats because once upon a time Laundromats made me happy. But now the hum of the machines sounded like life going past. Finally, one night I sat too long in the laundry. The woman who folded in the back - Alma - walked over to me and said, 'What are you doing here, girl?' And I knew that there wasn't any answer. There couldn't be any answer. And that's when I knew it was time to go.

In Hawaii...there's a spot they call the Toilet Bowl. There're these huge whirlpools because it's where the incoming and outgoing tides meet and crash into each other. It goes around and around like when you flush a toilet. If you wipe out there, you get pulled underwater and it's hard to float up again. Depending on the waves you might never make it back to the surface. So there you are, underwater, pounded by waves, and there's nothing you can do. Flailing around's not gonna get you anywhere. You'll just use up your energy. You've never been so scared in your life. But unless you get over that fear you'll never be a real surfer. You have to face death, get to really know it, then overcome it. When you're down in that whirlpool you start thinking about all kinds of things. It's like you get to be friends with death, have a heart-to-heart talk with it.

Fred gets married and on his wedding night he calls his Father for some tips on what to do, since he has never been with a woman before. "So what do I do first?"? His father replied, "Take her clothes off and lay her on the bed." 5 minutes later Fred’s on the phone again. "She’s naked and in bed, what do I do now??? His father can’t believe what he is hearing, "Take your damn clothes off and get into bed with her." After another 5 minutes poor Fred is on the phone again. "Dad, I’m naked and in bed with her, what do I do now?" His dad’s patience is now running thin so he says, "Shit son! Do I have to spell everything out for you? Just put the hardest thing on your body where she pees. Goodnight!!!" Just when the old man starts snoring, his son is on the phone once again. "Ok Dad, I have my head in the toilet bowl what do I do next" "DROWN YOURSELF, YOU F**KING IDIOT!!

According to Mrs. Portleigh, a bad boy had once stolen some of the communion-bread when the tray was passed and put it in his pocket. He took it home and threw it into the toilet-bowl just to see what would happen. At once—or so Mrs. Portleigh reported to her rapt Little Worshippers—the water in the toilet-bowl had turned a bright red. It was the Blood of Christ, she said, and it had appeared to that little boy because he had done a very bad act called a BLASPHEMY.

Over the next month, when I’d wake up, my mind was filled with colors. The apartment began to feel less cavernous to me. One time I awoke to find my hair had been cut off, like a boy’s, and there were long blond hairs stuck to the inside of the toilet bowl. I imagined sitting on the toilet with a towel over my shoulders, Ping Xi standing above me, snipping away. In the mirror, I looked bold and sprightly. I thought I looked good. I wrote Post-it notes requesting fresh fruits, mineral water, grilled salmon from “a good Japanese restaurant.” I asked for a candle to burn while I bathed. During this period, my waking hours were spent gently, lovingly, growing reaccustomed to a feeling of cozy extravagance. I put on a little weight, and so when I lay down on the living room floor, my bones didn’t hurt. My face lost its mean edge. I asked for flowers. “Lilies.” “Birds of paradise.” “Daisies.” “A branch of catkins.” I jogged in place, did leg lifts, push-ups. It was easier and easier to pass the time between getting up and going down.

