I Hear That Train A-Comin'

My personal physical plant had been popping along like a Swiss watch for a long time, and then, the other night, just before dawn, I awoke to a Disturbance In The Force. I returned to sleep with the expectation that whatever it was would have resolved by morning. But by the time I got up, nothing had changed. There was still a Disturbance In The Force. In fact, I could pinpoint its location.

A key element was missing from my morning ablutions.

An hour later, even after coffee, it was still missing.

By noon, I wouldn't have been surprised if a porcupine crawled out of my butt trailing a string of horse chestnuts. Relieved, yes, but not surprised. But it was not to be.

I must pause in this report out of a sense of delicacy. This might surprise you. I am well enough known for my regard for the subject of digestive output that complete strangers have sent me photos and articles about poop. But here's the thing. I may monitor it, and report on it, and crow about spectacular individual achievements, and Dave and I may maintain a lexicon of descriptors that we use regularly, as it were, but the actual performance of my daily opus is very private. I don't want you there. I don't even want Dave there, and fortunately, Dave doesn't want Dave there either, or he'd totally be there, trying to get a rise out of me. For all my interest and curiosity, my Key Element is deeply personal.

Yes, I am the one waiting you out in the next stall over, hoping you'll flush so I can blast out a boomer.

And so I return to the matter at hand, bleakly but obliquely.

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The train arrives at the station every morning, right on time. Everyone is on the platform, cheering and waving handkerchiefs. The engine pulls up with its cars, two, three, occasionally more, all in a measured pace, a triumph of civilization.

Until the day it doesn't. On the platform, we peer into the distance and check our watches. There is mumbling. The phone in the stationmaster's office rings once, and the rumors begin. There has been an incident. A derailment possibly; one or more cars are on fire. There's smoke in the distance. It's still as death, and getting warmer, with not a breeze to be found. We wait on the platform, trading a word here and there at first, and then trailing off, and one by one we curl up on the benches, silent with dread.

A day passes. Passengers from the tragic event begin to lurch toward us on foot, lugging their sorry suitcases, one by one, or in small groups, damp and dispirited. Then a few more. We begin to sit up on the benches, craning into the distance, scanning for survivors. Another day passes. Reunions occur in spotty bunches on the platform and, relieved, the crowd thins. Is everyone accounted for?

The tracks have been cleared. We who remain put an ear to the empty rails and hear the distant rumble of an approaching train. The wind kicks up. It's coming at last.

You probably heard all about it. It was all over the papers.

What?

Much of the eastern United States is bracing for the deafening return of the 17-year cicada. The cicada lives most of its life underground. It could be worse. It is related to the spittlebug, which, as we've previously mentioned, lives in a nest of its own wet farts. The cicadas hatch in a tree but then drop to the ground and begin to burrow, finally staking out a homestead up to eight feet below ground, out of the reach of predators, until they start to feel safe again, which, depending on the species' anxiety level, can be up to seventeen years. Then something compels them all to tunnel back up to the surface. This corresponds to the age humans are at their horniest, too.

In Greek myth, which for my money could take any religion in a cage-fight, a fellow named Tithonus captured the fancy of Eos, Goddess of the Dawn, and she asked Zeus to kindly make him immortal. Unfortunately for both of them, she neglected to request that he be forever young, and in due order he was stove-up and drooling on himself for eternity. At some point he was turned into a cicada, which made him easier to clean up after, but was still doomed to live forever, against his wishes.

The slobber hole

It might have seemed to the Greeks that the cicadas lived forever, boiling up out of the ground at regular intervals and keeping everyone awake, but they don't. In fact, if Tithonus is still miserably showing up every 17 years, he'd do well to park himself in the back yard of any Eastern subdivision, where veterinarians are warning people not to let their pets eat too many cicadas. They say "pets," but they mean dogs. A cat isn't going to gorge himself on cicadas. He's going to bat one around for a while and then go off looking for rare migratory songbirds to murder. A dog, however, will totally eat as many of anything as he can stuff into the slobber hole. And their wrappers, too. The problem is with the wrappers.

Cicadas aren't poisonous. The vets are concerned that the dogs will eat too many exoskeletons, made of a tough substance called chitin that is also responsible for keeping lobster meat together, and then the dog will get backed up something fierce, unless he is able to ralph up the bugs. Which dogs are certainly known to do. They will put anything in the pipe, and they don't care which direction it goes. But a highly constipated dog full of cicadas runs the risk of a major gastrointestinal bug eruption in his latter years worthy of an Alien sequel.

It is my opinion that the veterinarians are hyping the dangers. Any decent sized American dog,

Chitin consumption

particularly a Labrador retriever, is not going to be done in by a little chitin consumption. I have seen a dog carry off a pair of Carhartt overalls and, when confronted, back into the bushes and swallow the whole thing. Then comes the agonizing hours waiting to see if it comes out bib first, or breech. But you can't kill a Labrador retriever.  People have tried. Carhartt owners.

