Saturday 11 April 2009

Home.

What happens is I go to the room and I can see it... It’s visual. What can be said about the compositions, colours, brown, and green, on white, on off-white... within sight? Not much, as there is no order or reasoning. The way things come together in my life, objects and collections they build on each other on whims and gifts, over the years. The room is so functional, and our time in this house so transitory (the way things seem to go, single and living in shared houses, after graduating, echos of the annual student shuffle). So the room gets little aesthetic attention. Function brings together a bunch of stuff, and now I look at it, almost like working around an installation or sculpture. This stuff, what’s important, what do I want...
Solitude, being alone and being in the clear. I guess the importance of hygiene makes this room one that we keep clean. And this white clean, blank canvas, this is where I can be alone and see myself. In mirrors, but also... The interrogation from life halts, people stop talking to you, people leave that space where you can piss and shit alone... Brain and body wiped clean, often naked, existent and with no cultural expectations, no one knows what you do, not exactly, you might do nothing, stay quiet, press pause...
Some part of me, (some part of you,) might make use of that second glance, that moment where we are distracted not by things or noises, but by quietness and space, clarity... and a thought, a moment of waking dream, a weird idea, a fear, a terrible tale, an hour of conversation played out...
I
Piss, go to the sink, turn the hot tap and squirt a splash of the remaining soap, rub my hands in lather, rinse in hot water, rinse in cold water, look at the paper cut across the finger print of my right ring finger, looking at it for some time, thinking something about a writing project I have in mind to complete over the next six months or so... and I leave the bathroom.
End.

Friday 10 April 2009

Work.

There’s a lorry driver at the left urinal. I take the left cubicle. My eyes rise to the square shapes of the suspended ceiling. I always find these interesting, I like it when there is a panel missing and you can see into the dusty dark space occupied with sparse pipe-work and wires. This time I look at the panels that are there, because there are none missing. I follow the edges of one square around and around. Urine falls. I follow the edges of a square.

Pub.

Age.
I get the impression this one has been here a long time. Pubs can be deceptive, mail-order rustic charm slung around the place to give the impression of a ‘real’ pub. But this toilet seems like it’s been here a long time (I’ll buy into it for now). The window fittings, they open upwards along a small iron arch-runner. Hmmm , that’ll be hard to visualise, it’s difficult to describe. Other than the rusted iron, there’s no obvious traces of history. It wouldn’t be appropriate in the toilet. It should be cleaned so regularly that history struggles to sit. But the wrought iron window fittings look rusted where paint work has been scraped by use. Tiles are a navy blue, and an off white ceramic urinal has two spaces implied on the surface, a well ordered ridge down the center.

Thursday 9 April 2009

Home.

Interpret this room in words, again... It’s neat. It’s as clean as it’s ever been, like I’ve walked in for the first time, but nothings new. Kind of déjà vu, like I know everything about the room, but it still feels like the first time. Amazing what a quick tidy up can do. A housemates mother has initiated this clean up making it maybe a little more thorough than any other. The new room has the same spider hanging on in the corner above the shower. The bathmats now line up exactly parallel to the walls and bath. The window sill clutter has been economised and straightened up in to lines of logical use. Toothpaste tubes next to the pot of tooth brushes; Razor neat and parallel. The clean room grids up on these strange parallels. Order and system symbolic of the new cleanliness. The heating’s on too, so the room has soft air, a warm cushion. His mother can visit more often. But it’s strange, feels odd, like the bathroom has a facade, one that I must keep up for tonight, and I will, it’s nice like this. But where is the room I was telling you about before. This one is ever so slightly... somewhere else.

Work.

