The Outhouse Within

For 8 hours a day I sit in a black rolling swiveling chair and dream about taking a dump. Talk of big ticket items in a conference room behind me, labor rates, transfer databases and markups mixed with sounds of stiff shirts crumpling in step with jerky gaits and the just off the way firing up of the printer, muffled coughs, under tubes of ultra-violent light, wavelengths intended for interrogation and torture of Latin American revolutionaries beaming into my skull, cooking my grey matter into Salisbury steak until I think about major sporting events and new brewpubs, in propinquity to the tapping of keyboards, soft greasy fingers pressing keys and clicking smooth curved mousebacks, that slight soft sponginess or bounce of the hard plastic material, the bare-minimum prophylactic penetration of the machine body, the flat interface a deception; really each arachnoid typer crawls inside the device; he goes down into it and threads his fibers into its wires, probes and possesses his laptop or desktop from the bottom, the dimensions of his tunneling unacknowledged. In my black rolling swiveling chair I clench my bowels and tense my depreciating buttcheeks and I spring into a different world, a magical realm of solitude, poised on a no nick toilet, squatting in a perfectly sculpted immemorial thought; Rodin pose and a bronze glimmer through the blinds, the glow of a tin can and the cool flush of waste whisked away, the sounds of a secluded shore, tenderly waterslapped sand; in my plastic padded chair I twirl about and stare at gray walls and my body sheds its sex, its history, its genitive existence; it wants to ingest and excrete, but not here in the office bathroom, with its two stalls and one urinal; prison conditions, pants around the ankles, foul stench clouds billowing over and under the stall vulnerability, grunting and farting and plunging sounds, the lizard skin toilet paper rustling, the squeaking of the dispenser; the improperly concealed releasing in stalls the obverse of walled typing in the cubicles, the obscene juxtaposition of security and exposure, censored midsections and bared foreheads and unbuckled belts.

Civilization, culture, luxury all measured by one simple standard: the degree of privacy afforded to excretory functions.

The sense of self, the pride of the singular self coterminous with or maybe generated by the independent control of the bowels, by the shroud over the outhouse within; the individual soul appears as its cover, sees itself in the sliver moon hole on a wooden door. People think masturbation is lazy and selfish but a person generally imagines some contact with someone else, idealized, yes, or degraded (idealization’s ugly cousin) or an animal at least, maybe a household item or two, certain domestic cushioned crevices, heaven forbid, everyone has their preference; masturbation requires some imagined involvement, a production of some sort; a person must work for it, show some directorial verve; but defecation is the apex of selfish withdrawal, the ultimate dropping of decorum where fantasy no longer plays an active role; it is the highest denial of abject animality in absolute solitude, but it is also enabled by rigorous socialization, enforced by appearances. The ghoulish enjoyment and relief of atomized excretion is at the same time an expression of utmost conscientiousness, participation in the ethical substance of society.

Just as genital conduction also gathers its material from its phantasmatic environment, the constructed fantasy space of its time; the penis is ready to hand in the Heideggerian sense, equipment used for the sake of one thing or another, in one epoch a tool of procreation, in another an instrument of pleasure, with guilt and shame for misuse either way. (What is colloquially referred to as post nut clarity is captured in the Heideggerian register by the drop from the ready to hand to the present to hand, the genitals swollen with radiating significance deflating into inert shriveled objects, doused with ice water objectivity.)

In my swiveling plastic chair where I sit and gnaw a sandwich right at my desk as fast as possible like an anxious rat to skip the hour lunch which would then require me to stay an hour later, I roll ahead of myself to the moment when I can sit in my car which I recently spent 1000 dollars on to prevent some kind of belt from snapping, and I drive home, first leaving what they call a business park with office buildings for companies with names like General Systems Engineering and Plastic Objects and then drive down the cratered streets of declining neighborhoods seen through a windshield dirtily, finally arriving at home where I can take the long awaited fervently desired and vividly imagined dump, and it is, I have to say, though I do regret the crassness of it all, almost never disappointing or dispiriting; it lives up to the anticipation, it’s better, even, and that says something.