Toilet Paper, Part I
I have to confess that I get a kick out of nearly running short of toilet paper.
For some reason, I get an uncomfortable thrill from having just a few rolls (or one, or half of one) in the house, estimating whether they will last out the week, wondering whether or how, if I had only ten dollars to make it to my next paycheck, I would be able to budget in food, coffee, deoderant, toilet paper.
It would be very easy and very practical to buy toilet paper in bulk, whether I went to Costco or just to the supermarket. It’s cheaper that way, and I know I’m going to use it, so why do I gravitate toward the four packs – or, in convenience stores, toward the single roll for eighty-nine cents? I just wouldn’t get the same satisfaction out of a twenty-four pack; it would deprive me of the thrill of last-minute toilet paper purchasing.
There is something so reassuring, so cozy about buying a single roll of toilet paper.
For a few months in Eugene, Oregon in my mid-twenties, just before getting married, I lived in a rooming house. I lived with all my possessions and a futon (that replaced an air mattress) in a very small room. I knew only one other person who lived in the house, and I knew him not at all well. I had a very small, antiquated clock radio that my father had used. He would lie on his bed, inert, listening to repetitive AM radio news. This is one of my strongest images of him, and I quickly claimed the radio after he died. I took to lying inert and listening to the local NPR affiliate in Eugene. One strong memory I have is of lying awake one typically overcast morning and listening to a female vocalist covering the Kinks’ “Better Things,” a terribly sad song with an ostensibly optimistic thesis. I remember I had listened to the Kinks’ version many times my freshman year of college when I was young and hardly in need of the reassurance offered by the song’s speaker to (I think) a woman seemingly past her “prime.” Somehow I think the old radio and the toilet paper are connected, but I’m not sure how just yet.
The bathrooms in this house had no toilet paper in them. Residents were expected to keep their own, bringing a private or personal roll into the bathroom when they used it. One of the large house’s three bathrooms was my favorite. It was simply a closet with a toilet; I guess it was a half bath.. To bring my roll into this bathroom made me feel very secure.
I suppose it is a bit of a cliché of contemporary cultural criticism to find deep significance in the small and mundane. A whole culture’s deepest values or most crucial ideologies are to be found in its car advertisements, its napkin folding practices, its attitudes toward dental care. I begin to wonder as I write this whether the affective attachments I have to the purchasing and use of toilet paper have something to do with consumer capitalism or a kind of Barthesian mythology. Perhaps the roll of toilet paper signifies comfort, childhood (the associations above with my father’s clock radio?), protection from the messy materiality of bodily existence (the shit gets wrapped up in folds of angelic white softness to be flushed down the pristine toilet) – think of all those images of teddy bears and cherubic babies that decorate toilet paper plastic wrap. Hey – the roll/role of toilet paper? Hmmmmm…
More to come
For some reason, I get an uncomfortable thrill from having just a few rolls (or one, or half of one) in the house, estimating whether they will last out the week, wondering whether or how, if I had only ten dollars to make it to my next paycheck, I would be able to budget in food, coffee, deoderant, toilet paper.
It would be very easy and very practical to buy toilet paper in bulk, whether I went to Costco or just to the supermarket. It’s cheaper that way, and I know I’m going to use it, so why do I gravitate toward the four packs – or, in convenience stores, toward the single roll for eighty-nine cents? I just wouldn’t get the same satisfaction out of a twenty-four pack; it would deprive me of the thrill of last-minute toilet paper purchasing.
There is something so reassuring, so cozy about buying a single roll of toilet paper.
For a few months in Eugene, Oregon in my mid-twenties, just before getting married, I lived in a rooming house. I lived with all my possessions and a futon (that replaced an air mattress) in a very small room. I knew only one other person who lived in the house, and I knew him not at all well. I had a very small, antiquated clock radio that my father had used. He would lie on his bed, inert, listening to repetitive AM radio news. This is one of my strongest images of him, and I quickly claimed the radio after he died. I took to lying inert and listening to the local NPR affiliate in Eugene. One strong memory I have is of lying awake one typically overcast morning and listening to a female vocalist covering the Kinks’ “Better Things,” a terribly sad song with an ostensibly optimistic thesis. I remember I had listened to the Kinks’ version many times my freshman year of college when I was young and hardly in need of the reassurance offered by the song’s speaker to (I think) a woman seemingly past her “prime.” Somehow I think the old radio and the toilet paper are connected, but I’m not sure how just yet.