To say there’s nothing new, says something. I’ve been here, and I’ve been here, and I’ve been here... It’s where I work and it happens again and again, not like my other haunts. My other regular holes. Those are part of my life, where as this one? I’ve been here. That’s all.
It’s still grey; the uninspiring room tries nothing out, and holds no new tricks. Two cubicles, two urinals, three sinks, one huge mirror, woodchip depth to the grey, the suspended ceiling squared, grey, even the colour in here is consumed by drab grey, eaten and exhausted orange doors, that were once bright, once had the energy to fight a corner in here.

Wednesday 8 April 2009

Home.

I’m back. It’s back... it’s all come flooding back... warmer again, more alive again. Someone else’s clothes are drying on the radiator. I want to tell you everything about this room, there is not so much time left.
I step onto the floor, lino floor. The lino is a peaching cream, very fleshy colour. It has some design that’s been almost worn out of it, at least worn into inconsistence, so the definition between design and wear have been long blurred. It’s maybe supposed to be a marble design, or some kind of smooth stonework. Horrifically unconvincing. The pale green bath matts, combine to make a floor that’s so sick to look at it’s almost comforting. You know that comforting ill warmth you get from old colour indoor photos with ugly yellow light, sick homeliness. The door and skirting board in magnolia crème gloss, joins in this party, party of the late seventies colour photo. A plastic pipe replaces the skirting board from the sink to the bath, white plastic that’s not unusual across the room. Right at the corner, the white plastic has picked up a greening web of dust, it’s faint, until you see it... then it starts to grow and spread up on to the white square tiles, and other plastic pipework. White tiles save the day in here, optimistic and batting white light around. It’s bright and has a crisp... like the light hits you off these tiles and has some sprite... The fan is now switched off, so to avoid the sound of it crunching through the death throes of some wild animals as it starts up (that’s really how it sounds – no joke), once it’s picked up pace, busted the dust, then it just hums, not quietly.
There’s too much... two bathroom cabinets, one an awkward pine on the tile wall, the other chrome mirror(ish) metal, dried condensation has left water stain lines across the front face, slightly ajar.
There’s too much... we’ve hardly started... corpses of toothpaste tubes sit bent double on the window sill (Night time black out there), and tooth brushes lean across any angles in a small pot, a razor with speck of rust thats growing, and a half used tea light (reminiscing from when the light fitting broke).
There’s too much... we’ve hardly started...

Tuesday 7 April 2009

Home.

Strange how the same room has so many faces... this morning I am repulsed, and by nothing in particular. Nothings changed, but the white is off white, scribbles in the steamed up mirror, objects clutter a window sill and bath edges. I’m repulsed by my own body, skin tone a horrid inconstant blotches in the light, unforgiving blast of sun, bleached (almost cold blue) through the frosted glass. My eye races from one ugliness to the next, foot, floor, ceiling, door, fingernail... I close those lids, wait and reopen, start this day afresh. Things are not so complex. This bathroom is what it is, and it has accommodated me, I pursue a line through the day, one that’ll relax this unknown discomfort, a bloody minded positive act that will remain out of reach, as long as it is there...

Sunday 5 April 2009

Home.

White room, door ajar, and voices bustle in from other peoples chat. Chat in the kitchen. My distance from them is clearing. I’m nowhere near it. Were speaking different languages. Pouring into the lake, with pollutant. The white on white water hole, ruined by my hot dark piss, my magnolia crystal flow, flowing away... it leaves the room, through the hole in the floor... into the holes that draw, outwards, towards other crystal rushes. White tiles on the wall with a touch, a fraction of depth. A gloss so thin, and about to crack. Words are around, or in the background, but it’s bleaching... the background sound.
I don’t feel myself.

Saturday 4 April 2009

Empty Shop Unit.

A polite sign asks ‘Would gentlemen please refrain from using the female toilets, thanks’ - near two toilet doors; both unmarked. I search for some time for someway to figure out which was the male and which was the female. Even going right into both of them and looking around for clues. Not sure what signs of femininity I was looking for. Both appeared completely asexual. So I go (picked one at random). There is a kind of outer washroom, with a sink and hand towels and a door into the cubicle. The two parts of the bathroom experience completely and architecturally divided. The toilet is no cubicle in a room but a separate room. Each is small, and almost identical in size and shape.

