THE FROG IN THE TOILET BOWL

There's a Fly in My Soup - there's a Hole In My Bucket - there's a Bear In There - we have all heard them! But this was different. For a week, without telling anyone, feeling perhaps that this was a private matter, I could have shouted from the rafters - THERE'S A FROG IN MY TOILET BOWL.

And there it was, in the toilet of the Tea Rooms at Aboriginal community of Hermannsburg, a lovely little frog who greeted me each morning.

It did seem happy to see me. Either that or I am a very bad judge of frogs, and I am not. I can read them like a slimy green book. 

The frog was not shy. At my approach it splashed and scrambled around the bowl, clearly relishing the company.

And what did I do? Well we all know what I did. I shat on it from a great height then flushed the toilet in a scene reminiscent of the Great Flood or Water World. It could have been a lot worse, and probably was an hour later when the buses arrived full of meat-eating tourists. Imagine it. At least I am a vegetarian.

But it did make me think. Different people would have different reactions to this. From ... hey, there's a frog in the dunny  ...  to the more explicit ... there's a live poo in the loo.

I know many who would have been intent on trying to rescue it. You know, the ones who end up working in aged care or drug rehabs. Then nasty types would have found it hilarious and sought to mock the little frog. 

But for me it became the moment that I knew my instincts were those a writer. While the frog sought refuge under the rim of the bowl as Armageddon approached, I tried to place this little guy into some philosophical model. 

Was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Did it simply shrug its frog shoulders and say Shit Happens or maybe determined to just go with the flow! Was this some kind of test devised by a vengeful God, casting the amphibian into a poopy purgatory in which it had to learn some valuable life lessons, like .... duck when a human sits on top of you?

I clearly can't ever know but this I do know, very little happens now that doesn't touch me as a story. For a reactive personality such as myself it is of some solace, granting a momentary pause between events while a story is extracted.

You, like me, will now be spending the remainder of your life wondering what happened to that little frog. Did he, or she, finally succumb to the avalanche of excrement? Is that finally what happens to us all? Did it, after a massive rain, leap from the bondage of 'number twos' towards the Finke River, there to spend its last days in quiet reflection upon a world that is rarely fair.

Will I, or you, do the same? I know, now I am just being silly.

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