On the Intersection of TP and Politics
I was going somewhere with this, until I wasn't.
Toilet paper used to be remarkably straightforward: You’d select your desired feature (soft or strong—and when given those two choices, who picks strong? What are the sturdy enthusiasts doing in the loo that makes that quality more appealing than pillowy plushness? Are we talking about tushy wiping or Wi-Fi signals here?) and then you’d settle on your package size,* which was typically dictated by space constraints and how often you went to the market. You could pick up a 12-pack of Charmin without a tape measure or a finance degree.
*that’s what she said
What was once a boring but necessary bathroom basic has become a source of debate (Over or under? Just kidding everyone knows it’s over) that involves ridiculous adjectives (Super Mega! Ultra Supreme! Extra Hyper Ultra Mega Super Deluxe!), complicated math (6 rolls = 180 yards! 12 rolls = 244 hectares! 33 rolls = 53,468,921.007 intergalactic miles!) and an entire bathroom redesign. The spools I bought forever fit equally well on the dispenser and inside the little storage basket I purchased for this purpose. I admit I took this luxurious convenience for granted.
Because THEY NO LONGER FIT EITHER. They’re narrower now so they wobble on the wall holder and they’re too fat to fit neatly in the basket. Toilet paper wasn’t broken, but here we are. Choices! Abundance! Progress! Profitability!
It’s the same with TV (do we really need nine hundred channels?), health insurance options (is Gold Advantage better than Simple Silver better than Bronze Plus? And who can afford Platinum Premier?), phone plans (unlimited streaming, flexible data roaming, high-speed hotspots, oh my!), and don’t even get me started on food. Has anyone tried to buy an ordinary can of black beans lately? My market has 77 varieties, forcing me to weed through dozens of low-sodium, fat-free, refried, organic, pork-seasoned, fiesta style (*sombrero sold separately), and lime-and-jalapeno options to make my selection.
My grandparents had three TV channels, no computers, and a single house phone they rarely used. I’m not even sure if they had a TV, to be honest; if they did, it was tucked away somewhere out of sight. Gram played piano and Gramp played the sax, and their “entertainment” was making music together for hours at a stretch. Dinner was ham or roast beef and green beans or corn, after which they religiously took a nightly walk around their neighborhood. Gram never learned to drive, so Gramp cheerfully chauffeured her anywhere she needed to go for seven consecutive decades. They lived to be 94 and 95 respectively, happily and without Google or Fakebook or Spotify Premium.
When I started this post, my plan was to draw parallels between the intentional convolution of the inherently unambiguous world of toilet paper and modern-day politics. You know, how both try to seduce with meaningless words and overhyped promises when all they’re really doing is repackaging the same product in a slightly different size and shape in the hopes that people will finally switch from that other brand—or at least keep buying theirs. It’s a decent enough analogy I suppose, and surely it’s not irrelevant that people were frantically stockpiling TP during the pandemic, but then I went down the road of all-things-overcomplicated and I got surprisingly verklempt thinking about Gram and Gramp and their lovely, simple life and the whole thing went sideways.
I was trying to nudge the train back onto the track when my doorbell rang. It was UPS dropping off a gift from a generous subscriber; a beautiful, personalized for my family, carved hardwood topographic map. I have never owned or seen anything like it. It came with a touching, laugh-out-loud note that ended thus:
“I’ve developed a philosophy over the years that friendships are based on debts; not big ones, but numerous tiny ones. We use these to bind ourselves together and reassure ourselves that we will stick with each other, if only because we owe the other for so many little things. So here is an unvarnished (but oiled nonetheless) attempt to tie myself to you in friendship. Thank you for what you do.”
I have never met this person. He lives 1,200 miles from me and is a fairly new subscriber and promised me (when asking for my mailing address) that he was not in fact an axe murderer, and I believed him. I was humbled by his unexpected gesture of generosity, which could only ever happen in a complex world of social media and political polarization and the unlikely connections the two breed.
Yes, being a human—and a parent or a professional and a spouse or a friend and an activist or a dissident and a consumer of things or all of the above—is exhausting. And life, like toilet paper, is no longer simple. But in countless modern and intricate and surprising ways, it is still impossibly lovely.
For today, that is all.
I read a lot of TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it) dystopian books where we're either struck by an EMP, Yellowstone finally erupts, a nuclear blast takes out half the country, etc. In all of these novels, Americans are forced to go back to a simpler time. Finding their own food, fending for themselves, finding entertainment. I must admit - there's something about it that's thought provoking and nostalgic. I wouldn't wish any of those disasters on us, but I do sometimes wish we could get back to those simpler days when we grew our own food and families did things like play board games at night and no one stared at a screen. Losing the internet wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
Laughing so hard. See? The other day I said we’d read your articles even if you wrote about a pile of dog poo you happened upon during a walk because of how entertaining you are. Case in point almost immediately. ❤️
I actually spent at least an hour a few years back calculating how many squares I got and the price of each square when comparing options of a bulk order of TP. 🤣 I was enraged when they actually changed packaging and production to give a smaller roll size but using words to make it sound like it was larger, bigger, better than ever before. It wasn’t. Lmao
I saw the connection to TP that you probably intended to make before you “weren’t going somewhere”, pointing to the intentional convolution of modern day politics and how they use the same tactic to replace what doesn’t work (Biden) with something that works even worse and gives you less for more (Harris) and package it to be new and improved and better than what actually has been proven to work (Trump.) All same advertising tricks are used to scam the public into coarse, 1-ply effectiveness and coerce us into thinking it is evidence that they care about and listen to us. They don’t. 1-ply is cruel beyond words and what you do to those you deeply despise and have ill intent against.