Hazy, The Toilet’s True Arbiter of Taste…

October 3, 2025

532

…could use some help.

In On Learning to Heal, Ed Cohen writes, “Care is an interesting word. It comes from the Middle High German root caren, which means both trouble, grief, or sorrow, and the succoring thereof.” I also heard this rooted definition of the term recently at a conference. To care, on one hand, means to trouble over, to grieve, to sorrow about. On the other, it means to provide help, relief, aid, or assistance. Caren carries within it an “antithetical meaning” or a “kind of folding together of contraries… not governed by the laws of logic.” We can make sense of some of these contraries: to trouble over something or someone might very well mean to help them or assist them, though it might just as well mean to fret or worry over them. More troubling, however, is what “grief” and “sorrow” imply. We tend to feel grief and sorrow after loss, after tragedy, after the event that would negate the very ability to help or relieve or aid or assist. Moreover, we might even doubly grieve our very inability to provide anything like relief or aid following such an event.

Just earlier in the text, Cohen glosses Canguilhem injunction to embrace contradiction. “Instead,” writes Cohen, “he challenges us to recognize that the living contradictions that we are—and that we can only ever be—entail both our intelligence and our simplicity. We are many and yet we are one. We hope and our hope fails us. We are living and we are dying, always at the same time.” “Healing,” Cohen continues, “arises in the tension in between.”

Cure, or curing, goes Cohen’s argument, has little to do with living, whether that entails embracing our ontological contradictions or caring in the full contrariness of the word. To be sure, what we can do or cannot do about living, caring, or curing is both limited and expansive—another contradiction—but it is the first two that, for Cohen, becomes central to something like a path forward.

Recently, we learned that long-time and beloved fellow Toileteer Hazy (or HazyHex or Dan) was diagnosed with a late relapse of the Stage 4 Hodgkin Lymphoma with which he was diagnosed (and also subsequently treated) 8 years ago. I’ve never met Hazy. All our interaction is contained in the Disqus comments of Toilet ov Hell posts or the TovH Discord. Though I have never met him, what I do know about Hazy is this: the man is so rarely if ever wrong about if something is dope or not. There are few seals of approval like the Hazy Seal of Approval. Last week, when I posted the latest track from Dead and Dripping, you know what Hazy said? “Rips.” When, a few hours later, I posted a track from Bogota’s Raw Brigade, Hazy responded, in perfect lockstep, “Rips.” Two days later, upon the glorious release of PeelingFlesh‘s PF Radio 2, Hazy is holding court on the (sorry) state of Unique Leader. Who would dare contradict him? Sure, one might quibble, but even then, it would be a fool’s errand. Hazy has the unique ability to like or dislike something authoritatively but not prescriptively. Hazy’s approval feels like the sun’s warmest rays wrapping themselves around, but you are not shunted into the cold of an eclipse if he’s not into it. You accept that you’re wrong but feel no lesser for it. That’s just how it is for the rest of us.

In response to this news, Rolderathis swiftly set up a GoFundMe, and, just as swiftly, many have sent what they can. There is a goal on the page, though we of course hope to smash that goal like an ESG sample in a PF song. A GoFundMe cannot cure this diagnosis nor the various systems that make such fundraisers necessary. It can, however, allow us to care and, most importantly, allow Hazy to heal. “Whatever healing is,” writes Cohen, “it is never the same thing twice because neither are we, so it seems appropriate that healing challenges us to realize that we are always more than we currently know or imagine. Hence, in order to learn both to desire and to value healing, we might first need to unlearn the ways we have learned to imagine who or what we have been until now.” And what of living? “In undoing us and our most cherished expectations, illness sometimes provides us with an opportunity to learn to live beyond the limits that our culture represents as given. Learning that it is possible to live beyond these limits might indeed be one of healing’s greatest gifts.”

We can care, and we can give, but we cannot offer such gifts. Hopefully, though, whatever care we have and whatever we can give, will make it so that Hazy heals and lives beyond whatever limits shackle us to our most normative and boring modes of life.