Holy Crap

My friend David sent me a link to a poop article. This happens. It's like how people know where to dump off their unwanted kittens so they'll be taken care of. Poop articles come here to feel less lonely.

But until David sent me this one, I had no idea anyone ever thought about whether or not Jesus pooped. It never occurred to me he didn't. All men do, even John Wayne, who was discovered to be packing forty pounds of impacted fecal matter at his autopsy, which might have accounted for his gait.

That, of course, is patently ridiculous. Forty pounds of poop! John Wayne did not even have an autopsy. People are mixing him up with Elvis Presley, who did have an autopsy, at which he was reported to be harboring an even more stupendous quantity of stale caca, but the quality of the autopsy is suspect, inasmuch as he hasn't even stayed reliably dead.

Which, I guess, brings us back to Jesus.

#2

The problem, for many Christians throughout the millennia, is that Jesus is thought to be both human and God, and for some reason people don't like to think about God taking a dump, even though he has a throne. I'm not sure why something as natural and, frankly, satisfying as a bowel movement has gotten such a bad rap that we would deny the pleasure to the gods.

Probably this indicates my own privilege. The whole routine has always been a snap for me, and the first couple years my poop was someone else's problem. But when I once asked my parents what they thought was the greatest innovation in their lives--I was thinking about airplanes, and automatic washers, and rocket ships, and such--they both said, fervently and in unison, indoor plumbing. So. This business of making poop disappear with several gallons of perfectly good drinking water is kind of new, humanity-wise.

Anyway, some of your earlier Christians thought Jesus only appeared to have a human body but was really a god, through and through, running a sort of parlor trick, if you will. And these Christians thought Jesus never actually dropped a load. This position is known as "Docetism," from the Greek word dokein ("dookie"). No wonder the Trinity is so hard to comprehend. We can't even get past number two.

All of this kind of makes me feel sorry for Jesus, and not just for that part toward the end. Surely a man of his talents could turn shit into sugarplums if that's what a sensitive populace demanded. He did amazing things with a single loaf of bread and a dead fish, as you'll recall. And if he didn't poop, he'd have to keep a tight rein on that sort of behavior or he'd be one tunafish sandwich away from a serious personal backup.

There has to be some sort of mechanism for this celebrated self-control, or lo, it will be with him alway, even unto the end of the world. The explanations given are less than satisfying from a scientific standpoint. For instance, according to a second-century teacher named Valentinus, "Jesus digested divinity: he ate and drank in a special way without excreting his solids. He had such a great capacity for continence that the nourishment within him was not corrupted, for he did not experience corruption." That's religion for you--you're just supposed to accept that.

But it only raises more questions. For instance, did people in the second century, when they hit their fingers with a hammer, yell Oh, Experience Corruption?

At any rate, the digestive method described by Mr. Valentinus must be something like sublimation, the process by which a solid (in this case feces) makes a transition directly to a gas. Big deal. I do that all day long.

It's A Fly Ball

We have flies. Not a ton of them, really, just your standard set, and they're almost all in the outdoor stairwell going down into the basement. It's always a bit startling to open the basement door and see all those flies out there. They're mingling and talking over each other like they're at a church social. I don't know why they've picked that spot.

Because ever since those awkward early years at this house, we've kept the piles of cow poop in the stairwell to a minimum. We're likewise short on corpses. It is a bit untidy, and that might be attractive to flies, but it's hard to understand the draw. Being flies, they're marginally annoying even though they don't bite or anything. Probably we should install a frog.

I looked up "flies in the stairwell" to see if there was some reason they hung out there. To my chagrin, Google instantly supplied a billion articles about killing the hell out of flies, which was not what I was going for. I'm cool one-on-one with a swatter, but I always assume if you start spraying small beasts with poison, you'll eventually drop a tiger. Anyway I don't need to get rid of them. I just want to know what they're talking about.

My research proved to be a dead end. However, there was a lot of interesting advice about natural fly control, including the old "put some poop somewhere else" gambit. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that flies like poop, but I already fling the neighbor's cat's poop back over the fence, and my stairwell flies are still here. One woman on a forum was eager to underscore the poop-fly connection. "I have a pet rabbit whom's poop attracts the big fat juicy ones," she contended, and I'm not surprised. I think it's in them's nature.

But check this out. Have you heard of this? You put a penny in a plastic bag half filled with water and hang it near the flies, and they'll go away. People swear by it. I can't help but wonder if a couple of nickels would work even better.

It's not foolproof. One woman complained that although she tried the water-bag trick using fifteen pennies, flies were still hanging around her dog kennels. There's just no explaining something like that, you'd think, but someone did helpfully suggest she'd used too many pennies.

