the lady who cuts marty's hair had a friend whose family kept next to their toilet something they called "the poop knife". the moment marty mentioned this to me in passing was the moment the story became the tale i was most disappointed to not hear first hand in 2012.

what i mean by this is i quickly overwhelmed marty with a flood of questions. what did it look like? was it a proper knife or a tool that looked like a knife? was it taken from a kitchen drawer or a basement tool chest? was it bought special or re-purposed from something already in the house? was it a lame toilet or a giant-sized bowel? was it one bowel or a family of prolific defecators? if the toilet, why not get a new one (or maybe it was one of these new 'efficient' models that started it all)? was the same person, like the mom or dad, always responsible for hewing a fecal mass down to bite-sized chunks or did it follow the 'who dealt it deals with it' philosophy? who had the realization a full-time instrument was required? did they clean it? where did it sit? did they hide it when company came over? is it still used? do you know where it lives? can i go there and ask to see it?

i couldn't have been more astonished to find marty possessed not a single answer to my generous serving of questions. this led to one last question, "however does the phrase "poop knife" pass before you in conversation where the next forty minutes isn't dedicated to discovering everything there is to know about a family who conjured, procured, and put to routine use something called a 'poop knife'.

saddened.