Thoughts on "National Shower with a Friend Day"

  The other day it was “National Shower with a Friend Day.”

  I don’t know who comes up with these “National Days.”  Does someone have to come up in front of Congress and say, “We want a National Day for thus-and-so.”  Then congress argues about it, agree on something then a proclamation is issued?

  Or is it somebody just says, “I want February 5^th to be ‘National Shower with a Friend Day’” and so then they have dibs on that day?  Now that’s a possibility, because February 5^th was not only “National Shower with a Friend Day” but also “National Weatherperson’s Day” and “World Nutella Day.”  So I reckon weatherpeople and the chocolate breakfast spread people also had dibs on February 5^th.

  Questions came up in my mind:  Who was this for?  Was this for couples who have trouble with intimacy...giving them an excuse to get intimate?  You know, they’ve been out on dates like 17 times and still haven’t kissed because neither one knows how to bridge the gap…so on “National Shower with a Friend Day” one turns to the other and says, “You wanna take a shower together?”  Then love blossoms in the air and rainbows and dancing unicorns appear…or whatever.

  Do you shower with or without your clothes on on “National Shower with a Friend Day”?  Maybe you’re supposed to wear a swimsuit.  Maybe you’re supposed to be buck naked.

  What crossed my mind on “National Shower with a Friend Day” was the time a Belgian lesbian barged in on me in a shower in Bisbee, Arizona.

  It’s not out of bigotry or xenophobia that I tell you Franziska was a Belgian lesbian, it’s just statement of fact: Franziska* was from Belgium and she was very emphatic that people knew she was a lesbian.

  If you’ve never been to Bisbee I’ll describe it to you as a former copper mining town about 90 miles southeast of Tucson, about a rifle shot from the Mexican border.  In addition to everyday folks who work in county government, the town is populated by a significant chunk of artists, neo-hippies, alternative lifestylers and people with no visible means of support.

  You knew you were in an alternative type community when you passed by a sign reading, “This section of highway cleaned by The Southeast Arizona LGBTQ Alliance*.”

  While I worked 30 miles away at a radio station in Sierra Vista, the woman I hung around with…Muriel*…ran the town dance studio.

  Consequently our house was frequented by a parade of colorful characters:  The topless breastfeeding mom, the couple frequently covered in scratches and bruises because they fought with each other but insisted the marks were from a bar fight they were in…often.  There was the lesbian couple who had asked Muriel if I could “help them make a baby” and then there was Franziska.

  Franziska and her partner Camionelle had a dog grooming business.

  One summer Muriel went away with the two to a beachside resort in Mexico on the Gulf of California.  At the time I didn’t think much of it, didn’t think anything weird of the three of them traipsing off to Mexico, didn’t have a problem with Muriel calling me and saying she was going to spend an extra week down there with the two dog groomers.  But after Muriel and I had split up I looked at this particular time as one where after she came back there had been a palpable shift in our relationship.

  Then there was the time that there was a party at Franziska and Camionelle’s.  Muriel said I was invited too because, after all, to many of her friends I was known as “Mr. Muriel.”

  I showed up at Franziska and Camionelle’s, walked through the door and suddenly the house, full of only women, went silent.

  “What?” I looked around and smiled, “Do I smell funny?”

  “No,” said Camionelle, “You’re just the first man who has been in this house in probably 5 years.”

  I was surprised at how anti-male Franziska and Camionelle were, after all, I had moved to Bisbee from Phoenix after hearing that the town was an alternative utopia.  Back then I still naively believed that somewhere there was a place where folks all got along.

  Dumbass me.

  It was in Bisbee I learned that there is no such thing as utopia.

  I learned that no matter what side of the political spectrum you fancy yourself on, the left…the right, both sides have their extremes.

  I had a glimpse into the anti-man trip Franziska was on when she gave a talk at one International Women’s Day celebration.

  It was another one of those Bisbee things where I was one of a handful of men in the audience made up mostly of women.  I was there because Muriel was there doing a dance presentation in honor of the occasion.

  Then it was Franziska’s turn to speak.

  And speak she did.

  Franziska gave an emphatic talk on “The Hysterectomy Conspiracy.”

