My Father-In-Law’s Downstairs Bathroom

I would like to take a few brief minutes to discuss my father-in-law’s downstairs bathroom. It’s a place that has always puzzled and fascinated me.

Over the 11 years I have pilgrimaged to that special place to leave my bio-organic offerings, there have been several changes I’ve noticed, as well as other conditions that stubbornly remain the same.

The walls were formerly colored an electrifying Mountain Dewesque lime green, but have sadly been repainted to a more refined and understated gray. Back in the day, upon entering, you’d be instantly visually assaulted by those radioactive walls. Damn! was the typical mental or verbal response I’d have whenever I flicked the light on. The vibrancy provided a jolt of nervous energy that almost prematurely initiated the job I’d come to do. All good though, just some fuel to the fire contained within ones own bowels. Regrettably, this zeal is now gone. These days, I shuffle in and take a basic, regular, depressing shit in a nondescript, gray bathroom.

Never once in all my time in that bathroom has there been anything other than the shittiest, cheapest, thinnest single-ply toilet paper on the roll. Keep in mind, I too am a cheap ass. By no means am I buying the silky-smooth, lotion-infused squares, but even I enforce a minimum standard. Honestly, I don’t even know where one can buy such low-end toilet paper. I suspect at some sort of low-rent office supply store, but I’m not entirely sure. I imagine it’s like a Big Lots for stingy companies who really hate their employees. Anyways, back to the TP. The stuff is so thin as to be semi-translucent. One must stack 3-4 layers in order to not see one’s own hand. When cleaning a mud job, despite there allegedly being some toilet paper in your hand, it still just feels like your wiping your hand in shit. Yep, you just punched through and poked yourself in the butthole. Using those substandard sheets always makes me reminisce of travelling for sports as a kid and taking a poop in some random high school bathroom. Clearly, a poor high school. That statement sounds classless, but it’s true nonetheless. Rich kid schools have double, maybe even triple-ply.

The most recent and exciting change to the bathroom is that good, old-fashioned soap has made a long-awaited appearance. For probably the first 7-8 years I visited, if there was any sort of cleaning product present (not always a guarantee), it was a bottle of hand sanitizer, which-I assume this is common knowledge-is not the same as soap. Some jobs, quite frankly, cannot be handled with hand sani alone. In many cases, a surfactant is required.

I always marveled at the fact that this was the most public and trafficked bathroom of the house, yet there was no soap. How could this be? My wife is one of seven kids. Her parents are social folks- many people would visit and use this bathroom. Did they never once feel the pressure to put out the one item that every bathroom sink on the planet is supposed to have sitting next to it? And did no one in the house- kids, relatives, friends, anyone- ever think to say, “Hey I just got shit on my hands because I went to wipe my ass with that single-ply bullshit and my fingies blew right through it, and I’d really love some soap, but you don’t have any in your bathroom, which is a room literally made for shitting and pissing. Could I get some soap? Sorry for the hostility, but I just fingered my own butthole on accident, and I’m feeling kinda weird about it.”

But there’s soap now, so that’s cool.