The bathroom, and particularly the bathroom outside a commercial setting, is a shelter for the metaphorical shit of our culture and our lives. It is one of the few places that remain unmonitored, largely because, in principal, it is difficult to supervise the activities that occur inside.

But we all have an idea about what goes on in bathrooms because we all use them. There are, of course, cases where forms of monitoring do occur in the bathroom – police officers often patrol public bathrooms in cities and service attendants watch over the facilities, towel in hand, in fancier restrooms. But, by and large, the bathroom is a wilderness from the eyes of society.

The public restroom is a vacuum from security: a holy place. After all, God knows what happens there; perhaps no one else does. We all know that the bathroom is not monitored; everyone knows that no camera exists within those bowels. So everyone knows that anything is possible in the bathroom, even sex and drugs. But, alas, it is true that not much rock'n'roll comes out of the bathroom.

And, of course, bathroom sex and drugs are the metaphorical excrement of society. They have no value. And society gives the people that have bathroom sex and do bathroom drugs the tools that allow them not to be seen. Society gives the underbelly of society its lack of knowledge in the form of the bathroom. It turns its proverbial head and gives bathroom sex its tacit consent. Yet, as more and more public bathrooms are shut down or more closely monitored, this fact becomes slowly eroded.

Everyone knows that society has given over the bathroom as a resource, much as everyone knows where the pipes in bathrooms lead: sewers. The bathroom thus becomes a synecdoche for moral and physical sewers. But, of course, the synecdoche hides in much the same way that the sewer is hidden. Presence is not what the bathroom is about.

In truth, the bathroom is about the indirection seen in the curve of the pipes that lead to the sewer. It is about implication. And this is, of course, another important epistemological point. In this way, the interpretation of the bathroom as an unmonitored oasis is based upon a lack of knowledge on the part of the reader of that bathroom. This is the darkness of the restroom, or the flickering light, that makes you squint in order to see.

But there is another side in the equation of knowledge in the bathroom: the light in the writing on the wall, the idea – etymologically, 'idea' derives from a Greek word that meant light. The old writing on the wall metaphor calls to mind falling civilizations and prophets. The perfect example of this is of a prophet that writes on the white stone walls of the city about that city's demise soon before it is demolished.

Of course, nobody believes the prophet in that famous example. Or alternately, everyone believes the prophet's words, but the prophet does not. In either of these scenarios, the camera should fade out on the image of the prophet's words crumbling into pebbles.

Of course, this is not what we find in the bathroom, but these two scenarios are almost mirror metaphors for each other. The writing on the bathroom wall is the unknown society – unknown because it is unmonitored – resurrecting itself from the monitored city that has already fallen.

But the difference is that the society of the bathroom erects itself as the Victorians erected ruins, that is, as a society that has already fallen. This society advertises oral sex ("For Good Head Call 869-9200"), writes quipy notes to each other ("Here I sit/Broken hearted/Tried to shit/And merely farted") or merely writes their names on the walls ("CJ was here/September 28"). The writing on the walls exemplifies the knowledge that this underground society exists.

And so, we have the two nodes of knowledge present in the bathroom: the lack of knowledge that the monitoring society has over activities that occur there, and the knowledge of this fact that users of the bathroom possess. The notes written by the users of the bathroom, who are members of the underbelly bathroom society, are the only communications between those two nodes.