team player

I want to make clear that I support other people's dumping, broadly speaking.  I'm not so naïve as to have a mission or goal with my fecal focus here, there's no aim or end I'm looking to achieve.  I'm going to continue to take shits every day and I hope you will to, and then eventually we might have other medical realities and then we will ultimately expire, but hopefully that's a ways off.  I'm here, on this blog, for you as well as for myself, semi-regularly, for most of the last decade, just to talk out some notions on the topic of shitting.

What am I saying?  I'm saying when you take a shit, and it's a good one, I wanna smile with you, not because it's funny, but because it's good and also in some sense it's true.  A bad dump is in some ways even truer, and wanna be there for you when it's a bad one just the same.  And this merits saying in so many words because often the dumps of another are not socially supported.  The quality of the dump as you saw it becomes irrelevant to the third party who hears it, smells it, sees it (maybe even touches it).  And that's too bad.  It's just not the case that defecating has an unavoidable component of rudeness, it's a generally neutral and necessary act.

As I've previously expressed in this space, sometimes when I walk into the bathroom right after someone does some dump work,  in my head I'm like "yeah, nice work, you did it, way to go" to the person who did the dump.  I wouldn't say this out loud unless I knew the person really well, and even then, it might come across as sarcastic when I don't mean it that way.  I sometimes receive texts from a friend when he takes a notable dump, and it heartens me to hear about his efforts, while at the same time not needing to know any more.  It forms a solid connection with the other person.

Recently, I after doing this kudos thing in my head to the previous occupant of a rehearsal studio bathroom, I mentioned that I do this non-verbal support routine to some bandmates.  None of them ever had felt the need to silently congratulate a recent dumper, but I felt good saying it out loud.  And now I just want to reiterate the sentiment to a larger (I hope?) audience.

Next time, in your home or office or wherever you find yourself, ideally at a single occupant bathroom for this feeling, when you can strongly sense a major dump that's just been there, see if you can find a part of yourself to congratulate the dumper and encourage them for their work.  Maybe it'll help you do your own work and feel closer to the global community of shit-takers, which after all is all of us.

crowning achievement

Two words that I think of a lot these days:

1. If I get the sense I'd like to dump one out, go to the toilet, take my seat, and nothing is happening, then what say to myself is that it's just not ready to speak yet.  Like the dump will have something to say soon but it's not quite there.  And then eventually, it speaks.

2. If things are moving a little slowly, and some turd emerges, but it's hard to get it all the way out, that in my current parlance, is a form of crowning.  Maybe this is me wanting to be able to produce a child in my body but only being able to produce multiple daily stools and stealing some of the corresponding terminology.  Of course there are already extant words for this phenomenon but I like the link and don't think it's unflattering to either birth or shitting, two very significant acts, albeit with different frequencies.