Faysy's blog

My friend decided to take part in an essay competition. The topic was 'Where is home for you, and why?' First prize was an iPad. He didn't have time to write the essay so he asked me to write one for him. If he won, he would keep the iPad. Either way, I was getting a 14th Street Pizza treat. Sure, I knew from the start I was the sucker in this deal. But I love Pizza, and 14th Street at that that much. Following is the essay. Definitely not my best work (didn't make it to the top 3 even...out of only 27 entries):

For a place to have the dubious honour of the title of 'My Home' as opposed to merely 'A place where I happen to do the 4-Fs', it has to fulfil certain characteristics. A Home must be a place where I can feel at complete ease and at peace with myself in a zen-like state (the litmus test for this being the place where you get your best ideas). A home must be my fortress of solitude, an area of refuge from the big, bad dog-eat-dog world. Home is where I am King and where I can set my own rules. Home should be the one place where, after a hard day's work, I can drop my load without fear of public censure. Home is where I am right now. Home is where my toilet is. That's right, the toilet. Now reread this paragraph in a new light. Let the potty humour begin.

A man can cover up who he is in public with a facade, adopt various pretensions to culture, wear fancy clothes and roll his 'Rs', but all this becomes irrelevant when the time comes for a man to bare his soul and buttocks, stare down that endless chasm and s(h)it on the toilet. Even the president of the Unites States, arguably the most powerful man on Earth must have to 'go' sometime. Death and Shitting are the two great equalizers. If this exclusive ability to bring a man down to earth, to release his inhibitions, to leave him at his most vulnerable, to force to him to adopt positions he would NEVER assume in public doesn't make the toilet qualify as a home, I don't know what does.

The above paragraph just shows how any toilet in the world can be called a home. But what makes YOUR toilet specifically home and not any other? Very few things in the world are as personalized and expressive of a man's true self as one's toilet. Where else can one find such a concentration of a man's excreta? Our own unique mix of chemicals that tell us what we eat (and we are what we eat). Every other place in the house was built on the false grounds of looking good, as supposed to personal need, which should be the prime motivator. This concept has been most excellently articulated by the veritable Ayn Rand in her seminal 'The Fountainhead' (Wow, Ayn Rand and faeces in the same paragraph, I bet she's turning in her grave). The toilet is the only remaining bastion of the philosophy that comfort precedes all else.

If immigrant grandparents reminisce to their grandkids about how life was in the Old Country, on their lips may be praises of the food, culture etc. but what they are really yearning for is that water closet they had to leave behind. “Ach! Confound these newfangled auto-flushing toilets! Move your tucchus one inch and they let loose!” grumbles the Jewish grandpa. The Sami people of Finland have hundreds of words for snow. Why? Because that's all they see, day-in, day-out. While the number of English words for the toilet are not as many, a Wikipedia search still yielded 24 words (my personal favourite: porcelain goddess) And that number may be even larger in languages whose speakers are genetically predisposed to Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

A brief history of the toilet in various cultures around the world will convince you of the central place this holds in our hearts and between our legs. The Romans, famous for (among other things) throwing some pretty wild orgies and bacchanalian parties, reflected their perversions in the fact that their places of defecation were public baths. The people of the Indian Subcontinent are known for their squatter toilets, where no part of the body directly touches the toilet seat, unlike the Western Commode. This reflects the philosophy that even touching the area where one defecates renders one impure. One can know so much about an individual from what he lets out from the nether ends of his body, for example, disease diagnostic tests, drug tests, paternity tests, diet etc. Hobos and nomads have no homes, ergo they defecate and urinate all over the place. Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street was the antithesis of hygiene. He ate, slept, drank, peed, crapped, copulated in one trashcan.

As I drop another big doodoo, I ask you to join me in singing Talking Heads' song 'This Must be the Place',

“Home, is where I want to be but I guess I'm already there...”