blacklisted:

I recently moved into a very shitty flat in very shitty South London. In the spirit of removing the taint of the previous tenants with an entire can of Febreze and a whole bottle of Dettol, I became conscious of other people’s filth.

People emit all sorts of filth via multifarious avenues throughout their putrid existence. Because I’m a wretched mammal, I am to an extent filthy, but there is a great distinction between my filthiness and the filthiness of others.

My filth is tolerable as long as I do my best to prevent it from existing as obsessively as possible. I am up to this task. I am better at it than anyone else in the world.

The problem with the filth of others is that it’s raunchier than my filth, it comes in greater quantities, it smells worse, and other people are either not up to the task of ridding themselves of their filth or they don’t care and are lying to appear as if they do care.

I have since moved out of that South London flat and into filthier university accommodation. That’s right, folks, I am in my mid-to-late 20s and I share a bathroom and kitchen with people who did not originally come out of my vagina.

The thing about living in a post-graduate hall, though, is that if you haven’t by this point in life learned that piss, shit and jizz* are all supposed to be flushed down the toilet rather than splattered around the seat and the floor and the walls and left in a decaying pool, when do you?

And so we have almost every form of filth that is so much filthier coming from other people than it is from me:

Sludge: Whether it’s sludge blown out the nose or blown out the ass, if I ever come across the sludge of others, it’s an immediate eye-watering gag reflex. My own sludge is just tolerable enough for me to stay alive long enough to get rid of it. Also, I’m just going to put this out there: I’m fucking elegant.

Liquid: Other people don’t give a shit if they even make their dark, cloudy pee into the toilet. They just splatter all over the edge of the toilet and the floor and the bath mat, and they probably sit in their own dried pee later. And while their pee is surely crawling with disease, mine, while it is still pee, is sterile, clear, and gone before it even comes out. Same goes for tears and sweat. If I cry, it is tender and sad and must be stopped. When other people cry, it’s salty and messy and they shouldn’t be touched until they’ve had a good scrub in the shower with some steel wool. And if I’ve ever been put in the rare position that I have done enough physical activity to sweat, I just glow a little more than usual, and I’m so clean that the glow is odorless. Other people are like walking armpits.

Gas: Other people’s farts are like someone unscrewed the sewer lid leading to Hades. I just don’t fart. I just don’t. Can’t. Don’t know how.

Wax: The insides of my ears are just naturally clean, and yet I still pay very special attention to my ears when I’m having a shower. Other people are fucking greasy all over their entire ear. Wax sometimes occurs in the ear, but for some people it’s just melting and oozing all over the side of their face. Sometimes you can see wax stalactites clinging to a fucking candley cave of fucking horror.

Hair: If I lose a hair, it’s just as clean and shiny as it was when it was attached to my head. It can just be discarded without a second thought. But if other people lose hairs and they are found somewhere like in the shower or a bathroom sink, it is revolting, scandalous, and surely contaminated. The origins of the hair are ambiguous, giving rise to sordid possibilities. It is most likely crawling with invisible lice or crabs. And if any part of it touches me, that part of my body must immediately be sawed off, and the stub sterilized. No, that’s still too dirty. I would just have to kill myself.

Now, you may disagree with me and think that your filth is less disgusting than mine, in addition to the filth of others. But that phenomenon is why it is always other people’s filth that is just so inconceivably abominable. I know the pains I take to be as unfilthy as possible. Yet some other filthier person would probably (mistakenly) think that his filth is less filthy than mine. Because to him, I am the other person. But of course that’s just nonsense.

*That’s right, boys, when you leave jizz in the toilet without flushing, we all know what happened there. You think it’s transparent and invisible? It’s not. It looks like you hocked a loogie with your junk.

**Photo from The Jetpacker.