Dear Master
No doubt you will be surprised to hear from me. I have unsuccessfully tried every other means of communication at my disposal. These are very often unacceptable to those who may avail themselves of orthodox means.
Up until this time, because of my extreme situation, I have had no choice but to express myself after the frowned-upon fashion of rear apertures everywhere. Few willingly listen to our protestations.
At the outset I must ask you to forgive the audacity of such a rotten stinker as I and to make allowance for my squalorous background and my undeserved reputation for underhand practices.
Do not, I implore you, be put off by my suspect address. Remember that many have achieved greatness in spite of their lowly origins. I know you love me the least of all your dominions and who, in truth, could love me for myself alone whose chief role is to channel the body’s waste from its putrid confines to the world outside, a world visible to me only once in a blue moon when you are in dire need of a toilet in the great outdoors.
My secondary task is to convey and release the audible and inaudible, the fetid and the odourless gases of the dark interior. Sounds easy, but as one of your American cousins was once heard to remark:
‘Try being an asshole the day after Saint Patrick’s Day and see how you like it!’
Sometimes the anus is suddenly pressurised. I am not warned in advance and there is a foul-up. Nobody likes me for this although I am not to blame. Which of us has not endured this unhappy and embarrassing experience at least once in a lifetime!
It is I who refines and renders articulate all the explosive protestations of the anus. I am the ultimate processor of every sound that is allowed to escape from the behind. Only for me the disgusting bombast of these unsavoury revelations would be unbearably raucous.
It is I who conditions and musicalises these uncouth outburts till they are often no more than prolonged plaints, inoffensive and sometimes amusing to the surprised listener.
Now and then there are renegades who surprise the system and who shock and confuse those of sensitive backgrounds who may happen to be in the vicinity, thus ensuring that my rating stays at zero. I can accept this. You might say I’ve grown up with it. What I cannot accept is the contemptible way you treat me, the absence of any sort of regard for my feelings, the never-ending workload, your insanitary attitude, your verminous, unwashed, pathogenic underclothes, your germ-infested, unsterilised hands, your recklessness in choice of toilets, most notably the unflushed and obviously contaminated, where you will persist in irresponsibly depositing your buttocks for long periods while you futilely endeavour to make up your mind whether you are going to perform or not.
This is a most frustrating time for me. There I am, exposed to my natural enemies, willing and able to assist you in the discharge of your internal wastes while you persist with fitful piddling and misdirected pondering.
May God preserve rear apertures everywhere from the pensive and the pondering. Of all the scourges I have endured and in their entirety they would fill a book, the brooking defecator is easily the most despicable. He is a martyr to his own abstraction. He completely dispels from his mind the purpose which first brought him to the WC and indulges in wide-ranging flights of long-lasting fancy while the unprotected aperture is prey to the thousand contaminations for which privies are justly noted.
The longer I am allowed to remain exposed the greater the risk of infection and the less likelihood of any form of comprehensive cacation whereas with truly marathon sittings there is often the likelihood of no motion at all.
From my obstructed position I have no way of ascertaining what sort of expression dominates your visage during these extended sits and squats, whether it be rapture or sorrow, common contentment or simple suspension.
I dare say you might call me the blind eye of the anatomy but then anything is better than being called an asshole day in, day out. I suspect that while you sit fallow and functionless there is imposed upon your lineaments a trance-like expression which brooks neither interference or distraction.
You are at peace with yourself and the world and this is essential for man’s well-being as long as it’s not overdone. I have listened often while you rendered tedious soliloquies concerning your past, your present and the life of the world to come.
The real tragedy arises when you go on and on until you are so exhausted that the primary purpose of your visit has been supplanted by some other goal.
Fine if you submitted me to exposure in the open countryside where the air is pure and there is no likelihood of infection. This happens so rarely, however, that the experience might well be described as the annual holiday of the down-under cavity. Even when you do submit me to the benign influences of the rustic scene you are in such an almighty hurry that my holiday is over before it even starts.
When you fall asleep in the indoor toilet my nightmare begins for by so doing you extend an open invitation to every circumjacent creepy-crawly and parasite besides announcing to long-despairing germs that the time has at last come when they may assume bellicose roles once more.
The seismograph of my sensitive perimeter records the most shattering, devastating agitation while you are transported to the world of dreams forgetting the fearful dangers to which we are both exposed.
I recall with total horror the times you fell asleep on the seats of stinking WCs. I would listen to your drunken snoring while assorted insects mobilised themselves in lesser keys, using my vulnerable surrounds as landing bases for the later perpetration of outrages I dare not mention. Often you would sleep for hours, your grinding, grating snorts and intemperate skirls, oblivious to the frenzied pounding upon the privy door by legitimate aspirants to the vitreous throne which you so callously usurped.
Who could blame one of these demented claimants for wanting to implant the toe of a stout boot fairly and squarely upon your undeserving bull’s-eye.
I wish, not for the first time, that there were some means by which I might detach myself from your stagnating posterior, to run away from home as it were, never to return or to be transplanted holus bolus to the rear of a more fastidious master.
If I were asked to recount the most trying period of our uneasy relationship I would plump for that miserable night when you unsuccessfully tried to launch yourself on a singing career. There I was, perilously suspended over the most abominable toilet bowl it had ever been my bitter experience to encounter, when you launched into the opening bars of ‘South of the Border’. I had never heard you sing before. I had heard you humming tunelessly in the background while others joined in the refrain of a popular song but not until that night of the long sitting did you undertake the singing of a complete song.
I remember how I immediately expostulated through the only medium at my disposal. You totally ignored me as was your wont and went on to massacre a score of well-established ditties before exhausting yourself while you sat. You then mercifully submitted yourself to a deep sleep from which you did not wake until a neighbourhood rooster announced the arrival of the new day with a nerve-shattering sequence of cock-a-doodle-doos. I have searched fruitlessly in the hope that I might find something good to say about you before bringing this epistle to a close. There is, alas! nothing for which you might be commended.
Yours faithfully
Your Rear Aperture