I ranted recently about sneezing, coughing, spitting and blowing my nose. I’d visited a doctor for an annual checkup and encountered in his waiting room a trillion bacteriological invaders waiting for me and whatever vulnerabilities I might have brought along. Six days later, just as happened a year ago, the last time I visited the same doctor, a killer headcold ran me down and laid me Lowe.
Absent energy, reportorial inspiration, and/or a catch basin for my prodigiously leaking head, I wrote the following and elicited the following following snotty retort.
By the way, you can go to longislandpress.com and click on, “columnists,” and then on the name, “Ed Lowe,” and get links to each and every Ed Lowe column they have published since January 6, 2005. I don’t know how long that will last. They may clean the slate for 2006 and start over. Here is the column that appears as of Dec. 8, 2005.
ON A ROLL
By Ed Lowe
Dec. 08, 2005
Toilet tissue became one of my ruminations of choice during a recent siege of cold symptoms. (As a younger man, I fulminated rather than ruminated about head colds. Youth prefers angry protest to peaceful meditation, but meditation, we eventually learn, requires less effort.)
The symptoms began this time with excessive throat clearing on Thanksgiving Eve—no sore throat, the usual opening gambit—just "ahem, ahem, ahem."
During the holiday meal, I felt two Peterbilt tractor-trailers pull to an idling stop just behind my eyeballs, each leaking battery acid into my eye cavities. By the time dessert had arrived, the battery acid had burned my eyelids, which responded by self-lubricating, to soothe the sting.
Membranes inside my nostrils began to leak, as the Peterbilts inched forward, pressing their giant grills against my eyeballs in a threatened effort to push them out beyond their sockets.
I held only a linen napkin for a weapon, which I dabbed, unobtrusively, I thought, at my mustache, initially to prevent telltale glistening. I did not want to reveal to the other guests that giant trucks were idling inside my head.
Desperation drove me to the bathroom, to therein expel the accumulating liquids, and, more importantly, seize some extra toilet paper, so that when I returned to the table, I would have an alternative to linen.
I did not want to use a linen dinner napkin to absorb contagions. Why should some innocent person clearing the table have to handle my napkin and unwittingly infect him or herself with my approaching miseries?
This was not a rhetorical question I had invented either because of original thinking or procedural training. Some years ago, I learned accidentally that persons raised in the culture of Japan were appalled to discover that their otherwise pretentious European conquerors carried in their pockets linen handkerchiefs, into which they periodically expelled body wastes from their heads and lungs.
After usage, the Europeans refolded the linen cloths and returned them to the pockets, effectively storing their own body wastes and carrying them about for the remainder of the business day.
The Japanese couldn't believe the incivility of such behavior, I was told. Polite Japanese custom required that the afflicted sufferer sneeze or cough into a disposable catchall—say, paper—and then immediately deposit into a waste receptacle the contaminated paper and its vile contents.
It never had occurred to me that body wastes manufactured in and expelled from orifices above the shoulders might inspire the same revulsion as those produced and expelled from below. The idea made such sense on contact that I thereafter never again carried a handkerchief or employed one. I also embraced an entirely different attitude about the prodigious spittle of professional athletes.
I resolved to rely on paper products, solely, instead of handkerchiefs. At first, I bought facial tissues, probably because almost everybody else I knew did. I also had permitted the advertising world to convince me that I should pay extra for pastel boxes of soft, absorbent paper to apply to my face than for rolls of soft, absorbent paper to...well, use elsewhere.
So, for a while, I endured the annoying selection process (long, rectangular box or short, square box? Pastel green floral pattern, or pastel blue fleur-de-lis?) and the infuriating indignities of boxed tissue paper usage. The first piece of facial tissue resists leaving the box and must either be torn or dragged out with a dozen of its neighbors. The last piece, especially when grasped in the fear and desperation that precedes a colossal sneeze, often rises accompanied by the box itself, and thus provides no respite but only a panicked—and usually tardy—search for an alternate box of tissues.
However, I also had allowed the plumbing industry to convince me that facial tissue did not break down sufficiently when flushed, as toilet tissue did, which meant I should not dispose of facial tissues the way I customarily rid my house of toilet tissues. Instead, my wastepaper baskets ranneth over—little snow cones of puffed, white, infectious paper.