Pub.

Not roomy, things have been jammed in, three urinals where there is space for two, so you get a face full of condom machine and block the cubicle door if you were to stand at one of them. No such rush in here this evening, so its safe to pick a space. It doesn’t feel very pub in here. Can’t put my finger on it. There is something a little ‘hostel bar toilet’ or something, almost a little bit ‘school’. Ha! Using other buildings as abstract toilet archetypes. I start to wonder what the ‘hostel bar toilet’ archetype is? Something a bit like this one I suspect.

Wednesday 1 April 2009

Pub

The room comes in this order: door, cubicle, sinks, urinals. Nothing strange, except... it is. The room, unfolds, in this way. So I get to the urinal (one of three), and I’m gazing around. I’m alone in here, so I’m taking a good look, behind me, the sinks are set into a wooden cabinet, like a kind of dresser with a mirror back (I see - there I am standing at the urinal taking a look around). There are three drawers. I hypothesise that the drawers are fake, there for aesthetic effect, but decide I must check. If they open, could be something in there... who knows. Someone enters. I look, straight ahead, eyes fix on a mark on the wall, as I push out the last drizzle. I go to the sink, and try the handle, very carefully, so not to be seen. It won’t open. Fake.

Monday 30 March 2009

Restaurant.

So the two doors 'M F' 'M F' are shut and locked. A stand in the corridor waiting, it’s not a good corridor to wait in, no natural positions, and I look around for a comfortable spot before an awkward encounter occurs. A door a bit further up the corridor opens, a guy appears, not staff, and looks at me sheepishly, and returns to the dining area. I investigate the door from where he appeared. In gleaming steel, clear metal shape on the door. A symbol representing a disabled person. A kind of stickman in a wheelchair. The Disabled toilet. I defer this ethical debate to a later date and take the opportunity to relive myself. The rooms, pretty much exactly like the others. Maybe it’s a little bigger. The layout is exactly the same but in mirror image, the whole room reversed. The future. The sink. The mirror.

Restaurant.

Up a spiral stair case and past a few more diners, into a corridor, two doors are marked - M F, crisp gleaming steel letters. I guess this indicates a unisex approach. Each door opens to a generous cubicle. Grey/blue tiles, and a white/blue clinical light gives these rooms a very contemporary feel. Futuristic. The toilet it’s self looks a little larger than normal, quite a chunky design. The sink. The mirror. Wine has washed any smaller details from my head.

Saturday 28 March 2009

Work.

It’s a late shift, quiet and a little dreamy. Dreamy? Not in a sweet way, or a pretty way. More like a Hopper painting, things are kind of distant. Pastel tones, gentle faded signage, it’s muted. It’s a late shift, quiet...
I stand at the urinal... my bored eyes, fall onto a crack, just a little black hairline on the pastel blue. The line runs to the ceiling, and down to the gleaming white crest of this urinal. Just at eye height, a small piece of the wall has come loose, and fallen from the line of this crack. I think about how far through the building this crack could exist. This tiny hair-breadth, of movement, the building breaking, before my eyes...

Friend's House.

Here in this toilet (I’ve been here before - see the 11th march), I’m seeing things differently; where before teal was, now is just light blue; obsidian, now a rough black gloss... a familiarity that dampens any excitement, dulls the thirst... I want to use the toilet and go. Nothing against it, it’s just a toilet now.
It’s warm in here, the radiator, radiates this small room with ease. I look around, looking within myself for those naive wide eyes, ones that playfully imagine...
I notice in the bath tub, on the white, a spider, an eight-legged silhouette. I suppose he’s stuck, because people say that spiders can’t get out of baths. That’s why we see them there, more often than other places. I’m alone, He’s alone, were not even in the same world, so it seems. Even sharing this bathroom, with this animal, we see each other, but we are nothing to each other. So I don’t help him out the bath. It wouldn’t seem right.