  I can’t remember the whole thing but basically she launched into a diatribe against the American medical profession, that the removal of women’s uteruses was a power play by men to rob women of their strength and rightful place as the true leaders of humankind.  She went on to say hysterectomies are totally unnecessary, that when hysterectomies are performed the surgery disrupts women’s internal organs by taking out necessary balance and connective tissue rendering women weak.

  I sat in the audience with furrowed brow pondering her points.  I was fresh from a gig in Phoenix working at a talk radio station where conspiracy theories were their stock and trade.  At this point I was still two years away from tapping into the internet, still 15 years away from a cell phone with internet access, so I had no way to check the veracity of all the supposed facts she was spewing out that night.

  I had trouble imagining a secret cabal of powerful doctors directing other doctors to deliberately rob women of their strength by removing uteruses.

  The next year Franziska gave a talk on “The Gendercide of the Middle Ages:  Details of the Holocaust No One Talks About,” in which she described the wholesale slaughter of women from about 1200 to 1650 as a move to unseat women from their natural position of power.  The women were branded as witches and 6,000,000 women died.

  As I sat in the audience I pondered a loss of 6,000,000 women at that point in human history…that would’ve been a helluva dent in the population.  Wouldn’t that have been about most of the women in Europe?

  Oh well.

  I was in no position to argue.

  And Muriel danced on.

  Sometime later Muriel had a bunch of women over to the house for something or another, I wasn’t paying attention.

  I had to work the next day and so I had to take a shower and get ready for bed.

  I walked into the living room.

  “Excuse me,” I said as I looked over the 10 or 12 women there, “I have to use the bathroom for about 10 minutes.  Does anyone need to go in there before I do?”

  There was a general shaking of heads to indicate “no.”

  Except Franziska.

  “You just came in here to announce that in hopes that we would imagine you naked in the bathroom,” said Franziska.  “I can tell you none of us are interested.”

  I had to stifle a laugh at Franziska’s idea.

  “No, Franziska, that’s not why I came in here,” I said.  “I came in to see if anyone needs to go in there before I tie the room up for a few minutes.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Franziska.

  And so I went into the bathroom, brushed my teeth then hopped in the shower.

  About a minute later the bathroom door opens (there was no lock) and there’s Franziska heading for the sink.

  “HEY!” I yelled, gathering the shower curtain around me.  “I’M SHOWERING IN HERE.”

  “Well I’m certainly not coming to join you.  I’m washing my hands,” said Franziska.

  “HOW ABOUT USING THE KITCHEN SINK.”

  “You Americans and your false modesty,” said Franziska.  “You men thinking about sex all the time.”

  She turned around and left, slamming the door behind her.

  And I never saw her again.

  Well except for that time I came over to the house after Muriel and I split up.

  I came to pick up some of my stuff.  Muriel had said to come on over so I did.

  I got some stuff from the house and remembered some things I had out in the garage.

  Walking outside in the evening dark I heard some voices, looked over toward the hot tub and there was Muriel with Franziska and Camionelle, all naked in the hot tub.

  “Keep on walking, Mr. Man,” Franziska said loudly.  “Nothing to see here, and you have nothing we want.”

E P I L O G U E

  They had a fire in Bisbee some months ago.

  Seeing the place in the news brought back a flood of memories.

  I took to the Internet and looked up people I had known.

  The woman who had once been editor of the paper moved home to Houston.  Nermala who had once asked if I could help her and her lover have a baby had died…and when she died she had a new partner, not the one I had known.

  Many had moved away from the town “Where normal is weird and weird is normal.”

  But Franziska was still there.

  I looked her up on The Facebook.

  In that section where it says “Studied at” Franziska wrote “None of your damn business!”

  And in the other education section where it said “Went to” Franziska wrote “Also none of your damn business!”

  Ahh, Franziska was still the Franziska I had known.

  And a part of me still wondered, after all these years, why Franziska seemed so pissed off at the world.

*All names changed because people get upset over the slightest thing these days……

Dead or Unplugged...I Wonder

  If you say you’ve NEVER wondered what an “ex” was up to you MIGHT be a fibber.

