Toilet for Sale

Sorry for all the potty humor around here lately, and, well, you've probably already heard this, but JD Salinger's toilet is for sale on eBay, advertised as "used" and "not cleaned". You only have eight days left to bid on this item, which has a "buy now" price of one million pounds.

With a price like that, the seller outta consider offering it as buy to let (groan).

To put this in perspective, back in 1999, a signed copy of Duchamp's "Fountain" sold for 1.7 million dollars.

Still unsold, to the best of my knowledge, is a toilet that Hemingway "rescued" from, if memory serves me, the demolition of one of his favorite Key West Bars, and set up as a fountain or birdbath in the courtyard of his Key West home.

Curiously, there's a webpage about the world's most expensive toilets, which includes something in outerspace, but which lists none of these three artist-related commodes.

One last piece of toilet trivia to ponder the next time you're perched upon the throne: Leave it the US to build two-story outhouses.

Onomatomania

We just passed the winter solstice, and these dark and claustrophobic days have turned us into bibliomanic lexiconophiles. I'd like to continue our vocabulary obsessions by sharing a word I recently learned: onomatomania, which refers to the involuntary recollection of a phrase.

"Two eggs a dozen", for example, recently lodged in my brain like a watermelon in a toilet.

On a related note (bear with me here--this is going to get graphic and disgusting--but I do have a point and I will try to edit out the bad words), a buddy of mine suffered a temporary spell of impotence triggered by involuntary imagery. Every time he was about to, er, "matriculate", he envisioned a, er, "pencil" (more specifically, the head of his uncircumcised "pencil" with the hood pulled back), being sliced vertically by a razor blade. Apparently, that killed the mood.

Is there a word that generalizes these mental ticks, referring not only to onatomania and compulsive images, but also to songs stuck in your head and olfactory hallucinations?

Speaking of which, why are fake smells, of all these phenomenon, regulated to bad weirdness like epilepsy and stroke? Other mental ticks, like phantom phone rings, are so bizarrely common that they're written off to, "Dude ... workin' too hard?!", but phantom smells are just unheard of outside of serious problems. I mean, I've had some weird shit get stuck in my head, like I've recently been hung up on this observation: have you noticed, or is it just me, that some cars (when viewed from behind) lean to one side--but always to the left!?!? ... but I've never had a smell stuck in my head. Heck, I can barely even conjure up the memory of a scent, though I can recall all sorts of stupid trivia, for example, just off the top of head I can tell you that back in the mid-1970s scientists were stumped by the challenge of making fake banana taste.

But then there's "two eggs a dozen": stuck in my head like a watermelon in a toilet.

What gives?

(p.s., Thank you, once again, to WordSmith.org for stoking my bibliomania! The image, by the way, is from YouTube, but I'm not putting up a link here since this post is kind of gross and the video was made by a couple of kids.)

The Ballad of the Singing Loo # 5

There's now a suit from the FBI who stands in the bathroom all day long till the library closes. He never sits, not even to shit, not even to eat. I couldn't figure it out until I realized that there were actually two of them and some unseen changing of the guards.

I recognized them both, of course, from their earlier assignment, checking various patron records. This was even before the RNC was officially set here. On rainy days or spring thaws, scraggly hooded boys from the Urban Explorer's Action Squad used to come in and pore over the old sewer maps down in the subbasement where I worked ("when it's rainin', don't go drainin'"). The two suits would drop into the shadows and emerge the next day to examine the same maps.

Kevin, before he was laid off, had fun turning the tables, pulling the records of the two Feds to see what they were reading. He tried to chat them up, offer some reading recommendations, and he claimed that one of them was really into Daniel Clowes, that he'd actually caught the guy walking out of a bathroom stall with our copy of Like a Velvet Fist Cast in Iron. But of course you couldn't believe half of what Kevin said, even when it was true.

Anyhow, the two suits were older and must've resented this crap assignment, guns holstered and standing in the john all day being mistaken for queers. You could just imagine their younger bosses with their promising carreers and their blonde wives. These two were, in short, dangerous. I took to shitting at home.

____________________
Previously on Laws of Silence:
* The Ballad of the Singing Loo

The Ballad of the Singing Loo

There is, at work, a toilet that for several years has periodically sounded a sort of whistle, somewhat like a bagpipe, only more singular and somewhat more cheerful like a toy tugboat whistling while working or a teapot on a chilly day, and so somewhat unlike the more baleful and duplicitous unharmonies of the bagpipe, but sharing a certain timber nonetheless.

I once mentally composed a silly about "The Ballad of the Singing Loo" but forgot it while washing my hands.

Anyhow, I brought my guitar tuner to work today. After a cup a coffee I hit the facilities and waited for the whistle, tuner in hand.

It starts around a "C" and gathers steam before blowing a perfect "D."

Whoooo-EEEEEEEE!