Snopes.com is ambivalent about the efficacy of water bags. They wouldn't say one way or another, although they took a skeptical tone. It's relatively easy to construct an experiment with proper controls and an array of bags and pennies, and you can accurately measure fly concentration by tallying up the poop spots they leave behind, if that's the way you like to spend your time. The mechanism is thought to have something to do with the refraction of sunlight in the water bag amplified by the shininess of the pennies. The flies' compound eyes are completely taken unawares by it and they have to move away to unfrazzle themselves.

Could be so. I'm tempted to try it out, except for two things. My basement stairwell is a perfectly fine place to store flies, and I can think of worse places. Also, there is no direct sunlight in the stairwell. That's right: I am infested with flies where the sun don't shine.

No Doot About It

I don't always notice these milestones, but it came to my attention that this is my 700th post here at Murrmurrs. So it seemed like maybe I should take stock or something. There are a lot of people who were blogging before I came on the scene, but the scene in general has petered out. Fewer people blog, and even fewer pay any attention to those who do.

But I'm still here. I'm here with a reduced number of readers, but I'm pretty sure that those people still dropping by are sincere and pure at heart and have come here of their own free will, and also they're bored at work.

You're supposed to have a theme. You're a quilter, or you're a Mommy, or you're an irascible political junkie with grindable axes. Everyone knows what to expect of you. With me, you don't know exactly what I'm going to write about--you couldn't, because I don't--but I do wear some of the same paths smooth. I care a lot about the environment and extinction, and the wholesale destruction of the global systems that had been sustaining us and our fellow planetary passengers for quite a long time. I'm interested in poop. And I seem to be really hard on Republicans, which would be totally unfair and unbalanced, except that they have so got it coming. They are assholes nine ways to Sunday, the whole lot of them. They want their nests feathered with stuff they've plucked off of you, and then they want to tell you to get your own damn sweater and oh by the way how many eggs you should raise.

So here's an example. Found this the other day, at the 5000-foot elevation of one of our local volcanoes. I don't know if this is poop or not. It looks like poop, but it also looks like some other kind of non-digestive consequence of some little critter's shovelings or perambulations; or even something that water did to dirt in its spare time. I poke around in doots just to see if any clues pop out, and if they don't, I slap their picture on the internet like this so someone smarter than I am can tell me what they are. These look to be made of plain dirt.

I mean, I would totally support a Republican, on principle, if I agreed with him, but on every single dag-blasted issue I care deeply about, and all the second- and third-tier ones too, they've got everything totally fucking upside-down. The solution to the climate situation is to declare it doesn't exist until they're done drilling out all the money. The solution to the obscene concentration of wealth in a few individuals is to make damn sure they're not taxed. The solution to gun violence is more guns. The solution to unaffordable health care is really unaffordable health care. The solution to abortion is discouraging contraception. The solution to the problem of gay marriage is--wait, what problem? They're insane. They'll bang a pulpit one minute and a young boy the next, and gin up five reasons to go to war on the way to prayer breakfast. They've got the word of the Lord at one end and the tailpipe of the pirate class at the other, and in between is the vacant space where they allege there might be a tangible soul worthy of protecting. No matter how thoroughly they fuck something, they won't pull out. The only thing they'd like better than lining their pockets is if they could stash the cash in a wallet made from the scrotum of an endangered tiger.

The nicest thing you can say about them is they don't mean a damn thing they say. Take the Mexican immigrants. They love them. They love the cheap labor, and they don't plan to do a thing about it. But they'll sure as hell use them to pry up votes.

Ruined water, ruined air, ruined lives, squandered resources, hypocrisy, and sanctimony. Poke around this kind of shit long enough, you know exactly where it comes from.

One Hundred Cheers Of Jollitude

Grab yourself a little piece of that cake over there, and make sure you have a glass of champagne. This here is my 100th post in Murrmurrs! No one is surpriseder than I am. When I started, I would have sworn I didn't have a hundred ideas, total, lifetime. But here we are. My head is jammed full of stuff. As Dave likes to point out, it's really dense in there.

You should have a purpose in mind when starting a blog: to educate, to chronicle, perhaps to provoke. My goal is to cause a leakage of bodily fluids in my readership. If I can make you have to change your underwear or wipe something off your screen, I'm happy. That's where the cake and champagne come in. Everything reminds me of something else, and there's usually no more than one or two degrees of separation before you hit funny. So I think of something, and that makes me think of something else, and that makes me think of something else, and if I can remember what I started with--by no means a sure thing--why, I'm off and running.

I wrote my first post on December 27th, 2008, and my second a day later, and the Blogger template made it look real purty so I went ahead and told both of my friends, and then I settled into a comfortable twice-a-week schedule. Now, there's a lot of information out there about having a successful blog, and one thing everyone agrees on is that you should post at least three times a week. Call me a crank, but my thought is that no one will look at a blog three or more times a week unless it's entertaining. I searched my heart and decided I could only be funny twice a week, and you don't even want to be around me those other days.

