Day 200: Send a message in a bottle
Posted: February 24, 2012 Filed under: The Book | Tags: alcohol, bodily functions, destruction, fiction, food, lies, urine Leave a comment »I was awoken by bright sunlight on my face and a pressing need to urinate. I stumbled to the bathroom, knocking over bottles with each step, the noise like rubber mallets on my skull.
It was sunny outside; flowers were starting to bloom in the yard outside my cottage. Flowers? Wasn’t everything covered in snow just a few days ago? What month is this? It wasn’t important, at least right then: I needed food, water, aspirin, maybe a small glass of wine…
The quarter-gallon of milk in the refrigerator was a solid, and the bread on the counter was moldy. Breakfast was eggs and bacon—things that never go bad, right? While I was cooking, I reached for a bottle of wine—just a little, to tide me over until I could make coffee——there was no wine in the bottle, but there was a piece of paper. Paper? How the fuck did that get in there?
I scanned the kitchen: bottles everywhere, all of them with scraps of paper inside. I finally spotted an unopened bottle—a cheap, vile red, but it was better than nothing—poured a glass, drank it with my breakfast, and tried to reconstruct the last few months.
It was a blank.
I was sitting back in my chair after breakfast, drinking a third glass of wine, casting my eyes contemplatively around the cottage—most of which was one large room—when it finally occurred to me that, perhaps, the pieces of paper in the bottles might be messages from my excessively-drunk self to my mostly-sober self.
I grabbed the nearest bottle—and then realized that I was going to have to break the bottle to get the paper out. All of the bottles: dozens, maybe hundreds of bottles, all with scraps of paper in them. What to do with all that glass?
I grabbed an armful and carried them outside, to the fire-pit. I found a few logs, threw them into the pit, and broke the first bottle on one of them. The writing on the paper—well, it wasn’t really “writing,” it was indecipherable squiggling. I tried a second, a third, a fourth: all the same. A word was decipherable on the fifth scrap: “cold.” On the sixth was something that looked like “found corkscrew.”
I went in for more bottles.
Several dozen broken bottles later, all I had was a small handful of words: “wine,” “bread,” “piss,” “snow”—and a lot of squiggles. I was ready to give up, to throw the rest of the bottles in the pile and burn the lot of them—to consign the rest of the scraps to destruction, unread.
I couldn’t do it, though: surely the messages from the early days of the lost months would be readable, at least mostly? I had to keep breaking bottles. And so I did.
There were, I think, a dozen dozens. I’m amazed that I didn’t cut my hands more than I did, breaking all that glass. It wasn’t worth it: the squiggles got harder to read, not easier—some were just lines across the paper, like small children make.
On the last scrap—although who knows when I drew it, because I didn’t date any of them—as if I would have known what the date was——I didn’t know then, mostly-sober and smashing bottles…
…on the last scrap was a drawing of male genitalia. A hairy cock and balls.
I burned the cottage down, walked down the mountain back into civilization, and never drank again.
Day 212: Put the Book under your pillow, and record your dreams.
Posted: July 31, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: anxiety, bodily functions, dreams, lucid dreaming, sleep, urine, writing Leave a comment »I have this thing: I don’t remember my dreams.
I’m sure I have dreams, and they’re probably interesting; there are plenty of times when, in that groggy state between waking and sleeping, my conscious mind watches the last pieces of some dream or other drift away, and they always seem awesome in that moment, but then they’re lost forever.
If I didn’t like sleep so much, then I could probably make myself jot down notes in the middle of the night about whatever odd dream I’d just woken up from — I’ve even kept a pen and paper on my bedside table in the past — but really, I’m lazy and lack any sort of self-discipline. So most of my dreams are lost forever: most, but not all, because every once in a while one sticks with me long enough that my conscious mind can process and reconstruct it.
A few weeks ago, I had one of those dreams that stuck with me.
In it, I was in an elevator — one that was fairly large and actually kind of nice, as elevators go — carpet that had been recently cleaned, nice wood panelling, good lighting —— and I think there were a few people in the elevator with me, but I don’t remember who. So far, pretty exciting, am I right? Nothing more exciting than being in an elevator.
Three of the elevator’s walls — minus the door, of course — were lined with urinals, maybe three or five per wall: an odd number, anyway. The first thing I remember happening is the center urinal on the back wall exploding: well, it didn’t explode in a blaze of glory and porcelain, or I don’t think it did, but the metal hardware at the top burst, and water geysered out, and it was less than pleasant for all involved. At least it was water, and not piss.
