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From plant death to the jakes
May. 6th, 2004 12:30 pmToren may want to avert his eyes. Today was Operation Clean Sweep in Inglewood. You can throw out as much trash as you like. As long as you put a saucer of milk on the front step, the garbage fairies will whisk it all away.
We had probably ten giant black 55 gallon barrel-shaped trashbags full of vegetable matter. Some were filled with some of the remaining leaves from the backyard, others were filled with stuff pulled from the planters, some from the ash saplings that grow everywhere (including out of the house) that Rebecca cut down with the shears. And one big tree that Rebecca and I got the chainsaw out for. Sawdust a-flying, we got it cut down and dismembered for easy disposal.
This morning, I heroically used a bent coathanger to pull a goopy hair-clot out of the shower drain. Before it escaped to wreak havoc elsewhere, I flushed it down the john.
Y'know, a lot of people named John don't really care to be a euphemism for toilet. Not that my heart bleeds for them, or anything, but it seems strange to have settled on that. It used to be jack or jakes in centuries past, but in America it has mutated to john, the first known usage stemming from Harvard. Maybe this is why John F. Kennedy was called Jack. And so, from jack to jakes to john to jack, we've now come full circle, but haven't we all learned a little something?
We had probably ten giant black 55 gallon barrel-shaped trashbags full of vegetable matter. Some were filled with some of the remaining leaves from the backyard, others were filled with stuff pulled from the planters, some from the ash saplings that grow everywhere (including out of the house) that Rebecca cut down with the shears. And one big tree that Rebecca and I got the chainsaw out for. Sawdust a-flying, we got it cut down and dismembered for easy disposal.
This morning, I heroically used a bent coathanger to pull a goopy hair-clot out of the shower drain. Before it escaped to wreak havoc elsewhere, I flushed it down the john.
Y'know, a lot of people named John don't really care to be a euphemism for toilet. Not that my heart bleeds for them, or anything, but it seems strange to have settled on that. It used to be jack or jakes in centuries past, but in America it has mutated to john, the first known usage stemming from Harvard. Maybe this is why John F. Kennedy was called Jack. And so, from jack to jakes to john to jack, we've now come full circle, but haven't we all learned a little something?