I noticed (brilliantly), as well, that because toilet tissue arrived on a roll, I could see the whole roll in a glance and determine whether it contained enough paper to contain what I might offer it. I could keep a roll next to my bedside, a roll next to my computer terminal, a roll on the kitchen counter, a roll in the living room.
The car presented a problem. Unrolling off-roller toilet tissue is a two-handed project. Also, sudden stops and turns make a roll on the passenger seat roll, until it hides on the passenger side floor, out of reach to a properly seat-belted motorist on the verge of a volcanic sneeze. For the car, I keep a large rectangular box of tissues.
Otherwise, when in my lair, I am ever free to blow my nose, sneeze, hack, cough and spit into as much soft paper as my expulsions require, and then guiltlessly flush them down the toilet.
I sense a half-amused, half-resigned disdain for this practice from a certain personage in my life, but when I am afflicted, I don't always care what she thinks.
-end-
Here is an e-mail exchange in reaction to that column, and several other e-mails from today.
From: Jennifer Thomas
To:
Subject: A Personal Preference
I was approached by one of your sales people to take out an advertisement for the store I managed in Huntington Village when you first launched this paper. Having not had the opportunity to read it until today– especially your article “A Personal Preference”- I am quite relieved that we did not embarrass ourselves by doing so, advertise that is. I have a great idea what we can do with this new piece of junk mail… we can send them to you and you can save yourself a perfectly good roll of toilet tissue! Who in their right mind, do you think, really cares what you use to “blow your nose, hack, cough and spit into”????? My congratulations on another quality piece of editorial junk!
From: edlowe1@optonline.net
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2005 1:44 PM
To: Jennifer Thomas
Subject: waste
You might consider refraining from equating advertising efficacy with editorial taste. Calvin Klein ads, often tasteless, sell tremendous amounts of relatively nothing. Humor is in the eye/ear/nose of the beholder. Heaven forfend you should ever read (and I'm guessing you haven't, and wouldn't) Chaucer, Swift, Lovelace, let alone Twain's heroic epic on flatulence. Here, for your reading pleasure, is the e-mail accompanying your own:
December 7, 2005 12:54:41 PM EST
To: edlowe@theneighbornewspapers.com
Subject: Whatever works
I read with delight your column on altenative choices when faced with sniffly, sneezy compulsions. However, Ed, I was way ahead of you. Many (MANY) years ago I was the Kindergarten/First Grade/Second Grade teacher in a little country school that has long since passed into consolidation. Come winter season and the kids, all 25 of them, at various times and altogether, drooled, sniffled and sneezed at each other -- and me. For reasons of hygiene, the alternative being too gross to mention, I kept the regulation rectangular box of tissues on my desk for all who needed a tissue. Apparently, this was a special treat for box after box was emptied almost faster than I, or my wallet, could keep up with replacements.The solution: I kept a roll of bathroom tissue in an open bottom drawer of my desk. Those who needed it, used it. I don't know whether it was embarrassment that caused the restraint or not, but that roll of tissue lasted much longer than the equivalent in boxed hankies. Barbara Gunther
Jennifer’s response:
I'll stick to the New York Times... thanks!
To: Jennifer
Understood.In fact, perfectly understood. e.
From: Marooch77@aol.com
Thursday, December 8, 2005 9:50 am
TDear Ed,
Toilet paper is the preferred nose-wipe in my house. Since we always use it, it's always there. Boxes of tissues get stepped on, lost, stuffed under the couch, behind the couch and truthfully, toilet tissue is SOFTER.
We also euphemize it. We call it Irish Linen, among other names which are not too presentable. I hope the Irish don't take it personally..... Since I can claim 50% Irish heritage, I guess it's ok....
Maybe a barrage of mail from your readers will convince your friend that TP is the way to go! There's always a possibility that when she has time on her hands, she could sit and separate sheets of the stuff from their roll and make it look a little more presentable...
Have a good weekend, and thanks for the laugh. I hope you're feeling better...
Marooch
From: syd askoff saskoff@optonline.net
ED, GOOD ARTICLE TODAY. YOU MAY START A TREND.
FACT IS I HAVE BEEN USING PAPER IN THAT WAY FOR A LONG TIME.
MAKES SENSE.
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