Lube Them Cubes

From Trousering Your Weasel

Before I'd even gotten out of bed, I'd been sent the link to the latest wombat poop article, twice. As might be expected, dozens more followed throughout the day, although there is really no point in counting after number two. My friends believe I can squeeze a blog post out of something like this easily, with the only problem being where to snap it off.

But I had already written just about as much as a person should about the subject in my groundbreaking scientific opus, Trousering Your Weasel,* or so I thought. Short of fresh insight into the subject of wombats and their square poop, I didn't think there was anything left to clean up. But new research has emerged in the field of Biological Fluid Dynamics.

Photo by Bobbie Irwin, my very sister

Among other discoveries, it was found that in the final eight percent of the wombattal intestine, the contents change from a liquid-like state to a solid state. This is the primary difference between wombats and cows or mashed-potato extruders, for both of which the material sets up extra corpus. I myself have noticed quite a bit of variability in the state of my contents even over the course of a typical morning, with the solid state prevailing at first, and becoming more enthusiastic later on.

The scientists in question, including a Dr. Hu, from the University of First Base, examined the alimentary canals of wombatroids by emptying the intestine and inserting and inflating a long balloon. The breakthrough occurred when they began utilizing deceased wombats that could be reliably pinned down; previous attempts proved vexing when the wombats under study kept flying around the room backwards. There simply aren't enough graduate students in the world for that.

The balloon experiment showed that the intestine itself has varying elasticity and the contents are constrained at the corners, producing a cuboid like dimensional lumber, but no explanation was given for how the turds were expelled without the tapering action most of us find comfortable. It was assumed, by me, that the process resembles the calving of a glacier, writ small and brown, with the chunks falling where they may.

But such was not the case. In fact, the cubes themselves are completely formed inside the wombat, due to a process that remains mysterious, and the animal then tumbles out dice at the rate of about a hundred per day.

Photo by Bobbie Irwin, my very sister

Prevailing theories held that wombats poop cubes to mark their territories, which is true only so far as the presence of wombat poop is reasonable evidence for the existence of a wombat in that particular territory. "We're in wombat territory," a field biologist might thus note, without being able to conclude that she is not also inside an overlapping potoroo perimeter, or perhaps in the proximity of a platypus.

A sensible explanation for the compaction of the cubes is that wombats are conserving all the water they can, and if you really, really, really need water you can press it out of your poop. (We have some relevant experience here with our two cats, one of whom produced turds so dry you could pick them up with your fingers and not even bother to wash afterwards, unless it was real close to dinner and the Queen was coming. The other produces mostly moist marvels, and in a tremendous stroke of good fortune, she is the one who always uses the litter box.)

So the wombat squares off its dookie by compressing it inside intestinal walls that have a certain amount of "give" in some places and not others. Specifically, the intestinal wall has azimuthally varying elastic properties, it says here in the abstract, and bully for the wombat, because anything worth doing is worth doing azimuthally, as I sometimes say.

There is no grant money for research you can't eventually wring a profit out of, so the scientists suggest that wombat pooping might illuminate a new method of manufacturing cubes, using soft tissues. Whose soft tissues has not been addressed, so don't sign anything without reading it first.

* Trousering Your Weasel is still available, signed by the author, and makes the world's best Christmas present for the money, which is a ridiculously low $13. What was I thinking?

Advice To The Young

A lot of kids are stressed out these days trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives, which seems to them like a long time, even though a percentage of them are going to be culled during Spring Break. And it makes sense to have a plan, I guess, if you're bent on spending the equivalent of a house mortgage on some crappy education. I think it's a shame, though, because that having-a-plan business isn't how life works.

When I was a college freshman, I was concerned that I didn't have a major yet, and everyone told me not to worry about it. I was planning to major in psychology when I applied to college, but that infatuation lasted only a couple weeks and it seemed like the worst idea in the world once I got there. So I took English and German and music and literature and logic and calculus and something else and waited for a plan to materialize. All I knew was it was going to be something in the liberal arts. By the next year I was taking science classes and knew it was going to be something in the sciences, but I didn't know which one. When my four years came to a close and the music stopped, I happened to be closest to the Biology chair and that's where I sat. I even got a sort of job in a closely related field (mouse torture).

