Here's to The Good Poop

I don't feel quite as crochety. Although people who know me will tell you I'm always pretty damned crochety. Sometimes I just wish, you know, that I didn't have so many opinions. I used to think I had to have one about everything. I'm way past that by now, but I still have them--way too many of them to do me any good. Good grief. And so of course I have to share some of them with you. Forgive me.

--humans' bodily effluvia is just nasty. I don't care what anyone says. If it comes off of or out of someone with whom you're not madly in love (this covers lovers as well as mothers who swear their baby's diapers don't stink. Well, either this covers it, or they're just completely and totally nuts. Guess which one I believe. But never mind.) I have a lot of human hair at my house--the woman who owns the voodoo shop in New Orleans sent me a ton of hair from the salon next door to her shop. I washed it and dyed it. Sometimes some of it comes out, and I find it on the floor. This does not bother me. [Let me say here that I am typing this sitting on top of our ice chest (yes, we're the fucking Joads, traveling across the west with our blue and white plastic ice chest) because the chair, the desk chair I would normally sit in while typing, was covered with someone's long grey hairs, which made my throat close up. So I've eaten meals and typed blog posts sitting on the top of the ice chest and getting dents in my butt.] It's just like when I had hip-length hair and had pieces of it all over everything, as hair will do. It didn't bother me, either. Why not? Because I washed it every. Single. Day. Always. I might have missed half a dozen days in the entire 35 years it was that long. Hell, I doubt I've missed many more days than that in my entire LIFE, since I got over my Rampant Tomboy Stage when I hated having my hair washed even more than I hated coming in the house from playing outside. Since it's not like I camp or anything ("camp" = willingly going out into the wilderness to lie on the hard ground, pee in the dirt, and drink coffee that has been, as likely as not, filtered through squares of toilet paper (yeah, yeah, I know: I'm not a City Girl, and I'm not a Country Girl. Know why? I'm way too old to be a Girl of any sort, and that means I learned long, long ago what I can tolerate (weak coffee, very little food, hours and hours of walking in the heat up to about, oh, 102 degrees) and what I cannot (bad restroom situations, other people's nastiness, bad odors, parasites of any stripe, sleeping on the ground, crazy-bad traffic). See, I'd rather not eat than eat bad food (which is why I lose weight when we travel). I'd rather not sleep than sleep somewhere where I'll wake up with a neck that won't move and pain that will last for a week (which is why I sleep so little when we travel and wake up stiff and walk pretty much like Grandpa McCoy for those first few moments in the morning) and I'd rather not go at all than go in a Bad Restroom, which explains the inevitable bladder infection.

And, oh, honeys, I am not alone. Sure, if you're young and adventurous and given to touring the world, sure: you find me an anomaly. But let me tell you, this trip has proven one thing to me, if nothing else: we're way more alike than you might think. One of the most enlightening conversations I've had was at breakfast one morning with two delightful women--two of my favorites--who were just the least little bit irritable, spooning down bowls of granola and grousing about The Good Poop. Which had deserted them, if you will. Living in a dorm, eating dinner at noon (well, actually at 5:30, but when you're used to eating at 9 pm, it SEEMS like noon, and your body is all like, "Huh?" They were riffing on The Good Poop, and if you think Regular Women don't talk about stuff like this, you need to hie you to an art retreat. Not only do they talk about it, but they make it funny and then, later, will cheerfully report to you that The Problem has resolved itself. Which could easily fall under TMI, probably. Except you're so glad to know you're not the only person who finds the whole concept of shared bathrooms just completely uncivilized. It's like urinals. What's the deal there? Who decided it was a great thing to have men pee in a row, right in front of each other? Oh, sure: if you're in basic training and are going to be shipped out to the trenches where you're going to have to pee wherever, maybe you can see it as indoctrination. But just in everyday life? Let's have some privacy, people! Bathrooms with ONE toilet, REAL walls, a LOCK on the door. An exhaust fan. Some flowers. A nice painting on the wall. . . .

Where was I? Oh: since I do not camp, the only times my hair isn't going to be washed (and my damn legs shaved) is due either to surgery or the flu. That's pretty much it, and I try to avoid both, you know? I wonder how much shampoo I've used in my life. . . .

--people have got to quit reproducing such a reckless rate. There are way, way, way too many people in the world. I have seen most of them since I left home, so I know this for a fact. At first we thought it friendly and charming that the interstates in California have rest areas with restrooms every 30 miles or so. How nice of them, to provide so many places to pee! We quickly realized they must do this not out of the goodness of their hearts but because the rest areas are always packed full of all the gazillions of sweaty fat people who are driving their huge vehicles up and down the interstates, so you have to be able to drive to the next one without misery. Good lord, what a lot of people. And here I am, in my behemoth of a vehicle and with my tiny bladder, contributing to the madness. Mea culpa.

--there is no way in hell that those kids are Michael Jackson's biological offspring, is all I'm saying. And the pretense that they are just pisses me off anew. It's bad enough that someone with serious, unhealthy body issues was a star to so many people. That's sad. And it's worse that he was financially able to indulge his self-hate by altering nearly everything about the way he looked. But the fiction that he actually became that white, so white that he could produce blond-headed, white-skinned, pale-eyed kids? Oh, sure--biracial kids can be as varied as any other kids. They can be pale or dark. They can be paler than the pale parent or darker than the dark parent, given the quirks of genetics and secret liaisons by great-grandparents. But for three kids to have absolutely no visible features at all in common with one of the parents? And for that to reinforce the fairy tale that Jackson actually succeeded in turning himself white? White enough to make white children? If he weren't dead, I'd go slap him. I should feel sorry for him, that he hated himself that much, but no. He had enough money to get some help and get better and instead chose to indulge every bit of wacko weirdness. After I slapped him, I'd put him in prison; but that's just me.

Well, you can tell what we've been doing in the evenings in our room. Good grief. Jackson's death is everywhere--on the front page of the USA Today that's given out every morning, on the news shows, the entertainment channels. Sirius has a channel for his music. Did y'all see the story about the face in the clouds? Holy crap. Not only are there way, way too many people, but a large percentage of them appear to be both gullible and just the tiniest bit totally wacked out nuts.

It reminds me of when Elvis died: we were on our honeymoon, driving home, and we heard on the radio about his death at almost exactly the moment I realized I had a raging bladder infection, the kind that sets your nether regions on fire and requires you to hit every crappy little gas station restroom along your route AND, back in the car, to sit gingerly on a soft pillow and whimper. Elvis and a bladder infection, Michael Jackson and a mammatous cloud formation.

I'll take the clouds any day, never mind that, in West Texas, those are the kind of clouds you watch for tornadoes. Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere, but I doubt it. And so I'll leave you with those opinions as we head off to Bakersfield, where I've been at least once before, back in 1969, back when San Francisco was hip and groovy and Bakersfield was probably--although of course I don't remember it--the same Armpit our friend Debbie describes it as today. (She had a friend who was from there who said that was exactly what it was, so please do not send me whiny notes saying I'm trashing your favorite town, OK?)

But let me leave you with this: there is a completely delightful and adorable and hilariously funny artist who will forever be known to us only as That Constipated Woman from Atlanta. And when we bade each other goodbye, that last morning at breakfast, I did not wish her Happy Trails. Oh, no. You already know the wish I with which I sent her back to Georgia: Here's to The Good Poop.