Pandemic Potty-tics in a Gen X Home
There are no acceptable substitutes for toilet paper.
Pandemic toilet paper hoarding led me to purchasing two rolls of $1.00 paper towels from Dollar General in early March 2020. The PT (paper towels) rather than TP, were for pee-pee only and not to be flushed! In tandem, I picked up a pack of hemorrhoid wipes for those booty cleanse, sanitation station, personal moments. I thought the entire $5.45 purchase was genius, that I had outsmarted the hordes of Charmin-mongers. That was until I sat watching my better half run out of the master bath shouting, “It burns! It burns!”
The hemorrhoid wipe contained witch hazel. Our Generation X, now comfortably settled into our mid to late forties, or anyone who’s ever bathed every meal on a Mexican vacation in Cholula for a week knows what was happening. Hopping at rabid, bunny speed, she came from the bathroom to the bedroom and stopped to stand, pants to ankle, in front of a stand-up fan spreading her back there cheeks apart. She mumbled relief in a growl induced only by the one area of the body that can offer surprising pleasure or intense pain.
As my wife is standing there, spreading her bare necessities into the Aero Speed floor fan that we use for circulation and white noise when we sleep, I realize the witch hazel ingredient and feel that I should probably visually investigate her for a fissure. A fissure would be possible! Constipation during an American Pandemic is expected. We had been down to eating frozen burritos for a few weeks and constipation is listed as an ingredient and a side effect.
While I tried to assess the trauma with triage questions, approaching her, before I get to her she pops up and says, “I think I’m just chafed.” Just chafed? So I asked her why she would be chafed.
She explained that she had been “conserving resources,” something she said often during the early days of isolation in an effort to flatten the curve and do her part as an American. For example, I would ask, “Honey, why do you keep smoking my cigarette? Just light one.”…”I’m conserving resources.” “Babe, do you want a couple of breakfast burritos?”…”No, just one. I’m conserving resources.”
Now, watching her butt bent into a five blade fan, Pandemic Americana slapped me the face with the admittance that she is probably chaffed since she was “using old washcloths to conserve resources.” I walked away. Completely confounded by this confession.
Not because she would doomsday prep her bunghole for the continued toilet paper outage, but because we are Generation X! We are Red Dawn! We are War Games! We are 5 kids in detention on a Saturday morning using our wits in the legendary Breakfast Club! We hold nothing back; we are Mad Max living Beyond Thunderdome!
Oh! Not in this crisis. In this crisis, my wife was wiping her bum with a washcloth like a Gen Y/Millennial late to the show, on her soon-to-be fragile as a Boomer butthole.
I love her, but obviously I couldn’t help her. She had to be left on her own like the latch-key kid she once was, to remember who she is and how to survive.