We opened the doors, and exited the elevator. I think the water must have stopped, though, because then I was sweeping the water out of the elevator and into the gap between the elevator and whatever room the elevator had stopped at. I looked down into the gap, and caught a glimpse of some sort of subterranean cavern below us — and then I saw giant lobsters scuttling back and forth in that cavern, lobsters big enough that they could have eaten me.
Then I woke up, got up to piss, and tried not to think about the giant lobsters.
Day 202: Pregnancy test day.
Posted: July 27, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: bad jokes, bodily functions, trolling, urine 3 Comments »Originally scheduled for Thursday, July 21.
The Book wants me to piss on it. Seriously. To see if I’m pregnant.
When I was in high school, one of the local (and by “local” I mean “Dallas”) radio stations — 97.1 “The Eagle” — had a pair of late-evening DJs: Kramer and Twitch.
I didn’t listen to the Eagle much — it was a “hard rock” station at the time, and that wasn’t/isn’t really my thing — but I listened to Kramer and Twitch’s show at least once, because I remember a prank call they made on the air.
I don’t remember all the details — I remember almost none of the details, actually, about the call or about where I was driving from or towards at the time — so I can’t give the joke a proper setup. The punchline, though, is that they got some random dude to piss all over his dining room table.
Seriously. I think they pretended to be from the CDC, or some such place, and convinced the guy that he might have contracted some disease or other; they needed him to piss on a flat surface, like a table, I think so that they could ask him questions about color and consistency? Like I said, the details are fuzzy. The punchline, though, that’s gold.
I don’t know why that bit of radio tomfoolery has stuck with me so long — crazy dudes call a guy on the air and talk him into pissing all over his own table — but it has, and it was the first thing that came into my mind when I saw this task. So I knew, you see, that when someone or something asks you to piss in a nonstandard place — a place you’re not comfortable pissing — you’re probably being trolled.
I pissed on the Book anyway, obviously. Why the hell not?
Day 187: Pick up litter today.
Posted: July 6, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: animals, bodily functions, disease, filth, food, nature, poetry, shit, Swift Leave a comment »Imagine yourself in early 18th century London. You’re a domestic servant in some inn or other, and one of your duties is emptying the chamberpots. Where are you going to empty them? Into the streets, down the centers of which ran open gutters.
In 1710, Jonathan Swift published a poem — titled “A Description of a City Shower” — which describes the “Filth of all Hues and Odours” that rainwater running down a gutter carries with it: “Dung, Guts, and Blood, / Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud, / Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.”
As filthy as all this is — and it’s definitely filthy, and a paradise for infectious diseases of all sorts — it’s preferable to littering.
Shit, piss, vomit, blood, guts, kitchen scraps, dead animals: all of this is organic, part of the enormous and perpetual process of decay and growth that we call life. Shit in the open sewer is going to be eaten by whatever it is that eats shit, and eventually that shit is going to end up in some sort of plant, which will be eaten by some sort of animal, and at least some of it will — after a long and transformative journey — end up eaten by a human being.
(As an aside: anytime you smile while eating, you have a shit-eating grin on your face.)
Think about the litter you’ve seen recently: what was it? Piles of excrement, dead animals, discarded entrails? Probably not. Rather: beer cans, glass bottles, wrappers of various food-shaped substances, styrofoam, cigarette butts. Diapers. Pieces of tire on the highway. Plastic. Rusted metal. Things that aren’t food for anything.
The fact that we throw away so much that isn’t edible — so much that, being inedible, just accumulates — is only part of the problem with littering. I’m not sure I can go in to the rest of the problem, though, because — at least as I look at it — littering is a synecdoche for everything (or most things, anyway) that are wrong with this country.
Laziness. Apathy. Disrespect. Self-centeredness. Vapidity. Stupidity. Cupidity. A total lack of concern for one’s fellow humans, and — worse — a complete and fundamental failure to realize that there are things on this planet other than human beings that have as much right to live and thrive as we do. People who litter are the same people that kick puppies. People who litter urinate on babies. People who litter are like Stalin or Pol Pot, except worse. People who litter should be forced to eat the shit they throw on the ground, and then they should be forced to eat actual shit.
