August 24th & 31st, 2026 - Hidden Life
Dear TNY,
“Hidden Life” dispatched.
Have you taken to publishing on Sunday now? I think I have written to you on Sunday before. But only once (it was in a bar on Sandy in Portland in April/May of 2025; I sat at a high stool and drank Space Dust and looked out the window; it was also a steakhouse and had gambling but I didn’t get anything to eat; I did gamble but lost; I walked there but got picked up later by someone; we got a damaged tire changed for a used one in better condition afterward; it cost $50, in cash; the car model was a Buick, it was steel blue and the backseat had a dog bed in it; the passenger floor was a mess; the reason for the tire repair was poor driving and I had noticed the damage, not the person who was driving because…nug). Definitely did not used to be the norm, but then again I used to have a schedule and a life and you could time things by the beat of it. Now? It’s a loose, farty bowel movement that splatters the underside of the toilet seat.
Fun facts! You want to know something hilarious? It’s about toilet seat splatters. The underside. See, women don’t have to lift the seat very often. So, when a woman lives alone, or lives with another woman or women, you can tell the kind of cleanliness that they keep AND the kind of bowel issues they have AND whether the dudes they are sleeping with, if any, are honest with them (mainly about their cleanliness, but also things in general) AND whether those dudes are good dudes or not AND how much the woman or women drink AND if they suffer from bulimia or not AND if they just don’t fucking care…just by looking at the underside of the toilet seat.
While you can determine a lot with just one trip to the bathroom to piss, you need frequent visits to watch the petri dish that is the underside of the toilet seat develop. You have to watch the speckles grow. More to be added. Blood to enter the chat. And if you can watch that blood go from bright red to dark brown, blending perfectly with the shit-fetti, before a new growth of blood appears again, that is the level of data you can use to really see the habits of the woman/women that live there.
See, if the underside of the toilet seat is clean, and stays clean, you can usually tell how fastidious she/they are. They may have bowel issues and might have reason to clean the underside, but you’ll never know (unless you listen with your ear close to the door while they go to the bathroom, which is what my now dead brother used to do to me because he wanted to catch me jerking off so he would listen to the plop of the turd hitting the water before he would determine that I was pooping) because they clean up after themselves. A clean underside of the toilet seat shows someone that takes care of themselves and/or their space.
It may also be because they are embarrassed of their Pollack art. Either way, this is a person who thinks about others outside of herself/themselves. Or, in the rare case, this woman has a person with a penis in her life that is kind enough to clean it without telling her. Or, someone with bulimia. Or she herself has bulimia. Or might be a big drinker. I have encountered this type of seat only a few times, to be honest. And every time it was fastidiousness, the cause of which was different in each case.
Now, when we encounter an absolutely blasted toilet seat, we find someone who is a lot more…focused on self. And I mean a toilet seat that is fucking demolished, like the pockmarked pillboxes in Normandy; the kind of mess that would take weeks to accumulate. We know that in this house, no one lifts the seat. So, maybe it’s that men sit to pee? Rare. Or the men do come over but don’t care enough about the woman to do a nice thing for her. These men likely aren’t quality. We see that the woman doesn’t drink all that much because if she had to puke, she would see the underside of the seat. We know that she likely doesn’t have bulimia. But we also know that she doesn’t think about the underside of the toilet seat because it isn’t her experience to need to lift it, therefore no one does (to her perception as she cannot perceive beyond herself). There’s less empathy in this person because they cannot be another, seeing the world how the other would see it, and thinking about the underside of the toilet seat. I have encountered this type of seat many times. And it was, as far as I could tell, a lack of consideration or misaligned empathy. These individuals did not consider anyone, therefore that part of the toilet did not exist.
My approach to this has been varied. I learned that telling this person only provides an intense amount of immediate embarrassment with no change to the cleanliness of the seat. Then I learned that if I clean it, and tell the person after, there’s intense embarrassment, but I don’t have to see the backblast anymore, so it’s high-living for a few days before it returns because this person doesn’t have the capacity to recognize this issue. The best approach I have found is to clean it and say nothing. Ever. In this way I spare the embarrassment and don’t have to look at the mess, and it’s not that big of a fucking deal anyway.
