Passing-Thought

No.

But we have motion sensor faucets in the ladies' room at our church which seem to cough at you rather than provide water. I complained about them on the back of the paper used to register our attendance. This will prove if anybody even reads those things.

No. This has never happened to me. You must be skinny. I used to be fat and let me tell you. For big people, those motion sensored toilets are an evil conspiracy of embarrassments. One can't sit down, do their business, stand up, pull up, untangle or whatever it is that needs to be done, no, not even open the door to leave without those detectors going off at least 10 times. So, do I wonder if I'm there? No. Everybody in the whole place knows I've been there and they're wondering what on earth I'm doing in there. What an unnerving thought. I have, however, wondered if I've tesserecked myself to Niagara Falls, though. In fact... all that water rushing makes me gotta go to the bathroom again so... I'm afraid that if I get fat again and enter another one of those things ... I'll never be able to get out of my stall. Make sure you send someone to rescue me, will ya? Sue (telling it like it is)

yeah, I figured most people have the same shared experience with those motion censors (at least the sit down ones). That they tend to go off (even several times) before we have finished the job. How bothersome! Nothing worse than trying to use toilet paper under such conditions. But this very fact helps to underline my question. The sensor NOT triggering the flush (as it normally does) would be a very strange and unusual thing, and would be even more reason to wonder "what's wrong with this picture?"

The title of my entry, however, is meant to draw this experience into more of the realm of philosophy of human experience. Aren't there things that we do on a regular basis for which we depend upon "automatic flushes" to get rid of for us? The routineness of those experiences can be a kind of escapism, almost as if the ugly, stinky, smelly things that we do, didn't really happen. Now what happens if those "automatic flush" systems don't work like we expect them to? We are confronted with the reality of the situation, and that others might take notice afterall. We sense embarrasment or guilt. We want to escape from our "being there"-ness which now confronts us. Ultimately, we would even choose to believe that we aren't actually there, in order to cope. But the evidence of the dirty deed is left sitting there, whether we choose to believe we're there or not. Thus, sometimes, on special occassions, God takes away our flush-mechanisms to confront us with the inescaple reality of *His* "being-there" in the stall with us, behind the closed doors. In fact, I would even be so bold as to declare that what separates the reality of Christian religion from all other religions is the fact that the White Royal Throne of Redemption is a toilet rather than the most comfortable and esteemed chair in the king's castle.

Eric, do I need to warn you again about thinking too much? (just teasting!)

I just figured you were having a brain fart. You know. Like asking 'if the tree falls and no one hears it ... did it fall' ... if so, then applied to your toilet question then your analogy would look like this: toilet question is to sin as tree question is to sin. That's stinkin' thinkin' for sure. The toilet question sounds like you are wondering if you don't get caught then perhaps it didn't happen. So, before we start a bunch of crappy puns, since you started it, I'll go with your newest defining statement about the toilet question. Your theology in the second statement is much better. Your original toilet question stinks. sue

How odd that I ended up here during a search on google for existential escapism. Someone who thought about the same word pairing as me.

When I think about the philosophical question you propose, i think of solipsism. Its something that has been bugging me for sometime since a few months ago I learned that there is a term that went with what I felt.

I wonder if IT is really there instead of the I. Does it really exist? Does it exist solely in my mind and did the toliet not flush because of some Fruedian-like repressed thought cause it not to?