Uh-Oh: Not A Poop Post

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A few weeks ago I took a trip to Uh-Oh World. Uh-Oh World is where everything is upside down and nothing is as it should be. In Uh-Oh world, W.C. Fields strolls through Disneyland with a sarsaparilla. Michele Bachmann takes up paleontology. The Pope gets caught in public without his homilies. And I don't take a dump for three days.

Not three consecutive days, but still. It's so wrong. This is not the sort of thing that is supposed to happen to me. No matter what I put in the top end, it is supposed to motor on through on schedule. I could eat a sofa and pass it in neat little pillows. Sewer rats set their tiny watches by me.

The first day I didn't drop a deuce was annoying but not, to tell the truth, entirely unprecedented. Sure enough things seemed to be back to rights the next morning, including what we will call the backlog. But something was amiss. There was a sensation of holding back. Specifically, there was an area of tenderness on the west coast of my GI tract in which I suspected some unauthorized malingering material. There was also a fever.

I got Dr. Google right on the line. Dr. Google suggested that I might have developed a diverticulum. A diverticulum is a little pouch in your intestine where you can store shit in case you need it later. This is the sort of idea that seems thrifty and sensible at first, but you follow that line you will end up with nothing but tiny aisles running through your whole house, as it were, and your relatives will be talking about an intervention. It's not good.

The whole beauty of shit is wasted if it doesn't come out where it can be appreciated properly. Without that, it is a noble thought unexpressed, a greeting card lost in the mail.

When I delivered mail, speaking of mail, I was particularly taken with the advertising flyers put out by some outfit hawking probiotics that warned against the dangers of a sluggish digestive tract. It was illustrated. "What does it mean if you have small, round poops?" it queried, showing a drawing of small, round poops. (My friend Carl knew that one. "It means you're a deer," he said.) Other drawings depicted a cross-section of the intestine after proper use of their recommended pill. It was not only pink and shiny but actually spangled with little star-gleams. In contrast, there was another illustration of a man holding what appeared to be the blackened, gnarly skin of a massive python on a stick. This, we were informed, was the actual content removed from a deceased gentleman's intestinal tract. Possibly with the stick. It was alarming. We were further informed that John Wayne was discovered, upon his death, to have been harboring thirty-five pounds of fecal matter, neatly explaining both his peculiar gait and the downside of fame.

Well, when I die, I am hoping for a better legacy than that. I immediately phoned the advice nurse at Kaiser and advised her of my turgid condition, demanding treatment. She was not unsympathetic, but suggested I might wait a few days to see if things resolved. The fever did go away, but it was another two days before the train came rumbling through, car after car after car. The morning commute is back on track, but I am not interested in being a person with diverticulitis, which Dr. Google told me all about. It's not my thing. Except for the possibility of flatulence in the urine. That part sounds sort of interesting.

Personal Horticulture

My Friend Joanie

Recently a man was admitted to the hospital in pulmonary distress, and X-rays revealed he had a small pea plant growing in his lung. These things can happen. A friend of mine, Joanie, once checked into the doctor's with respiratory difficulties, got a battery of X-rays and what-have-you, and was just a week away from starting chemo when she sneezed out a fava bean and that was it for her cancer.

So what makes this gentleman's experience so unusual is not that he inhaled a pea but that he was able to grow a pea plant in his lung. Just the right conditions had to prevail. He might never have gotten a start if he hadn't been in the habit of huffing potting soil, and once he snorted the Osmocote it was a done deal.

My Friend Tamara

My friend Tamara is brilliant and beautiful, but the best thing about her is she snorts when she laughs and she laughs all the time. Still, I was astonished when she mentioned she had gone to the emergency room because she had aspirated a piece of linguini. I was astonished because I thought she had already been to the ER several years back for the very same thing. "No, no," she assured me, "that was vermicelli." The girl's just one good pun and some pesto away from growing a lasagna in her lungs, and that's yet another thing I love about her.

I had a good idea I had a hop vine growing out of my liver once, and with good reason, but it turned out to be a pulled muscle. However, if the history of the earth teaches us anything, it's that life will prevail anywhere it gets a foothold. This is why it's so dangerous to eat raw eggs. Medical lights try to scare you away from the prospect by raising the specter of salmonella poisoning, but the real danger is an inadvertent hatch. It's uncomfortable, it's unsightly, and the intestinal crowing can lead to insomnia and loss of companionship.

This is the real reason constipation is so hazardous to your health. If you have an intestine packed with fertile soil that isn't going anywhere, it is essential to get it moving again lest something take root. High-fiber cereal should be ingested immediately, and then the race is on to see whether the obstruction can be moved before you sprout a field of oats. Massage can help. It's touch and go all the way.

