One of my all-time favorite features of my childhood home was the spacial relationship between the toilet and the bathtub. The tub, an ancient clawfoot affair, sat directly in front of the toilet, perpendicularly, so that while one sat on the throne, one could drape a newspaper over the lip of the bathtub and engage in hands-free reading. As far as I could tell, everyone in my family made use of this architectural marvel. It was the only way to drop a deuce.

We subscribed to two daily newspapers when I was a kid -- the morning paper and the afternoon paper. Usually, I read the morning comics at the kitchen table sometime during the day. But the late paper, that one arrived on the doorstep just in time for me to pinch off my afternoon Baby Ruth. Barely had the paper hit the doorstep before I was scrambling up the stairs, dropping trow, and seeing what old Marmaduke was up to.

While the family throne was my favorite place to go, my least favorite was easily the outhouse at the family cabin. This was a huge double-seater, built sometime in the 1930s or 40s, and I rarely deigned to enter it. Parts of the lower walls had rotted away, allowing a small amount of sunlight to peer into the hole, down where you didn't want to look. Occasionally, there were garter snakes hiding in the corners. The ceiling was hung with reams of flypaper and dozens of Christmas Tree-scented car deodorizers. The walls were covered in the graffiti of generations of nameless relatives. One long-forgotten cousin had childishly scrawled "Have a nice terd" directly at eye-level.

Generally, on weekends when we went to the cabin, I didn't even open the outhouse door, opting to pee in the woods and just hold off on the number two. By Sunday night, I really had to go, and for a 10-year-old boy who really needs to go, there is no sight finer than three days worth of funny pages (from two papers!) stacked up neatly inside the screen door.

Somehow along the way, I completely lost interest in reading on the can. It's purely a hygenic bodily function now, and I spend as little time performing it as possible. I can think of at least 15 other places in the average house where I'd rather sit and read at leisure.

What a weird thing to do.