The Shit Bag, pt. i

When I lived in London for a throw in the early 90s on the border of Holloway and Islington, my roommates & I had an “electric” toilet. The toilet’s outflow pipe was so skinny that our landlord, Omar Everyday In The Same Green Sweatsuit, forbid us to throw paper in it and cautioned that certain fibrous meals, when finally passed, were guaranteed to require a real cranking wellie on the flusher. Sometimes, though, even with the welliest wellie, not everything made it through the pipe and the unassuming plastic bag next to the bowl brush became “that of which we could not speak.” The flat was not air conditioned. The spectre of the Shit Bag haunts me…