Here's how life actually works. You wind up with a Classics degree in some cool college town with a bunch of other kids you know and you get any kind of job you can, and then someone at a party mentions a great job opportunity in another town far away. And it's not in your field or anything, but it's in your girlfriend's field, and off you go with your girlfriend and try to find another job. And you don't, and your girlfriend seems kind of high and mighty all of a sudden, and you complain beerily about that to the woman at the end of the bar, and she knows someone, and you wind up with a part-time gig in Inventory at a department store, and after about ten years enough people have dropped dead that you can slide right into a slot in Sales, where being able to insult people in Latin comes in handy, and meanwhile some of your sperms have accidentally made something of themselves, so you bump up to Management and stay there, and then you die.

There were the rare kids who knew exactly what they wanted to do in their lives. And they marched straight through and took all the right courses and slid down the Greased Path of Inevitability to their goals, and then one day they woke up miserable in their forties and said "fuck. I'm a lawyer." But they can afford good enough toys to distract themselves for a while, and then they die.

When I was young, I wanted to be an author. I didn't really have any other ideas. I wrote a lot of awful stuff. You know what they say: "write what you know." Which presents an obvious problem when you're a teenager.

I was dismayed by not being acclaimed as a genius and eventually quit writing altogether, and lurched my way into that biology degree, and drifted to Boston, and got a job slicing up mice, and broke up with another boyfriend, and moved to Oregon just because, and made scrimshaw for a few years, and got a job Moving the Nation's Mail for another thirty, and then started writing again, and now I'm an author, just like I planned it.

You might not believe me, but I can prove it. I have actual physical copies of my book Trousering Your Weasel, with my name on the front and everything. And, by the way, there's no more perfect or inexplicable Christmas gift than that. Your friends will be rendered speechless with gratitude. So if you want a couple dozen autographed copies, fire off an email to me and we'll talk. We can go ahead and leave Amazon out of this--they're already set for life.

Prices (domestic) including shipping and handling:

One book       $12.99 + $4.00 S&H = $16.99

Two books    $25.98 + $4.50 S&H = $30.48

Three or more books  $12.99 apiece; no shipping fees. 

Do You Know Where Your Weasel Is?

Here's something you don't know about my book Trousering Your Weasel. It's a great gift book. I know this because people no sooner get their hands on a copy than they're trying to give it away. What I'm thinking is that it's something you want to keep a nice stack of on hand, to use as hostess gifts. Sure, wine is more customary, if you want to go the humdrum route. But it's been done. Picture instead arriving at the nice dinner party and exchanging air kisses and then pulling out Trousering with a flourish and saying "I thought you'd like to have this. It's for the toilet tank." And your hostess will be numb with gratitude. She might not even be able to express it.

You'll have to explain right away that if she is expecting to learn how to trouser a weasel, she will be disappointed. Nowhere in the book is that explained, but the information is out there for anyone inclined to hit a search bar for "ferret-legging." This is an endurance sport that originated among Yorkshire coal miners whose prospects for a fulfilling life were already bleak. According to the world's champion ferret-legger, clocking in at five-plus ferreted pants-hours, the trick is to wear baggy trousers and cinch them off at the ankles. At that point all that is required is to hoist up the ferret and pour it into the top end of the trousers, and then belt up. There's no way out for the ferret, but the ferret does not know that, and will begin to search up one side and down the other, and if there's anything to swing on, he's liable to swing. Many parts of the ferret are sharp, and all of it is skittery. The experience can be transformative, because it forces the ferret-legger to live in the present. It's sort of a shortcut to enlightenment.

Actual installation in happy consumer's home

Trousering Your Weasel is not enlightening at all, unless you didn't already know that wombats' poop is square, but it looks really good on a toilet tank, and whatever is currently on your toilet tank has probably gotten dimpled and speckly. The practice of reading whilst on the toilet is one that seems to cleave down gender lines. Most women do not read on the toilet, and most men will risk their underpants looking around for something to read before they go in. Dave has never understood why I don't bring the newspaper into the bathroom with me, and the answer is simple: I go in to the toilet shortly before I am going to take a dump and leave directly afterward. I am goal-oriented and in tune with my colon. Men, however, go into the bathroom when they think it is reasonably likely they will take a dump sometime over the next few hours, so that they are not caught by surprise. They are inattentive creatures by nature, but boy-scout prepared. If something should emerge in that time, they might yet remain on the toilet until they're done reading. I wonder that they don't find themselves crusting over more. Anyway, the gracious hostess will have provided reading material handy-by. If I were to go into someone's house and find a copy of Trousering Your Weasel in the toilet, I would consider it a classy joint. A book of matches is a nice touch, too.

