Oscillating and pulsating, on and off, -OR- “What we talk about when we talk about extremely personal hygiene, assuming we’re tasteless enough to talk about it at all, and we are.”

bidet

Campers, I give you herewith:

The dashboard for an electronic bidet’s remote control.

Oh, you heard, cupcake. Oh, yes you did. Stop going “LaLaLaLaLaLa” with your fingers in your ears.

I have so much to share.

Don’t ask me how I stumbled across this treasure. I do not remember. Any more than the bathrobe-wearing 85-year-old dementia sufferer remembers how he ended up on the midnight bus to North Bay with egg-yolk in his chest hair and clutching a box of wet wipes.

(I would like to say I found it “on the computer”. This is how my Luddite friends would respond to the question.  And I don’t complain, much, because at least they’ve remembered that “the computer” isn’t “the TV-looking thing with all the pictures on it”.

(But it’s a losing battle as their trembling white senior-knuckles gradually give up their hold on the crumbling cliff edge of the twenty-first century, and they slide back! back! into the abyss filled with IBM Selectronic typewriters—whose golf ball technology replaced the gentle thwack-thwacking of individual keys with the sound and sensation of being shot point-blank in the forehead with an assault weapon—carbon paper, correction fluid, avocado-green kitchen appliances, orange shag carpeting and push-button princess telephones.

(That was their defining era, the fork in the path when they shook their heads at “progress”, took a just-invented Valium and called Bell Canada for return of their “perfectly good” black rotary dialler.  To get an idea of what Bell Canada was like back then, think Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” but without the wife to stand in her way.)

Now let us return our gratefully wandering attention to the dashboard in question.  I may be remembering correctly or I may not, but I think it was the options for “front cleansing” and “rear cleansing” – and their shamelessly derivative Keith Haring-inspired icons – that made me stop for a moment and really think about my life up to this point.

Specifically, my total mismanagement of the whole euphemism quandary, including the words “fresh” and “man-scent”, and those countless times when the other person waiting for the elevator opted to let me go it alone.  Always happy for another excuse to lie awake at 3 A.M., wide-eyed and counting the holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles.

Also about: “Deodorizer – on/off”. This instantly raises the bar on what I previously counted as torment, for I have never known a torment quite like the torment of wondering who would choose “Off”.

Also: “Wand cleaning”.  Let me just say that again:

“Wand. Cleaning”.

For the combination of those two words—the wizardly, Harry Potter-ish and oh-so-phallic “wand” and the quotidian, practical “cleaning“, conjuring as it does Mrs Aquino from up the road who wears her support stockings rolled to the knees, and which all but forces your reluctant little face into the fact not just of something NEEDING cleaning, but WHY – well, let’s just say that, in the game of word association I play with myself, “wand” elicits the response “injury“.  As in, “Get this guy to the ICU – it’s a wand injury, poor bastard. And page the plastic surgeon on call!”

Also: “Oscillating / Pulsating”.

This is almost past the point of what the human psyche can bear, because with those two words we’ve crossed a line in the sand that I thought uncrossable.  I must finally face the cold fact, namely:

There is a machine that offers more options for the tender care of my nether regions than my ex-boyfriend did.

WAY more options.

And you know what?  Somehow, I always knew.

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