Private Lessons

Listening to statements by local residents concerning recent newsworthy events, I guess it’s time to be brutally honest with each other about what we are secretly doing in the assumed privacy of a restroom, among other places and other things.

A few months ago, a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road found its way to my downstairs bathroom. That book was purchased for me a couple years ago but I hadn’t finished it until recently. And, honestly, I probably never would have finished it if the book had been languishing in the most expected spot, like in my office or on my bed stand.

The truth is I find reading in the potty to be a wonderful escape. I can’t control it. I sleep in the bedroom and mess around in the office with old tax forms and phone bills or whatever so there’s little time for serious reading in those places. Yes, I do often crap in the crapper, that is part of the honesty coming out here and, as Hitchens neatly pointed out recently, that blunt admission may be unusually notable for the adventurous minority who scurry hastily from one international airport to another.

But my forays into this private abyss have always had a literary and educational if not a pragmatically time-saving theme. Rather than in search of a risky rendezvous, instead I’ve been known to stoop for the advertisements on the back of a tissue box, routinely and thoroughly peruse the instructions on plastic bottles of household cleaners, and have been curiously consumed by the government warnings against improper use of lye and other specific chemical additives. In fact, if not for these sacred moments of solitude, I would have no earthly knowledge of something called FD&C Blue #2.

The Wife believes this practice may have dangerous, life threatening consequences but reading something, anything is a pleasant and necessary diversion for me while occupied in the facilities.

Fortunately for all of us, On The Road was near and available during the brilliant summer of 2007. Historically speaking, I can’t think of a more perfect time to read that book than over the course of natural events in the crapper this year.

In the end, as the dog days went by, I was not secretly surprised to detect certain similarities with A Moveable Feast. Paris can be Frisco for some. To others, the sloping countryside of the American Midwest might as well be the hills of northern Spain as the lazy tongues spoken in both forests seem so foreign to our patiently observing heroes. Beatniks and Flappers were surely born of the same wandering mother. Wild young men on urgent and pointless missions, brainlessly compliant women and strong drink or the powerful drug of choice typically make the perfect trail mix for a long and winding road. These timeless characteristics, not to mention the repetitive if not misplaced epiphanies of those attractive, wealthy few who have nothing worldly or unique to say, all add up to make an addictive story.

But there was one other common aspect that, honestly, I will never forget.

The next time some bonafide bozo tries to tell me that our words must form a clear pattern and that particular pattern must take proper sentences into a proscribed institutional style of paragraphs and meld themselves with identifiable transitions which leap from page to page, forcing the reader to want more and impressing the reader with tales of memorable drama and marketable excitement, rather than just relate ordinary things as they happen around us in all their instantaneous heat and blind misery of the numbing human moment, then I will tell that fool to take a short trip from Frisco to the New Jersey shoreline where the classic glimpse of a dim oceanfront sunrise may lead that person to think of Dean Moriarity, think of Father Dean Moriarity who we never knew, and to think of Dean Moriarity.

But, rather than aimlessly trotting around the countryside, denying our own previous admissions, I expect that simple yet brutally honest secret could be learned in the privacy of one’s own restroom and probably should be known by all.

Cheers,
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