Then there’re the women who don’t fucking care. This is where I would put most men as well, which kind of makes them worse. Because they see it all the time and still don’t clean it. I have phased in and out of this range myself. Depression is a helluva drug.
Finally, there’re the other outliers. The “outside the bowl” mess. I have encountered this twice in my life. And I don’t mean piss. Because with dudes, it happens more often than you’d think, but it’s almost always urine down the front of the bowl. I’m not counting that. I mean turdmeat. Both cases I have encountered it were women. One, it was everywhere when one looked closely. On the light switch. The window sill. The door. The back of the toilet seat had one long brown line that I had to really lean over the seat to see. On the wall. And the underside of the bowl. Some of the trim around the floor. Guys, this one gave me anxiety because what happened in that bathroom…it must have been a very bad day. And the other was a nug of turd on the front underside of the bowl, the size of two pencil erasers having sex with each other, and it was craggy, not streaky, like it had been flung there, four inches down from the rim, if my dick was midnight then it would be about two o’clock, right behind where my right calf wanted to be. To this day, I’m unclear how it got there. But the owner of said turd denied it vehemently after I cleaned it and told her about it. Which was such an obvious lie because it was impossible for it to have been anyone else. After, it came to my attention that her life is scaffolding, though, and I saw why the lie was generated. And many, many other lies. It doesn’t matter if I forgave her, or forgive her for the lies. Or the scaffolding. Or anything. Because I don’t matter.
WAIT!! A third. My sister. And it was on the toilet lid, on top of it, and on the covers in her bed. And on the outside rim of the toilet. And on a towel. And in the shower. She also denied it. Blamed it on a friend. Yeah, sis, your friend shit in your bed, one she didn’t get in or sleep on, for fun.
What I’m trying to say is that you can read a lot about a person, like tea leaves, by looking at the underside of their toilet seat. Moreso for women because they don’t have a reason to lift it during normal use. I’m not trying to single them out here, it’s just their lack of needing that aspect of the toilet makes it a unique and interesting dataset.
What does all this mean?
What I want you to hear from all of this is that there isn’t a place for me here. Here being existence. It doesn’t matter what I can do, how good I am, how fun, special, unique, brilliant, or worthwhile I might be. Or the opposite, really. The person who pays this much attention to EVERYTHING doesn’t belong here. This might be the most a person has ever written about the underside of a toilet seat. What does mine look like right now, by the way? Mold. So does the sink and shower. It was there when I moved in and it’s worse now. I should clean it. But I’m learning a lot about myself when I look under the seat, too.
What I’m saying is that ignorance is bliss. People skate through life shitting up bathrooms, literally and metaphorically, and they don’t think anything of it. And yet, I’m walking around looking at everything this intensely. I can close my eyes right now and remember the underside of about 20 toilet seats, what state I found them in, what I deduced, how I reacted, etc. (in one case, the anxiety case, I almost got up at 1AM to clean it while she was sleep, the whole fucking bathroom, but then I assumed that she would catch me or notice the clean smell & appearance in the morning and wonder what sort of mental waterboarding I was doing by not bringing it up, so I laid awake for hours and sweated).
I don’t belong.
You have no idea. I can close my eyes and see the insides of people I have put my fingers in (through my finger’s mind’s eye). I can grow my childhood home right out of the earth like a field of corn, and walk around in it. I can feel skin and tell you whose skin is whose. I can tell you which goosepimples are the most rigid, the softest ones, the ones that appear from breath, the ones that appear from fear, the ones that appear from ecstasy. I can tell you so many of the horrible things I’ve said and I say, and what has been said to me. I can tell you about all the quiet moments too, the little ones. The sounds that people make when they sleep. I can tell you about people I have loved, the way they look to me, so much beauty you cannot believe; and I can physically describe them, all their details, things I’m never allowed to tell them because they would be horrified I saw it all. I’ve smelled their breath and licked their teeth. I can tell you what it’s like, in aggressive detail, to pull goats from other goats, and watch the mom eat the steaming, hay-covered afterbirth when the event is over. I can tell you all the times I struggled to ask a girl to dance at school, and how sweaty my hands were, how focused I was on my acne or how wet the fabric of their dresses were getting. I can tell you when I fell in love, why and where and with whom, and when I fell out of it. I can tell you what my oldest son’s cowlick smells like (bread yeast and cookie dough) and I can tell you how it felt to break all of the 14 bones I’ve broken.
