(vulgarity tends to mean universality) in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

I guess I usually keep my more vulgar preoccupations out of here. Perhaps a good idea (certainly there’s enough advice around that says to keep your online identity inoffensive and irreproachable for fear of being passed over for employment or of dying without tidying up), but I think it means that I don’t fully encompass the essential quality of my ongoing circus experience.

For example:

I can’t for the life of me remember when or where this was, or who - and it doesn’t matter, people sometimes do this - but I recall a person getting up from the table at mealtime (a restaurant? a brewpub?) and over-explaining to the group of us, to wit: “Excuse me, I need to go Number Two.”

(Yes, an adult; no need to feign surprise; this is not the Edwardian Age.)

For some reason the shadow of this occasion has recurred for me of late - with respect to the way no one had a response, or the way no one would have had a reply in general, barring an awkward or forbearant pause or the unimaginative “TMI”.

So for the last week or so, I have been readying myself to, whenever this happens again, without a pause, raise my beer glass and wish him or her: “A firm turd and a clean drop.”

The crisp tone will have to be exactly right, and the look in the eye just the right look, and just as much the gesture of raising the pint glass.
Hence . . . well, my mumbling to myself has probably not increased from my usual level. But I am sometimes out in the front of the garden doing something or other, and sooner or later one of my neighbors may notice as, over and over, at random but nearly regular intervals, I stop dead in my tracks, straighten like a soldier on review, fix a levelly sincere gaze on a rhododendron branch, and sweep my right arm into an unfamiliar salute with my hand formed into a mechanical grab.

“Whence came the toast/blessing, whence the inspiration?” Come on. :-) You know. All are initiates of these mysteries. That sunlit clean drop!

As if the universe has noticed your recent virtuousness and has given you a confidential certification.

Immaculacy!

That private, not even marked and remembered quarter-instant of pride in being aware that even that single square of toilet paper that happily dabbingly suffices is really but a formality. (“Gee, if civilization had fallen, I could just walk right on out of here!”)

For - verily - isn’t so very much of the rest of life made up of having to file the long form?

Having broached this end of things (oh, badly apt; go on, go on!), this would be the perfect opportunity to finally take up another questionably advised matter - this falling into a class of tales of triumph or catastrophe that everyone has but virtually no one tells regardless of their dramatic value - but I do not have time. I am deep in a new novel-manuscript assignment. :-) And the going has turned out to be hard enough that, between the page rate I’m doing and the rate at which I find myself getting exhausted each day, it would be too easy for me to fall too far behind. Maybe later, when my critical abilities are worn out for the day and my judgment is almost drunkenly untrustworthy.

Felt good, this entry. One less lonely (abysmally silly, tiny) secret-by-default. Another turn of the road that may not just get lost in the mass of them or my forgetfulness or the grave.

And having written down an intention is of course an additional useful level of self-reminder. :-)

Last updated October 05, 2016