One of the most enlightening and educational conversations of my formative life commenced just about forty years ago around this very time. It encompassed facets of sociology, biology, psychology and civil engineering, all rolled into one brief exchange. And for it all, I'm in debt to someone I never even really knew.
Carolyn was the stunning young classmate that sat one row across from me in my tenth-grade English class each afternoon. Flowing blond hair, and bearing a variety of knit sweaters, Carolyn was the embodiment of a scene straight out of a Bergman movie, or maybe a Polo ad in the Sunday Times. Me and my fourteen-year-old pre-adolescent cherubity were silently mad for Carolyn, but did not need to be reminded that the likes of us were of no attraction to the likes of her. As a daily acquaintance, we did in fact know one another quite enjoyably, and greeted and joked with one-another from time to time. But certainly nothing further. Carolyn was proudly the arm-hook of a motorcycle-riding young fellow who showed up to our schoolfront each day to politely collect his prize. I'd watch this designer-jeans commercial from afar each day.
With my love hopelessly unrequited, I shared my tale of admitted defeat to my mom, who offered her condolence. When I told her of my retained intention nonetheless, to somehow let Carolyn know how I felt about her, although my mom warned me to be careful not to allow myself any embarrassment before others (this was, after all, high school..), she did remind me not to be deterred. "Don't forget, she's just like any one of us. Remember....we all go to the bathroom..."
Forty years after my brief encounter with Carolyn, that phrase remains in my lexicon with the greatest philosophical quotes of the last six centuries.
To be reminded, or to remind one's self of the common human function of bowel activity is perhaps the most leveling awareness possible. It generates both humility and courage. Gratitude and fortitude. Peace and hope. It connects us with our domestic and feral animal brethren and puts us closer to our devotion and beliefs of creation.
And typical to us irrational human beasts, we conditionally prefer to never think about it.
There has got to be a reason why perhaps the holiest and most critical of human functions of the human organism is characteristically the most unbroached, un-discussed and openly unacknowledged. Bowel activity is perhaps the single most intimate function of any warm-blooded mammal. Yet, in today's scientifically hypochondriacal world, where people will wrap their heads in masks ineffectively, in fear of the spread of some virus they don't really understand, a bodily function the process and related science of which is only too well known is chronically avoided and deterred, both in word and in mind. Is it really that hideous..?
When one's car proceeds to leak oil or develop troublesome sounds or symptoms, the owner will dash over to the mechanic, and likely discuss all the finer specs of the matter to really anyone, professional or not, who will tolerantly listen. If the same car owner is having a bout with constipation, no one will know.
There's a good chance the constipated owner won't, either. Even the most health and illness-fearing folks won't debase themselves by referencing their bathroom activity to even their most intimate partners sometimes. Spouses are one thing, but if you're in some new intimate fortnight situation at the girlfriend's apartment, you're not going to come out of the bathroom before bedtime and talk about how concerned you are that you haven't moved your bowels since Tuesday night. Or to make the reference more contemporary, you haven't pooped.
What a cute little word. I thought "pooped" meant tired. But apparently it's a verb as well, to poop. It's too bad they don't have cute little euphemisms like that for things like appendectomies or hysterectomies. If it's just a little fact-of-life human function like that, the least we can do is give it a cute name. That'll help conceal it's existence.
We don't seem to have the need to re-name such activities as eating, breathing, or having sex. But something this hideous in nature apparently demands it. And the problem isn't so much the re-naming. It's the overwhelming stigma that goes with it.
It's bad enough living in a culture where people deem certain words wrong or evil. But by no fault of its own, here's an entire, unavoidable bodily function, perhaps the most critical of all, and pretty much no one will express full comfort in discussing it or even referencing it. If nothing else, it's not doing our bodies any big favors.
