Corona Falls

As soon as I retired, I shifted into budget mode. I asked myself what I could do to reduce costs and maybe at the same time save the environment.

Myself answered, “think about paper.”

My first idea was to stop using paper towels. My aunt Kay made hand-drying towels using old cut-up bath towels with strings attached that looped over a kitchen cabinet knob. So I set out and hacked up a bunch of ancient towels, stitched seams in them with my Viking sewing machine (the same model Kay had), and I attached loops of seam binding to them to hang on suction cup hangers in the kitchen. In two and a half months, we have gone through just two rolls of paper towels, thank you very much

But then there was toilet paper.

Do I have your attention, Corona virus losers who are now Googling “corncob wipes?” So I decided to get ourselves a bidet attachment for our toilet. This was the end of December, before the words “social distancing” became a catchy phrase.

I bought one for thirty bucks. I could have bought a used one for less, but, hey, c’mon, I have SOME dignity, don’t I? All the You Tube videos looked like it was a simple, ten-minute installation, so in just a few days, the butthole washer arrived.

True to form, I installed it with nothing more than a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. I had seriously debated earlier about buying one that was more complicated and would give our puckers a heated douche, but decided that, hey, this is Florida. The tap water here is never that cold.

So just as I was putting the tools away, nature called, so I sat down on the toilet seat and gave it a, how you say, shot. 

My life has not been the same since.

That fountain spray of water couldn’t have been aimed more perfectly. Immediately I thought, “How did the makers of this device know exactly the right trajectory that would both feel arousing in an analingal kind of way and cleanse better than a pressure washer on a sidewalk?” It was amazing. It was tingly and effervescent, as if someone was feeding my anus a Perrier with lime. I was liking it too much, and I found myself dancing around on the toilet seat so the spray could hit other areas. Think Hokey Pokey: You but your butthole in, you put your butthole out, you put your butthole in and you shake it all about. I didn’t want to even get off the toilet, but I forced myself to. I have an addictive personality and didn’t want to spend the whole day there. Plus I had to figure out the drying issue. 

I had read on a no doubt unreliable website that in Europe, people keep small towels next to their bidets to dry the drippings. I thought, well, maybe I’ll stich up some butt-drying towelettes one day, but for now, I just unrolled a few squares of toilet paper and patted my boyhole. Amazingly enough, there was no brown mark. 

There are times, as an old man, that you have poop episodes which frequently involve wiping and smearing for hours. You have to flush multiple times so as not to stop up the toilet and back up the septic tank. Sometimes you have to do the Bunny Hop out to the garage with your shorts around your ankles because you mistakenly thought two rolls would be enough. Often you think you are done wiping, but then another milky turd slips through and you have to start from “square” one. With the bidet, you can flush out your hole until eternity and only wipe once, when you are sure there is nothing more to get rid of. Score one for ecology!

Americans, as a (w)hole, don’t know what to make of bidets. They think that they shoot up dirty, bacteria-infested used toilet water into your b-zone, but the truth is, bidet water is the same stuff that comes out of the tap that you would drink from if only you weren’t some sort of giant-Lexus-SUV-driving, white-priviledged, entitled, designer-water-drinking, environmental pariah who doesn’t give a shit about the plastic problem we have on earth.

Wait, I am getting off track here.

So we have been enjoying the bidet titillation for a couple of months now, and then, out of nowhere came the Corona virus, and people are now Desperately Seeking Charmin. Since I retired and got off a lot of my anxiety meds that I needed so I wouldn’t murder my supervisor and supervisor’s supervisor and chief of police, suddenly, I am less anxious about everything.Could those meds have been making me anxious? Nah, it was just the paper-wiping holes I had to work for.

Other Bill still has toilet paper supply anxiety, even though he too is a proponent of the bidet by a, um, wider margin. So because I am retired and we joined Sam’s Club so we could get free drugs, he sent me off earlier this week to ensure we could get to the year 2525, if you were still alive, without having to re-purchase toilet paper.

As a new customer to the big box world, I often lose my shit (in keeping with the theme of this essay) when I go into Sam’s Club. I always get migraine auras walking through there. Horrific hot white light and tons and tons of plastic that I know isn’t going to get recycled, will end up on Plastic Island in the Pacific, where no one gets voted off. 

Normally when I’m there, in order to avoid the headache, I just beeline to the pharmacy, pick up my free bottle of antidepressants and get the hell out. But on that day I had a mission to procure rolls of old school flushable anal cleaner for Other Bill. That involved wandering around 134,000 square feet (look it up) of overlit retail space.

Because it was the early days of Corona, (well, early for Americans, because Cheeto-head initially said the whole thing was fake news), I saw that no one was leaving Sam’s Club without an Eiffel Tower of toilet paper and a pickup load of bottled water that came from the same source as my bidet but packaged prettier. I was too embarrassed to ask where the TP was, so I had to roam aimlessly to try to locate it.

Sam’s Club has no sense of organization. They have tube socks next to the coffee which is next to the 6 pound bag of feta cheese which is next to the iPad that is bigger than your living room TV, which is next to boxes of 3,000-count tampons, which is next to a 20 pound opaque tube of what they call ground beef that you can’t see but could just as easily be wet topsoil. It’s like the stock people are all on meth and just find a hole anywhere to shove stuff in.  

Weeks later, dehydrated and reminiscing about my doctor who used to give me Percocet for migraines, I finally arrived at the almost empty aisle of toilet paper, and with the help of a sweet old lady in a wheelchair, we hoisted up a shrink-wrapped load of 45 rolls of septic safe generic toilet paper. 45 rolls! Who buys that? Who has room for that? I have never bought that much toilet paper at one time in my life.

I called an Uber and had them deliver the huge package to my car. I gave her a big tip and a good review because it wouldn’t fit in my trunk, and she helped me tie it down on the roof of the Civic. When I got home, I had to shoehorn the huge package in through the garage door, and then I swallowed a fist full of free Lexapro and called Other Bill on the phone.

“Honey, you’ll have to park outside the garage in the driveway when you get home tonight. But I can guarantee you you’ll have a clean butthole for years to come.”

And after I calmed down, I thought that maybe we should get a second bidet for our other toilet. When two men in their mid-sixties with unpredictable colons live under one roof, you can never be too careful. I looked all over the place online, even at analdouche.com, and the cheapest one I could find was $47. For a used one. 

Price gouging during a state of emergency is illegal. I’m calling the cops. But not the chief of police. That bitch hates me.

I love retirement.