Brown About Town with Suma Iyer

I was under the impression that living in Canberra is easy. But judging by the 11am state of the bathrooms at any large agency, some folks are holding a LOT of stress in their gastrointestinal systems.

I’m a bit concerned. You know how when you walk into a public toilet, you sometimes have a false start with the cubicle you walk into and you have to go to another one? The number of times I leave having seen a Rorschach blot of someone’s vivid turd is too many. My brain likes to screengrab that with maximum image resolution and test me:

“What do you see when you look this inkblot?”

I see IBS, brain. That’s what I see.

I think it’s the cold. I think we are all self-soothing with warm drinks, and those bonus morning coffees and extra cups of tea are just white knuckling it through our intestines.

And that’s fine. But like, don’t hurt yourselves. Be careful.

Lunchroom noticeboards are how you become aware of the level of weird at your workplace. Someone at my work is asking $3500 for a used mattress. That’s some wishful thinking. I don’t just mean because mattresses stain easily; obviously if there’s a ghost in yellow on that upholstery. No one’s gonna buy it (well at least I wouldn’t; I don’t know what you lot are into).

We need to educate ourselves about the factors that we need to consider in the purchase of a second-hand mattress. I, for one, would like to know about gas retention threshold, which is simply not talked about enough.

Before I put down thirty-five hundred dollars, I’d like to know about the number of farts a mattress is holding. You might say “that’s ridiculous, mattresses don’t hold farts”.

Please.

Any mattress belonging to someone at my work is holding onto intergenerational digestive trauma. I have seen, first hand, the way my colleagues mainline Guzman and Gomez, and I’m sure that $3500 Sealy Posturepedic can double as an extensive food diary.

And I would like to educate myself on the extent of the damage before committing to a large purchase.

I don’t want any brain farts, either. As soon as someone’s had a messed-up dream, then I don’t want that energy anywhere near a place where I could be sleeping. If someone has entertained any kind of non-physical vulnerability on a mattress, then that mattress has performed emotional labour. And that means it is less well equipped to deal with my problems. Which are considerable.

It doesn’t even have to be a dream, it can just be like weird sad boi reminiscences. Once a person has laid on a mattress and wondered whether the girl they dated in first year uni has kids now and gotten an erection at the vivid memory of the smell of her hair but then felt too sad to do anything about it because of the cumulative effects of SSRIs and middle age… I would estimate that that mattress has lost 10% of its value.

Mattresses do the work of a subconscious travel device, super absorbent towel and bulk billing psychologist and they are tired. A mattress isn’t just for Christmas, people. Please if you buy a mattress, do the humane thing. Make sure the only farts it has to retain are yours.

Suma Iyer is a Canberra-based comic and Raw Comedy National Finalist 2024. Keep up with her shenanigans over at @sumaiyercomedy on Instagram.