The bathrooms in this house had no toilet paper in them. Residents were expected to keep their own, bringing a private or personal roll into the bathroom when they used it. One of the large house’s three bathrooms was my favorite. It was simply a closet with a toilet; I guess it was a half bath.. To bring my roll into this bathroom made me feel very secure.
I suppose it is a bit of a cliché of contemporary cultural criticism to find deep significance in the small and mundane. A whole culture’s deepest values or most crucial ideologies are to be found in its car advertisements, its napkin folding practices, its attitudes toward dental care. I begin to wonder as I write this whether the affective attachments I have to the purchasing and use of toilet paper have something to do with consumer capitalism or a kind of Barthesian mythology. Perhaps the roll of toilet paper signifies comfort, childhood (the associations above with my father’s clock radio?), protection from the messy materiality of bodily existence (the shit gets wrapped up in folds of angelic white softness to be flushed down the pristine toilet) – think of all those images of teddy bears and cherubic babies that decorate toilet paper plastic wrap. Hey – the roll/role of toilet paper? Hmmmmm…
More to come
posted by Mark Meritt at 3:49 PM
6 Comments:
Hmm...
This is an interesting post - I don't know if this was your intent, but I found an undercurrent of wistfulness running throughout - a most interesting subtext when the ostensible subject is indeed as mundane as toilet paper. I thought your post was more about loss - the dwindling toilet paper supply as metaphor for a past that can never be recaptured - a novel if imperfect metaphor.
By the way though, there are lots of toilet paper substitutes if you truly run out - for example - a dried up corn cob. That's how it used to be done in the halcyon days before Charmin. I'd recommend you buy corn on the cob - eat them, then save and dry them - that way you kill two birds with one stone and save some money!
Always happy to help,
Albert
Hey, maybe you should buy the bulk pack and then have Sarah hide each roll throughout your abode. When one runs out, you can scavenge for one of your hidden ones, like a squirrel for its acorns. Then you're saving money AND only aware of one roll at a time.
Another way of dealing with personal hygiene (I love that - like they have to distinguish between wiping your own butt and wiping some other guy's butt) is to have a bucket of water and a scoop next to the toilet. Scoop up a cup of water and pour it on your crack with one hand; rub with the other. Shake dry and wash hands when finished. That's the way they do it in parts of Indonesia. From personal experience, I can tell you it works better if you are wearing a caftan or perhaps a muu-muu.
I just realized this was "Toilet Paper, Part I." There's a part II coming???
WOW...I think it was my idea to write about the toilet paper, and I agree with Albert that it's amazing how non-mundane and Proustian, rich with resonances, it actually became...but this blog is definitely making my question our definitions of "personal info." I find that I will say almost anything about my internal life on my blog, but shy away from topics like toilet paper...well, but I guess the t.p. is really just a vehicle for exploring your inner world. Well, whatever the reason, it's nice that we always have enough toilet paper.
A much more prosaic take on this is that it really takes a certain lack of self-consciousness and/or the utter abandonment of any concern re: "cool" to walk around with a package of 24 rolls of toilet paper.
I have little else to offer on the subject except for one (possible apocryphal) memory and a fuzzy anecdote.
It's possible (though by no means certain) that toilet paper was the product that once caused me a minor fit of anti-consumerist rage when it occurred to me that I'd been standing in the goddam aisle at the grocery store for ten minutes trying to dcide what freaking brand to buy. Ten minutes of my fleeting time amongst the living, spent idly staring at dozens of different colors, thicknesses, scents of (pardon me) shitpaper. Carlin later summed up the political side of this outrage in his bit on how we have the wrong kinds of choice in this country--dozens upon dozens of different creeals but only two political parties. Argh.
OK, the other piece is from when a friend told me about the English comedy bit that Rich Hall ripped off for Sniglets--yes, another idea that the English had first and did better. The only one my friend could remember was a word for "the shade of brown that tells you when you're done wiping."
"Toilet Paper, Part I" really got me reminiscing. In my youth I, too, only
bought TWO rolls of individually-wrapped toilet paper at a time. Now I buy Costco's 50 rolls!!!!
Or it seems like 50 when you try to put them away. With only 2 rolls in your home, you are forced to think about running out every day of your life. It keeps you on your toes, synapses clicking. Now in old age, I never worry about t.p. A certain lethargy has set in, and now I know why. Thanks, Mark.
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