My mother used to accuse me of being "silly." After all, once I reached the age of three, I was already showing prodigious skill in the artistic genre known as "Pee Pee Poo Poo Fartism." I was highly skilled at turning any topic of conversation into a giggling laugh-riot about urine, defecation, or flatulence. I was the star of the kindergarten class of 1974. Many a parent forbade their child to befriend me.
Although many children outgrow such affection for toilet humor, I am now approaching middle age and I still fall to pieces upon the mere utterance of the words "poo poo" or "caca."
Through my younger years, I took great pleasure every day in playing with dog poo found on the walk home with my friends. I would examine it for freshness, comment on the age of the sample, pick it up with a stick, and do something hilarious with it like put it in a mailbox or up the tailpipe of a car. Playing with feces became a pastime in my small group of friends.
One day, when I was in the third grade, I discovered a large pat of diarrhea outside in the school's loading dock. It was the smell that attracted me -- an acrid, stinging mix of sulfur and bile. I smelled it from at least twenty yards away and honed in.
The first thing I did was stare at it in stunned silence. What a find! The opportunities for amusement and mischief with this pat of human diarrhea would fill every recess period from that day until the last day of school! I ran away to collect my friends and, upon our return, we all fell on the asphalt in spasms of laughter at the sight of a large pat of diarrhea lying there silently like a ruin from the not-so-distant past.
When we regained our composure, we began to seriously consider this find. Clearly some other kid had an emergency and found the most secluded spot to deposit his ass oil. "But," I suggested, "how do we know it was another kid? Maybe it was a janitor! Or MAYBE a TEACHER!!! Maybe it was Mrs. Liu!! Her butt smells like this!” We fell on the ground once again.
The time to research the diarrhea's physical properties was soon at hand. First we found some Styrofoam and sprinkled it in there. My friend Josh was particularly brave and got close enough to hold his nose and put his initials in it with a stick. Of course, it dawned on him that people might take this marking to mean that he was the depositor of the diarrhea, so he quickly turned his initials into a happy face. This, again, sent us into spasms of laughter so hard one of my friends pissed his pants!
And that was only the first day.
The next day opened with temperatures well below freezing. I arrived at school early just to see the diarrhea again. The cool weather had neutralized the smell completely. The diarrhea was frozen, and the smiley face staring up into the cold, steely dawn with optimism. It had darkened to a deep shade of chocolate brown.
I had to see if it was frozen solid, so I poked it with a stick. Yep, it was solid. I could have picked it up and thrown it like a Frisbee.
The thought crossed my mind.
The thought crossed my friends' minds upon their arrival as well. It was frozen so solid that we could easily have scraped it up in one piece and not gotten any of it on us. But none of us had the guts to find out. We spent most of the day arguing over who should try to pick it up; and only a fraction of the discussion revolved around what we would actually DO with it once we did get it off the ground.
It was I who suggested we should put it in the school library. On the TOP shelf.
During recess that afternoon, we managed to put the plan into action. We scraped up the frozen diarrhea pat using a variety of sticks and other miscellaneous debris. It flaked a bit, but didn't thaw. I now had in my possession a mobile disc of diarrhea to play with. This filled me with a sense of power I have not felt again in my life.
Alas, I lacked the courage to actually go through with the plan, as well as a sufficient vessel to contain it while bringing it into the library. So I just picked it up with my mittened hands and went to the boys' room, where I placed it in the urinal and we, each of us in turn, peed on it. This warm bath thawed it enough to release the smell from its frozen prison and stink up the boys' room.
Oh, how we laughed.