I’ve written elsewhere about the death of the thong in our college classrooms. Time was–and it wasn’t long ago–when we could count on on our undergrad co-eds to enliven and enrich our teaching by flouting their so-called undergarments. We relied upon those lacy secrets. They told us that there was life somewhere on the other side of campus–somewhere we will never again go. So many ass cracks; so little time. 

The Grumpy Academic has wondered not so much about where the thongs repaired, but what would replace them. And this year he has been struck with a thought: Cleavage is In! Now The Grumpy Academic has never been a fan of cleavage. It’s so disastrously overt, so in-your-face with its bulbous thrustings, as if signifying a punch thrown with no warning. When done by our undergrads, cleavage is monstrosity unfettered: a blow to the gut. It has no redeeming value, and in fact it says a lot about the Iraq war. Bomb ‘em until they come round. 

I can’t figure the sudden appearance of these low cut knit shirts, these little doilies abortively covering all but the these young mams. Why? I ask. Wherefore? And whence?

By what strange chemic and metabolic alchemy does that steak that I ingested this eve become, upon its twelve-hour journey, a load of poop upon the blossomy morn? And what part of the poop does said steak occupy, for it is exceedingly difficult to parse it from the salad parts and the potato parts and the pea parts? The corn parts and the nut parts are always readily if not curiously identifiable, as are the skins of various vegetables: I guess it’s easy to spot an Asian in Sweden.

Might we say that poop is the original multicultural cosmopolitan, all hybrid and mestizo and pastiche, not at all anxious about what such mixture has wrought? Is poop postmodern?

But back to my original question: what happens inside this, my own body, that transforms the appetizer into something so abject? And wherefore the capricious consistency of said turds? Why can’t I get some handle on their contingent nature? One day: solid, rock solid, and as lethargic as an ice-cold Sunday. No clue as to why. Drank enough water, I think. Another day, this poop of middling heft and solubility. Again: no rhyme or reason that I can discern, save that of pure fate, the fickle bitch. And then, of course, we come to the watery stuff, that which you might think is the result of too much of something, de trop, be it butter, alcohol, sausage, cheese, whole milk, or, my favorite, some dastardly combination of the three. You got a real smell on your hands now, fella. You may have some Old World bacterium, of course, coursing through your G. I. tract, but that’s nothing you can’t handle as long as you achieve some balance in the near future.

I believe that there are as many types of poop as there are types of people. Some trustworthy and purposeful, poop you can count on; some as unctuous as a used car salesman; some poop clearly wants to teach us something, the pedant poop—full of itself and full of pride in its own dark accomplishments; there’s the poop that doesn’t want to be poop, that tries to undo itself, that is afraid to become; the poop stuck in the infantile stage of its development, yellowish and putrid in extremis; the old man’s poop, your grandfather’s poop, which could stopper up the fundament of God.

A world of poop.

I have commerce with poop. Why, you might ask. Friends, I have children. I had not really known poop very well, paid it scat attention, until my brood arrived. And with them, their poop. When you have younguns, you become close to poop—too close, I guess, for some. But getting close to someone else’s poop is something all of us should experience, for it provides an intimation of our mortality. No one likes to think of death—or of poop, even—but in doing so we become more human. Poop reminds us wherefore we came and whence we go. It is our story writ small, for we are all ingested, digested, and evacuated in our own way. It’s just a little easier for some than for others. Trust me.

The first time I soiled my own hands with my young daughter’s poop, I was repulsed. The very thought of poop that I myself didn’t produce sent me into a swoon. But like so much else in life, I adjusted. I am no longer phased by the poop of children. I can get close to my kids’ shit without so much as flinching. Do I want to? Well, no. But I do it out of a sense of duty, as well as out of a small bit of curiosity. After all, poop has personality, and we might in fact come to know our kids better if we reached them through their poop. Unfortunately, however, they have to grow up. And with them, their shit. I believe in the innocence of children (within reason), for it is unfeigned, honest. I believe in the innocence of their poop as well. But true knowledge is coming, and adult poop surely signifies the Fall that we must all endure. 

