I Could Say It Stronger, But It's Too Much Trouble

I had a friend in college who did not use butt-wiping paper. She thought it was gross. For her, pooping was a ritual that involved special cups, washcloths, and care. Though, she was often the target for questions and the butt of jokes (because everyone knows that wiping your butt with anything other than thin layers of pressed dry wood pulp is wrong), she did not change that habit the whole time I knew her. She ate well so was very regular and could expect to poo (hmm, "poo" is misspelled but "poop" isn't) at about the same time every day and made it as much a part of her routine as you might make brushing your teeth or putting on makeup. This was in the dorms, so she took her cup, water, and cloth into the toilet stall and did whatever it was she did that was a part of her after poop business. This, as I said before, was strange.

But if you had poop on your arm, or bare foot, or worse, somewhere on your face, what would you do to clean it? Would you think smearing it around with a dry piece of thin tissue paper would leave you clean? Would you figure that, somehow, this paper that you wouldn't use to clean anything else, thoroughly removed the feces from your arm? You likely wouldn't, but somehow, magically I suppose, we do that with our butts.

Of course the magic involved is convincing ourselves that our butts are different and our poop world is normal. Our butts are different from our arms, feet, faces, etc.... Sure, but that act of rationalizing or being convinced that tissue paper works to clean poop, that difference of butt from arm is something we have to think about and negotiate. We create the characteristics of the world around this sense of butts and poo to lead to a world wherein those things become more fixed and given so that something that would actually get you cleaner after pooping, water and washcloths, is strange- or seen as something that would not actually get you cleaner, or is itself dirty, or not appropriate for something like butt. We have a world wherein the ways of our pooping even go to work on our sense of what is natural; the general ugliness and irregularity of our pooping and poop has us thinking that so many warning signs concerning our health are merely the ways we are supposed to poop. We have a world of pooping that accommodates all of the features of our world of poop and the way it is becomes confused for the way it ought to be. When I say world, I mean our sense of what is, what counts as real, the physical features we make that correspond to this sense of what is real, the physical world that we don't craft but see as having a relation to what is, what is or isn't possible, what is and isn't normal, good, right... all of those things that go into the way we know our lives.

Really, all of this is a justification for my way of being, an apology for what I am about to say. I choose apology carefully here. It is an apology, not in the sense that I must express regret or remorse, but a defense or a case for why something could be. I am aware that what I am about to say, needs a defense; it is "the strange" in our world of magic paper and butt differentiation.

I use something called flushable toddler wipes to clean my butt. For a long time now, I've watched what I eat so that my pooping is what I call "fast and furious". (I've called it that for longer than there's been a movie by that name, though it's perfectly appropriate to me that the specific movie of that name brings to mind my poop). Unless something is wrong, unless I've done something wrong, my poop is abundant, solid, quick to leave, and clean (by that I mean not leaving a sticky residue). Still, relatively recently, I've taken to using what we call "baby wipes" to make sure my butt is clean after pooping.

It's strange that I am the odd one, that I am the one who has to defend himself against a world that sees toilet paper as perfectly suited to the task at hand. My butt is likely cleaner than yours, but I am the one who has to explain himself. If cleanliness is what we're after, isn't what I do better? Isn't what my strange college friend did superior? Of course there are other concerns, but I hope we see that those other concerns are, in fact, concerns- things to which we are decidedly attached or committed as we exist. They are not simply "out there" nor exist "just as they are". It is not simply the way the world is though it simply is the way the world is. Hah- what a jerk.

I mean, we make it that way but just because we make it that way does not mean it isn't "right" or reliable. It does mean that we need to be cautious to not take it too seriously. We need remember that what we do is what we do in relation to what we say the world is but it is never more than what we do in relation to what we say the world is.

That said, imagine if there were a people who rightly then distrusted or found our concerns suspect. Imagine if there were a people who knew that as humans, our concerns were never more than human, so they worked hard to prevent those concerns from becoming powers that mastered us or became the means by which we mastered some them.

I suppose that's quite a leap from poop to this imagined people but it seems poop is the right place to start. Especially since, the way we do things now, poop is where we end up.

There Are Devils In Many Ways
Weird Divide- The Shins
Nature Boy- David Bowie and Massive Attack
Transformer- Gnarls Barkley
Crossroads- Cream
Fool in the Rain- Led Zeppelin
Untitled Original- John Coltrane
I Was Made to Love Her- Stevie Wonder
Bluebird- Buffalo Springfield
Symphony in D- JS Bach
I'm Still in Love With You- Al Green