Thursday 4th September 2003 - "Do You Like Sex?"

There are two women and two men (including me) in my office. We share a toilet. This is awkward as, however well you might know them, the only women who should ever smell your toilet smells, or - God forbid - hear your toilet noises, are your mother, or your girlfriend/wife of two years plus.

Furthermore, due to the environment I work in, the option of simply going to another toilet is not there. It means a long walk, involving the locking and unlocking of many doors. Plus, it's impossible to leave the office without having some reason - just getting up and walking out without saying anything looks weird, so you have to say "I'm just nipping out to do some photocopying" or "I'm just popping over to the machine - does anybody want anything?" (the concepts of 'nipping' and 'popping' are integral when making a poo-break excuse). Also, making these excuses means that you have to return to the office clutching some photocopies or a Twix, otherwise suspicions will be aroused. You end up having to plan your poo-break in painstaking, militaristic detail.

This is a human drama that is played out every day in my office. I only know of my own poo-torment and guilt but, unless my colleagues are super-human and subsist only on sunlight and water, they must have to go through it too. Sometimes the oppressive air of poo-denial hangs so heavy that I feel an overwhelming urge to spring from my desk and shout, "I am just a man! I need to poo! What is so wrong in this??!! Tell me, please!" But I don't. It would probably make things worse. There would just be shocked silence, a heartbeat, and then everyone would turn back to their monitors and resume their keyboard-tapping with the fevered intensity of the conflicted soul who has heard a truth spoken but is not yet ready to confront it. And I would be shunned for my honesty. Like Winston Smith, but with a few small differences.

Either way, my normal solution is to try to ignore the urge during the morning, and nip into a convenient site I've discovered that is on my way back from the canteen at lunchtime. It is perfect - spacious, clean, and isolated. Only very rarely will there be anyone there when I go in. I can use the toilet and saunter back to the office feeling like a million dollars, and no one ever need know my filthy shame.

I was sitting in one of these cubicles this lunchtime when I noticed some writing near the bottom of the right-hand wall. Graffiti. Someone had written, in tiny felt-tip letters, the following question:

"Do you like sex?"

What a very strange thing to write. For a start, it is clearly a rhetorical question, as the writer has not left enough room for responses. Either that or it was simply written in a weirdly juvenile, inept attempt to shock. Under any other circumstances, I would be happy to accept this explanation. But, as it happened, this toilet is located in a building solely populated by pharmacists, psychiatrists, and their attendant admin staff, almost all of whom are women. This last detail is relevant because I was in the men's toilets, not because women are any less filthy than men. They are equally filthy.

What I do seem to be saying, however, is that I somehow think that pharmacists and psychiatrists are above childish graffiti. I don't know. Obviously they aren't. But I still find it hard to imagine one of the sober, bearded, bespectacled fellows who inhabit that building, on his hands and knees with a felt-tip pen writing "Do you like sex?"

I cannot help but question the sanity of whoever wrote this. It is not an uncontrollable explosion of rage or some witty epigram. It is not even proper smut. It is…. inexplicable. It seems like a postcard from the edge of reason, and it made me want to finish my business very quickly and get out of there. Knowing that my favourite cubicle is being frequented by a possible nutcase makes me feel disinclined to go back. So, starting tomorrow, the search begins for a new place of poo-snactuary. Wish me luck.

Would a stranger who read this think that I was a massive goon, given the number of poo, pants, and balls related posts? Or some kind of scatological philosopher? Probably neither. Having said that, I am still searching for more than a handful of weblogs that are really worth reading. I've linked to the most obvious ones I've found. Naked Blog is funny and well written, as is Scary Duck. Richard Herring is a benchmark, and anyone who has read this and him will see the stylistic debt I owe him (pompous).

But there is such an enormous amount of dreck out there. The Internet is an incredible achievement, and has changed the way we live. I am about to use the term 'democratisation of information', so lower your head: Democratisation of information.

See?

This should be a good thing, and of course it is in most part. But, it seems to be turning a large corner of the internet into a hi-tech jumbo jotter where people young enough not to care and people old enough to know better spill their guts and indulge their most horrible creative whims. Lord, there is some bad poetry out there. Really bad.

I am being grumpy - there's nothing wrong with self-expression, no matter how cringeworthy, is there? If I'm being dispassionate, there is nothing less self-indulgent in me writing this than in some mixed-up 20 year old jabbering about fighting her demons and typing out lyrics from Linkin Park songs. But, I award myself psychological points for trying to create something as opposed to just launching an embarrassing stream of consciousness at the screen. Maybe something British in me can't abide the emotional incontinence of a lot of what I read on the internet. And maybe a bitter, misanthropic part of me feels appalled at the way it turns complex experiences and emotions into woeful literary dirges, for the consumption of an obsequious support group who respond to stories of heartbreak and death with 'Big Hugs' and frowny-face emoticons. Is this really bringing people together?

It seems that a lot of people today use the internet as a sounding board, or even a coping mechanism. It feels pretty churlish to criticise this - I read someone else writing about a blog written by a gay boy in some southern state of America, who can only be himself with his online friends. How can this be bad? Unless it distracts him from facing up to his challenges in the real world. But more than likely, it’s a valuable outlet.

It’s not this that annoys me. It’s the massive self-worship. The people who turn the internet into a shrine to themselves and their neuroses. As I say, this is fine and normal in adolescents, but not everyone hosting horrible self-indulgent sites are young. It is normal to be racked by angst from time to time, but the problem seems to arise when support groups form that turn tedious neuroses into something to be celebrated.

Bah! I am losing it. And I can't help but end on a bland 'Diffr'nt Strokes' note. I suppose people want different things out of the internet. I badly want to be entertained, and am searching high and low for more than a handful of weblogs that can provide genuine entertainment. By the same token, other people will look on the internet as a social or emotional outlet. Of course this is a valuable service.

All I'm saying is that it can result in some terrible poetry and some stinking prose.