Imagine you live on a planet where the dominant species is far more intellectually sophisticated than human beings but often keeps humans as companion animals. They are called the Gorns. They communicate with each other via a complex combination of telepathy, eye movements & high-pitched squeaks, all completely unintelligible & unlearnable by humans, whose brains are prepared for verbal language acquisition only. Humans sometimes learn the meaning of individual sounds by repeated association with things of relevance to them. The Gorns & humans bond strongly but there are many Gorn rules that humans must try to assimilate with limited information & usually high stakes. You are one of the lucky humans who lives with the Gorns in their dwelling. Many other humans are chained to small cabanas in the yard or kept in outdoor pens of varying size. They are so socially starved they cannot control their emotions when a Gorn goes near them. The Gorns agree that they could never be House-Humans. The dwelling you share with your Gorn family is filled with water-filled porcelain bowls.Every time you try to urinate in one,nearby Gorn attack you. You learn to only use the toilet when there are no Gorns present. Sometimes they come home & stuff your head down the toilet for no apparent reason. You hate this & start sucking up to the Gorns when they come home to try & stave this off but they view this as evidence of your guilt. You are also punished for watching videos, reading books, talking to other human beings, eating pizza or cheesecake, & writing letters. These are all considered behavior problems by the Gorns. To avoid going crazy, once again you wait until they are not around to try doing anything you wish to do. While they are around, you sit quietly, staring straight ahead. Because they witness this good behavior you are so obviously capable of, they attribute to “spite” the video watching & other transgressions that occur when you are alone. Obviously you resent being left alone, they figure. You are walked several times a day and left crossword puzzle books to do. You have never used them because you hate crosswords; the Gorns think you’re ignoring them out of revenge. Worst of all, you like them. They are, after all, often nice to you. But when you smile at them, they punish you, likewise for shaking hands. If you apologize they punish you again. You have not seen another human since you were a small child. When you see one you are curious, excited & afraid. You really don’t know how to act. So, the Gorn you live with keeps you away from other humans. Your social skills never develop. Finally, you are brought to “training” school. A large part of the training consists of having your air briefly cut off by a metal chain around your neck. They are sure you understand every squeak & telepathic communication they make because sometimes you get it right. You are guessing & hate the training. You feel pretty stressed out a lot of the time. One day, you see a Gorn approaching with the training collar in hand. You have PMS, a sore neck & you just don’t feel up to the baffling coercion about to ensue. You tell them in your sternest voice to please leave you alone & go away. The Gorns are shocked by this unprovoked aggressive behavior. They thought you had a good temperament. They put you in one of their vehicles & take you for a drive. You watch the attractive planetary landscape going by & wonder where you are going. You are led into a building filled with the smell of human sweat & excrement. Humans are everywhere in small cages. Some are nervous, some depressed, most watch the goings on on from their prisons. Your Gorns, with whom you have lived your entire life, hand you over to strangers who drag you to a small room. You are terrified & yell for your Gorn family to help you. They turn & walk away.You are held down & given a lethal injection. It is, after all, the humane way to do it.

What did Kavinsky say about it?” Chris asks me. “Nothing yet. He’s still at lacrosse practice.” My phone immediately starts to buzz, and the three of us look at each other, wide-eyed. Margot picks it up and looks at it. “It’s Peter!” She hot-potatoes the phone to me. “Let’s give them some privacy,” she says, nudging Chris. Chris shrugs her off. I ignore both of them and answer the phone. “Hello.” My voice comes out thin as a reed. Peter starts talking fast. “Okay, I’ve seen the video, and the first thing I’m going to say to you is don’t freak out.” He’s breathing hard; it sounds like he’s running. “Don’t freak out? How can I not? This is terrible. Do you know what they’re all saying about me in the comments? That I’m a slut. They think we’re having sex in that video, Peter.” “Never read the comments, Covey! That’s the first rule of--” “If you say ‘Fight Club’ to me right now, I will hang up on you.” “Sorry. Okay, I know it sucks but--” “It doesn’t ‘suck.’ It’s a literal nightmare. My most private moment, for everybody to see. I’m completely humiliated. The things people are saying--” My voice breaks. Kitty and Margot and Chris are all looking at me with sad eyes, which makes me feel even sadder. “Don’t cry, Lara Jean. Please don’t cry. I promise you I’m going to fix this. I’m going to get whoever runs Anonybitch to take it down.” “How? We don’t even know who they are! And besides, I bet our whole school’s seen it by now. Teachers, too. I know for a fact that teachers look at Anonybitch. I was in the faculty lounge once and I overheard Mr. Filipe and Ms. Ryan saying how bad it makes our school look. And what about college admission boards and our future employers?” Peter guffaws. “Future employers? Covey, I’ve seen much worse. Hell, I’ve seen worse pictures of me on here. Remember that picture of me with my head in a toilet bowl, and I’m naked?” I shudder. “I never saw that picture. Besides, that’s you; that’s not me. I don’t do that kind of stuff.” “Just trust me, okay? I promise I’ll take care of it.” I nod, even though I know he can’t see me. Peter is powerful. If anyone could fix such a thing, it would be him. “Listen, I’ve gotta go. Coach is gonna kick my ass if he sees me on the phone. I’ll call you tonight, okay? Don’t go to sleep.” I don’t want to hang up. I wish we could talk longer. “Okay,” I whisper. When I hang up, Margot, Chris, and Kitty are all three staring at me. “Well?” Chris says. “He says he’ll take care of it.” Smugly Kitty says, “I told you so.” “What does that even mean, ‘he’ll take care of it’?” Margot asks. “He hasn’t exactly proven himself to be responsible.” “It’s not his fault,” Kitty and I say at the same time.

