fling93 loves fishies

From Beneath You...

Well, like everybody else, I could blog about Reagan, or George Tenet resigning, or maybe about that fantastic seven-game Stanley Cup Finals. But instead, for reasons that will become apparent, I’ll just talk about our weekend at the excellent Claremont Resort & Spa up in Berkeley.

I’d booked us a room and a couple of 80-minute therapeutic massages to celebrate my wife’s birthday and graduation. While the massages were absolutely heavenly, the view from the room was spectacular (deluxe bay view), and yes, it even came with free Internet access (not that I needed it to feed any sort of blog addiction whatsoever), we’ll forever remember something else…

As we were settling in and I was admiring the view, my wife called to me from the bathroom. “Come here! You’ve gotta see this!”

I rushed over to see… two toilets.

“No, silly,” she said, with obvious excitement. “It’s a bidet!”

Ahhhh, and now it all made sense.

What’s a bidet? Well, basically it’s a bathroom appliance that looks much like a toilet (thus my confusion), only it sprays water upward, towards where your bum would be. What purpose does this serve? Well, think about it. Why would you want to spray water up from a toilet? So you can live out your dog fantasy of drinking from the toilet, but without having to stick your head inside the bowl? No, you dope! It’s so you can spray off the ooky poopiness from your ass after you’ve taken a dump.

And in case you were wondering, it’s pronounced bih-DAY, since only the French could invent such a hoity-toity way to clean your butt. Of course, in the great U.S. of A., where we Americans know we’re so much more civilized than the rest of the world, the bidet serves little more than a source of cheap laughs. As in that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy is talking to Willow about Principal Wood (“First Date,” from the seventh season):

Buffy: You know, it’s not even that he’s acting that suspicious. It’s just—there he is. On the hell mouth. All day, every day. That’s got to be like being showered with evil. Only from underneath.

Willow: Not really a shower.

Buffy: A bidet. Like a bidet of evil.

You see? The bidet just gushes with comic potential. Except, of course, the joke was completely lost on me, since at that time I didn’t know what a bidet was and my wife had to explain it to me. But ever since then, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to try it.

“Well, why don’t you?” asked my wife.

“Well, I don’t need to poop right now.”

“You don’t need to poop to use it, goofy! You can just test it out,” she said, and then her cell phone rang so she left the bathroom to take it.

Well, of course, she had a point there. But I wasn’t exactly sure how to use the thing. The bowl had a drain, whose purpose was obvious, as well as a nozzle which presumably was supposed to squirt water up your ass. At the back, the bidet had two faucets with a stopper in between them, just like a sink. However, behind the stopper was this strange metal cylindrical knob. I couldn’t push or pull it, but I could turn it, although nothing happened when I did. So I carefully turned on the hot water. I could see a little bit of water dribbling up through the nozzle now, but not very much.

Hmm, I tried turning the knob in the back, and yes, the nozzle began to spray a little higher. Aha, so that controls the height and strength of the butt-cleaning stream (I’m such a good engineer). Well, now that I had it figured out, I dropped my pants and turned around to squat… oh wait, it occurred that I should make sure that it’s not too hot. I turned back, bent over the bowl, and touched my fingers to the spray — yes, it was a bit too hot. So I turned up the cold water, and…

POW!!!!

I got smacked in the eye with a stream of bidet-water and fell flat on my naked ass. ACK! As I struggled to crawl over and turn it down, my wife came to see what all the commotion was. There I was, water dripping off my face, kneeling in front of the bidet with my pants down in a bathroom with bidet-water all over the place. Of course, my wife’s first instinct was not to worry about my health or safety, nor to help me clean up, but to laugh and run for the camera. Luckily for me, we’d forgotten to pack it, as evinced by her loud cursing (I wasn’t so lucky the time I got drunk and tried to crawl into the cat carrier).

Eventually, with the help of some highly amusing instructions, we got the hang of it. We discovered that it was much easier (and safer!) to turn the knob all the way to the left (the lowest spray), and then turning up the water enough that it runs out through the overflow hole, from which you could test the temperature before sticking your butt over the bowl and turning up the spray (although we later found it we were using it backwards — you’re supposed to face it and straddle the bowl). And let me tell ya, once you’ve tried it, you’ll never want to go back. There were times when I didn’t really have to poop, but decided to try anyway just so I could use the bidet (forget about me being a blogoholic, we’re bidet-oholics!). I mean, you just feel much more clean.

Just think about it. Does wiping anything with paper ever really make it clean? Makes so much more sense to wash your butt with water and then just use the paper to dry it off (no, the bidet-water wasn’t soapy, but I’m sure there’s some fancy-schmancy ones in the works that’ll have that as an option). Plus, your hand doesn’t need to get anywhere near your ass while it’s still messy, although you should still wash your hands thoroughly afterwards, of course. It’s also handy for women to use it after peeing and before and/or after sex, depending on what they think of the guy.

After our adventures in bidet-sitting, it was the saddest thing in the world to come home and have to use the toilet. <sniff!> We now think the bidet is the best thing since sliced bread (and hopefully, that will be the only time you ever see the words bidet and bread in the same sentence), and maybe we’ll try and buy one from Amazon or something.

Well, while other couples will always have Paris, at least we’ll always have that time by the bay when I got smacked in the eye by the bidet. Doesn’t get any more memorable than that.