Something Old, Something New

I don't like to mess with something that's working for me. If looking like a scruffy pound pup moves people to bring me inside and feed me, I'm not going to change just for the sake of dignity. If I've racked up 57 years of continuous air breathing, I don't want to take up scuba diving. Even more adamantly, I will not change anything related to my computer if I've figured out a way to make it work. I may have done the equivalent of taking a document, walking it into a room, getting out the step-stool, hauling the box off the top shelf, grabbing a sticky label and applying it to the document, running around the yard three times and plopping it in the tool shed, but that's where I'll find it again. Don't start telling me I can hit two buttons and shoot it into a safe deposit box a foot away. I don't want to know.

Visual Park Bench #1

So what does my nice host site Blogger do but start making all kinds of template choices available to me? I hate choice. Choice is why we never get out of the grocery store. Choice is why it's almost certain that the latest whiz-bang electronic device we bought was the wrong one. Choice is the enemy of happiness.

Until recently, when I wanted to post a new piece on Murrmurrs, I went to the front door of the site like everyone else and used my key and went straight to the study and cranked one out. Now, thanks to Blogger, I can still get to the study, but not without going through a giant foyer with pretty pictures down the sides. "You can have one of these!" the butler says. "Any one you want! Any color you want!" I'd smack the butler and push on to the study. Finally, one day, I stopped to glance at the pictures.

There are about five new templates with lots of opportunity to re-jigger. Things get bigger, wider, pinker, brighter, right in front of your eyes. I like my old template. And I really hate messing with something that already works. Last time I tried to take a screwdriver to my template, my whole site blew up. You probably heard it from there. Why would I change?

Because it's fatter, and I've put a lot of mental capital in the notion that fatter is better.

Visual Park Bench #2

When I picked out this template, there were about a dozen choices. Mine jumped out at me. It was conservative, stately, a little rumpled, didn't put on airs. It had a name that I do not recall, but it might as well be called "Old Fart With Writerly Aspirations." If you do a casual cruise on the blogosphere and loop into a groove with a lot of author types, you'll see this template a lot. We're drawn to its old-parchment body. Spinster-lady wallpaper drapes down its sides. The blinds are always drawn, and the air is redolent of old books, African violets, medicine, and a little pee. No one with this template is planning to wow anyone with graphics. We are serious wordsmiths, and we don't want anything distracting people from our literary pearls.

Most do not even hang up pictures on their writerly sites. I do, because I worry that if I creep past 600 words a post, my audience will panic and click off. The photographs are little visual park benches. Folks can rest up and then find the stamina to push on to my last, perfect word. I think it's working for me. So why would I change?

Visual Park Bench #3

It's the damn wallpaper. I like it, but I have to squeeze every last thing in a narrow curtain down the center of the page. If a bigger photograph crowds my paragraphs, the words dangle down the edge like they're Chinese. My sidebar is smashed thinner than a passenger on the window seat. It looks like I don't even care about my blogroll. We don't want to put too much pressure on those Poop Posts.

So I've been tinkering with the new templates. I've tried to jigger most of the color and flash out of them. I haven't succeeded in getting them dull enough yet; we may be stuck with the wallpaper and parchment. If anyone has an opinion, hang it off the hem here, but try not to blow anything up.

The Flatulympics

I have no memory of anyone in my family farting, ever. It just wasn't done.

I do realize that it probably happened. Otherwise our whole family would have been bobbing about on the ceiling like balloons in the Macy's parade, and I'm sure I'd remember that. And looking back, I now see that my brother was probably world-class. All I knew was you did not want to go in the bathroom after he'd been in it. He always planted a major fug in there, part aftershave, part cigarettes and part Fumes of Mystery. My eyebrows still haven't grown back all the way.

I also remember it happening to me at least once. I've only got about ten memories from first grade, but tops among them was the time I farted and Chris Ripper smelled it and he got all the kids to stand up in a line so he could sniff their butts. Chris probably had a lot of self-confidence to pull that off, and I don't remember anyone flinging that "he who smelt it, dealt it" line at him. Anyway he passed right by my butt without fingering me, as it were, and that's probably why it's so vivid. You always remember your biggest humiliations and triumphs, and while that one could have gone either way, I put it in the "triumph" column.

(The next memory I have of Chris Ripper was in tenth-grade biology, when we were doing a study of blood types and had to prick our own fingers with a lancet, and he volunteered--with glee, mind you--to stab all the leery ones. I wonder what Chris is up to now. I really do.)

