The Duality of Manners
Sometimes, the associations we have for things can be a bit confusing, which explains why I get excited each time my co-worker and longtime friend, Sam, tells me that she’s just had a bowel movement.
“I almost shit myself when trying to figure that out for him,” I told her about a question our boss had asked me yesterday morning. I didn’t use the phrase as a euphemism for my lack of knowledge but meant that while solving the problem fecal matter almost began decorating my leather office chair.
“Funny story,” she replied. “I weighed myself before my shower this morning and hadn’t pooped yet. Ended up taking TWO massive shits and weighed myself again out of curiosity…lost TWO FUCKING POUNDS.”
“Yoooo! Nice!”
“I ate a bag of popcorn last night. Cleaned out.”
“You know what this calls for?”
“You can send her.”
I replied with a photo of the queen of my heart, her blank expression and oh so slightly disheveled attire in no way masking her striking beauty that stunned me each time I looked at her. I’d combed through my bookmarks in Twitter, which consist entirely of photos and videos of her along with occasional videos of Asian professionals cutting and chopping fruit with enviable expediency and precision, to find a photo I’d see on my screen when chatting with Sam until the never-ending wall of text hid the lady from view in the afternoon, ready to resurface the next time my pal felt the urge to share the details of her latest anal expulsion.
When Sam takes a shit, I picture Dua Lipa’s face. Right there in the toilet bowl, human potpourri masking the unseen filth, the pomp and circumstance our regular activities lack. What better way to enliven discussions of our primal instincts than pair them with other things that give us pleasure? Imagine if every time your significant other loudly sneezed, you ate a chocolate chip cookie afterward? It would undoubtedly make sneezing more fun than it already is as well as a convenient excuse: “I gain so much weight due to my wife’s allergies”.
It’s not something you can do without a partner. If every time I take a shit, I view a photo of a gorgeous woman, I’m merely some scatological pervert with a weird fetish. Get a friend involved and traditions can take hold, although set some limits for yourself.
As I sipped tea while reading an email Moore sent me a couple days prior to Sam’s pounds-shedding dumps reveal, I read about how his ex-girlfriend had told him that she permitted a man with a stump for a foot to insert it in her vagina, but only after thoughtfully requesting the lucky guy put a condom on his toelessness first. It didn’t make me wish that each time I drank green tea I could picture a birth canal fully engorged with a lonely ankle, but I at least considered it out of loyalty. Maybe it would’ve clicked had I been eating some finger foods.
Nichole, Sue’s best friend, mentioned a day later how she planned to leave a comment in a Facebook chat for two Jesus freaks (one of whom is Sue’s ex-boyfriend) celebrating the current political landscape, arguing she had to do it because she’s Irish, a lazy defense for such an impulse, immediately causing me to declare that because I’m Lithuanian, I shove a bowling pin up my ass every Thursday. Nichole countered that she was doing it on Sue’s behalf, which didn’t sit right with me for the sole reason that Sue correctly believed hearts and minds couldn’t be changed by arguing with people on the Internet.
I texted Nichole later: “I was thinking about your ‘but I’m Irish’ reasoning in the car and pondered, ‘You know me! I volunteer at the soup kitchen once a month…cuz I’m Irish!’ If you were to transform it into something positive, that kind of brain trick would be the realest way you could honor Sue.”
Sam had taken me to task at one point for what she referred to as “gaslighting,” when I occasionally said something humorous yet confrontational and reacted by expressing my surprise that the recipient, always someone I knew closely, had become feather-ruffled, which led to my contention that I was not deliberately attempting to upset anyone I loved, that hurt feelings aren’t more important than any other feelings, and that passive aggression is a tool in my kit not invoked to rub a loved one’s face in Dua Lipa-covered shit, but rather to force them to comprehend why I would spend time engaging them on the subject by presenting my point in a specific way to change their mindset for the better without the kind of didacticism or moralizing I loathe, something I hope they would fearlessly do for me in return whenever it was warranted.
“Not everyone can find humor in EVERYTHING, people have boundaries (you excluded, of course),” Sam had texted me, the same woman who regularly baited her line by slathering the hook in excrement knowing she’d reel me to the surface with a photo of Albania’s most exquisite export at the ready.
She had a point. I wasn’t offended by Moore’s email, but once the disgust wore off, I did find it funny like Moore thought I would, the primary reason he shared the anecdote, and told another friend about it while we ate dinner together, certain he too would be disgusted. The people we care about most are our best subjects for testing our ugly impulses. To love is to be judged via a humorous lens, the great equalizer.
“Sue tried that for her throat,” I told a friend as we viewed a product in a store. “Worked out really well, as you can see.”
Despite knowing me as well as he does, my buddy was startled that I could joke about her death so brazenly. What other option did I have? And if he had made the joke? If the joke was good enough, I couldn’t be punitive about someone else making light of a personal tragedy. Few things tickle me more than the absurd.
When I inevitably repulse or offend another loved one next week or next month (surely before next spring), I hope they know it’s all part of the plan to continuously incite the laughter necessary to braving things as life-altering as death or as life-affirming as bowel movements that tip the scales. If you can find a way to pair the mundane-slash-profane with the beautiful, you’ll know you’re doing it right.
Have a friend secretly itching to document his auto-erotic asphyxiation habits? Let him talk about it before you force him to listen to Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” each time afterward. Your sister-in-law likes to free bleed five days a month? Tell her she’s welcome to discuss it each cycle, but only if you get to share your new favorite recipe in return. Sure, you may say your loved ones won’t be this frank with you, but you might be surprised if you dangle the carrot by first divulging your dingleberries.
I’ve gotta go now. My phone screen just lit up. Could Sam be texting from the toilet? Logic says no, but the lust I feel in my heart tells me her sphincter beckons. I can already sense that this one’s gonna be a beauty. And you know what they say about beauty: it’s in the ass of the beholder.