The title refers to an incident in the very first essay, about a man caught trying to smuggle a ferret out of a pet store in his pants. This is a true story, of course; every time you turn around, there will be a new story about someone who has attempted to smuggle some sort of beast--snakes, monkeys--over the border or onto an airplane or what-have-you. And that's just the ones who get caught. It's probably just scratching the surface, as it were, of the total population of trousered fauna. The rest get away with it by taking advantage of the public's natural disposition to look away from a man with especially lively pants. And you can just about guarantee that, like the toilet reading thing, it's going to be a man. Women will bury strings inside their own butt cracks to avoid visible lines. Even a small rodent would be simply out of the question.

Anyway, I thought I'd bring up the gift-book idea purely out of selfless concern for others. If I can solve that vexing hostess-gift conundrum* for a few people, I will have considered my time on earth well spent. And I do want to point out that if you wanted to go to my book page and order a slab of books directly from me, and not amazon.com--that is the kinder way, from the author's standpoint--you can not only get them signed, but shipping is free for orders of three or more books. You're welcome.

*It probably works for Christmas, too.

A Month In IKEA

My colds all follow the same script. There is the inciting throat tickle; the sore throat and fever; then the march of the phlegm brigade; sneezing and congestion; and finally, a dry hacking cough for a day or two, and we're done. A week, tops. The dry cough is the worst. Nothing alleviates it, although there is medicine that will transform it into a dry, mentholated cough.

So when I got my inciting throat tickle in the airport in Fiji on January 20th, I thought: well, at least I'll be done with this before I give a reading of Trousering Your Weasel at the bookstore. And judging from the crush of humanity and humidity in the Fiji airport, I should be grateful it's not Ebola. People who are not me love that kind of heat, but I associate it with lying wretched on the linoleum floor in front of the black oscillating fan in August in Washington, D.C. in 1960, and other tropical diseases.

My throat did get sore, but that misery was eclipsed by the fact that my ears sealed up on the airplane and never flopped back open again.

After two weeks, they still hadn't. "Have you tried yawning?" people inquired, one after the other. No! Really? I am nearly sixty and I've never heard of the yawning trick, you annoying shit. Young mothers steered their children away from me as I walked down the street repeatedly gaping like a carp and yanking on my earlobes. I still didn't have congestion. Then, all out of order, came the dry, hacking cough. "I've still got three days before my reading," I thought. "I should be done by then."

The cough continued unabated, especially when I tried to talk. I quit talking two days before the event in an attempt to rest my throat, a nearly unprecedented phenomenon which left Dave confused as to whether to enjoy it or be worried sick. The dry, hacking cough remained in force for a solid week, with one two-hour break in the middle, during which I had my reading. It was a little miracle, for which I was advised to credit God, who intervened on my behalf because he really wasn't up to wading into that business in Syria.

And then the cough subsided, followed by--we are three weeks into this thing now--the beginning of major congestion, which appeared to be having no effect against the invading virus, and so was amplified by a surge of phlegm soldiers, which emptied into my hankie in such quantities that it seemed my head should fold up like a drained juice box. On Day 24, my left ear unclogged for several minutes and then thought better of it. A few days later the mucus quit running but kept accumulating and filled up every available space inside my head like a herd of unemployed twenty-year-olds in a house full of sofas. And then the sneezing began. One after the other. FAGLAVIK! FORHOJA! SNOIG!

That's when it hit me. OMG. My cold went to IKEA and it can't get out.

That's what happened to Dave and me. We went in to IKEA for something specific. Escalators herd you straight upstairs. I didn't notice at the time, but there are no down escalators. We did maneuvers through office furniture, bookcases, and bathroom furnishings, and finally located our section, selected our item, and tried to make our way back. In IKEA, there is no way back. Retracing your steps requires a sort of reverse peristalsis that their staff is not equipped to clean up after. We were instead directed to the exit by large one-way arrows on the floor aisles, and so we began our odyssey, kinking around the store like farts in a bellyful of intestines. There are no windows. I have a good sense of direction but after four turns I had lost all sense of the exit. "This is ridiculous," Dave said. "Oh look: picture frames," I said. We got some traction in the pillow department and gained momentum through glassware, until Dave bogged down at the tumbler display. Linens were next. I could use some new curtains. I pawed through the samples. "There's a shortcut here, it says," Dave said, pointing at a sign. We headed that way.

