My friend Dan uses a different towel on every day of the week. He steps out of the shower, dries himself, uses the towel, and throws it in the hamper. Seven days, seven showers, seven towels. On Sunday he washes them.

"Isn't that a waste?" I asked, genuinely concerned with the environment and/or the real victim of this calamity: his battered, over-washed towels, thinned through the years by a cycle of ultra-cleanliness.

"I just don't want to wipe my face where I wiped my @ss the day before." he stated, not with his usual disdain for my ignorance, but with the sincerity of a friend coaxing his alcoholic roommate into attending his first AA meeting.

But right there he was out of line. If I needed anything anonymous, it was Gamblers Anonymous: I'm a motherf*ckin' gambler. I'm not guaranteed to wipe my face where I had previously wiped my @ss, I'm just taking a chance. Picking the part of towel for the face may not be rolling the die or spinning the chamber, but it's gambling, no doubt (So says GA brother "Stan"). Because it was a form of gambling, it couldn't be the straight and narrow, @ss to face, moral decision as Dan would have led me to believe. If there was a chance I would not wipe my front where my rear had received treatment in the not-so-distant past, then I wasn't necessarily choosing to wipe my face in butt-tracks by using the same towel. But the odds (and towel) get bad after two weeks--real bad.

Dan clarified my discombobulated reasoning, in case I harbored any doubt about the fallacy of it all. "Ok, so the first few days you may say to yourself, '@ss in the middle, face on the edges,' but after a few days you begin to wonder: 'Was it face in the middle and @ss on the edges? Man it's cold, standing here, f*cking dripping wet,' and in your haste you skirt the memory process and jump face first into the middle of the towel." Dan then explained how he is the next evolution of the human species and people like me are simple minded peons caught in a web of habit and deceit and I could either get on the boat with him an Noah or stay on shore and get drowned with the rest of the stupid-@ss creatures.

But would I give in? Hell no. Sure, he had a good point, but washing every Sunday? That sounded like a lot of work, and besides, I'd be darned if I would concede to that solipsistic nincompoop, especially after the condescending lecture with fancy "logic" and sophisticated "reasoning." Instead, I chose to go on the offensive.

"You're a d*ck." I said, not in a complimentary way, but with obvious disdain for the male genitalia.

"Yeah, well at least I'm not wiping my face in my @ss." He almost tagged on an "@ss face!" or "@ss Clown" but his point had been made and neither one of us wanted this debate to last any longer, well maybe he did, but f*ck him, I'm writing this story so I get to tell what he was thinking, and in MY STORY he didn't want to talk about it any more..

Needless to say, I still use the same towel for at least eight days back to back. My towels thank me for it: they're still thick and healthy, even if they're a little dirty. Unbeknownst to Dan however, I use towels with different textures on each side, carefully remembering that I dry my arse with the course side, and my face with the soft side. Or was it my face on the rough side and my posterior on the soft side? ("Face in the Rough, that isn't so tough..." or was it "@ss in the Rough, that isn't so tough.." "Beer before liquor you've never been... F*ck!") Well, I try not to let it bother me. When you're cold and wet, you really don't give a f*ck. Besides, I bet my @ss is pretty clean.

-KV

(Klaus swears his next article will not be about something you do in the bathroom. We don't believe him. And we call him "@ss Clown." Because it makes him mad.)

If you liked this article you can see more writing about Klaus's @ss at The Literary Brothel.

© Copyright 2001-2010 John Hawkins
	hit counter