I was sleeping with my head on the wooden arm of a seat as six attendants of the theater converged with their night’s total of swept-up rubbish and created a huge dusty pile that reached to my nose as I snored head down – till they almost swept me away too. This was reported to me by Dean, who was watching from ten seats behind. All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the come and the gone were swept up in this pile. Had they taken me with it, Dean would never have seen me again. He would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and the life of everybody concerned and not concerned. What would I have said to him from my rubbish womb? ‘Don’t bother me, man, I’m happy where I am. You lost me one night in Detroit in August nineteen forty-nine. What right have you to come and disturb my reverie in this pukish can?’ In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Café on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchments on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? – anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.

I’m so stressed that a weird Olympic-style commentary starts up in my head. And here we have Zelah Green, the fourteen-year-old champion of rituals, attempting the afternoon toilet-touching event for the first time … I take my first faltering step towards the rim. And she’s approaching the target, booms the voice. Steady approach, good footwork … My right hand, naked and trembling, is now hovering over the inside of the toilet. Will she set a new world record? screams the voice. Will Zelah Green take the gold medal for bravery and/or total stupidity? ‘I’m going in!’ I say. I skim the curved cool surface of the bowl with the fingertips of my right hand and jump back as if I’ve been electrified. And she’s done it! shrieks the commentator. Zelah Green wins the gold medal for toilet touching!

Comparing marriage to football is no insult. I come from the South where football is sacred. I would never belittle marriage by saying it is like soccer, bowling, or playing bridge, never. Those images would never work, only football is passionate enough to be compared to marriage. In other sports, players walk onto the field, in football they run onto the field, in high school ripping through some paper, in college (for those who are fortunate enough) they touch the rock and run down the hill onto the field in the middle of the band. In other sports, fans cheer, in football they scream. In other sports, players ‘high five’, in football they chest, smash shoulder pads, and pat your rear. Football is a passionate sport, and marriage is about passion. In football, two teams send players onto the field to determine which athletes will win and which will lose, in marriage two families send their representatives forward to see which family will survive and which family will be lost into oblivion with their traditions, patterns, and values lost and forgotten. Preparing for this struggle for survival, the bride and groom are each set up. Each has been led to believe that their family’s patterns are all ‘normal,’ and anyone who differs is dense, naïve, or stupid because, no matter what the issue, the way their family has always done it is the ‘right’ way. For the premarital bride and groom in their twenties, as soon as they say, “I do,” these ‘right’ ways of doing things are about to collide like two three hundred and fifty pound linemen at the hiking of the ball. From “I do” forward, if not before, every decision, every action, every goal will be like the line of scrimmage. Where will the family patterns collide? In the kitchen. Here the new couple will be faced with the difficult decision of “Where do the cereal bowls go?” Likely, one family’s is high, and the others is low. Where will they go now? In the bathroom. The bathroom is a battleground unmatched in the potential conflicts. Will the toilet paper roll over the top or underneath? Will the acceptable residing position for the lid be up or down? And, of course, what about the toothpaste? Squeeze it from the middle or the end? But the skirmishes don’t stop in the rooms of the house, they are not only locational they are seasonal. The classic battles come home for the holidays. Thanksgiving. Which family will they spend the noon meal with and which family, if close enough, will have to wait until the nighttime meal, or just dessert if at all? Christmas. Whose home will they visit first, if at all? How much money will they spend on gifts for his family? for hers? Then comes for many couples an even bigger challenge – children of their own! At the wedding, many couples take two candles and light just one often extinguishing their candle as a sign of devotion. The image is Biblical. The Bible is quoted a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. What few prepare them for is the upcoming struggle, the conflict over the unanswered question: the two shall become one, but which one? Two families, two patterns, two ways of doing things, which family’s patterns will survive to play another day, in another generation, and which will be lost forever? Let the games begin.