In all seriousness: I don’t like people who litter. I especially don’t like people who litter deliberately. They are bad people.
And, for the record, I did actually pick up some litter today, in addition to writing this tirade.
Day 183: Sense-less day.
Posted: July 2, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: animals, bad luck, bodily functions, bullshit Leave a comment »“Go through today with out your sense of smell.”
Let me tell you how well my sense of smell works on a normal day: not well.
Once upon a time, by which I mean last April 1st — and despite the fact that April 1st is a day on which people say things that aren’t true, this story I’m about to unfold for you is entirely true — I went down to campus. It was a Friday, and I taught at noon. I got there early, for some reason I no longer remember, but I was in the office shortly after nine, which means I left the house no later than seven — I have 45-mile drive to the train station, which can take upwards of an hour during rush hour, then a thirty-minute train ride, then a ten-minute walk. If I left the house at seven, the children were probably not yet awake, and I probably didn’t make myself an espresso, because the grinder and the espresso machine are loud, and would have woken them up. Not having had coffee doesn’t excuse explain what happened, but it was certainly a contributing factor.
I wore a pair of Doc Martens, the soles of which look like this (and you really have to click that “this” to understand the rest of the story. I’ll wait).
I got to the office. I sat down. I started working. I smelled a smell, though I was not sure what it was that I smelled. I ignored it, thinking it was a transient smell. I smelled it again, several minutes later. I began looking for the source of the smell.
You see where this is going, right?
Get to office. Notice odd smell. Unable to locate source. Smell persists. What the fuck is that? Dawning realization: dog shit on shoe.—
(@hcgoldsmith) April 01, 2011
I must have stepped in the dog shit as I was getting into my car — because it’s sidewalks all the way down all the way from the train station to my office — which means it was on my shoe for hours before I finally smelled it.
I repeat: dog shit — dog shit — on my shoe, for hours before I noticed it.
That’s how well my sense of smell works.
Day 172: No sleep day.
Posted: June 21, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: bodily functions, books, coffee, sleep, twitter, work 1 Comment »I love sleep. It’s not my Most Favorite Thing, but it’s certainly in my top ten of Favorite Things.
There was a brief, glorious period of time, when Elanor was very small and still slept a lot, during which I would come home from working the opening shift at Starbucks and nap from 2:30 or so until 6:00, and then get up, have some dinner, spend some time with my wife, and go to bed around midnight (and then get up at four the next morning and do it all again). It seems glorious in retrospect, anyway.
I don’t get to sleep as much as I’d like to, but that comes with being a parent. And I’m not a morning person, but that doesn’t mean I’m not up earlier than I want to be most days. Frustratingly, at least for me, all those years working the early shift at Starbucks — getting up at 4:00 or 4:15, getting to work at 4:45 or 5:00 — trained me to think that I ought to have a fair amount done by 8:00, and by 11:00 the workday was close to being over. These days, I’m usually still on my first espresso at 8:00, and not really running at full capacity until 10:00 or so — which works out alright, but it also means I always feel like I’ve gotten far less done on a given day than I ought to have gotten done, and so I always feel behind schedule. I usually am behind schedule, in an objective sense, which doesn’t help with feeling behind schedule…
Where am I going with this? I’m not sure. Maybe I’m just trying to say that I’m no stranger to no sleep.
I have a fair amount of reading to do over the summer, and I haven’t done much of it thus far: it’s time for me to get serious, though, now that I’ve frittered away a month, and so today’s task is conveniently placed for me. I’m going to stay up — probably not all night, but later than is good for me — and get some reading done.
I will probably fall asleep on the couch at some point, wake up some time later, attempt to continue reading, give up, and go to bed: that is, at least, the pattern I established last semester. I’m not as young as I used to be, and my body often reminds me of that fact.
I’ll post a running commentary on twitter, though it probably won’t get rolling until after eleven, and it’ll be after midnight before I start posting ridiculous, delirium-induced nonsense, so it might make sense to just check it tomorrow morning. Until then, I leave you with this:
Day 162: Make prolonged eye contact with everyone you meet.
Posted: June 11, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: bodily functions, coffee, rude gestures, silence, strangers, trolling Leave a comment »I made this more fun by not saying anything.
Most of the people I tried this with just refused to play: they’d studiously avoid my gaze once they figured out that I was some sort of silent, stare-y nutjob. That was no fun, though I did get thrown out of a grocery store after staring down a checker.