"Look at this sweet vase!" I said. "We don't need any more vases," Dave said. "But it's so cheap!" I said. "We have a million vases," Dave said. "Look at this price!" I said, to his back, which was disappearing around the bend. I caught up fast. He'd gotten hung up. "Look at this sweet drawer divider!" Dave said.

Ten minutes later, I was pleased to see another display of curtains. "Hold up," I said. "There's more curtains here."

"They're the same ones," Dave said. Pshaw. I'm the one with the good sense of direction, not him. Holy shit. They WERE the same ones. I was rattled. "Okay, run! Run! And this time, no shortcuts!"

The exit doors finally came into view. They are easy to find. You start at the entrance doors and follow the arrows for forty-five minutes.

I feel sorry for my cold. But enough is enough, I told it. Grab some Swedish meatballs like everyone else and get the hell out of Dodge.

Looky Here!

You want this

It's an exciting day here at Murrmurrs, Inc. Champagne corks are ricocheting off the blogroll. Confetti is piling into drifts on the comment section. A knitting blog has registered a complaint about the noise. We have a book!

Strange business, running a blog, keeping it lubed and fibered-up and regular in output. It's a strange business especially in that it's pretty much income-free and yet it cannot be deducted as a charitable contribution. Why does anyone blog, anyway? So many reasons. Maybe we have opinions that must be expressed before they become impacted and begin to fester. Maybe we have made some socks, and have pictures to prove it. We might have a cat that we're pretty sure the world wants to look at.

But for me, here at Murrmurrs, Inc., the blog is the place to pin down my thoughts as they pass through my brain before they shoot out again. And that's getting more and more important all the time as my brain becomes more ventilated.  Most days, it's downright drafty in there. No one's figured out a way to caulk up the leaks, so the best we can do is net those thoughts and spraddle them out on the blog like dead insects, where we can sit back and admire them. Otherwise they're lost forever. It works pretty good. I can dip back into the archives and read things I don't remember writing, but there they are.

It's a real fatty.

I'm not much of a businessman. I am supposed to be aggressive about sending my efforts to magazines and getting published, but I'm only good for about a one-week spurt of that a year. I've written one humor book and two novels since I retired from the post office in 2008, but the magic publishing fairy has not dropped in to have a look at those either. I did pop off a half-dozen queries to literary agents about my first novel, but then I got an idea for a second novel, and it's so much more fun to write a novel than a query letter that I did that instead. As a result, I have a lot of what is called "content," but not really so much of a business, in spite of the fact that I might have mentioned to the Internal Revenue Service that I did. And one of these years, they're going to want to see some evidence of income.

Murrmade Productions: Powered by Pootie.

So in response to the clamor (I believe two people constitute a clamor), I have assembled seventy of my most snortworthy essays in a book, Trousering Your Weasel. Why would anyone read a book containing material they can read for free? Several reasons. One, no one ever digs back into the archives. Two, it's a way of saying "thanks for all the free crap, Murr." Three, the book that most of you currently have on your toilet tank has gotten all speckly and damp and needs to be incinerated and replaced. Four, some people might be interested in keeping the author out of trouble with the IRS.

And they make great gifts for those friends and relatives who have ignored your recommendation to read this blog. "I don't do blogs," they say. These people fall into two categories:

(1) They don't know what a blog is or what you do with one, and the whole suggestion makes them feel stupid and insecure; and

(2) They do know what a blog is, and they have way better things to do.

Both of these kinds of people need this book.

But suppose you have been following Murrmurrs faithfully since 2008, have perfect recall, and don't really care if its author is strung up by the IRS? What's in this book for you?

It's illustrated. Yes, each snortworthy essay comes with its own drawing. And you have definitely not seen these before. From my childhood...

To my growed-up-hood...

Or simply out of my fevered imagination:

You might have noticed a new button up there on the left margin, and if you would like to buy this book, go ahead and have a whack at it. It's also available on amazon, which is your best bet if you need it by Christmas. There are 250 pages of concentrated Murr here, with over seventy illustrations. I hope you love it.