4Paul Gaydos My Books Browse ▾ Community ▾ The Way of the Superior Man Quotes The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to... by David Deida Read Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine. If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it. Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control. Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering. By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.

No doubt, the toilet must have come alive and regurgitated all over the floor and walls. The putrid water is still trickling from the bowl.

A mob stormed the apartment and threw the family’s furniture out of a third-floor window as the crowds cheered below. The neighbors burned the couple’s marriage license and the children’s baby pictures. They overturned the refrigerator and tore the stove and plumbing fixtures out of the wall. They tore up the carpet. They shattered the mirrors. They bashed in the toilet bowl. They ripped out the radiators. They smashed the piano Clark had worked overtime to buy for his daughter. And when they were done, they set the whole pile of the family’s belongings, now strewn on the ground below, on fire.

Somehow, I thought it would be bigger.” Clary looked at the Cup in her hand. It was the size, perhaps, of an ordinary wineglass, only much heavier. Power thrummed through it, like blood through living veins. “It’s a perfectly nice size,” she said indignantly. “Oh, it’s big enough,” he said patronizingly, “but somehow I was expecting something . . . you know.” He gestured with his hands, indicating something roughly the size of a house cat. “It’s the Mortal Cup, Jace, not the Mortal Toilet Bowl,” said Isabelle. “Are we done now? Can we go?

I became aware that I was repeating certain actions: checking that doors were locked, cookers were turned off, basins and toilet bowls were clean. Connected with these things were strange, repetitive rituals:

How will he get by in the desert without bowls and plates, without coal stoves, without carpets to lie down on with the little ones? Without his toilet, without the view from the window onto the square and the fountains with their crystal-clear water.

By the beginning of March, I had sunk into the state of mind you get into when you know you have to take castor oil and there's no way out. I just did what had to be done, without discussing it or thinking about it. I would get up, polish my saddle shoes, bathe, get dressed, dump my bowl of oatmeal into the toilet so Grandma India would think I'd eaten it -- but my nervous stomach wouldn't have to eject it -- and go to the war inside that school. I listened to shouts, to ugly names, while I smiled and said, 'Thank you,' I waited for a ride, came home, did homework, got to bed, and started over again the next day. I felt kind of numb, as though nothing mattered any more.

46. Bubble Pop Discreetly place some bubble wrap around the rim of the toilet bowl and then gently lower the toilet seat onto it. The next time someone sits down to do their business, they'll be in for quite the popping surprise!

The single drop of pee made a pitiful splash. Fred sighed as he stood over the cracked toilet bowl that, like him, had seen better days. The public restrooms at Wattle River Reserve weren’t as dirty as he’d feared, though the walls hosted a colorful array of aging graffiti. Another couple of measly drips. Was there a job in the armed forces for people who could urinate in Morse code? If so, he’d be an ideal candidate, though it was unlikely they’d accept eighty-two-year-olds.

Albert remembered reading somewhere that you could pick up more germs during a short journey on the London Underground than you could from licking a toilet bowl.

Didn’t Reine-Marie tell you how awful it was? Blech. Even Ruth couldn’t drink it, and she drinks from the toilet bowl.” “I don’t think that’s true,” said Olivier. “I saw her once.

His stream lasted so long I thought about throwing a quarter into the toilet bowl to make a wish.

