TOILETS, AGAIN: All good things must come to end, of course; that is simply in the nature of our temporal universe. “No man at all can be living forever,” says one of the characters in Synge’s Riders to the Sea, “and we must be satisfied.” Thus the unscheduled vacation has come to end—the electricians have restored the power, the furnaces are once again furnishing heat from one end of this egregious pit of mold and mildew to the other, and the pumps have reduced the vast ocean in the basement to a string of small ponds not worth of serious oceanographic study. The arachnid Noah and his family stand now at the top of their Coke can Ararat, praising whatever deity spiders pay homage to for their deliverance from the great flood, and, no doubt, casting vile aspersions on the corrupt morals of the ants and cockroaches that perished in the catastrophe, who clearly got what was coming to them.

So all is as it was, although I do notice that Rachel has once more fired a major broadside in the toilet wars. I do not understand the brouhaha over this subject myself; if I want to lower the toilet seat in order to use the facilities then I lower the toilet seat to use the facilities. I do not know why this makes me a typically insensitive male lout, but given Rachel and Tatiana’s previous screeds on the subject it seems I must be. You would think that women would appreciate the fact that men no longer lower the toilet seat for them, that this practice was the last symbol of a traditional male chivalry that helped maintain a oppressive patriarchal domination that women struggled for centuries to be free of, and now the practice is gone, one with tipping one’s cap or opening a door for a lady in the catalogue of fiendish oppression put aside for the new modern woman. What then is a little cold porcelain in the morning compared to the end of oppressive patriarchal domination and the right to choose the course of one’s own life?