I have an acquaintance who once bragged to me that he has never changed his daughter’s diaper, and she was nearing her first year on this planet. I do not think this an occasion for pride. Indeed, such neglect is surely something to be ashamed of. Because we receive very important messages from our kids’ feces, not the least of which is that they are part of the ongoing cycle, the whole wheel of life thing, input and output, a lesson in economics that can be applied to quotidian life if we are just open to it.

And also, not terribly fair to the person changing all of those diapers. Imagine not getting your daughter’s shit on your fingers once in a while. What kind of life is that?

What about the poop of our nonhuman other companions? I am reminded of those occasions when my father made me pick up his dog’s poop from the yard. (Why wasn’t it my dog? Didn’t live with the old man. Period.) Mountains of poop. You couldn’t walk anywhere; you wouldn’t want to. And the method? Toilet paper in hand I bent down perilously close to the soiled ground and picked up each rotting turd by hand. No gloves. No scoop. How many sultry southern afternoons did the stench of that dog’s rectal emanations waft into my nostrils, across my tongue and into my throat? The bile rose, bilious. The gag reflex kicked in, evolutionarily designed to make sure that I didn’t eat said poop of that mangy cur. Need any more reasons why I didn’t like visiting dear old dad?

As for my own dog back at home, we had a special place in our side yard: it was hers alone. And Marnie, the fattest Doberman pinscher on God’s green earth, made us of it. Grass and bushes and trees sprouted there, quicker, thicker, richer, greener than in the rest of the yard. This place was now fertile ground. The earth was in love with Marnie’s shit, reciprocating her gift with its own verdancy. I did not then understand the clear lessons of fertilization, of return, and I remain determined to put this lesson to use some time in the future when we are all forced by circumstance to put the world’s poop to better use. Time will come when the mere act of flushing will be considered in extremely poor taste, economically outré, and an affront to nature.

Which makes me wonder: why is everyone else’s poop so dastardly, when our own disgusteth not? Why do our personal and private excretions remind us of roses, while those of our neighbor reeks, and we turn away? Even those we love are apparently not immune to this curious dynamic. Some evolutionary imperative insuring that were we to eat poop, we only eat our own?

I am reminded of the day I shit myself. Good times! Just out for a walk, stroller and six-month old in hand, stranded half-a-mile from home, the feeling hit me in a most forceful way. Couldn’t make it back in time, and the waves kept rolling on, down my sweats and onto the sidewalk. Neighbors waving from their yards as I dropped a string of poop that wouldn’t take a bloodhound to follow. I chalked it up to the new medication and let it stand at that. I left portions of myself all over my hood, and to this day I’ll bet the good people of XXXXX wonder to themselves, “what manner of person was it that shit about the place?”

Something similar happened to close friend. He had been out with a wedding party in NYC the night before the big day. Eating. Drinking. Bar hopping. But not being a city boy, he couldn’t find a suitable depository. And so, like the anal retentive toddler, he held on until he made it back to the hotel, by which time his bowels were under such extreme pressure that as he dropped trow he exploded its contents forthwith and generally. And this, while the wedding party sat amidst the general drollery in the next room. He maintains it took him a good half-hour to get it cleaned up enough to make things presentable. But the stain was on his soul, and it has never been cleansed.

I give leave to end with a brief literary reference, one of the great poop stories. I am speaking of the shit scene in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which our hero, Tyrone Slothrop, must retrieve his mouth harp from the public toilet at the Roseland Ballroom:

For some time has been aware of shit, elaborately crusted along the sides of this ceramic . . . tunnel he’s in: shit nothing can flush away, mixed with hardwater minerals into a deliberate brown barnacling of his route, patterns thick with meaning, Burma-Shave signs of toilet world, icky and sticky, cryptic and glyptic, these shapes loom and pass smoothly as he continues on down the long cloudy waste line. . . . He finds he can identify certain traces of shit as belonging definitely to this or that Harvard fellow of his acquaintances. Some of it too of course must be Negro shit, but that all looks alike. . . . Slothrop is going past the sign of Will Stonybloke, of J. Peter Pitt, of Jack Kennedy, the ambassador’s son—say, where the heck is that Jack tonight, anyway? If anybody could’ve saved that harp, betcha Jack could.

And on and on into the veritable shitstorm, deeper and deeper, that we all must face someday. 

