AS SUSPHINCTLY AS POSSIBLE UNDER THE CECUMSTANCES
That humans helplessly excrete stench and poisons through our various holes is a facile focal point for checked-out misanthropes
David Friedlander, a friend and fellow writer and runner now on his second stint in Boulder, recently wrote a post called “The Tao of Poo.”
I’m glad David did this, for two reasons. One is that I was already preparing a similar essay, so now I can use his work as an excuse for exploring matters colonic myself. The second, more important reason is that I’m finally introducing others to David’s excellent writing.
You can glean his story from his own words, but in essence, his experiences at the intersection of real estate and climate change have led him to realize not only that the incentives in both areas are aligned for maximal grifting, but also that the problems of housing on a planet of eroding, increasingly hoarded resources are—in concert with the machinations of governments and extra-governmental actors—leading to the literal end of civilization as we’ve been led to perceive it. He’s a smart guy, smart enough to evince needless intellectual humility, and has already divorced himself from reliance on anything digital to the extent I should have by now instead of just screaming from one end of the ship as it disappears beneath the Northern Atlantic swells, taking all the plaintive noises of the living along with it.
I’m enjoying David’s “90-in-90” project, though I have fallen almost a week behind in reading. He’s had some interesting experiences, including being on television with a drunken would-be date and winding up in The New York Times—no longer among his favorite publications, I’ll aver—as an exemplar of ultra-efficient ultra-urban living.
But enough about him. A few weeks ago, I did an ordinary run of about 45 minutes, feeling no sense I was carrying any excess ballast around. No more than fifteen minutes after I finished, I had the sudden urge to take what I understood would be a massive, solid, high-quality dump, one likely to leave an extravagant streaky signature around the bowl like an umber sneer and require several flushes, with the entire sewer system of Boulder hanging in the balance with each one. And that’s just what happened.
This was unusual in that I should have had some warning during my run that I was basically bursting with feces, just trucking a core full of excrement around public paths with no consideration for others. Imagine a skinny woman generally in charge of her faculties suddenly realizing she was in labor, 35 weeks in, with no prior knowledge she was even pregnant. I know where it was all hiding; I do have a physics degree, after all. I just don’t know how.
This experience was neatly countered by one I had more recently while running with Rosie through some open space. I actually may have been on private property, because I came across some white wooden boxes that looked like miniature wooded shipping containers. When I paused to investigate, I realized that there were bees swarming around them, some of which had noticed me. So I immediately stopped pausing and ran. And the only real escape route was straight up a muddy hill.
About twenty minutes before this, I had needed to shit and realistically didn’t have the option, unless I wanted to leave a log in a church parking lot while children looked on. The log itself would have been unruly enough even without an audience of young’uns watching it being relinquished by a squatting, overgrown urchin and his loyally squatting dog. I had consciously fought off the need to shit in about thirty tense seconds of bargaining with my innards, knowing the need would return with redoubled force erelong, hopefully when I was out of sight of other humans.
Having now disturbed these bees, whoever they belong to, I managed to clamber up the slope, leash in hand, without getting stung, even though I felt I few bees bounce like little douchebags off my shoulder blades, You’d have to be a stupid-ass bee to sting someone running away from you, given that bees sticking their stingers into things is a well-documented suicide mission. But some of them do, so I was lucky to escape this fate.
And amazingly, despite the rush of adrenalin that accompanies being swarmed by stinging insects, the urge to shit did not return. In fact, I felt light as could be for the rest of the run. And for the first thirty minutes I was home, I still believed I was, for the moment, shitless.
But how? Had the mass dissolved and been dispatched in its constituent dungoid molecules from my pores and mouth? I like to think I would have noticed this, as would have those around me. It seemed more likely that my colon had, after being denied its right to shove its fetid cargo distally, simply reconsidered and sucked the mass up into my small intestine, where it was absorbed and converted to metabolically useful energy. If true, this effect would both be unprecedented in the an(n)als of human digestive physiology and carry a great deal of explanatory power in terms of my moods.