An awful lot can go wrong--and you might want to make a note of this--when you put things in the wrong holes. We each have many holes, each with its own dedicated function, although there is some overlap (whistling, for instance). I've done such a careful job minding what goes in my holes, if you don't count the Seventies, that I've even managed to avoid swimming for decades. You would too, if every time you came up for air, you were still underwater. Last thing I need is a bunch of lungfish.

Lee's Eel

It was recently reported that a 59-year-old Chinese man--let's call him Mr. Lee--died after having an eel inserted into his rectum. Naturally, I found this deeply disturbing. But upon further research, I was reassured that the variety of eel in question is not an endangered species. The Asian Swamp Eel, in fact, is an invasive species here in America, as it was in our Chinese friend. In a further parallel, it is beginning to dominate habitat in the southern states. Its method of introduction into this country is unknown. We do know the method of introduction into Mr. Lee.

The approved method of introducing an eel into the rectum is from the top end, breaded and fried, but unfortunately for Mr. Lee, the eel took a more direct route. It would not seem to be an easy trick, but my research shows that eels naturally hide in holes in the bottom of the ocean, so the hole in the bottom of Mr. Lee may not have been such a stretch. Insertion was also aided by the addition of alcohol, both into Mr. Lee (in sufficient quantities as to render him past objecting) and into several of his friends, who came up with the eel idea in a fit of hilarity. Doctors attending the suffering Mr. Lee days later discovered the eel, now deceased, had chewed up a considerable portion of bowel, and Mr. Lee died ten days later.

One wonders where people come up with these notions, but no matter how dumb an idea is, once it's introduced it's capable of spreading like wildfire. That's why there are so many young people shambling around with their pants under their butts, and also Birthers. And in the area of the world Mr. Lee inhabited, there is an abundance of swamp eels, and there had already been a well-publicized incident of a man inserting an eel into his own rectum in a bid to cure a bout of constipation. He was not only not relieved, but checked himself into a hospital with abdominal pains several days later. There the doctor, after consulting an x-ray, pointed out that he had an eel up his butt. "Oh that," the man said, admitting he had put it there, and apparently surprised that it might be the source of his problem. The eel was removed along with the constipation and the man continued on his merry way, sadly retaining the ability to procreate.

One can only guess that the intent was to use the eel as a sort of plumbing-snake to scour the intestinal tract clean, but unfortunately eels do not care for the contents of intestines, preferring to munch on the organ itself. Any of a number of other animals are known for eating feces, but for various reasons are not suitable candidates for rectal insertion (dung beetles: too creepy; Labrador Retrievers: too noisy). Rabbits are known to eat their own feces in case they missed anything the first time through, but they're notoriously jumpy. And rectal gerbiling, no matter what you may have heard, is a myth, so my research has met a dead end. However, two things can be concluded. One, the world has presented us with a rare opportunity to combat alcoholism and invasive Asian swamp eels at the same time. Two, we could all use more dietary fiber.

The Poop On Gardening

"Urban garden sharing" is the latest trend. It's a terrific idea: one urban dweller might have some land but no time, Urb Two might have time but no money, and a third Urb has money but no land. Ideally, they all get together and everyone gets a tomato.

My gardening hat is off to all those gentle souls able to make a go of garden sharing, and I'll try it too, just as soon as I finish shaking up this box of cats. In my experience, no two gardeners are likely to agree on a plan, and there will have to be a lot of compromising. I'm the only gardener at this house. If the flower garden were up to Dave, we'd have an expertly installed platform of concrete, stained green in the spirit of compromise. So I get the whole flower garden to my self.

Sort of. The bird population is also keen on planting, and they don't have the same vision I do. I would like to see a rolling, undulating celebration of color and texture, with each wave of perennial beauty giving way to the next, azaleas to peonies to penstemons to agastaches, spiced with bulbs and punched up here and there with the vivid spark of annuals. The bird population has in mind something more along the lines of a holly forest with a galloping understory of blackberry.

Our methods differ also. My method is to dig nice big holes, juice them up with homemade compost and maybe a shot of pumice, lay in healthy small plants, firm up the soil around their roots, water, and fertilize. This totally freaks them out and half of them die outright a few weeks later, and then I pull them out. I get compliments with this method. "You must know so much about plants! Everything looks so healthy!" is a typical comment. That's because I've pulled up everything that crapped out. Sometimes, if I'm pressed for time, I bring things home from the nursery and pitch them straight into the compost pile.

The bird population takes more of a blitzkrieg approach to planting. I sow, they strafe. I invest time, money and effort in a horticultural Marshall Plan. For the birds, it's Holly Seeds Over London. Their method is wildly successful. And a two-inch holly tree has a hell of a grip on life.

In my more philosophical moments, I realize I can learn from my fellow gardeners. They're not given to angst or self-doubt. Or second-guessing. Or constipation.

The neighborhood cats have been planting stuff too. I have also learned from them. I wear gloves all the time now.