I live in all these moments, all at once, always. And I can’t escape. You know what would be nice? Someone to share all of this with. Who didn’t say I talk too much. Or was too much. Or was too intense. Or whatever. Or fucking what the fuck ever. I think a lot about that nug of turd on the toilet bowl. And that person. The crust on it from drying in place, the still soft inner core. The complete lack of self-awareness it takes to put that there and it stay there long enough for its condition to occur, and to not notice. How did I expect anyone of that calibre to understand, or even try to understand, my hot mess of shit. Or most recently, to be joked with repeatedly about how I talk too much, even after I said that saying that hurts my feelings, because while you think it’s funny, you haven’t heard it from people who tried to rip you apart for most of your life.
Thing is, I can’t take all the abuse. I’m not that strong. And you know who abuses me the most? Me. If you think you are good at it, you have no idea how good I am at it.
I miss drinking because boredom was devoid of thought. I miss not thinking.
I woke up today and wanted to die again. Because I don’t belong here. I sat on my host family’s porch last night and smoked my pipe and talked with my host dad and looked at the universe, which is very, very bright at his house. And we told stories and laughed and I found myself just wanting him to be okay. For his family to work. For his daughter to grow up and live a beautiful life. For him and his wife to stay together (they are and there are no signs they won’t, but I’ve seen life happen real close up and I know detonation can happen at any time) and I want them to find each other time and again, through the years. I want them to say, “Can you believe it?” And not be able to believe it. I wanted to walk into the annex, where I sleep, and die. Because I don’t belong.
And you know what? It wouldn’t matter. That’s the wild part. It would not matter if I did. I think about Ben, and listening to so many people who did not know him as well as I did talk about how sad it was and how sad he must have been and how he should have stayed and how terrible or selfish or misguided or what the fuck ever. I have never heard a single person say: I wonder if he knew something I didn’t know.
And he did. And I’d like to talk to him about it. But I can’t, because he left. He knew what this place was better than most, and he left. It’s the same as the story Dave Chappelle tells about a brilliant friend he had that ended up at Foot Locker and was happy; meanwhile Anthony Bourdain killed himself. I read a great quote by Nietzsche this morning, and one of the comments under it said: We should probably file this under, “And we can see how well that worked out for him.”
There isn’t a place for some people. The world demands that the simple survive. The ignorant. Or the brilliant ones who are at peace. None of those feel like me.
Fuck am I boring. I’m boring myfuckingself.
This story isn’t worth anyone’s time. There’s nothing to it at all. It’s worth less than the resources necessary to put it out into the world.
Just like me.
Nick
P.S. The pic is from my sister’s old house. It’s my drop. I stand to wipe, like a lot of you do. And it dripped on the toilet when I stood up. I cleaned myself up and then took this pic to send to Ben. No one would know I did that, because I was embarrassed and because I respected someone else’s space and I cleaned it before I left the room. And now I’m showing you because why not. It doesn’t fucking matter.
P.P.S. Written hours afterward. You know what I did? I went back and cleaned my whole space. Vacuumed up all the detritus. Scrubbed the shower. Washed the shower curtain. Cleaned the sink. The toilet. Scrubbed the floors. Shook the Nissan Rouge floor mats that are used as rugs out. Did laundry. Ate mushrooms. Got high. Had a sandwich and chips and macaroni salad and candy and ice cream. This? This is being a loser. Don’t do any of this. These aren’t even real problems. I’m just a bitch. I’ll stop now. Sorry.
