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fecal sieve
Wednesday, July 3 2019
After I got up this morning, I did an unusual thing with the first bowel movement of the day. I shat into a sieve near the water tank at the north end of the house and then used the water from that tank to dissolve away what I could of the material. The hope was that if I'd accidentally swallowed the crown from my punk rock tooth last night, I might find it on the way out of my body. Sadly, though there was no crown in my fecal production, I did learn some things. The most interesting of these was that a lot of the black beans on the burrito I'd eaten yesterday (I'd been to Bubby's in Red Hook) hadn't actually been chewed. Part of this was probably due to the discomfort of the temporary crown on one of my molars, but Gretchen is always telling me that I eat too fast. It probably means that a fair amount of food goes through me undigested. Isn't that a little like having a gastric bypass? Maybe that's how I stay relatively thin while getting almost no exercise.
Gretchen would be coming home from California later in the morning and then going to work at the bookstore in Woodstock. Predicting that, on the eve of a holiday, we'd probably get to go home early, I brought both dogs (Ramona and Neville) with me to my workplace. This is always a bad idea, since two dogs roughly doubles my potential for distraction when I'm trying to work. And when I'm walking the dogs in the fields behind the building, Ramona tends to take her cues from Neville, and the sum of their misbehavior ends up larger than it would be with the sum of the misbehavior of both dogs individually. Today, they weren't actually all that bad. But I had an unusually low tolerance for their inevitable misbehaviors, most of which took the form of not doing as they were told (or only doing it grudgingly). This was because of the discomforts in my mouth, a kind of discomfort that has an outsized ability to weigh the spirit down. It wasn't just the improvised ill-fitting crown on my punk rock tooth and the uncomfortable temporary molar crown, it was also an outbreak of mouth sores worse than I've had in many years. On our first walk at around 8:00am, there was still lots of dew on the vegetation. As I walked through waist-high poison-ivy-choked weeds in one field, my trousers became soaked. And then the trail I was following beneath a powerline came to a part where the shrubs on either side had completely grown in with a burst of vernal exuberance, and these were wet from dew too, meaning my upper body got wet as well.
I took the dogs on a second walk behind the building when I had the feeling that I needed to take another shit. Under some trees, I found a few flat rocks (unusual in this area), so I set one up on top of a tree stump as a table. I then shat on it and used a stick to poke at all the lumps in hopes I'd find the missing crown from my punk rock tooth. You won't be surprised to learn that I came up empty. I then had the challenge of avoiding poison ivy while finding suitable natural toilet paper. At the time, the dogs were so distracted by a chipmunk that they didn't try to get to eat my feces. I was able to dispose of most of it in a bundle of old woven wire that a dog would have a hard time negotiating. (Maddeningly, there'd been some of my output that had sloughed off the stone "table" into a crack between the stump and a tree, and it had been enough fecal material to possibly conceal a tooth.)
My mouth was so uncomfortable that I never ended up actually eating any lunch. Late in the day, I ate a few peanuts, which I shared with the dogs. Meanwhile, someone in the office had ordered pizzas, which Neville and Ramona would've definitely preferred.
At around noon, we learned we could leave at 3:00pm, which (for me) was only an hour earlier than usual. As the end of the day approached, I was so eager to leave that I'd periodically do calculations on the Windows calculator app to figure out what fraction of the day was left.
The plan for after work was to drive to Woodstock and hand Neville off to Gretchen at the bookstore so he could put in a partial day there. The shortest route to Woodstock after crossing the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge is via Sawkill Road, which is so twisty that the dogs kept sloshing out of their seats. One of them was also farting a lot, and I didn't wanted to drop off Neville at the bookstore if he needed to poop. So I stopped at Big Deep to take the dogs for a short walk, not even as far the water. When they'd both taken shits and I said it was time to head back to the car, they both seemed disappointed and in no hurry.
This might seem a little psycho, but on the chance that one of the dogs had eaten my punk rock crown, I gathered up both their shit in a plastic bag that I concealed within a paper bag. Of course, dog digestive systems are shorter than those found in humans, so it was unlikely that any shits they would be taking so late in the day would contain artifacts from 22 hours before, but these were the first shits I'd seen them take since the loss of the crown.
By the time I showed up at the bookstore, I was feeling miserable for multiple reasons: the state of my mouth, the fact I hadn't had a proper lunch, being overheated in the summer sun (I was still wearing the long-sleeve shirt I have to wear in the over-airconditioned office), and assorted irritations. I hate it when I'm in a store and the cashier is distracted by personal bullshit, and (because I'm not a hypocrite) I hate being the cause of a cashier's personal bullshit. So it was hard to be comfortable socializing with my own wife even though I hadn't seen her in nearly a week because customers were needing her attention in the store.
My aggravation continued on the drive home. First, I tried to do the right thing and pick up a hitchhiker near the Woodstock end of Route 375. He was a skinny old man with guitar claiming to be going to an audition. When I said where I was going, he made it like I was some sort of asshole because I wouldn't be driving all the way to Kingston. He walked away in a huff before I even knew he didn't want my damn ride. Then I was behind some idiot in a Subaru driving extremely slowly who then failed to respond with sufficient perkiness at the light over the intersection between Routes 375 and 28. I beaped my horn to wake him up and passed him in the right lane. He showed up later at the Tibetan Center thrift store but didn't recognize me as the driver of the car that had briefly road-raged at him. Today, the only thing of interest at the Tibetan Center thrift store was a tripod designed to make fine adjustments in the orientation of a small reflecting telescope. I couldn't tell if the price was $15 or $75 (both prices high by TCTS standards) so I didn't get it. If it's still there on a future day when Rob is, I'll ask him what the price is.
Back at the house, I ran Neville and Ramona's shit through the sieve the same way I'd run through mine this morning. As you probably anticipated, there was nothing of interest to be found. Also: either the dogs chew their kibble better than I do or it breaks down naturally in their stomachs. It made their sprayed-down shit look like golden sand with few lumps or other impurities.
Before Gretchen came home, I put together most of the ingredients for a rigatoni pasta meal with a red sauce containing tempeh, mushrooms, and onions. Though I hadn't eaten all day, continued discomforts in my mouth kept me from eating more than a small bowl of it.
Later tonight we lay in bed, a close friend called Gretchen revealing that cancerous cells had been found in an ovarian cyst. This news provided a bit of a reality check for the things that for me had seemed like traumas today.
Ramona and Neville in the office today.
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