Plays and random stuff

There’s a place in my house I go to do my mental “heavy lifting”, where I can write, read, relax, maybe take a moment to reflect on the day’s events. Where all my cares gently drift away and I can feel replenished in both mind and spirit. Where I can shrug off my heavy load and just let loose for awhile.

I’m speaking of course of my crapper.

Ah yes. Some of you dear readers saw that coming eight words in, and it is at you fine people I aim. The ones who have a bookcase in their bathroom instead of a magazine stand. The ones who can’t make a major life decision without their pants around their ankles. The ones who know they’re done with their business when their thighs are numb. You, my people.

It was on the throne that I quite romantically realized my wife was THE one. On the can I mused that playwrighting was my surest way to posthumous glory. Visiting the porcelain god I decided I wanted to be a father… (Sorry, I couldn’t write that last one with a straight face—like either of us DECIDED anything. Ha!)

We have two bathrooms in our home, each with its own unique flavor, sort of how wines from different seasons carry their own remembrance of the vine. Except with a toilet.

The main bathroom downstairs is brightly lit, as if for an impending stage comedy or perhaps a light operetta. Large, rounded lighting fixtures protrude over the sink mirror, establishing an airy, yet confidential feel. The beige shower curtain suggests a certain enlightened, academic vibe, making it the perfect secluded alcove for artistic endeavor. It is here that most of my blogs are written (and, some would say, belong). Beside the commode is a volume of Pinter plays given to me as a gift that I’m trying my best to slog through, along with a baseball book by sabermatrician Bill James and my trusty copy of “Playwrights On Playwrighting”. I’m thinking of taking on Joyce’s annotated “Finnegan’s Wake”, but I’m waiting for a good stomach flu or a little food poisoning so I can give it the time and attention it so richly deserves.

The upstairs bathroom has more of a subdued, jazzy air, with dim, moody lighting reminiscent of a long, lonely night spent on a beach in Fiji. The earth tones of the curtain create an organic, improvisational current that opens the mind to all manner of possibility. Here is the venue for modernist poetry, interpretative dance, shower-time serenades…perhaps a particularly loose and freewheeling dramatic monologue. The gift I’m slogging through up here is the “Autobiography of Mark Twain”, along with a coffee table hardcover about Bruce Springsteen in concert and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. For inspiration. A single candle burns indefinitely, a flickering, unreliable beacon in an otherwise dank, depressing…dare I say “sewer-like” existence. A bass guitar is within reaching distance, in case I wish to play. I don’t know HOW to play, but in the upstairs lavatory I am unencumbered by such rigid definitions of proficiency.

Perhaps one day one of my fellow “facilities fanatics” will be reading one of my books, perhaps a collection of moderately humorous blog posts contained in a hardcover coffee table job, sitting in a magazine rack next to the can. One of my brothers or sisters will open up a random page and end up taking an extra moment to read what you just did. And as their thighs begin to numb, somehow, somewhere I would know that the circle was complete.