Actually, I'm fun to be around slightly more often than twice a week. I began to accumulate blog posts which I confine to a little kennel on my computer. I have a pack of at least fifteen of them ready to let loose. At any given time a few will be under construction, and about three of them will be told to go to their crates until they funny up a little more. I worry when I put out a post that I think is pretty funny but not very funny. I always think: well, there goes my audience. Same thing applies when I put in one with a political or religious theme, which I seem unable to prevent myself from doing. "That one will drive people away," I fret, but then I think: No. My readers are smart and delightful and agree with me on every last thing. Right? Right?

But even though I have a group of posts just yipping to be let out, I decided not to increase the output to three times a week. That would be more pressure than a retired and, frankly, slothful person should be expected to bear. Especially one who isn't getting paid.

That getting-paid thing has been an eye-opener. I started the blog to develop an audience, which you need before anyone will publish your book. I'd still like to get a book published, but I discovered that having an audience was most of what I wanted. It's almost as if my readers are the people standing in the forest with their ears peeled, and I'm the tree that falls down. If they weren't there, would I make a sound? I'm not at all sure that I would. So you people are drawing out my work, and that energizes me and makes me very happy, for which I thank you all.

Wherever you came from. I haven't hit the big time, but I do have more readers than I have friends, so something's going on. Now, a person could conceivably trip over my site just by Googling the right thing. For instance, if you type in "ferret snot," I'm right there in the number-one position out of 400,000 hits. (Dave Barry is number three, people.) Most of my readers live in Oregon, which tells me they're my friends or their friends. But a goodly percentage, when I dig into it, are birders. This means my friend Julie Zickefoose sent them. Which brings up another thing:

I didn't know much about the so-called blogosphere before I began bobbing around in it. But here's one thing I found out: it's got friends. I now have friends I've never met, but friends they are. My head says "those are just names on a screen," but my heart, a much better judge of such things, has already brought over a bottle of wine, checked out the fridge, and curled up under an afghan on the sofa. It's the real thing.

Regular readers will have learned a lot about me. I'm muddle-headed, I tip over a lot, and I live with a cat and a large man, both of whom are total goofs. I like beer and flowers and salamanders, I'm a big chubby liberal, and I'm probably going to hell. That's me in a nutshell.

I always thought I'd be a writer. I wrote a lot of bad poetry in school and some exceptionally bad fiction. After that, I didn't write much of anything for over thirty years. They say that you need to live a little to have something to write about, and I think that's true. What did thirty years of living prepare me to write about? Poop.

I checked back, and at least eighteen of my posts are either about poop or mention poop (in passing). I've written about lizard poop, and bat poop, and raccoon poop, and sandhill crane poop. Possum poop, people poop and the poop of the potoroo. Hamster doots. Quark shit, for crap's sakes. I don't know what this says about me, but I will report that my poop posts get a lot of commentary. However, the post that got the most comments of all was about erections. That says a lot about you.

Here's a little primer about comments, for those of you not in the know. You can click on the little "comments" line at the end of every post and put in a comment. It will ask you how you want to be known, and you can be anonymous. But if you wanted to create a Google account, and have your name and picture and everything right there, I'm here to tell you that it's free and easy and no one seems to hound you about anything afterwards, so go for it. Also, if you want to send a particular post to somebody, you can click on "share this." I won't stop you. If you want to email all your friends about Murrmurrs, I will encourage you while blushing at the same time, which is all the multitasking I can handle without tipping over. If you want to put a link to Murrmurrs on your Facebook page, I will lick your feet and bake cookies.

Thank you all for coming. In the spirit of the season, Post #101 will be about poop.

Here are a few of my favorite posts, excavated from the archives, which you can find at the left:

We The People

Loved Ones, With A Side Of Lefse

Requiem For A Biology Degree

Speaking Phlegmish

Pimp My Platform

Here's how I thought the writing business should play out: I would go sit in a tower and write a really cool book. I would polish it up and present it in a form that required no editing, and pass it briefly under the nose of an agent or publisher, who would detect the scent of genius and promptly fling out thousands of copies to a waiting world.

I didn't actually write much of anything for about 52 years, but I did have a tower, so I had a good start. Then my friend Dave Gerritsen gave me some sort of choice--I believe one of the options was "get off the pot"--and I started writing some stuff down. It went well. I got a little something published, I won a couple little contests, and then I revised my plan. I had gotten some free publicity as a result of winning the contests, and so I thought I'd just sit in the front room, in literary heat, and whack at the agents and publishers with a broom as they crowded around the front porch; I'd let one or two with impeccable bloodlines stay. Meanwhile, I'd write a book.