  I’m giving you an old-fashioned knowing wink here.

  I think Muriel is dead.

  I hung around with Muriel in the 90’s.  We hung around with each other for 7 years, lived in a few places in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona, went on a few adventures and then it was over.

  And I’m just sensing that she’s “gone on to Glory.”

  Have you ever had a sensing like that about someone?

  It’s like that time there was a school shooting over a thousand miles away, a place where I used to live and when I heard the news I knew an old friend of mine hadn’t made it…knew it because I felt she was gone off this plane.  Turns out I was right.  In a school filled with a few dozen teachers she was one of the three who died.

  From time to time a thought of Muriel would cross my mind, wonder if she’d come back to her page on the social media, her page where her last entry was March two years ago.  I mean she used to be really active on it, railing against the establishment, trying to get people to sign a petition to stop a horse slaughterhouse that was proposed for her home town in New Mexico, protesting the war in Afghanistan, stuff like that.

  I typed her name into The Internet:  “Muriel Auzermann.”*   Her last entry in cyberspace was an entry the next month where she was offering one line of condolence to an old friend who had just become a widow.

  Do I care?

  I suppose not.

  I just wonder.

  Because I want to see if there’s anything to this feeling, this feeling that she is gone.  I believe we have senses we ignore, that once upon a time we were told to ignore.

  Now and then when she crosses my mind I search obituaries.  I search county files.

  Nothing.

  I told The Lady of the House that I thought Muriel was dead.

  “Why do you care?” she asked.

  “Because she hasn’t been on the social media in two years,” I said.

  “Big deal,” said The Lady of the House.  “She wouldn’t be the first to have unplugged from Facebook or whatever.”

  “Yeah,” I said.  “But I just have this feeling.”

  Most of the time The Lady of the House is right about stuff, she’s real smart like that.

  But I still had a feeling.

  So I consulted with the lone member of Clan McGee who can plug into the “Cosmic Electric” as I call it.  Maybe she could tell me if she could sense anything about Muriel.

  I texted Cosmic Daughter (C.D.) a bit about Muriel, told her about her whereabouts on social media, told her about her last known location in the southern Rockies.

  A few minutes went by after I texted C.D.

  “I kinda get the impression she’s dead but I’m not seeing an obituary,” she wrote.  “Then this scene came to me from ‘NCIS’ where Ducky talks about what happens to the dead when no one misses them.  After 30 days they’re cremated and the county scatters the ashes.”

  More minutes passed.  Then more words.

  “Something about it was sudden,” wrote C.D.  “She’s ghosted pretty hardcore.  It’s a little disconcerting.”

  “Yeah, it’s like one day she’s there railing against this horse slaughterhouse then she’s gone,” I texted.  “No goodbye, no ‘Adios my friends’ (wink), nothing.  What do you vibe about her character, her personality?” I texted.

  “Seems mischievous, wry sense of humor,” wrote daughter.  “Carried something inside her that made her really quiet and weird sometimes.”

  “She never found peace after the death of her mother and sister in a car wreck when she was a kid,” I wrote.  “Drunk driver hit them head-on.”

  “She’s upset about a necklace,” wrote C.D. “Oooh, wait, it happened in a room with white walls and a tan floor.”

  “What happened,” I texted.  “Is that where she is on the ‘other side’?”

  “No,” wrote C.D.  “The room where she died.  It’s like an empty kitchen.  Now she’s holding this silver necklace as if she wants someone to see it.”

  “Interesting,” I texted.

  “Hot and dry there,” she wrote.  “Now she’s yelling at the sunset and she’s not looking at me.”

  C.D. was silent for a few minutes.

  “She may have had cancer,” she wrote.  “Something in her eyes in the last picture on her social media.  She keeps showing me the right side of her head and gesticulating pain, like she had a stroke.”

  “She was fighting,” C.D. went on, “She woke up that morning to fight whatever it was.  Something happened in that kitchen.”

  “A partner?” I texted, “A burglar?”

  “No,” she wrote, “No one’s there.  The room kinda just topples up and something breaks.”

  “So,” I texted, “You perceive she’s dead?”

