Toilet paper is the opiate of the asses

Avast, ye wretches! Ye sheeple! Know ye not the ways and means by which thou hast been cuckolded? Fooled? Corralled? Knick-bottomed?

Like you, I was raised to believe in my own wasteful incapacity; or rather, my own incapacity to handle my own waste.

Yes, I too was a slave of the porcelain throne. A pedant to that prettified-pooper, that quiet commander of tile floors and shuddering thighs. I, too, worshiped at that alter of gastro-intestinal exflux. I bowed my bowels to the bowl. I hunched, and strained, and prayed for desperate release to the gods of civilized shitting. I was not a man, but a supplicant.

They say that religion is the opiate of the masses: that it steals of man his sacred self, and sells it back to him at inflated price. Well, I have had my bodily processes stolen and resold by the CAPITALIST KYRIARCHY and I say: shitting is religion.

What is a water-closet but the temple of the secular world? A separate place, of enforced quiet and private meditation. Observe the similarity of the toilet stall to the Catholic confession box. Notice the juxtaposition of hushed silence and exaggerated echo; these are the sounds of a holy place, a sanctified realm. The scrawled, illicit messages on doors, mirrors, and towel dispensers: are these not prayers of a kind, bottled-messages flung blindly out toward god or man? The unspoken ritual of the line, the urinal, the line, the sink, the towel:

I once was lost, but now am found; Was blind but now I see.

I once held filth that's now released; Was pained, but now am cleaned.

Is the closing ritual of handwashing not a secular re-configuration of baptism? Ancient Israelites washed themselves of sin and evil; modern humans wash themselves of germs and shit, the scientificized articulation of that same sin and evil. Like our forebears, we must 'get clean.'

We do this. We hock our bodies, our selves, the very process which sustains us, into an anonymous white water-bowl, to be flushed away and forgotten. The public toilet is the modern guillotine: a public resource for separating the social chaff from the social wheat, a ruthless "cleansing" mechanism. Rather than surrender our heads, we surrender our excrement; but in that great calculus of power/knowledge, it is all one and the same. Control my shit, and you control my life; for if I cannot shit, how can I live? Does not the absolute authority of the toilet (that is, its authority over my bowels, and the complete absence of any socially-accepted alternative method of relief) coupled with its relative scarcity (ever tried to take a dump in downtown Seattle? If you're shopping, it's easy; if you're poor, it's damned-near impossible) make for a most insidious form of social control? THINK ABOUT IT, man!