NAPI IS NEVER EMBARRASSED

This doctored photo was posted to accompany comment about tabooed behavior in close quarters.  Recently a very drunk man (how did he get on the plane?) peed without restraint while sitting in a stupor.  Most of us have been on a flight that nauseated everyone with the smell of vomit, triggering those of us who’d been in control until then.  In the early days of my teaching, one student was gaseous beyond everyone else.  We made him sit by the open window even in cold weather.  Everyone wore their coats anyway, as though we might have to flee from the cavalry, not entirely unrealistic for these people.

Blackfeet tolerance for what I frankly called farting in those days is a cultural feature since Napi, that bad example, was constantly having conversations with his A-hole.  If everyone more or less lives outside and eats things that are a little marginal, one’s oosie is more an individual problem, esp. if the wind blows as much as it does here.  

But modern life with a Euro fetish about cleanliness is not tolerant.  Until recently the media only mentioned the possibility of smell and muck problems in terms of magically reliable and pristine “hygiene products” and never admitted that for street people, such modern products weren’t available, not even diapers for babies.  

As part of training for hospital chaplaincies, we learned about problems with the last section of intestine so severe that a colostomy had to be performed, so that the rectum was bypassed until it healed.  Like so many remedies for problems that would normally be managed daily, almost involuntarily, the same functions become conscious and take a lot of attention and small chores.  If zits are a cause of worry for developing kids, think what a colostomy might mean.

Little is discussed in terms of painful guts or even constipation.  Again, the emphasis is on products and they are considered magical.  But lately our appetite for the appalling and extreme has led platforms like YouTube to actually picture the enormous contents of an impacted intestine: pounds of excrement.  Hospitals keep a set of graduated spoons, like those in a kitchen, to scrape out what they can.  After all, food-in means excrement-out, transformed food.  We’ve gone from using Latin euphemisms to street jargon like "shit" and "crap" to the rather mysterious “stool” to the babytalk of “poop.”

"Pee" is a rather different problem, though we know it fascinates our President.  At one time in the context of feminism there was a call for video games that weren’t all male-violent.  Instead of going to female-violence, one team of developers devised a game in which a woman comes home from the grocery store and immediately feels an overwhelming urge to get to the bathroom, but has to run a maze with a time limit.  It made people laugh, but why game it when living it?

This phenomenon is “conditioning” when the body subconsciously “learns” that getting home is linked to draining the bladder.  There are other causes of urine incontinence that can be found online, and even suggested remedies.  Remember when we all worried about how Charles Lindbergh peed when crossing the Atlantic?  And now the guys who cut the grass along highways worry about running over and breaking into a spray the cast-out bottles of urine from truckers trying to make fast time.  The machine is not adaptive to the body.

The new consciousness of consequences to nerve numbness “down there” and the stingy scarcity of public bathrooms is said to be due to the pressure of an increasing number of old people.  We’re more shameless and more willing to choose comfort over appearances, non-conformity when necessary

Yesterday, bringing back my clean clothes from the laundromat, I reflected on underwear.  First of all, I have become impatient with the white cotton underpants, absolutely standard, that I’ve worn for years and have accumulated into a big heap that generally lasts a month.  So I’m experimenting at Shopco, first with flimsy plaid boxers for men, the kind that boys make sure blouse out of their jeans at the top.  I’ve got a dozen of them and they are FAR more comfortable, esp. when it’s hot weather.  Even more daring, I bought some knit men’s underpants that go halfway down the thigh and cling tight.  The plaids are predictably dark, but the knit pants are black and gray only.  So they’re young man’s pants but conservative at the same time.  They’re very comfortable.  I admit that I wouldn’t have known they existed except for the aggressive advertising online.

Then I looked at my underwear drawer since I need to make space.  I just bought two new bras that hook in the front and are quite relaxed in design.   I’ve got an old woman’s waistline bosom now — flat but shapelessly bulgy though I prefer to go sans support.  Winter is not a problem -- I treat t-shirts like bras -- but in summer that’s too hot.  I discover I already have a couple of front-hook bras, but have no idea why I’m not wearing them.  Also some bras that I creatively altered with flannel pads on the straps and other nips and tucks.  I remember that they ride up in the back and are uncomfortable.  Two are black bras that fit but they are so old that they are fragile, rotten.  Somehow I have five slips.  Two are full slips, black, that I must have bought in the ministerial years.  Three are half-slips, one black, one white and one “blush” which is pink.  You’d think that someone who was briefly a costumer and studied period underwear would be more aware.

Impatient with old yellowed underpants, I cruised YouTube  to see what to do and was advised to use laundry augmenters, not just bleach but also laundry soda or hydrogen peroxide, and to soak for a day and possibly boil some things.  I want to do this more seriously with old pillowslips and tablecloths.  I bought a big kettle to use.  So far, the pants are improved but not solved.  I need to learn more about organic stains, which seem to be the hardest.

Why should anyone be too ashamed to figure this stuff out?  I believe in being proactive, esp if I can quietly use YouTube.  If Russia is watching, maybe they need to.