Houses Are Caps for Sewage Pipes

When I fly out of here on an airplane, said Babe, it always makes me shudder. Row upon row of houses in grids, or at angles, stick out their driveways to meet up with their streets, and meeting up with other streets they all pour into the same freeway. There are endless stretches, you don’t realize this when you’re driving around, but there are endless stretches of “residential areas” that are just warehouses, they’re warehouses for humans. Planned communities with white streets. Everyone has their own cabinetry. Everyone has chosen their own bathmat. Their own awning color. The shape of the window in their front door. Everyone has decided if they want to plant a plum tree in the front yard, or if they don’t. People spend hours in Home Depot deciding on paint, on moulding, on doors. Not just to get a door, so you can close it, but to have a specific and exact door that is the door you chose, that you painted a kite on, with a glass door knob you found at a junk sale.

In the city it’s more honest. You look at Chicago. All the high rise apartments up along the waterfront. In the morning, those buildings empty out, and the office buildings downtown fill up. If there were gauges on the sides of the building, you could see the one level going down while the other went up. Those apartment buildings look like nothing but warehouses, holding tanks. And yes, while everyone does choose their draperies and their dining room tables, there’s none of this careful landscaping and choosing between marigolds and pansies. It’s more honest in the cities, more overt. You’ve got to have people to fill up those office buildings, and you’ve got to have a place to put the people when they’re not working. So you have apartment buildings. Here where I live though, there are these residential areas. Pine needle mulch, or cedar chips? There are professionals running around who will make an effort to help you define your personal style, but from a mile up in the air, it all looks like geometry anyway.

Take the truth. You need a house for a place to sleep, a place to store and eat your food, and a place to take a quiet poo. All houses have beds, refrigerators, stoves, and toilets. There are like 20 total refrigerators available for purchase in this whole and amazing world, so everyone’s got one of those. Well you can eat in a restaurant, and you can sleep at a hotel, but everyone has a home toilet on which they feel secure. This toilet has a spout, a very important element of it, that leads down to a pipe in the ground where everyone’s waste mixes together and is carried away. The fundamental quiet poo is the most basic function of the house. So, you need a box with a door you can shut and a toilet inside and while you’re at it a stove and a bed, and four walls for everyone, a place to store your car out of the rain, and a sidewalk to get from here to there, line them up, one after another, until there’s no one left pooping in the woods, and then set to decorating, kids! Yellow and blue together make ocean foam!