A while back Brother Steve wrote a comment on the blog:
Nick, did you get the latest Occidental mag? It has that picture with you and Rex in it…..and your enlighting colon remarks….from the guy whose Fang contribution was about farts, as I recall.
The Oxy mag, to which he refers, is this thing that comes out twice yearly with the class notes in it. I had thrown it out but retrieved it from the trash when I read his comment. I had thought they wouldn’t print my colon remarks. I was in a bad mood when I wrote it:
So I tested positive on the fecal matter test and they practically forced me to go in for that colon thing where they knock you out a bit and stick the tube with the camera all the way up there. I was sure I was dying. So I was lying there with my bum in the cold air and asked the nurse lady plaintively what might cause blood in the stool, and she said the particular fecal matter test I had taken gives all sorts of false positives. “Great!” I thought sacrastically. Afterwards the doctor said I had a normal looking colon for a 61 year old man. I guess that’s good. So my colon is aging along just like my face, except that I can’t see it. Which is good too I guess.
Nobody writes a class note like I do: the other folks write about what they are doing or what job they have or how they bumped into each other on a trip to Hawaii. I write about my colon. I can’t help it. I have an anal humor streak. Sometimes I will be in the corridor with colleagues and get them into laughing and when I go into my anal humor mode, some of them actually just leave, more or less politely. Well, got to go now.
I am honestly befuddled. I mean what’s so offensive about talking about farts and shit. I mean anal humor—Swift did it all the time. It’s positively Rabelaisian. By which I intend to indicate that there is an honorable anal humor streak (or should I say skid mark) running throughout some of the greatest of Western literature. Jeez, I am in a long line of analists.
Sometimes, people say, Please, Nick, not while I am eating. I think this is absurd. What better time to talk about anal matters since people are stuffing food into the tube from which turds will eventually come at the other end?
Recently I was writing a song the punch line of which was:
We’re born in blood and feces; we die in our own shit.
Nobody ever said you have to like it…
Well, I do have to admit that song is not likely to reach a mass audience.
Brother Steve, in his comment refers to a little article I wrote for the college humor magazine. It can be found in these pages at.
