I’m not sure who had this idea first, but I hope they made millions from it.  It’s so simplistic it’s pure genius.

This is my first experience with it and I’m sold, lock, stock, and barrel.  I’ll do infomercials, write ads, give testimonials in church if need be, all on the cuff (east coast speak meaning for free).

Welcome to the inner sanctum

I’m of course speaking of the separate room in the master bath for the toilet.  Or as I’ve come to call it, the crapper closet.  It’s 5 feet by 10 feet of pure awesomeness.  I have never seen one before we had this house built.

I was 37 years old and asking the builder what the heck this little room in the master bath was for.  I mean how many linen freaking closets do we need?  He looked at me like I had escaped from the mental health hospital down the street. He says, “look at the plans again Roger Ramjet, tell me what you see.”  So I glance down as if I know what I’m looking at and then I noticed a little symbol that looked like a toilet.  Can’t be.  I mean an actual architect drew these up, you would think the symbols would be a little more sophisticated than a tiny outline of a commode.  But there it was; a toilet, in a room, inside the master bathroom.

And it’s three doors deep inside the bowels of the house.

The more I thought about it, while trying not to make eye contact with the builder, the big poopy head, the more the beauty of it came to me.  It’s genius, pure freaking genius!  But at that point I was only working from theory.  It was just a concept on paper.  I would have to wait 6 months to experience it.  But again that was only potential value, its true value did not become evident until almost 6 years later, once Frank came along and reached his noise making stage.

Now that Frank is 4 and Anne Marie is walking and yelling at Frank, and Frank is crying about Anne Marie yelling at him, well, I’m not sure there is the calculus necessary to explain the value of those three doors.  It has grown exponentially from that first day I closed off Frank ranting incessantly about something he saw on the golf channel.  Some enterprising young mathelete might one day develop an algorithm to properly illustrate the relationship between the three doors and the amount of solitude received, but I’m not that mathlete.  So you’ll just have to rely on my anecdotal evidence of the greatness of the “Closet”.

Suffice to say the three doors is not only a great physical barrier to the raging circus that is our house when the kids are playing, fighting, or otherwise being kids, it serves as a psychological barrier as well.  Not one of those bad psychological barriers, you know – the good kind.

Just knowing there are three doors between you and the bag of crazy erupting over Anne Marie savagely tearing down Frank’s Thomas the Tank Engine city and the miles of associated track, all while staring at him to get his reaction, would be enough to make a Tibetan Monk find another gear in the journey for inner peace.

The physical barriers should be obvious, but if you’ve not seen one, read on.

Bathrooms have been escape pods since they were invented.  But man, wait till you have to pass through three doors to get to one.  The master bedroom door, the master bath door, and the toilet room door; each one its own airlock to solitude unto itself, but when all three are closed in conjunction, it’s what I imagine the quietness of deep space must be like.  I’m not saying it’s like the existence God, or the vastness of space he created, otherwise unexplainable, but it’s pretty damn close.

So here’s to you, separate toilet room inventor person.  Your contribution to humanity will not be soon forgotten.  In fact I’m not entirely sure why we don’t celebrate the birth of this invention with parades, fireworks, the finest meats and cheeses in all the land, etc…  It strikes me a bit of a travesty.  Maybe I’ll go to the inner sanctum and ponder this.

Alone with your thoughts, on the crapper, protected by three doors, in a cocoon of silence.

Just as God intended.