Finally, a vice presidential candidate I could see myself sleeping with. O sure, there was Walter Mondale–Wally–who fired my loins as a young man. I touched his hand–once, fleetingly–in a hotel ballroom in Louisville, Kentucky. I will never forget that day. He looked down at me with those soft midwestern peepers, and I could hardly contain myself. His manner spoke political loser, but he communicated with me, personally, an altogether different story. It’s something we shared, and it’s something you will never understand. 

George Bush–he was a looker as young man: Ivy boy, stud ball player, skull and bones necro-monger. His heyday was far before mine, and I could only see him as the happy, silly, avuncular type. No fantasy seemed right when GW was the VP. And with Barbara hovering about the edges, I always felt as if I were in for a spanking.

Dan Quayle was another animal altogether: corn-fed Indiana party boy, I could imagine him swingin’ from the chandeliers after a long night of blow and Jack Daniels. I bet the smile never left his face. Golden boy VP:  Where are you now? Where are you now?

It was always tough to have a full-blown VP fantasy about Al Gore, not because there’s anything wrong with Geek sex, but because Gore hovered in the shadow of an enormous presidential ID. Imagining Al undressed took full concentration, for the huckleberry face of ole Bill Clinton himself always wedged its way into my image bank. But that’s been Gore’s lot, hasn’t it? Nobel Prize notwithstanding, he will always be the sapling struggling to reach the light. 

And so we are blessed, my friends, with uber-fertile VP candidate Palin, whose brood is testament to this Brave New World. Let’s have more candidates about whom we suspect: they may be wearing something really interesting underneath all of those platitudes. And I’m not talking about Temple Garments.

Just back from an illuminating weekend up North, where I was led to believe–erroneously–that redneck-dom isn’t the force that it clearly is in my native mid-South. Oh, my friends, but I now disabused. 

I have lived in a number of states: LA, KY, MD, IN, NJ (and more), and I have known rednecks. My friends, I am descended, proudly, from a long line of rednecks. I am a painted redneck, wending my way toward bourgeois middle-class respectability. When your daddy dies from too many cigs and Miller Lites, you know that you are the progeny of rednecks. When your daddy’s best friend tells you at said daddy’s funeral, “he could drink a case of beer and you’d never know it,” you know that you are in the presence of a great redneck. I have redneck in my blood and bones. And to top it off, I barely knew my daddy.

And so when I stole away to Lake George, New York, for a weekend break before the semester madness, I was brought up short: Lake George is full of rednecks. And I mean this with both affection and a certain amount of revulsion, for I have both for my own family. 

Resort this is not. The good ole boys in the room next to mine drank beer on the deck all day and smoked cigars. They were good enough to offer me both, but I haven’t had a cigar since college and I wasn’t about to ruin my weekend by throwing up.

Here is what I saw in Lake George: two and three-year olds up until 11 and 12 at night, tattooed already or on their way thusly; obese first-graders that would gladly kick your ass if you looked at them slant-wise; big-assed trucks driven by cage-fighters, UFC t-shirts tightly wound around their shot-put bodies; a shop that hawked shirts advertising something called DILLIGAF, which the buck-toothed red-head told me meant, “Do I Look Like I Give A Fuck,” though I had already figured that out since it was plastered everywhere; skinny little teen-aged smokers carrying cases of lime-inflected beers down the street while simultaneously pushing strollers as their babies’ mommas tailed behind, sporting tight blue jean cut-offs and a bad attitude. Non-helmet wearing ATV driving rednecks: YAHOO!

And you just knew that given the right public health program, this would be an orthodontist’s dream town.

This Bud’s for you, redneck town by the lake!

Since when did we become a nation so in love with the put down, “predictable argument”? So-and-so offers another “predictable argument” about such-and-such. Our fearless leader put forth another tired, “predictable argument.” Should a thinking person lend any credence to her “predictable argument”? 

I’m seeing it everywhere. Are we only to believe those who can come up with an original, fresh, fruity argument? Do we really put that much stake in originality?

Spare me the “predictable argument” shtick. Try to come up with something a little more original if you are intent on reaming out some poor bastard who only wanted to put in his two-cents’ worth. And by the way, if it was so “predictable,” why didn’t you come up with it yourself?

This just in: Forty-one year old Olympic medal hopeful Dara Torres has a two-year old baby! No word yet on where John Edwards was two years and nine months ago, but my sources tell me that he’s not a strong swimmer.