Wednesday 25 March 2009

Friend's House

I was told, before hand, about this one ‘That toilet is big.’

‘Are you going to use our toilet Sam? Go on.’ – knowing about the blog.
Inevitably nature tinkled those little bells: I imagine as I go up the stairs, some massive expanse. Like stepping into a huge hall with a little bog right at it’s centre. It’s not quite as big as that, but it is unusually large. Part of it is that everything in a toilet clings to the walls, so all the space in the room is there, right at the centre of the room. You could fit a few armchairs in here with a little coffee table, comfortably. But the toilet, a little ceramic chair to the left of the room, presides throne-like over the room (the chamber). I feel the need to stand there, in the middle, everything well out of armsreach, and I look at that toilet. The bog that greedily claims all this space, in this little house.

Parents' House

Yellow is the overriding colour in here. Yellow. It’s quite distracting, when looking about, trying to find things of interest. The colour kind of plains everything out. The toilet is also as standard as they come. If you imagine a smallish room with a toilet right in front of you, a bath to your right, and a sink in between, with a window behind the sink. The walls are yellow, but it’s the yellow/orange blind that covers the window, effecting all of the light coming into the room (except at night when it’s one of those energy saving bulbs, which always give off a kind of yellow light, when you first switch them on).
Also for some reason, I am always very aware of this being my parents’ house. It’s calm but... maybe too calm, unnervingly quiet. You don’t want to spill your noise in here, ’n’ ruin it.

Saturday 21 March 2009

Street

Under the roof that mother nature gave us, a black, star speckled open expanse. Soft breeze in my hair, and chips... My drunkard friend hurls chips at me, oh how hilarious, and the line waves across the side of this footbridge near the train tracks. I couldn’t decide if this really counts, but since I found an area, a private (within reason) space, off the beaten track, close to the stonework...
For sure I’m not the first to have gone here either, not in this kind of ‘student area’, on the line from town to my humble home.

Pub

The toilet has a dirty redish colour, somewhere between the light and the paintwork (neither taking full responsibility). Dirty, as in, evoking the depraved (more than it can live up to). Claustrophicaly thin, it’s kind of set out like a corridor between two cubicles, with one wall designated for collecting urine, the aluminium curtain, a small incompetent drain at the centre.

Gallery

Hospital? Maybe it’s the baby changing facilities, and the electric water heater... I don’t know I’m just getting hospital here. There are two steps up to the door into this room. The window is barred with no subtlety. and a set of four pipes run up the wall next to the toilet bowl. There used to be a large door, (out of use) lent against the wall in here, until recently. There’s room to breathe. I’m about to do a short reading from this blog to a small audience. It makes me nervous, even though it’s small and informal. I get that nervous shit forming feeling. Performances are often preceded by a significant eviction of the bowels. I’m not sure why, something that the body does in response to the nerves and stress? This time I retain control, and decide against it.

Friday 20 March 2009

Pub

Out of order faded across the cubicle door, won’t put me off, it looks ok. Typical order for this kind of pub the cistern is very high up with a chain, the cubicle has tiles up to waist high. The rest of the room, is pretty small, kept kind of clean. There’s no overriding style here, a mix of allsorts. Wood, plastic ceramic, any colour, things have been written on... it’s been this way for a long time. Kind of just flitting and evolving.

Thursday 19 March 2009

Work

The toilet is like this: you step in through a door, that’s fairly normal from a room that has lockers and coat hangers. Right in front of you is a large mirror with three sinks; on the wall to the right are two soap dispensers. There is an empty disposable hand towel dispenser on the wall and under this is an open brown cardboard box with disposable hand towels, they scatter around, some flat, some screwed, toward a bin. Next to the bin is a mop and bucket. To your left (the whole room is maybe ten by fifteen foot) are two toilet cubicles, the locks are almost broken, but operate well enough to jam the door shut. everything is… is a kind of greyish hue, one way or another (green, blue, orange, cream...)
Enter.
I go to one of the cublicles: God knows what has occurred here! I use the urinal instead.

