Oh Merde

Nothing keeps our species honest like the smell of our own shit.  And nothing is consistently funnier or more universal than potty humor; already my 21 month old daughter gets a laugh every time she says “faht” (not sure where she gets the Boston accent).  We are never more vulnerable than when we sit down to take a crap, and even more so after the fact as our human stain lingers in the air for all to smell.  Potty humor works precisely because of this vulnerability inherent to the act of moving our bowels (my all time least favorite euphemism for shit was that used by my maternal grandmother: “B.M.”; those two initials somehow made every shit I ever took in her house approximately five thousand times stinkier).  Effective potty humor releases the tension we all feel regarding our excrement and the act of expelling it by universalizing the absurdity of the act.  Nothing levels the playing field more than the realization that even the Queen of England stinks up the W.C.  Potty humor is the ultimate “I’m OK, you’re OK” moment. 

It is no coincidence that the greatest Zen Masters take their regular turn in the rotation cleaning the monastery’s toilets.  There is no better reminder that each and every one of us has Buddha nature than the fact that each and every one of us shits.  The individual of whom it is said “he thinks his shit doesn’t stink” is in exile from his own Buddha nature and in denial of everyone else’s; taken to its logical extreme this insight reveals the toilet seat as the throne of the son of man.  If we all “love our own brand” it is not because it doesn’t stink but because in the smell of our own shit we smell our own basic humanity. 

The office workplace is revealed, then, as soul crushing antiseptic vacuum by the little can of Glade air freshener in the restroom.  It does not matter whether you spray the can of Glade after you have done your business or not, for the real purpose of the can of Glade is to announce to all who enter that here, in the office, your human stain on the air is unacceptable; i.e. it is your very humanity that intrudes on your purpose here in the office, which is not to have your excrement extracted from your bum into the toilet but to have the surplus value extracted from your labor to serve your employer. 

There is something bracing, invigorating even, about walking into a freshly shat in bathroom.  The stinky bathroom is, if nothing else, alive.  But this honest stench is transmuted when subsumed under the cloying sweetness of Glade. Paired together, Glade and human shit smell like the scent of the stink bug.  The living, breathing, shitting human being is reduced by the office and the can of Glade to the status of pest.  And the pest is nothing other than that which must be controlled.