I admit, I love to s(silent h)it.

Picture this, you’re at work during a busy day, hair raining down your face from stress, your manager screaming and there’s a weird smell emanating from a nearby desk. Or, and don’t get mental whiplash, you’ve just finished running five kilometres around your neighborhood, and the kids are calling for dinner.

Where do you turn? Is there truly a place of peace in this information-packed, always humming with electricity, eternally busy world? I, along with many others, say yes. For you see we share something in common. We often rest upon the house of lords, the crapper, or the porcelain throne, which conjures an image of clean, glowing white porcelain.

To call it that, one would require the power to turn back time, to ignore a thousand forceful splatters, a million streams, ten years or more of stoic endurance. What I most often sit upon are royal seats with a hearts of gold, shown on their exterior as a proud yellowish cast to their plastic and ceramic parts. A rock weathered by time and tribulation, but unbroken.

You might be thinking, ‘ew gross,’ or ‘haha, wait, I should’ve laughed instead of thinking of laughing’, or somewhat unnervingly, ‘damn toilet’s are sexy’. No matter which it was, I judge you not, and I ask you reserve your own, to see this read through. After all, isn’t every article, written with passion, worth a chance?

Chances are you also are seated right now, as you read this. Sitting is perhaps the most common bodily position to accompany the countless activities we do, beating standing or lying down. Why? Because it’s easy. The gluteous maximum is perfect for expending less energy. More importantly, it offers the opportunity to relax. Combined with an activity such as meditation or creative thinking, or, for, bathroom intellectuals like myself, crucially, using a toilet - it becomes a leggy gateway to serenity, or as only I call it, serensity, or even serens*****. While in this place of zen, someone may knock on the door. I always ignore it, or better yet, do not even hear it, and maintain my tranquility.

Within this peaceful place, in-between the mindless scrolling through memes and pointless internet arguments, I like to ponder. Envisioning sea breams swimming off the shore of Ohio, understanding the motivations of a cat wearing a hat, or replaying a poignant memory where everyone laughed at my joke.

My imagination is the eye of the storm. Outside, my body might rage, clench, and push, as it preparing to release the remnants of the food and drink that, once nourishing, were now naught but fragrant husks, but it is distant, until... A slight rumbling, that’s the only warning, before the world truly begins to tear asunder. Lightning flashes, the clouds cry and giants bellow thunderously. During this period, yesterday, I briefly considered whether a story about a bull owning a China shop would be a funny sketch to write. The answer, is no.

As the storm approached its zenith, whilst my body let fly, my mind gently carried me to the Elysian Fields where I held hands with Hades, to wait patiently until my body subsided and an avalanche of relief could surge through me.

Sometimes, I offer up an elegant donation to the sewer gods. Yesterday, I unleashed the underworld upon my stalwart bearer, my stoic seat, the Sam to my Frodo.

The tension in my body fled and I almost ragdolled into the door, which, at the time, had been set upon a flurry of louder knocks. I'd coughed and muttered “Almost there.” They'd chosen to wait this time. Feet had shuffled outside, casting shadows that dared to cross the door threshold into my realm. I felt for them, but this was my time. My space. As I sat, my attention returned to roaming free, soaring above petty physical matters. The aftershocks of my bodily war would briefly return me to the matter at hand, before I would jet off once again, endlessly dreaming.

Coming back to the present, I confess, I write this work from, as you would now be expecting, a cafe. Just as I did yesterday. We all know why. The community atmosphere suffuses us literartists, the clink of the ceramic cyclically rouses us from thoughts so deep we might fall asleep, to begin creating again. Perhaps most importantly, the environment is truly balance of calm and chaotic. I truly feel it all from my domain, enclosed but adjoined, close but distinctly apart, interlinked, but alone.

Whilst it is the virtue of uniqueness and taste that separates us artists and our works apart from one another, that is not all. I don’t just sit in the cafe, I, in fact, sit upon their toilet again. I won’t bless you with the sounds, and scents, of which I have made major contributions to. No, I want you to experience these for yourself, to acquire your own peace, through sitting upon a throne. Be it at a café, at home, or at work. Anywhere except one of those portable tradesmen ones, they’re often an abomination. Although this practice, this creative, relaxing activity is special, I certainly am not. We can all do it, you, the reader, might be doing it right now.

Through this story, I want you to realise that you too can give it a go, let your mind and body rest and allow your imagination to run wild. You too can take a seat. A toilet seat.