The book was coming right along, but the front porch was kind of quiet. So I joined a writers' community and went to a meetin'. The preacher at the meetin' house soberly informed us that we needed to develop a Writer's Platform. My platform is pretty well developed, I've always thought, although it's nothing that couldn't be handled with stretchier pants. But I had misunderstood. In order to get a book contract, we needed to prove to a publisher that we could personally sell books, because they weren't about to be responsible for that. Heavens no. And the way to do that was not just to write a good book; certainly not. We needed to read in the town square, get a column in the paper, give commentaries on the radio, advertise on bus benches, wear spangly outfits and hire a bugler. Really, the writing was secondary.

So with great sadness and trepidation, I decided to start a blog. I didn't want to. What if I had only twelve ideas in my whole head, and after I had sent them out for free, there would be nothing left? Well. It turned out that I can go on and on about virtually any little thing. I had no idea. My husband Dave knew, and has made his peace with that over the years, but I didn't. It turned out to be fun. It's like a big paperweight for flyaway thoughts. All those odd little ideas that go traipsing in and out of my brain (there being, literally, nothing to stop them) now get pinned down in one place.

The book I'm writing is tentatively titled Miss Delivery: A Substantially True Postal Memoir. It's in the polishing stages. If you want to see it all published and everything, here's all you have to do: tell ten of your friends to read Murrmurrs. Tell them to tell ten of their friends. Within three or four weeks, we should have most of the planet on board unless some of you have duplicate friends--try not to do that. And don't break the chain or I'll have bad luck. Okay, pop along now--you should be able to do this before breakfast.

Incidentally: the blog posts that seem to engender the most spirited commentary are the ones about poop. I have written about it several times (raccoon poop, possum poop, lizard poop). Clearly, it speaks to something deep inside us all.

Requiem for a Biology Degree

I saw a flat dead squirrel today on the road. I can't bear to look at them when they're still gooey, but this one was as flat as a cartoon coyote. It occurred to me that it had really been quite a while since I'd seen a dead squirrel. Used to be, the city was chock-full of suicidal squirrels. As soon as I saw a squirrel dash ahead of me when I was driving, I would slow down or even stop, because it was guaranteed to double back to see if it could get under my wheels. I'd wait until it got all the way to the nearest tree before I'd drive on.

I have a theory about this. The reason squirrels are so whacked-out around cars is that they evolved to evade eagles, not Expeditions. If they run to and fro, and try to mix up the "to" and the "fro" a bit, they might escape death from the sky. I'm thinking that in a matter of forty or fifty years, the city squirrel population has finally evolved to reward the individual that just goes full-tilt in one direction. Because even though I still tend to slow down around racing squirrels, they don't seem to double back the way they used to.

It's either very urban of me, or very lazy, to make a study of dead fauna. I should be able to do better. I do have a dusty old Biology degree, by now vestigial. But you study what you can, and the dead stuff doesn't take as much stealth. So I noticed that another thing has changed. Years ago, we were awash in squashed opossums. Of late, they've been almost entirely displaced by dead raccoons. Did the raccoons eat the possums? It seems unlikely, possums being so stringy and greasy-looking and all, but raccoons eat a lot of things, so maybe they eat possums; after all, in some parts of the country, people do too. And they're huge (the raccoons, I mean, although some of the possum-eating humans can run a little large). I remember when they used to be medium-sized and cute. Now they stand there, leaning towards you, not backing away, looking at you eye to eye behind their villainous masks and rubbing their hands together like assassins. My night vision isn't that great, but the last one I saw was the size of a Volkswagen, had tusks and was swinging a tire iron. I don't remember them being so big before. That's one reason I think they've eaten the possums. Oh, sure, you hear about the natural shifting of fortunes of different species occupying the same ecological niche, with one population gaining temporary ascendancy due to variations in food availability and vulnerability to parasites. But one thing I learned in science was that the simplest and most elegant solution is often the best. So I'm sticking with the giant possum-eating raccoon hypothesis.

There's an impressive pile of poop under our grape trellis, all in one spot, and since I'm not out there at night checking, I don't know what has produced it. I do, however, have a field guide to poop, and I consulted it. My bookcase is a little light on literature, but I feel sort of proud of keeping a poop guide handy, and so I mentioned it to my sister, who was not especially impressed. She has a poop guide too. I think this says something about our family. For both of you still reading, possum poop is reported ("unfortunately," adds the guide) to lack distinctive qualities. Raccoon poop, it goes on, is not tapered at the ends, but is more or less broken-off. I see that as careless and lazy on the part of the raccoons. The guide says raccoon and possum poop are easily mistaken for each other, and in both cases they vary according to what is being eaten. I do not know if the poop of possum-eating raccoons is distinctive.

I do know they're up to no good. Poop should be tapered.