When you're shopping for a new toilet seat, and you're looking at that wall of toilet seats in the hardware store, you usually see a small selection of "novelty" or unusual toilet seats, like for instance the one of transparent plexiglas with coins inside. I have never seen one of these novelty toilet seats in a person's home, or anywhere outside a hardware store for that matter.

Shopping for a new toilet seat can be a somewhat uncomfortable activity. Everyone looking at toilet seats knows, in fact is painfully aware, that every other person there is imagining himself or herself sitting on this seat or that seat, as that's really all there is to do, you look at a particular seat and the criterion is, can I see myself sitting on this and excreting solid waste, can I see myself sitting on this with the lid down, with my head in my hands, weeping, or making a really important phone call? Is this the toilet seat for me? So everyone is doing this, and everyone is aware of everyone else doing this, and it's painfully uncomfortable. It is so awkward that when the employee approaches you and asks if you need any help, well, you simply can't say no emphatically enough.

My stepfather, never a silly man or a man given to outbursts of whimsy, would become so uncomfortable and ill at ease in the toilet seat aisle that even he would indulge in silly awkwardness-deflating comments about the toilet seats, doing little bits with them, his little shtick, because that's what people do to relieve their discomfort, they kid around. So everyone is either frozen in embarrassment, eyes darting from side to side, just wanting to choose their new seat and flee to the checkout, or everyone is engaged in clever banter, making little toilet jokes, even people who never do such things, like my stepfather. It was a very unsettling thing to behold, because he never did such things, and he did them really badly, which just made things worse. When my stepfather, not a funny man or a silly man in any way, took a toilet seat off the wall of the hardware store and poked his head through the toilet seat and crossed his eyes at us like Jerry Lewis, I, at that precise moment, wanted to collapse and die or become a spectral entity incapable of being seen by human beings.