Perhaps I am coming late to the game, but I feel like I’m in high school again. My new obsession, Belle and Sebastian’s “Piazza, New York Catcher.”

Elope with me, Miss Private, and we’ll sail around the world
I will be your Ferdinand and you my wayward girl
How many nights of talking in hotel rooms can you take?
How many nights of limping around on pagan holidays?
Oh, elope with me in private and we’ll set something ablaze
A trail for the devil to erase 

San Francisco’s calling us, the Giants and Mets will play
Piazza, New York catcher, are you straight or are you gay?
We hung about the stadium, we’ve got no place to stay
We hung about the Tenderloin and tenderly you tell
About the saddest book you ever read, it always makes you cry
The statue’s crying too and well he may

I love you, I’ve a drowning grip on your adoring face
I love you, my responsibility has found a place beside you
And strong warnings in the guise of gentle words
Come wave upon me from the wider family net absurd
“You’ll take care of her, I know it, you will do a better job”
Maybe, but not what she deserves

Elope with me, Miss Private, and we’ll drink ourselves awake
We’ll taste the coffee houses and award certificates
A privy seal to keep the feel of 1960 style
We’ll comment on the decor and we’ll help the passer by
And at dusk when work is over we’ll continue the debate
In a borrowed bedroom virginal and spare

The catcher hits for .318 and catches every day
The pitcher puts religion first and rests on holidays
He goes into cathedrals and lies prostrate on the floor
He knows the drink affects his speed, he’s praying for 
a doorway 
Back into the life he wants and the confession of the bench
Life outside the diamond is a wrench

I wish that you were here with me to pass the dull weekend
I know it wouldn’t come to love, my heroine pretend
A lady stepping from the songs we love until this day
You’d settle for an epitaph like “Walk Away, Renee”
The sun upon the roof in winter will draw you out like 
a flower
Meet you at the statue in an hour
Meet you at the statue in an hour

Okay, I get most of the references, and I’ve done a little research on a few others. I get the pun on the Say Hey Kid. But looking more generally at the song as a whole–indeed, thinking of it as a performance–moves past the realm of mere interpretation into the place where music best sits, emotion. I’m not trying to say we shouldn’t do a little exegesis here, but that something slips away in the telling, and that’s exactly why the song works for me.

If you know the song, what do you think?

I wrote previously about the old farts at my local–which is to say, global–coffeehouse. I made it back this week and they were there again, loud as ever, disrupting the calming influence of white noise with their boisterous banter. 

Taking my cue from the now defunct Dr. Disillusioned, I decided to listen in, and here is what I heard:

Framing, rebar, ball joint, crank, sending lights, flange, wizz snips, reciprocating saw, soldering station, sleeve puller, threading kit, plug wrench, acoustic tile

And it thus occurred to me, perhaps not for the first time, that the language of people who actually work for a living is every bit as specialized as my own, and every bit as undemocratic, alienating, and frightening. I remain repulsed at my own ignorance, not of the intricacies of post-Marxist theory (to take but one example), but of all that makes the world work in a real material necessary way. 

And yet, I remained pissed off that they had, once again, invaded my air space. 

I made the mistake of ordering The Special, both for the appetizer and the entree. I knew from experience, of course, that The Special would cost twice as much. But I expected–no, I hoped–that this would be different. I had eaten at this Japanese place before, but I had never had The Special. Where did such hope come from? Wherefore such delusions? Was it because I was trying to make nice with the waiter? 

Did I want to be friends with him, or make him believe that America is a place where everyone orders The Special? Did I want him to like me? 

I wasn’t disappointed at first. It was delicious. One of the best Specials I’ve ever had, so much so that I can say unequivocally that it lived up to its name. It. Was. Special.

And yet, when the bill arrived I was confronted with what I already knew. It had returned in the exact form that I expected. 

Perhaps I was only disappointed that it didn’t cost more.

Don’t jaywalk. Don’t spit on the sidewalk. You might leave the chewing gum in your hotel room. Forget about urinating in public. 

Hands off Cain released a study that says that of the roughly 5,851 executions in the world last year, China was responsible for around 5,000. 

Reuters, 2001

If I were you, I’d try to get a room at the U.S. Embassy. Unless it’s in Texas.