Roman Thrones + Poetry and Art by Aaron Newcome-Beill

I started a longer post, but I’m too discombobulated to finish writing it — I’m getting ready for tomorrow’s routine colonoscopy. Have you had one done? Hopefully your experience went well…

Curious how average big city people went to the bathroom in the way back when days? Here’s what HistoryHit reports:

“The public baths were also breeding grounds for disease. Roman doctors would often recommend that ill people should go for a cleansing bath. As part of the baths’ etiquette, the sick usually bathed in the afternoons to avoid healthy bathers. However, like public toilets and the streets, there was no daily cleaning routine for keeping the baths themselves clean, so illness was often passed to healthy bathers who visited the next morning.

“Romans used a sea sponge on a stick, called a tersorium, to wipe after using the latrine. The sponges were often washed in water containing salt and vinegar, kept in a shallow gutter below the toilets. Yet not everyone carried around their own sponge and public latrines at baths or even the Colosseum would have seen shared sponges, inevitably passing on diseases such as dysentery.”

Today’s guest blog post is thanks to Aaron Newcome-Beill. From Baltimore, Maryland, he describes himself as, “an artist with sincere misgivings and concerns about industry and capitalism writ large, particularly in the face of more universal ethical fallacies that have seeped into the infrastructure of the great social machine and have become the norm. I recently quit my role in healthcare because I refuse to passively participate in the exploitation of others when my passion and productivity can actively be engaged in other endeavors, preferably for the greater good. I received my MS in Psychology at Arizona State University and returned for an MA in Sociology but dropped out when I stopped caring. I am currently devoting all of my time to creative pursuits while also writing about art, activism, and other topics on my blog Please Stand By.

Unchanged by Aaron Newcome-Beill

In the asphalt 2 decades later,

unchanged time

warps in the sun

like dogs climbing

sticky architecture, out of breath.

This is how we silence the world.

I’ve closed minds to new ideas

as ideas get dumped

like diminished chords and empty cases

in the places they preach about gunships

that let all possibilities end.

Most days my heart’s not in it.

It takes all magic not to think of you –

To feel remorse refilling

in the time of the carbine –