Rod Serling, creator of the “Twilight Zone,” famously said that there is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. Mr. Serling, while quite sharp and observant, did err in one important way: he thought that this fifth dimension was the Twilight Zone, when in fact it is right here in Northfield, in the men’s bathroom on the first floor of Myers Hall. 

This bathroom answers the question we’ve all been asking, the one perennially burning a hole through our tongues and coming to settle on the bottom of our mouths, resting gently against the front teeth, and weighing us down every day, so that we wander with gazes downcast: what if you turned off the light above the toilets? What if all of the tiles were a bit grimy, and the mirrors were clouded? It asks, ‘how much can you be unsettled by that which is perfectly ordinary’? The bathroom then boldly replies: it unsettles like the eerie feeling when, on a Sunday morning, the campus is perfectly quiet, as if all students and faculty had suddenly disappeared. It unsettles like the zap of electricity from biting into a pickle which, you realize with horror, has inexplicably gone bad in the jar. But pickles aren’t meant to go bad, that is precisely their purpose. The pickles are the bathroom. 

And so, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the first floor Myers bathroom is a purely philosophical object. When we consider the fact of the matter, we realize that there is no bathroom on the first floor of Myers. Think to yourself right now: “if I am on the first floor of Myers, and I need to use the restroom, where can I go?”. Perhaps you would go to the second floor, or perhaps to the basement (if there is such a place!). If you happened to live in Myers, and to be the distinguished owner of a chamber pot or other similar implement of excrement, you may just go to your room. If the sun is shining and the geese are hollering, you might even walk over to Goodhue, just to catch a lungful of fresh air. What you would not do is use the bathroom on the first floor of Myers, because there is no such bathroom. 

And so, dear reader, we see that the most terrifying bathroom of all is the one that exists purely in the mind. Were there to in fact be a bathroom on the first floor of Myers, we might at least be able to fit it into our minds, into our conceptions of the world. But, as of yet, it remains purely conceptual, and yet self-contradictory, and so entirely ungraspable. It must remain among other such creatures and concepts of the fanciful, like the Chupacabra, the Zebra and the “Goodhue Tornado”. The Myers first floor bathroom does not belong to this world, but rather in stark vindication of our good friend Rod Serling, to the Twilight Zone. And so, perhaps you are reading this, but I suspect not. One day this school might get a newspaper. We could call it something witty like “The Daily Carl”, or “What’s Up Carleton!” Until then, though, this piece will have to go entirely unpublished and unread.