Wednesday 18 March 2009

Home

There it all is again, the tiles, the window sill, bits and bobs lying around, a tap dripping into the bath, a mirror surfaced bathroom cabinet with a door ajar... in the morning light there is less romance, ha! Romance? Not what you’re thinking. I mean everything is so pedestrian. Everything looks kind of ugly in the blue grey spray through the window at dawn.

My home is very much my own home. There is something through these unslept eyes that likes it here. Likes the kind of lifestyle, staring into the sink, remembering every drink, in turn. Scrubbing them off my teeth.

Tuesday 17 March 2009

Pub

Terracota tiles square out the floor, it’s compact and quiet. Urinals regulate a corner and two cubicles, not in line, one deeper set than the other. Black gloss on a panel gives me a refracted relfection, a kind of scratched silhouette, as I stand facing a toilet bowl in the cubicle.

Sunday 15 March 2009

Home

Home again, in this little temple. The house is more active than it has been for an age. I wait patiently my turn in the diary room. Things to evict. That feeling your being watched, happens to me more often in the toilet than anywhere else. There is something filmic. Often at night, especially if I’ve been watching films, even more so if I’ve watched horror films, I can’t look into the mirrors. It’s too close to a scene. It’s uncanny.

Saturday 14 March 2009

Home

I thought I’d be writing more about the very fabric of these rooms, shapes, structure, layout... you know, the initial activation. The first moment, before colours and objects and acts. But it’s not speaking to me. I’m listening to it, but it’s almost monotone. Walls are walls, baths are baths, toilets are toilets. Things really are as they seem.

I go into the toilet to use it, although I’m looking more than before, I’m still under the usual functional distractions. The body is busy, and mind pulled along... not dislocated... getting involved.
It wonders such strange pointlessness’, ‘Can I touch the ceiling?’ and enacts the test, with inevitably positive results. And there I’ll stand holding it up, biding my time before getting on with more pressing concerns. I vocalise a few lyrics that are looping my thoughts, let these pesky beasts loose, let them their raucousness outside of my brain, they’ve drained.
Piss.
I check my pulse.

Friday 13 March 2009

Home

The sink, stores a chill, a crisp cold in its ceramic. To touch it, it’s soaked in cold. Dry cold. The rooms bigger than before. I don’t want to touch anything. Everything has sucked the warmth from the room. Even the floor consumes the heat from your feet. The draught reigns here. The outside atmosphere allowed to influence everything in this room. Blackness looks in through the window, pressed close to the glass. White clinic. I’m a brave.

Thursday 12 March 2009

Pub

Small blue mosaic tiles rule this wall of this large airy room. A spa feeling. Urinals are intersected by frosted glass. framed drinks promotions hang at eye level. For a pub toilet it’s big and clean. A wall of sinks with a huge mirror. This is almost extravagant. Somewhat against the grain of, pub culture... grot, small leaky spaces, open window all year, graffiti wrapped condom machine. I’ll not complain, I hate having to wait till I’m too tanked to think of the fat biker waiting behind me, eyes burn into the back of my head causing a serious stage fright – not here. The most elegant space in the building here saved for the soils. Saved for a safe feeling where we are most vulnerable, most exposed.

Wednesday 11 March 2009

Friend's House

This room's small, has simple aesthetic that’s well considered. Bare dark wood and obsidian floor, teal walls and a Japanese print tastefully above the bath. It feels kind of bohemian, a sort of European in love with the eastern. The idea makes me smile and I imagine stepping out into some smoky Turkish bar, crossing over to some bare wood table, to play chess on a board sloppily stained onto the wood in Indian ink, scratched and faded with use, drink espresso from a tiny brown cup with a stags head (bust) coming from the side... ok and back in the real world, I’ve been looking around, reading the room. This blog has given me quite strange toilet habits.