On that base matter alone, our culture has in the last several hundred years seen little if any advancement. But, the Grand Canyon wasn't formed in a day, either. The reconditioning of a traditionally repressed culture's sensory perception of bodily function is a process. Perhaps one of the first great monumental, sociological strides past the fifty-yard line was marched prominently by entertainment innovator Norman Lear in 1971, when the punctuating sound of the upstairs toilet flush had audiences roaring at themselves uncontrollably on many an occasion, in no less than prime-time, on All In The Family.
This small little digression is most likely the basis of more than a few recently published, incisive books by any number of alternative and medical doctors and practitioners, with a devotion and determination to educate once and for all. It wouldn’t surprise me. But sadly, an abundance of hard science information, the kind no religion will necessarily refute, still will not reach an intolerant republic.
But as far as what we might cite as intolerance goes, therein just might lie the basis of the traditionally and economically successful, and vastly ineffective digestive health pharmaceutical industrial complex.
It has long been the fascination of the unfortunate domestic patrons of plumbing maintenance engineers, those divine dispatches who arrive, tools-in-box, to quickly patch up that broken toilet, just how precious they are in a globe of “important” people. The domestic patron is then only devastated by the healer’s price long enough to be placated by the relief of what is undeniably the most critical appliance in the household back in service once more. Many economists have astutely stated that were the academic youth lure of lucrativity in cyber-development, stock brokerage, science, nursing, M.B.A. or C.P.A. certification swapped for an intended future in trade skills, things like carpentry, roofing or electrical wiring, one’s place in our economy would prove way more cost-effectively valuable. At the top of the trade list would be plumbing. There are in fact people who don’t own or use a computer, cell phone or even a television of any sort. What’s the one piece of machinery every domestic bathroom, big or small does have..?
And if that’s the case, why are there not in fact at least six to eight plumbing maintenance engineers to the ratio of every civilian worker..? If the market were flooded (I think you pretty much knew that pun would show up soon..) with plumbers, just how would that effect the economy and health of the trade unions..?
Why not a romance image of such career pursuit..? As total speculation on my part, could it stem from a genuine aversion to a daily intimacy with the intrinsics of the arbitrary biological functions of others, and their end product..? There are many who insist they could never be paid enough to venture their face or hands into the desolate orifices where lie the whole or remnants of toxic human waste.
Yes, toxic it is. It is perhaps the most renown toxic substance known to man yet. More than even that stuff that leaked at Three Mile Island decades ago. You wouldn’t want that stuff anywhere near your hands, face or body. Yours or anyone else’s.
It is a substance pervasive and common enough to be traditionally cited in analogy down through time, in every cultural language, as a pejorative poison. So hideous in fact that its most familiar slang title was, long before any invented word, deemed language vulgar and restricted. And still the most effective when one needs to rip out in a verbal blue streak.
Our warm-blooded, domesticated pets, feline and canine alike, man’s alleged best friends, have made unwitting enemies out of their well-intentioned owners in their infant difficulty to achieve a passing grade in housebreaking. Many old-school traditionalists who “have raised them for years’ will have no difference with teaching an out-of-bounds-relieving pet the error of his ways by snatching him by the neck and shoving his snout into his fecal matter, Cool Hand Luke-style. He won’t do that again. Perhaps that strategy works just as well on their children.
Of course, that’s a badly acerbic joke right there. Nevertheless, just what is it that creates amongst our idealistic young such aversion to the respect and awareness of one’s operative bowel health..? Is there a healthy twenty-three year-old, one who isn’t in fact afflicted to the point of medical gastroenterologist-waiting room patronage (a population onto itself) that along with concerns of distances run, weights lifted, fasting and dieting goals accomplished, skin and muscle tone achieved, as well as hair volume, actually brings equivalent concern to one’s daily fiber intake and resulting bowel function each day…?
And how about those helpless waiting-room patrons…? The young ones, those “otherwise healthy”, but are forced to get to the bottom of why their stomachs are always miserable...? And for that matter, as a result, the rest of their anatomy…?
What are long known and termed as “gut health” conditions are actually a convenienced phrasing for the science of bariatric health and wellness. There are certainly enough of us brave and unbreakable “walking wounded”, who simply grin and bear our aches and pains every day. But some chronic ones are harder to grin past. And if we don’t pay attention to our lack of attention, they might not go away.