I needed a challenge, a worthy opponent, and I was at a loss. I thought about going to bar, but attempting to stare down a drunken stranger on a Saturday night sounded like a plan that would not end well for me.
Then, I remembered: Day 100. The eight-dollar bill. The barista who never laughs.
The staring.
I went back. I was fortunate: there was no line, and my nemesis was working the front register. She’s not actually my nemesis, you understand: I just said that for effect. I’m sure she’s nice, aside from the not-laughing. Besides, my nemesis is my doppelgänger, “William Wilson“-style, except I drink instead of gambling.
Anyway. I walked up to the counter. She said hello, asked what she could get me, waited. I stared. She stared. I stared. She —— well, you get the picture.
We attracted a small crowd — the other baristas, mostly, who started handing us shots of espresso, and we downed them while still staring at one another, and then there were more shots, and soon I felt like we were Marion and that bald Nepalese dude in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I wasn’t sure which of the two I was.
I once had something upwards of a dozen shots of espresso over the course of an eight-hour shift, more than half of them during the last hour. I felt okay afterward, maybe a little shaky, and I wanted to nap and couldn’t, but it wasn’t really that bad. We got to nine shots, my nemesis and I, and I felt great, and she started looking queasy. We got to ten, then eleven, and then——
Well, she vomited. In a projectile manner. On me, obviously, because I was across the counter from her.
Vomit is never pleasant, but some sorts are more not-pleasant than others. You’ve all had to deal with vomit, so I won’t elaborate. Too-much-espresso vomit is, I think, the worst vomit there is, because it still smells like espresso, and espresso is a good smell, and vomit is not a good smell — so there’s some conflict going on, olfactorily speaking. Plus there’s vomit.
I managed to hold my ground, mostly out of shock, but it must have looked good: I mean, this woman just vomited on me, and I’m still staring her down. I don’t look down at my vomit-covered shirt and pants, I don’t recoil in disgust, I just keep staring. She starts crying, runs to the back room. Not the first time I’ve made someone cry in a Starbucks.
Everyone else just stared at me. I think someone offered me a towel, but I’m not sure. I made eye contact with each and every one of them — prolonged eye contact, of course — and then walked out.
I drove about a half-mile down the road, stopped the car, got out, stripped my clothes off, and set them on fire.
It was the only way to be sure.
Day 155: Confess to a priest.
Posted: June 4, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: bodily functions, disapproval, political incorrectness, Popery, power, Protestantism, religion, urine Leave a comment »Man, I haven’t been to confession in … hmmm … well, it’s been over a decade.
I was raised Roman Catholic, and confession is sort of their thing. I know I went at least once, before First Communion — a requirement — and my guess is that I was also required to go before Confirmation. It’s possible that I went a third time, voluntarily, but I don’t remember.
Halfway through high school, I started going to a more-or-less Anglican church. I went to confession there a few times, and it was, on the whole, a less-than-helpful experience. I haven’t ever gone back.
I don’t like confession. I dislike it because it’s about one thing, and one thing only: power. The priest has all of it, and the confessor none. The priest hears, judges, prescribes penance; the confessor does (or not) the penance assigned. One commands, the other obeys.
This is a cynical view, I know, and I realize that not all — maybe not even most — particular instances of confession do not embody this power differential. It’s always present, though, in the structure of the sacrament. The confessional derives its power from guilt, shame, and fear, which work to make the confessor more abject and powerless and the priest — the structure — therefore more powerful.
Confession is not for the confessor; it exists to reinforce the structure. That’s why it doesn’t work. I, at least — and I’m betting I’m far from alone in this — always confessed the same thing at confession, and no amount of post-confession Hail Marys did anything to help me quit doing the thing in question (urinating on squirrels, if you must know). If I were to indulge my cynicism, I’d say that confession is like a drug dealer running a rehab clinic: you’re not going to come out clean, because that would be bad for business. They want you to stay hooked. (As an aside: you should all read PKD‘s novel A Scanner Darkly, and/or see the film.)
I won’t indulge cynicism that far, though. I’ll content myself with pointing out that priests are not counselors; they’re trained to hear you talk about pissing on squirrels, but not to help you not piss on them: which is unfortunate, because people need the latter much more than they need the former.
