warning: poop ahead

WARNING PART 2: POOP STILL AHEAD. and love, too. poop and love.

[early March twenty fourteen]

Drivin' down 29, on our way home, and we're talkin' about bowel movements and irregularity dang it, and how lucky she is to poop all the time, so easily, no matter what retreat she's at. It's not about the toilet for her; when the movement moves, she goes.

And it's funny how this poop-talk categorizes those masses of individuals in your life. Delineates that very fine and tenuous line between People With Whom You May Talk About Personal Poops and People With Whom You CANNOT. EVER. AH STOP.

Why is it that I find it so easy breezy to talk about all kinds of bodily functions with you, you, and you, but would never ever ever want to reach that kind of level of relationship with you, you, and then you? It's a funny thing -- and more complicated, I think, than just how "close" we feel with one another, or how much we like each other, appreciate each other, or even how many minutes of life I have spent, steeped in your presence.

I'm thinking it has more to do with familiarity and defamiliarity. How familiar, and unfamiliar, you are, with a particular individual's daily goings-on and quotidian actions and states. Someone I have seen emerging from a sleeping bag after a night of pajamatalk = Yes. Check. Someone I have seen with a face void of all make-up (and vice versa) = Probably so! Someone I have arguably spent a LOT of my time reading of, thinking of, agreeing with, admiring = MAYBE NOT. Case in point: John Piper [in the loo] (it's just an example).

It happened to you, too, right? You immediately got a picture of JP sitting on a toilet and it was like OH GOSH STOP NO because there exists no reservoir of quotidian images of this person in my mind -- no familiar brain scans of JP in the kitchen, JP in conversation with his dog (or cat), JP taking a normal-life kind of stroll. And no matter how familiar I become with the thoughts and purported feelings of this person, I will probably never feel comfortable discussing bowel movements with him until I've seen his face devoid of ALL the makeup...You know what I mean.

Because, I'm realizing, it's in the little moments of quotidian revelations that you - I - fall most in love with people. Seeing those bare-morning faces. Watching a person go through her night bed-readying routine, walking around in their comfortable trails: bathroom sink to the kitchen for a glass of water to the bed. g'night. Noting how he pours his coffee into his favorite mug, and holds it tight in his left hand, always. How he blinks kinda funny. How she curses, sh*TTT, without really meaning to [oops, sorry sorry].

And I love -- and think it makes a lot of sense -- that the love would come with the poop, enabled through the same channels of astonishing, disgusting, cycling trivialities.