Monday 9 March 2009

Work

A huge mirror meets you as enter, the doppelganger looks unimpressed at your poorly kept uniform, so you share a careless customer service smile, stretching into a grimace for a fraction of a second, proving a cold irony.

The cubicle doors swing a little and so slowly, like a ghost town, paleness of the clinical decor. Details mostly in blue and orange scatter, Orange cubicle door (stopped swinging), blue bog brush, orange hand washing reminder, blue toilet roll dispenser...

My brain is deadened by this building. I’m a series of functions. I fit in, in here.

Sunday 8 March 2009

Friend's House

A bath, boiler, and toilet. It’s almost a bit rough, the side of the bath is uncovered. I’m naked at the centre of the room washing from the sink. The room feels so... so many things I cant find words for. It’s quite peaceful... yes, peaceful. I’m waiting, trying to discover something. Trying to discover the point of all this writing. All I keep seeing is the dusty rough exposed underside of the bath.

Saturday 7 March 2009

Friend's House

This one is long and thin. A yellow hue. Damp floor. Lino.
My eyes struggle to stay open. I’m just glad of a spot of relief. I’m leaving in just a few hours, To go back home. I peel back days of... A thousand worms uncanned this week... I’ll be trying to untie from some of them, with my megabus home. Some though are rooted in, and require a little care.
The room is everything required of it. There is no time to exploit the space here, what I need now is forty winks.

Friend's House

It has crisp shape, clinical accuracy, but not losing its homeliness. Stepping around the shower, a large window has frosted glass that looks scratchier than smooth. I’m in a tangled daze, this morning, and drift through (slowly unpicking), I rub at the red wine tarred on my lips. A light steam hangs off someone’s shower a few minutes before this. A high density collage of shampoo and conditioners on a little wooden set of shelves. Something about it here is not myne. But it’s safe to be here.

Pub

Such a small space the tiles grid up everywhere. Off white (in the direction of cream) and a glistening Blue. There is something farmhouse about the feel of it. Something rustic and cold. The metal urine trough lines one short wall, a man stood unsociably close to the centre... I risk the cubicle which is clean.

Tuesday 3 March 2009

Arts/events Venue

Somewhere between playschool and prison… or more… Activity center. The doors are brightly coloured to cubicles. The venue is hosted by huge railway arches, man-made caverns.
The toilets occupy one arch, high ceilings rocking overhead. Thick dusted brickwork and strip lights strung at jaunty angles. The venue sometimes operates as a nightclub venue, this had been the case recently as the debris of drunken poor aim and discarded drinks a sticky wedge of lime pressed in the base of a glass. Trying to find a respectable space here is not as simple as it would have seemed. I’m on my own again, whilst here in the toilet. But it’s such a communal space, even appears to be mixed gender. I stand at the washbasins chunked in right at the center of the room. I can feel people milling around, chatting, their leftovers in glasses on the floor, or balanced on the back of the sink. There’s a clear social feeling, echoing into the daytime …the clean up … the set up …today.

Monday 2 March 2009

Home

Sometimes I remove all of my clothes before taking a shit. I can’t explain it, I just feel compelled.
This is one of those days. The fan (it’s been broken for ages) howls like an abattoir; my heavy hand thumps it into a rough buzz. And... I disrobe. I can already feel the weight pressing gently.
My body shaped lump of flesh, stands in the air.
With a kind of minds eye (not in the mirror), I observe myself ...like a kind of third person detachment.

A shit occurs.

Get dressed.

That’s it.

