‘Blame for ‘The Sharp Place’ lies definitively with the Baby Boomers, whose method for the disposal of razors parallels their method for handling the climate, a whimsical laissez-faire approach (that may, yet, be the death of us). The method is simple, if not baffling: 1. A slot is cut into the bathroom wall, sometimes in the mirror cabinet and sometimes garishly chiseled out of tile. 2. Used razors are pressed into the slot by freshly shaven homeowners. 3. Intrusive ideas about where the razors may go or what may happen when they are found are ignored. 4. The homeowner’s subconscious remains distantly aware that the walls are filling with rusted razors, hair, and blood. 5. The homeowner’s subconscious manifests irrational fears that the razors will turn up at inconvenient times (i.e. in the apples given to children at Halloween). 6. Repeat.
‘The Sharp Place,’ then, is an American state of mind, a chicken-or-egg straining of logic that takes the example of pressing razors into the walls of our private restrooms and allows us to assume the worst of everyone in the neighborhood because, if good people can press razors into their walls, who knows what the shifty couple across the street might be capable of? Gluing them to playground equipment? And if the neighbors are feeding razorblades to stray dogs, is it really so bad to press them into the bathroom wall where, at least as far as we can tell, they are safely away from children and animals?
‘The Sharp Place’ is equal parts condemnation and permission, the new American paranoia. It’s the reason razors are banned from airplanes- if we can’t trust ourselves with them, we certainly can’t trust the man sitting next to us who may, in our absence, slip under the seat and run one across our delicate Achilles tendon. And he, under the seat, can hardly trust that we have not gone to press razors into the walls of the airplane bathroom, risking catastrophic depressurization for the relief of being free of a blade.
‘The Sharp Place’ is also a place, deep underground but open to public viewing. It is the terminus of a complex series of pipes, an infrastructure that connects the walls of all American bathrooms and ferries abandoned razors into a natural pit, the bottom of which remains something of a mystery. It is a place that smells like blood, though it is likely only rust.
Visiting the site of ‘The Sharp Place’ does nothing to mitigate the feeling of it, though some have found small relief in bringing boxes of their used razors for disposal at the hub- a guilty pilgrimage that misses the point entirely.’
The Editor and I search for an entrance to ‘The Sharp Place’ off I-5 in Washington and find nothing but an orchard where Shitholes suggests it might be. I call her superstitious when she stops me from eating an apple there but I drop it when she isn’t looking. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.
-traveler