So if I don't remember any farting in my family, it must be because I learned early on that such a thing was never to be remarked upon, or noticed in any way, and I took that to heart so much that my memory slate was wiped clean. As it were.

But although I signed on for much of our family ethic, in this respect at least, the apple fell from the tree and hasn't stopped rolling away. I now live in a household in which flatulence is a competitive sport. No matter what sort of noise I might make, Dave can imitate it. We go back and forth. It's a form of conversation, I maintain, and while not elevated, it serves a lot of the same function of ordinary discourse ("hello, I'm here, I care, I'm listening"). We're not just talking about the weather; we're doing something about it.

I remain fascinated that so many different sounds can be made with just the one instrument. It's a matter of embouchure, just like in woodwinds, I assume; everything from the little squeal to the pop-pop-pop-pop to something worthy of a ship in fog. And we both try to hold back enough ammunition to get in the last word. (Also, we do our own laundry.)

One of the beautiful things about modern technology is you can write an essay about farting and blast it all over the planet (as it were), and somebody out there will care. The blogosphere is a cozy place, and there are all sorts of interest groups and communities in it. There's something for everyone. There are mommy blogs and birding blogs and art blogs and knitting blogs and wingnut blogs, left and right. And sometimes when you're bobbing about on the ceiling of the blogosphere, you can recognize a kindred spirit, someone who holds your core values. A case in point would be Don Joe, the proprietor of the very funny blog Workforced. Ostensibly, it's about life in the modern office; but after reading this post and that post and OMG this one, I realized that Don was essentially putting out the same inspirational message I am.

Pull my finger.

The Blogosphere Is Flat

I was trolling the Internet the other day when I tripped over a blog with a post entitled "Eight Reason's Santa Claus Must Be A Conservative Republican." This didn't look good, but following the same instinct that compels me to flip through the National Enquirer in the checkout line, I clicked on it.

Danger! Danger!

It wasn't good. The blogger was a fan of both conservative Republicans and Santa Claus and he went on about it at some length. I found this absurdly upsetting. Santa Claus is the major figure in what passes for my religion, one in which happy fat people and sugar plums and exotic roof mammals play prominent roles, and I found myself as appalled by the blasphemy as any other fundamentalist. In a gingerly way, I appended a comment to the many approving comments on his post, just to tilt the universe back a little towards normal.

Danger! Danger!

"I agree," I wrote. "Santa Claus got fat working one day a year and living off the labors of a platoon of elves." Something like that.

Well.

The first woman to respond to my little bit of fun disapproved, describing my comment as "snarky." The entire original post was snarky, of course, although from her standpoint it bloomed with truth, which made it not snarky. I refrained from pointing out that if I had really wanted to be snarky, I would have edited the post and all succeeding commentary for grammatical and punctuation errors, and who has that kind of time? However, I did put in another comment.

Danger! Danger!

Then everyone piled on. I was set straight on any number of misconceptions I am laboring under. Because of people like myself, who exist only to suck on the life-blood of hard-working Americans, our entire engine of commerce is about to run off the rails. My President is an actual devil and a Nazi and bent on destroying all that is good. Wealth is always in the service of goodness, and the extremely wealthy, if left properly alone, will pull the worthy up to prosperity. The tiger of industry will surge forth if I quit stepping on his tail, and our destiny, if not thwarted by socialism, is to wring all the use out of this planet and stride on the unblemished plains of Zargon, which we will reach either because of our scientific ingenuity or by catching a ride on the next comet of righteousness; and the only thing keeping us from oblivion is the fierce defense from upright and (by the way) heavily armed Americans, who will continue to stand tall and proud whilst socialist peas roll beneath them and eventually fall off the ends of the earth. And I must not dare to decry the violence that is surely coming my way, because--referring, inexplicably, to violence--"your side started it."

Well.

Now I'm all depressed. I was tempted to continue, but it was becoming clear that even if you picked off one gopher of ignorance with a shot-pellet of wisdom, there's a whole golf-course full of them out there. And where do you begin? Do you mention that "nanner nanner" has two Ns in the middle? Do you start by gently pointing out that, in reality-world, it has long been known that peas will not roll off the ends of the earth, because it's really like a giant plate with a lip all around it?

It's not just that you don't know where to begin. There's no ending it, either.