Did we mention the giant toilet bowl? Wet ’n Wild has an attraction dubbed The Storm. The ride actually looks like a lot of fun, but in all honesty it strongly resembles a huge commode. Riders wash down a chute to gain speed, then circle around a huge bowl before dropping into a pool below. This must be how that goldfish you flushed in third grade felt.

It’s the Mortal Cup, Jace, not the Mortal Toilet Bowl,

SOLUTION: Pour a small cupful of mouthwash in the toilet bowl. After fifteen to twenty minutes, dip a toilet brush in the water and give all surfaces a quick wipe. Just one flush and you’re done.

it is the hallowed Scientific Method which dooms the "theoretical science" of Darwinian Evolution to the toilet bowl of pseudo-scientific error.

She worshiped the ground he walked on and would even eat out of the toilet bowl he took a dump in if it came down to it.

Every time the sound of one of my farts reverberates in a toilet bowl, I think of you. Could this be love?

Toilet bowl basins need to be deeper, because every time I sit down my penis clogs the pipe.

I want to pour your voice into a goldfish bowl before flushing it down the toilet.

The prescribed setting is removed from the everyday world, but reminiscent of it in essentials: a tea house, just three meters square, set in a garden, with a stone water basin, lantern, and toilet. Entering the room, one becomes not a spectator but a participant. The smell of incense, the sight of a scroll hung in an alcove with a simple flower arrangement below, subtly stimulate the senses. The simmering of the iron kettle over a charcoal fire is likened to the sound of the wind in the pine trees. Tea—thick, green, and bitter—is made with the utmost economy of movement. After each participant has sipped a bowl of tea, the conversation turns to the quality of the tea bowl itself and associated subjects.

Drop your blinders and raise the sewer to eye level; admit you’re swimming in shit. If you don’t acknowledge the turd hurtling down the drain toward you, you can’t dodge it. I’ve come to get out of the toilet bowl and become the commode that flushes the shit.

There were stories, told about Ukrainians, who had never previously seen toilets. They washed their feet in the toilet bowl. Others bought fish and kept them alive in the bath tubs. They were faced with another problem. They realized that many people had radios and could hear news from all over Europe. In the Soviet Union they only had loudspeakers at every street corner and they played marches or propaganda from Moscow. At home, the population could enjoy a kind of news box (tochka-spot) which transmitted the same program as the loudspeakers. The length and breadth of that entire vast country everybody heard the same thing: propaganda. They were really cut off from the rest of the world and were indoctrinated to think that theirs was the best country in the world.

At times, I find my cats near the toilet with a look of suspicion, like they’re asking, “Why is there a lid on our water bowl?

I hate to admit I was enjoying this experiment in naked confrontation. There are not many occasions in a fellow’s life when he gets to really dig into the primal meat of fighting for his life while not wearing a stitch of clothing and armed only with a knife and toilet bowl cleaner.

Everything in the bathroom was white. I sat on the toilet and looked at my thighs nostalgically. Soon they would be perpetually entwined in his thighs, never alone, not even when they wanted to be. But it couldn’t be helped. We had a good run, me and me. I imagined shooting an old dog, an old faithful dog, because that’s what I was to myself. Go on, boy, get. I watched myself dutifully trot ahead. Then I lowered my rifle and what actually happened was I began to have a bowel movement. It was unplanned, but once begun it was best to finish. I flushed and washed my hands and only by luck did I happen to glance back at the toilet. It was still there. One had to suppose it was the dog, shot, but refusing to die. This could get out of hand, I could flush and flush and Phillip would wonder what was going on and I’d have to say The dog won’t die gracefully. Is the dog yourself, as you’ve known yourself until now? Yes. No need to kill it, my sweet girl, he’d say, reaching into the toilet bowl with a slotted spoon. We need a dog. But it’s old and has strange, unchangeable habits. So do I, my dear. So do we all. I flushed again and it went down. I could tell him about it later.

What is round may not always be a toilet bowl.

I’d rather bury my head in the jail toilet bowl than get within inches of your crotch.” “Nice visual, but like I said, I could do better. Your pussy is not worth my time.” “I have a great pussy,” she defends. “You’re not worth my pussy’s time.