One of the many, many facets of Mikeleh’s and my increasing folie a deux is our horror of bodily functions and any discussion of them. (There is one exception to this rule, but the last time we tried to explain we sounded even more deranged than usual.) By and large, any discussion of… effluent, shall we say, mortifies us both. We can discuss, freely, horribly depraved sexual practices. We both think war crimes can, in a certain light, be hilarious. (If they want a homeland that bad, no one lives on Bikini Atoll anymore, and - look, I’m not suggesting anything.) But bring up something you brought up, and it renders us helpless. If it has been digested, even in part, it is our Kryptonite. We discovered this mutual Achilles’ gag reflex during our first weeks at Tulane, when we first came to discover that we shared a floor with The Edgeshitter, a young man who, for some reason I now hope never to discover, could not… fully… obtain the angle of descent most convenient for subsequent… oh, hell. He shat on the rim of the toilet bowl, somehow. CONSTANTLY. This didn’t happen twice, this happened twice a week at the very least. I have no idea why, or how. Theories included ingestion of rocket fuel, a vacation in India, an anus misplaced by a capricious or vengeful God, or a bizarre reign of terror. No one liked the situation, but Mikeleh and I were almost in tears. We probably would have killed him and his parents, but we never learned for sure who it was.
Considering my near-hysterical hatred of all things excreted, try to imagine my horror to find it used in New Zealand as an advertising (note the “s”) gimmick. Yesterday, I was in a hostel in Franz Josef, a town named after the glacier named after the emperor. It is beautiful and you should go. Anyway, in the hostel, I went to the can to, uh, let the sin out, and I saw a poster on the wall that, in the pseudo-science recently favored by advertisers, discussed the effects of a certain X-TREeEeEM ride’s effect on the bowels. New Zealand was divided into concentric “zones,” with the epicenter at Queenstown, and these zones were number as to - I can barely type this - how many pairs of underpants should be worn in each zone to minimize… well, to minimize. The various levels of protective gear required for each zone were demonstrated on a teddy bear to the right of the map. Level 5 - Red Alert - Attack Imminent - Queenstown Bear had on five pairs of underpants, goggles, a gas mask, a helmet, and was encased in an immune-system-sparing bubble. On the wall next to this poster was a sticker someone had later placed there that said “WARNING - LEVEL FOUR” and, of course, and enormous brown splotch.
Who does this work on? Who is on the fence, thinking “I know Queenstown is pretty, but it’s so touristy, and I wanted to get to Dunedin before… wait, they have something that will make me shit myself? WE HAVE TO GO.” Who even thinks, “Ah! Fecal marketing. Capital, capital. We’ll stop by that little village.” If I went up to someone and said, “Hey, would you like to go out? We can roll around in our own excrement!” almost no one would say, “Yeah, all right. Dinner and a movie and then an encore by dinner sounds great.” What part of “feces rocketing by with such force that protective headgear is considered indispensable by most prudent plush toys” makes anyone, no matter how drunk, think “Queentown or bust!”
And then. And then. I’m sitting here in an intenet cafe in Christchurch, terrified by the thought of going out into the street in a strange city in a foreign country on a Drinking Holiday and going back to the hostel room I share with ELEVEN other people (I don’t even like eleven whole people!) and I have to, uh, powder my nose. I go into the can, and there is a sign that says:
WARNING
THE RESTROOM WILL BE CHECKED AFTER EACH USE AND RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANYMISBEHAVIORS WILL BE ASKED. PLEASE THINK CAREFULLY.
What? What? A little Korean person (everyone who has ever owned an internet cafe is Korean. If they aren’t when they buy it, they soon become so) is going to check the bathroom after I leave? For what? To see if I bought curry when I should have cooked something at home and scold me for poor spending habits? To check what amount of toilet paper is left and, if need be, chide me about the Amazon? To - God forbid - see if I was overcome by my passions after going to Anna Kournikova’s website and accidentally stumbling into her “just for friends!” gallery? And if they find evidence of these or other sins, will they announce it to the room or simply pillory me in front of the cathedral with a sign saying “DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS DAIRY?” And, to top it all off, to plunk the urinal cake into the bathroom of horrors New Zealand is apparently becoming, the sign had a clip-art of a “kawaii” girl sitting on the can, bareassed, with the “my-eyes-are-slits-my-mouth-is-open-real-big-and-there-are-indeterminate-drops-of-sweat-or-tears-by-my-face-so-you-can-tell-I’m-in-distress” Japanime expression on her face.
I would vomit, but this would only compund the problem.