Now, I did take a dump about an hour later, and it mimicked the ass-rending, bowl-smearing asstravaganza described above. But I cannot be confident that it was the same dump.
Astute faecologists and scatographers will notice that these two events, in a way that can only be described as poignant, cancel each other out. In one case I seemed to produce shit from nothing, and in the other I magically transformed shit into nonmatter. Many of the basic principles of thermodynamics can be invoked in a way that explains all of this.
Otherwise, I am keeping up with my pattern of running for about an hour a day and delaying any formal speedwork for 24 to 48 hours on a rolling basis. As it’s gotten warmer, I’ve started taking it easier with Rosie and pausing for a few minutes at a time when we’re in direct sunlight. I seem to be in a pattern of running 40, 70, and 70 minutes a day, with the 70-minute days including two runs, the shorter one with Rosie in the morning and the longer one solo at twilight. I see folks specifically preparing for the Bolder Boulder 10K, a Memorial Day event I’ll briefly pretend I want to run again before sleeping in and moseying over to watch the minuscule professional races go off at 11:30 or so.
I’ve also realized that even if I had five people helping me with this blog, each assigned to a different political or cultural sector, I would be unable to keep up with the ever-accelerating level of oppressive, censorious, and plain stupid shit happening everywhere. And I mean the really consequential stuff, not grifting fatties or liars whose heads one can see through by looking directly into either ear demanding more money for their inelegant literary labors. I just have to watch most of it whoosh by and decide exactly what instances of deterioration and madness deserves my dubious focus.
I stopped using most of my brain almost exactly half a lifetime ago, in the fall of 1996. That was when I withdrew from medical school and embarked on twenty years characterized by running, binge-drinking, moving around the country, and cobbling together income from different sources. Sometimes these patterns temporarily cohered and became mutually reinforcing, resulting in fits of goal-oriented behavior. But eventually, this all organized into the benign-enough realization that I was doing nothing more than trying to avoid boredom between orgasms while not causing an excessive ruckus in seeking them, and that the rest of my life, however long it lasted, would consist of precisely this, not things “normal” people do.
I had to embrace this as a route to personal satisfaction, because I long ago placed traditional routes for generating purpose and stability—having kids, pursing a steady career, home ownership—off-limits to myself. I will never regret that choice despite acknowledging how it has amplified my tendencies to withdraw into loneliness and isolation, because any alternative would have only expanded the reach of the problems I caused.
People like me don’t just become magically more accommodating of the imperfections of civilization and especially grotesque human actors merely by surrounding ourselves with flesh; we instead just spread the stain of our dismissive and misanthropic precepts and suspicions. That’s why I carefully calibrate how much time I spend in the presence of others and under what conditions.
But I don’t actually see people primarily as roaming vessels of poisonous waste and helpless producers of oft-nauseating slime, liquids and solids. During my indulgences in freewheeling misanthropy, I focus on this as a means of dismissing the value of people and wanting to be around them. If I am around someone, and we just sit there for long enough, one of us is going to start producing unwanted smells, usually coupled to unwanted sights. The only reason this rarely happens is because someone moves to a different room before the secretions and excretions commence.
Despite my own experience not mimicking this hapless track toward social stench in any way—I mean, I love to eat pussy, and sometimes ass too—this attitude serves its crude and childish purpose of demonizing not so much human beings as the way in which a tiny few of them manage to control the rest of us. That part really does stink, and when the whole circus is characterized by people being herded into a narrow set of behaviors without most of them even realizing it, it’s tempting to hate the players and the game instead of the directors and producers.
Meanwhile, and speaking of shitty people, a hot take: Michelle Obama will wind up being the Democratic nominee for president next year, right before a livid joke of a national election. This is not an original idea, but it occurred to me months ago as a possibility, considering that her husband is obviously still pulling many of the White House levers.