The bowel is the climax and resolution to the stomach’s proper nutrient-and-waste sorting and elimination system. Mindful approach toward what gets consciously placed into it will have direct cause and effect on how it makes the insides feel, and how easily the trash is disposed. If you try to create any product with cheap, rancid or defective material, or even incorrect material to begin with, the machine will still do it’s job and produce. But what will it produce..? Or in fact will it..?
Poor gasoline won’t run an adequate automobile well, the time-honored theory holds. That’s the first thing mechanics will point out. Car Repair 101. Is there such a thing as Bowel and Gut Health 101…?
That’s not really the stuff taught and learned by the gastroenterologists behind those waiting rooms the young folks spend hours watching afternoon TV and gazing at ask-your-doctor flower-and-kitten decorated drug print ads in. They are scientists far advanced in the business of connecting the dots. The dots are the patient’s symptomatic claims. The connection challenge pertains to tying each claim to a symptom recognized in the encoded glossary of serialized treatments acceptable by insurance coverage. It’s a cottage industry. As a teenager, a friend of mine got a job once at a fast-food stop. I asked how tough that must be, taking and ringing up all those items ordered. How do you remember prices..? She said it was a cinch: The cash register buttons were all designated by menu selection title. “Golden Browns” had it’s own key. She knew little about the products themselves. But she knew how to distribute them. Medicine has no real history of being genuinely spoken for. Business is an exact science.
Some of the greatest health epiphanies, usually for those most desperate, many war-scarred by their four-or-more-figure odyssey and inferno of waiting-room prescription vigil, come from the most unlooked or medically least respected places. With all the due respect emanating from any licensed physician, the most immediate and often first-stop approaches to gut and bowel repair are the ones legitimately outside the bounds of their reference lexicon. These are what are known as Alternative or Naturopathic Doctors. Indeed, there are many who bear conventional medical license as well, but the difficulty in accessibility comes in simple uncommon existence of those in practice. And those who are usually bear prices and services that most medical insurances will not hear of or honor.
That’s when some out-of-the-box detective work is necessary. Your gut and bowel need to hit the phone book and locate Jim Rockford, or the non-M.D. licensed Naturopathic Practitioner, who doesn’t exactly work undercover, but does treat only on an insurance-free out-of-pocket basis, and as such will not be the next-step candidates referred by that waiting room G.I. doc who’s too busy and out of solutions. For a grand wallet total of probably well less that whatever ends up spent in waiting room co-pays over a six-month course, a good and concentrated naturopath will engage the patient frankly and directly over just what they’re eating every moment of every day, what actually is “going down” in the restroom each day, if it is, and what supplements along with sometimes an unhappily corrected diet will soon put a smile on that gut’s face, make that bowel system run better, kill the bugs inside and discover that “Number Two” is not some foolish euphemism for something best ignored.
A timeless phrase I’ve long heard in reference to entertainment and culture is “toilet bowl humor”. You don’t hear the phrase “roof gutter humor” or “carburetor replacement humor” too much. Why do you suppose that is…? One’s plumbing fixtures are pretty important and serious stuff, far as I know. Why would one equate them with humor…? Wouldn’t “TV repair humor” be a much more relevant reference..?? It’s just possible that our culture, our socioeconomy, even our religious tenets might see some very constructive change when we recognize that absolutely no part of our body or human function is at any time something to be ashamed of, ignored, or best handed off to a service professional because we’d just rather not be bothered. It could in fact lead to a re-structuring of the nation’s long-criticized health system. But it’s a cooperative effort. And truthfully, it only begins with large-scale enlightenment.
I have no idea where my unrequited short-term high school heartthrob Carolyn or that kindly boyfriend of hers are today, together or apart. But I’m still grateful for the encounter that brought that immortal quote into my life. And I pray that those two are still alive, well, and have at some point today, flushed successfully.
N.F
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