Welcome to My World!

“Reflecto-porn” hardly seems the right subject for us to use as the basis for getting to know one another; it’s hardly a sanguine augury or an auspicious beginning. Nonetheless, being Ken Digby, I simply have to share what comes my way. And when I am (say) in the toilet stall and I happen to see a rather lurid (if not just plain scatological) drawing on the wall that takes creative advantage of the reflective properties of the toilet paper dispenser … well, when circumstances like those occur, I have to share it with you. Old Ken is not much of a believer in coincidences; now, I’m not necessarily saying that things happen for a reason. But I do know that whoever wrote “poo” in reverse so as to form the palindromic mystery word “poo oop” must have known that I was on my way.

As I may have shared with you, my all time favorite graffiti is one I found carved into the red enamel paint on the inside of a door in a men’s bathroom immediately adjoining the computer lab of a science library at a major research university in the American midwest. The message scrawled across the center of the door was this: “I hope you get poo on your fingertips.” I have often tried to analyze why I like this message so much and I have come up with three basic reasons.

First of all, the inscription explores the under-appreciated mixture of crudity and elegance. The writer could have said: “I hope you get shit on your hands, asshat.” But, no. Saying the word “poo” makes one’s lips purse, as if to form and then blow a kiss out with the exhalation required to produce the cooing sounds of the double “oo’s.” It sounds light, maybe even slightly otherworldly to me. Then, consider the attention to detail—the fastidiousness implied by the concern for the state of my fingertips. What a mixture!

Secondly, there is something about this message that puts the “curse” back in cursing. Some, I know, will say it never left. Well, I submit to your consideration that cursing seems to me to have lost its strength, its power to truly hex either the speaker or the one to whom the malevolent speech is directed. The same might also be said of swearing. That is, the so-called “curse” or “swear” words (a.k.a. four-letter words) seem to me to have drifted quite far from their connotations of actually putting a curse on someone or swearing an oath. As other readers of the Marquis de Sade will agree, the practice of swearing oaths is one sadly lost in our culture. Therefore, should brave souls attempt to resurrect these admirable practices to its former glory by scrawling curses across a stall in a computer lab men’s room, I feel I can do nothing other than salute their brave vision.

Lastly, I appreciate what I can only describe as something wonderfully human in this coarse curse. Or else, I would like to submit to your consideration that this inspired scribe has an unusually trenchant insight into the contradictions at the heart of human life. Not an animal that relieves its natural needs in some more or less secluded zone distant from its life world, the human has designed a system for expurgating wastes (call it the toilet, the bathroom, the WC, or the regional variant used in your locale) closely connected to its centers of work and entertainment. Squatting upon a porcelain throne as one must at times; unrolling and employing the proffered papers as one is expected to do; the human finds that this rather ignoble situation truly does create a scenario wherein he or she might plausibly sully one’s hand or hands with feces. In that volatile situation, staring ahead—perhaps thinking of a new organizational framework for the a writing project flashing on the screen in the computer lab less than forty feet away, or maybe contemplating why rubbish like “Everybody Loves Raymond” is always on the television—one finds this unpleasant scenario materialized in the inscribed curse. Would I be pushing too hard if I found a bit of the uncanny in this message, as if someone had read our unspoken thoughts and articulated them where we could not but see them? And yet, the curse is expressed as an aspiration: “I hope you get poo on your fingertips.” Confined to the smutty finitude of a computer laboratory bathroom, liberally mixing hope with fear and fear with hope, inescapable in its hold … yes, yes, dear friend. The writer of this message certainly knew a thing or two.