The Crone Is In

"That's why old ladies' houses are so messy. We can't see it, and we don't give a shit." That's what my friend Gayle says.

I never did have good eyesight, but I'd say the number of shits given tracks closely and inversely with age. And the number of shits given has a lot to do with how much we care what other people think of us. The older we get, the less we care. Personally, I think either people have a decent enough opinion of me, or they're wrong, or they may be right but I don't give a shit.

There's another aspect to it. If I've gotten to be this age without keeling over, I assume I've been doing things okay. The dust mites in my pillow aren't going to take me down. The spiders who are enjoying my hospitality and my disinclination to use the vacuum are not interested in biting me.

So consider this a warning if you want to drop by. You will find a friendly cat at the front door and lots of beer in the fridge. Dave will have seen to it that the toilet is clean. But you're not going to find the toilet seat lid down. If it is, I'm either indulging your delicate sense of vulnerability, or I had to stand on the toilet to reach something. But it won't be because I really believe the toilet sprays fecal matter all over the bathroom every time I flush. Because I don't believe that. Even if I'm wrong, it hasn't made me sick yet.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm part of my own ecosystem, and I don't want to mess anything up as long as everything's going okay. I don't believe that ecosystems work because Nature designs them that way. Nature doesn't plan any more than I do. Whatever you see in a given ecosystem is a snapshot of What Works Now. If circumstances change, the components will change with them.

So what you see in my house is what works for me now. It's going to be somewhat tidy, but not excessively tidy, because I will have struck a balance between my wish to not be visually burdened with clutter and my wish to not actually do a lot of work. If my writing room is tidy, I have writer's block. And I never have writer's block, so there will be crap all over in there. And no part of the house is going to be actually clean.

If you judge me for that, no hard feelings: I don't give a shit.

I haven't decided what, if anything, to do with the roof rats that have moved in above our kitchen. I never even know they're there until about eleven o'clock at night, when they start rough-housing and plotting and scraping their teeth on stuff. I do find this disturbing. So maybe I'll start going to bed earlier.

If I did have a plan, the plan would be to live to 99 and then go down fast and hard from late-onset hantavirus, dust mite allergy, spider bite, and fecal contamination.

Giving A Shit For Science

I'm always looking for a way to advance science, and three recent articles pointed out some possibilities. Unfortunately, I'm too afraid of the water to become a dolphin snot collector, and although I would be only too happy to harvest semen from a snot otter, that involves travel. So that leaves poop donation.

It has only been recently that dolphin snot has hit the news. The promise for research breakthroughs seemed endless. Could we one day cure the heartbreak of plankton-induced asthma? Develop a new marine adhesive from porpoise boogers? Sadly, none of this is on the horizon. Dolphin scientists are excited about snot collection only because it is a good source of dolphin DNA, which has proved invaluable in the study of, uh, dolphins. Previous attempts to scavenge DNA from a dolphin involved remote techniques using a crossbow or a long pole. This worked well, as far as  it went, but only allowed researchers to study irritable dolphins, with no controls for amiability. With the new snot collection discovery, they now need only use a bucket and a boat and locate a pod of dolphins with kelp allergies, and it's DNA city.

Rush

Snot otter semen is, to my mind, even more valuable. "Snot otter" is the perfectly adorable term of endearment for the hellbender, a species of salamander that used to be common in streams in the eastern United States. The hellbender is to a regular salamander as Rush Limbaugh is to Johnny Depp, but we love them anyway. There is no higher use for snot otter ejaculate than the creation of more snot otters, and that is precisely what is being proposed. I'm certain I'm qualified. I love salamanders very much, even the rare massively ugly ones, and I think that would come across. And there are aspects of snot otter fondling that are very similar to activities I might have already perfected over the years, if I do say so myself. Snot otters are currently in steep decline, and it isn't because they finally got a good look at each other. It's no doubt due to something stupid we did, so I'd love to help. Maybe next time I'm back east I'll check on craigslist for people who want their snot otters stroked. I'll probably find some, too.

Johnny

But my contribution to science is most likely to be in the field of fecal transplants. There is a need out there for good healthy shit, and I am really full of it. I've already updated my driver's license to reflect my donor status, and in the event of a serious accident, collection should be a snap: I probably will have donated before impact. The transplant recipients are people with difficult infections, colitis, and other intractable intestinal woes. Evidently someone has discovered that if their intestines are scrubbed clean and re-injected with healthy crap, everything clears right up. I'd be tickled to give some of mine away. I can always make more. And TurboTax already has a calculator for charitable contributions to tell you what your shit is worth.