Sunday 1 March 2009

Pub

Chlamydia ?
Clamydia?
The poster asks? I’m not sure if I’m part of the target demographic, at least... that’s not what I’m in the toilet for. The warning tells a thousand stories of those for whom it is intended. Those people who pass to pick up a condom, or drag a female drunkard into this tight cubicle. One who casts his eye over her shoulder and sees that vigilantly bi-lingual sign... doubt? It’s all yours.

Tiled floor, small shaped, thankfully quiet, wooden door, lock busted, held shut by my foot, balance ,piss, failing to decipher graffiti, wooden door.

Saturday 28 February 2009

Home

So these two bogs, Home and Work, punctuate the average day. Back at my house, empty , myself excepted. The bathroom, sits right at the back of the house, a window would open out onto the garden, but it’s too cold for that. The Fan has fizzing to grating motor sound. Simplicity is something held in high esteem in this area of the house. Functionality is the most important element to the room. There is something so logical, so systematic; it’s somewhat pleasant to walk into the order; away from household build up of clutter, junk, trinkets, books, work, tat and stacks of... The door closes you into a routine, so ingrained you almost don’t know your doing it. The space awaits you and guides you, offers no distractions or quirky brilliance. And in one moment of that order, there is a pause, it’s a pause for as long a you want.

Thursday 26 February 2009

Work

Institutional toilets are a hit and miss affair. Well, I can’t help but enjoy the warm clean clinical situation of the art school, or the art centre (before they moved theirs outdoors for major redevelopment – and I have high expectations of the new toilet facilities.) The art school was the first time I broke the unspoken rule of every young boy ‘ No Shitting at School’ .I can never quite figure out why this rule existed, and I remember coming across significant evidence of some kids breaking this law. Maybe it’s something that I fabricated. Something I applied (unspoken) to everyone hoping that I’m not being weird. The rule however somehow has carried, not into the art school but into the work place. I never shit at work. This has never been a significant problem. The room is reminiscent of the school toilet. Very grey, flaking paint. Disconcerting signs that regulate the space with logo and slogans ‘Make Handwashing a Habit’. Two cubicles and two urinals, if possible I only use the toilets if the room is empty of my colleagues. The room has a bit of clutter, a bucket and several boxes of industry standard paper handtowels. The cubicles itch with graffiti, currently homophobia is the major theme, taking the baton from racism some months ago. A few poorly made A4 posters (which is a generous description for a printed word document) advertise some kind of charity raffle, which I don’t know much about, the font is too small and I’m not about to hang about here reading. The smell is unpleasant in a chemical rather than natural way; I’m not sure which is worse. I make handwashing a habit, and leave.

Wednesday 25 February 2009

Home

White squares, green oblongs and a red circle. Ok so I’m looking around the room, much more conscious of ‘looking for things’ than ever before. I’ve sat here staring into space, day after day after day. There’s nothing I haven’t absent mindedly cast my eye over. The white square tiles cover one wall, and part of its adjacent wall. Two green bathroom mats and one circular red bathroom mat. The red circle almost really strikes me... but fluff and bits of hair and stuff gives it the grotty uniform. This bathroom is mostly clean (obviously lived in- old toothbrushes, empty shampoo canisters, and damp towels slouching off the radiator- signs of life) but there is a kind of faint grotty outline, just along the base of the walls and around the base of the toilet.

I think a little about the lock. It’s just a tiny brass bar, but it’s critical to the toilet’s definition. The lock needs to be there. I hardly ever lock it anymore. I used to, and in every other toilet I do without fail. But this is in my home. Mostly home alone. So the peace is unlikely to be disturbed.

Tuesday 24 February 2009

Space for Safe Solitude.

This page will contain text based documentation of every toilet that I enter over the next forty days. Toilets are unusual in that they are architecturally designed for aloneness. In this place the very bricks and mortar have been placed for safe solitude. The space for private happenings in the flesh and safe exploration of our thoughts.
I think the texts will be focused on the space and locus of the toilets rather than the events that take place durin my visits. I'll see how things progress.