My Favorite Place on the Planet

NOTE: This is another shared post with Mrs. Brown and Lady Margaret (though I don't know is Mags has done it yet, so that's just a link to her general site.)

Hands down, my favorite place on the planet has got to be the bathroom.

Let me make this a little clearer: my bathroom.  I find public bathrooms to be helpful and I am grateful for even the grossest of them due to what I expect is overactive bladder, but my personal bathroom is my absolute favorite place.

First of all, it’s where the “get clean thing” are. If I could, I would take three showers a day—that is how hygienic I am, or, rather, a testament to how much sweat and oil I secrete. Starting a day without a shower turns me into, well, a slimy bitch.  That’s the most poetic way I can put it. I will slowly sink further and further into myself as the day passes, replaying the morning in my head to figure out how I could have gotten a shower. Then I continue by berating myself for not following the now seemingly simplistic path that would have led to a cleaner day. I start to be able to feel every part of my body, every inch of skin and the layer of oil that has formed on top of it, every hair follicle on my legs and under my arms working tirelessly to poke out as much extra thick bristles to go along with the overnight unshavenness as possible, every bodily crevasse I own pooling with sweat. Yes, that crevasse too. Especially that one. Once I feel how terrible it all is I realize that there is absolutely nothing I could have done, including shooting kittens in their furry little faces with bear mace, that would merit me coping with such an existence, so I quickly blame whoever is closest to me. To punish them I repeat how badly I desire washing in various ways:

“I need a shower…Oh my golly do I need a shower…Dear, God, please, I need to bathe…OMG I feel disgrossting…Do you smell that? It’s me. What, you don’t? *pitt shoved directly into face* Yes, THAT!...Don’t touch me; I feel gross…Seriously, I’m so nasty…DON’T FUCKING LAY YOUR FILTHY GODDAMNED HANDS ON MY ALREADY REVOLTING SKIN, YOU’RE JUST ADDING MORE OIL TO IT! DO IT AGAIN AND I’LL BITE IT OFF AND BATHE IN YOUR BLOOD! FUCK!!!”

Aside from containing a shower, though, the bathroom is also the greatest sanctuary known to man for the simple fact that it is largely socially unacceptable to enter into whilst someone else is occupying it. This means you can be totally alone in there for as long as you want. And…you can poop.

Heaven knows I love a good poop.

But my body largely fails at allowing me to do this anywhere that is not the safety of my own bathroom. The question to “Does Ashley shit in the woods?” is “NO.” I have incredibly shy bowels. It doesn’t matter how badly anything is rolling around in my colon, it is just NOT coming out unless I’m safely at home or somewhere I’m incredibly comfortable or am absolutely sure that I will be alone. It’s actually kind of tragic.

So this is why my own bathroom is so dear to me. It is apparently the only place that my sphincter feels safe.

And it is also the place where I get my best ideas. Showering allows for some extra think time for a lot of people, but I’m pretty interested in actually cleaning my body which we’ve already established is naturally more soiled than most. But while pooping I write some of my greatest masterpieces, albeit in my head. I’m sure that this has something to do with pushing out crap in order to make room for new stuff. Yes, that must be it.

See? Poetic.