I eventually got help with my squirrel-pissing problem, and several other things that turned out to be related, because I went to a fucking professional — fucking being an intensifier, and not an indicator of her area of specialization — counselor (therapist, psychiatrist, whatever). It worked, because she knew what she was doing, and because we were equals: the sessions were structured as conversations, and not as depositions.
Of course, I still piss on the occasional squirrel, I just don’t feel bad about it afterward. Make of that what you will.
Day 150: Reconnect with your aquatic origins…
Posted: May 30, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: adventure, animals, art, beer, bodily functions, nature, whales 2 Comments »“…by spending all of today underwater.”
This was tough.
I didn’t have easy access to a body of water that I could spend all day in — no swimming pools, no ponds, no stock tanks — so I spent all day in the bathtub. And by all day, I mean about an hour and a half.
It was the most boring ninety minutes of my life. The water was nice and hot for about twenty minutes, and lukewarm for another fifteen, and then it was cold. I turned into a prune, and then into a mummy, and then I began collapsing in on myself like a black hole. I wasn’t in a sensory deprivation chamber — I was in a bathroom, with the lights on, and with people knocking on the door and asking what the hell was going in there — but I started hallucinating at some point: flying monkeys and talking rocks and faceless men in bowler hats.
I don’t feel like a fish. I don’t feel like a walrus. I don’t feel like a shark, or a dolphin, or a clam, or a krill, or a giant squid.
I don’t like large bodies of water, and I don’t want to “reconnect with my aquatic origins.” Water is a necessary element — you can’t make beer without it — but it’s somewhat inhospitable in large quantities. If I’d spent all day (ninety minutes) in a larger container of water, even something as big as a hot tub or a children’s wading pool, I’d probably have drowned, or lost my mind and set something large and wooden on fire.
If you were to get dropped, alone, just yourself, in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles from the nearest town, on land, you’d have a decent chance of surviving and getting back to civilization (at least if you’ve ever been outside in ‘nature’ before). If you were to get dropped in the ocean, a hundred miles from land, you’d be fucked. If you had an inflatable raft, it might take a little longer for you to die, but you’d probably still die.
Water doesn’t like you. It puts up with you, when there are small quantities of it, but when enough of it gets together you’d be wise to steer clear of it. In this, it’s like fire ants: if you find eight or a dozen walking along the sidewalk, you can stomp them or jeer at them or piss on them or whatever, but if you fuck with a colony they’re going to eat you alive.
What fire ants have to do with a bath, I have no idea. I guess I’m still recovering.
Day 144: Men-only day.
Posted: May 24, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: batman, bodily functions, food, friends, star trek, work, zombies 1 Comment »
Really, this is “Do manly things day” – and, as always, the suggestions the Book gives are less than compelling. Pee on a wall? I pee in my compost pile every day. Fill a shopping cart with nothing but beer? The distributor makes a stop at my house. Leave the seat up? That’s just inconsiderate, if you share a toilet with a woman – and being inconsiderate isn’t manly.
So I followed the Book’s instructions and did manly things today, and it was awesome.
I got my son dressed and delivered to school – because ensuring the survival of your offspring and the propagation of your genetic code is, really, the manliest thing there is.
I did some yard work. Then I went to the hardware store, and then I did some more yard work. I had beer with lunch, and lunch was baked beans out of a can. I didn’t actually eat them out of the can, because my daughter put them in a saucepan to warm them up – but I did eat them out of the saucepan, with the giant spoon she’d used to stir them. Then I cleaned my kitchen.
Because peeing outside isn’t a big deal, I took a shit outside – a big, nasty, smelly shit. …I really have no idea why I wrote that, because it’s not even true, and who wants to read that kind of thing? I’m going to leave it, though. Why not?
I went to the gym this afternoon to “pump iron” with my “bro” – and let me tell you, that iron didn’t know which way was up when we got done with it. Even manlier: I biked to the gym, a whole seven miles from my house. Seven miles isn’t actually that far, and each leg was more painful than it should have been. It was actually a bit humbling, but that’s okay: humility is also manly.
I made a fucking roast for dinner. I cut up onions for it, and didn’t cry. I cooked it in an entire bottle of wine, and drank a second bottle while I was cooking it – and I drank it straight from the bottle.
…I think that’s it. I took a shower? I washed the dishes? I watched the rain?
Close enough. Now I’m going to watch Dawn of the Dead – for science!
