SOS Gab & Eti 1.02

Gab and Eti consider displaying their historic portable toilet with a new one. Architects propose a theme park. The GWSHF tracks George Washington's toileting habits. 

Transcript

“The Walking Outhouse was an automaton created by the illustrious inventor Artemus Ward in 1855 with a desire to introduce clean hygiene to the town of Danville following after a devastating outbreak of typhoid. It consisted of a tall wooden box with four rickety wooden legs beneath that waved in the wind like red cardinal bird wings on a carpenter’s homemade garden folly. It was controlled by way of a lengthy braided rope. Unfortunately, it did not have the beneficial effect intended by Artemis. The citizens of Danville were terrorized by the contraption whenever it marched down Main Street, particularly on Sunday mornings. Subsequently, a vigilante mob formed that went after the Walking Outhouse. They hung it from the sturdy branch of a white oak, then Josephine Fortune Clofullia proceeded to bash it to pieces with her fire axe, wherein the excited crowd promptly kindled the contraption into a roaring blaze.” Dr. A. P. Eldunker, Ph.D., historian of record

Oscar Charles Marsh, an architectural conservator, sending e-mail in from Edinburgh through trans-Atlantic copper cable, has suggested that Gab and Eti purchase a new blue fiberglass toilet, one without a gaping hole in the side, to display alongside their well-used toilet.

Along with this scheme it has also been suggested that we investigate to market the pair to one of the quaint colonial villages that dot our rural countryside, or, as suggested by a Bullamanka Community College (BCC) respondent in the preservation trades program who also studies creative writing as a hobby and so far in their innocence has no experiental knowledge of the rigors of paying off a debt when their immediate post-graduation career curve is to wash dishes in a pizza parlor, or staff the aisles of a porno bookstore, they suggested to donate the upright blue pair to the Natadingo Institute (a beat school of disembodied pottery) to be used as decorative columns incorporated into a rustic entry portal to one or another flash courtyard (a stalwart pair of erectile dysfunctions in remembrance of Dante before the storm, an homage to the social silence of a stiff Burroughs.)

This will require money, and we pretty much have none.

Seven architects, not all of them obscure as we may mention without dropping names, have stepped forward with offers to design a theme park to surround the units.

One architect complained that his tempered-glass unit was superior in design to the mundane fiberglass units, a much more GRAND GESTURE. 

We must bear in mind that a modest gesture, well maintained, becomes grand, and thus elevates our common American biffie to a refined temple of populist taste. 

I asked this one architect, Rolfundo Beeswax to draw me a sketch of the glass house on a napkin and angrily he refused, with a claim that if he signed and dated the document that I would sell it at auction. He claimed, and it always seems to be a frigg-you he-person that does this, that his see-through aquarium style shitter was more worthy of promotion than anything in America preserved, and that he was in the midst to negotiate a highly lucrative proposal to dot the street corners of Corning, NY with his fantastic post-modern waterproof enclosures. In our opinion a demand for fabrication of a structure too highly exposed for public or polite consumption. Just another tiny glass house from an ultra-tiny brain, an edifice that we need like a hole in the head. Suitable though, if he switched his material of choice to nano-cement and carbon fiber mesh, for a one-cricket band stand at Mount Hood prior to cyclical eruption.

We were fortunate though, despite the stress that this intrusion of this exuberance for recognition of a modern see-through crapper was countered by a lengthy letter from the executive director of the George Washington Shat Here Foundation (GWSHF), a sort of stink tank based in Virginia. One of those beltway nonprofits, NGO, do goody institutions that can never seem to keep their white papers clean of smudge. But they are very good at writing grants to compete with the likes of French pygmy donkeys and are very well funded and apt on any afternoon at a fluid lunch to woozy up billionaires for a legacy donation. 

Endowment.

It seems, and this was a profound revelation to me, that our founding father had occasional want of respite from fiddling with his cullions and deposited a likewise occasional fetid mound, with a lump of lime, here and there throughout the colonial frontier as he surveyed the manifest horizon of destiny. This is not to say that the GWSHF is one of a crop of 19th century turquoise-blooded societies that commemorate where George rested his noble head, as much as to give recognition to those modest heads where George wrestled another anatomy.

Which reminds me of the gray-haired lady in CT who took the double holed loo seat that GW was said to have used, her husband had rescued it salvage from a defunct inn near to the Hudson in Hudson, painted it red, white and blue and hung it on her parlor wall. She made very tasty cinnamon buns. I liked the LED lights. Blink blink blink.

How the GWSHF is able to locate and confirm these landmarks is completely beyond my comprehension, which I admit is fairly briefed. I can only surmise that GW kept a highly detailed diary of his movements at a time prior to Kellogg. Detailed data retention by the Founding Fathers would not be completely out of joint as several other notable historical figures have kept note of their excremental labors.

Martin Luther claimed he was persisted upon by a stenching and rotten odoured Devil expelling a foul and rancid breath every time he had to go. I believe, though, a considerable step down from Saint Augustine's vision of a Golden City, Luther's was a well-intentioned warning to his flock of the presentment of Hell. I think all of this came about prior to the vogue of alchemy to form gold of common dross and variously pendulated the Rosicrucians. We do not need presidents who insist to shit on a golden throne. Enough said about the preservation of sacred red cows, red crows and graven images in that.

We did receive a map from GWSHF. It is very nicely laid out and color coded with little house-like images, reminding me of a Monopoly game with a subterranean Boardwalk, though instead of a sharp blue, a subdued burnt umber sort of Boardwalk, and labels dated to preserve a sense of chronological continuity.  One of those four-color printed tri-fold things with different types of dotted and dashed lines leading one to really believe that it must be absolutely true that someone at some time really did wander around in that sort of loop-de-loop misdirection (unless the interns were being lead around that day by a flush master, we can all credit to an early form of GPS with dowsing rods and crystal pendulums) that leaves us utterly aghast, baffled and expectorant. Despite causing me to eat a slew of bananas (organic of course and lower priced, quite ripe, black, not art objects), it left me exceedingly curious to know if there is any extant documentation on the technology of 18th century TP. Was this stuff really embossed with the bearer's initials as GWSHF claims? Exactly how was the hot wax applied? Was it normal to use flax and stinging nettles mixed with the slippery elm pulp?

To be continued... on the bus.