I Could Be Wrong, But... |
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Unless noted otherwise, all writing on ICBWB.com is by David Boyne. No one else is to blame. And while David Boyne does not own the words he has used (English being a truly open source code) the exact way he has arranged those words is protected by copyright laws. Thank you for playing. |
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Plein Air Peeing Recently, finding myself alone in the chilled early morning sun-drenched backyard of a suburban San Diego home, I rediscovered a long forgotten small pleasure of being a guy, and being alive: peeing outdoors. Don’t get me wrong: indoor plumbing is one of my all time favorite inventions. If not for indoor plumbing, humans could not live in cities of millions, with all the cultural, intellectual, and social pleasures to be experienced there, while not expiring en masse from the noxious effects of their collective effluvia. But in the sanitary time and place in which I live, peeing outdoors is unusual, out of the ordinary. Not to mention illegal. While I was in fact peeing outdoors, it was different from peeing in public; not like standing outside a Blarney Stone bar in the 5pm Manhattan rush hour, peeing on the Locksmith shop next door. I was alone, had plenty of privacy, stood partly screened by the leafy tree I was watering, and when done, I’m sure I left nothing but my footprints on the grass and a coded message only the neighborhood’s dogs could parse. Peeing outdoors every now and then gives one perspective. We live almost all of the hours of our modern lives indoors, which is to live in boxes of one form or another. What is a house or office, but a series of connected boxes? What is a car, but a box on wheels. What is an airplane, train, duck blind or television, but a box we choose to put ourselves into as we move through time and space. How many minutes of our lives do we simply stand outside somewhere, looking around, feeling the sun, temperature, quality of the air, just being alive? The reason I found myself alone in the chilled early morning sun-drenched backyard of a suburban San Diego home, peeing on a small tree near a wood rail fence, was because the artist friend who I was visiting had no indoor plumbing in her rented studio space. She had also made me drink cup after cup of some strange herbal tea I suspect was a powerful diuretic developed by the CIA for use in torturing, I mean interrogating, prisoners. I peed a long time. And as I peed, a montage of memories played across the movie screen of my mind. I saw myself 6-years old, wearing only underpants, being chased around the yard of our home by a visiting uncle, then suddenly pulling up beside a dogwood tree and showering it. I saw myself, 17-years old and in the scraggly woods of Connecticut, peeing on the rocks and fire-colored autumn leaves covering the hilly ground. I saw myself 36-years-old, at 3am of the first night I had gotten the dog I had always, always wanted, standing in a chilly suburban backyard in Portland beneath a starry, starry sky, peeing, with the golden retriever puppy who would share so much of the next 11 and one-half years of my life, beside me, peeing. I smiled with the memory of a 5-year-old boy I lived who, for many months after watching the movie Ghostbusters, would bust into the bathroom when I was peeing and join in, both of us shouting, "Don't cross the steams!" I shivered from a sudden sweeping over me of cold New England winter air, and heard across decades of life, a rowdy pack of beer-drinking guys waiting in a heated, idling car pulled to the side of a black ribbon of road, as I peed on a snow bank. Peeing simultaneously in both worlds, I almost lost my balance, there in the San Diego backyard as I looked up at the sun, just as I had on the side of the road in Connecticut, when peeing and suddenly looking straight up into the thousand-watt bright full moon in the black sky. Then looking down at the blue-white snow and shadows of the landscape, the steam from my arc of urine rising into the white beam of the headlights. I laughed quietly, peeing in the backyard in San Diego, as I remembered the first girl I had loved and lived with who would sometimes come into the bathroom as I peed and plead, “Oh! Let me aim it!” Which made me recall another long-forgotten pleasure of being alive: making love outdoors. But that’s another story.
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