  “I do,” daughter wrote, “I may be wrong but I do.  She grins and says she’s not dead.  The space where she is now is open but it’s empty.  She didn’t have kids?”

  “No,” I texted back, “She absolutely wanted no kids.  She loved other people’s kids but wanted none of her own.”

  “Interesting,” texted C.D., “She regrets that now.  Oh, and she misses coffee.”

  I remember owning an electric coffee bean grinder when I hung out with Muriel.  She always wanted her coffee to come from freshly ground coffee beans.

  So I really didn’t get a solid answer about Muriel.  I think there’s a 55% probability she’s “gone on to Glory” and a 45% probability she just abandoned The Internet, after all, when she and I were together she’d have nothing to do with computers and cyberspace.  Then, like a switch got thrown in her brain, she was “all in” when it came to the cyberwebs.

  Long ago, wow, has it been 27 years?  Long ago Muriel told me a story about a cat she had.

  “I had an orange cat named Tuna,” she said as we sat in the living room one evening.  “I changed apartments and couldn’t keep him.  My brother was teaching in the Hopi Nation in Arizona and he said he’d take Tuna, take care of him.

  “So I drove to Arizona and left Tuna with my brother,” Muriel went on.  “About a year later we were at a family thing in Roswell and I asked him about Tuna.”

  “Tuna disappeared from my apartment, it was the weirdest thing,” said Brother.  “He didn’t slip out, he just wasn’t there anymore.  I looked around the neighborhood.”

  “Some time later I was telling the story at school on a Parent-Teacher conference day,” Brother said.  “There we were in this room and there was this Hopi elder, part of a family who came that day, this Hopi elder sitting in the corner.”

  “Your cat is still here,” said the elder.  “Tuna has moved on, he wears a mantle of stardust and walks the nation scaring coyote.  That gives him great pleasure.  He laughs a cat laugh.”

  “How did you know his name?” Brother asked the elder.

  “He drops by my home every now and then in the evenings and we talk.”

  Maybe Muriel just moved on too.

-End-

   *Name is made up to cover my ass in this litigious world….

Girls Pass Gas Too

  

  I was 18 years old when I first heard a girl fart.

  It was an amazing thing to me, I have no other way to describe it.

  I mean being as I’d never heard a girl do that before when I first heard it…it was a big moment.

  Guys fart, it’s what we do.  But a girl?  I think “amazed” is a good word to use the first time I heard it.

  It was during my first quarter in college.  I don’t know how I met Kirsten but there she was in my dorm room on a fall Saturday afternoon.

  And we were just talking.

  I’m not cleaning this up or anything.

  “Swar t’God” as my old dead friend Mark might say, we were JUST talking.

  It turned out that even though her dad worked for the U.S. State Department and she had been to Europe and stuff and was from the D.C. area she had been born in the mountains of Virginia, not far from where I was from.

  “We oughta go on a road trip,” I said to Kirsten.

  “Next weekend,” she said.  “Say, I need to use the restroom.”

  Hit pause here.

  Remember, this is a dorm room we’re sitting in.  An all male dormitory.  To use the restroom you have to go down the hall where there was a restroom with 3 toilet stalls, a couple of urinals and a shower room with 3 or 4 shower heads.

  “But,” I said to Kirsten, “There aren’t any girls toilets here.”

  Kirsten stared at me for a few seconds.

  “You go check and make sure no one’s in there,” she said, talking slow like she was talking to someone with diminished mental capability, “Then I go in and you ‘stand guard’ outside so no one goes in while I’m in there.”

  “Oh!” I said, having a lightbulb-over-my-head moment.

  “I’m the first girl you’ve had in your room, aren’t I?”

  “Sure,” I said.  I didn’t see any reason to lie, besides I’m sure she could tell.

  So we went on down the hall to the restroom, I checked to make sure no one was in there, she went in and I stood by the door.

  Then the noises began.

  And more noises.

  Noises of explosive flatulence.

  I furrowed my brow, standing all alone outside the bathroom.

  This was something I never heard before.

  And so Kirsten emerged from the restroom, we went back to my room and made a date to go on a country ramble the next Saturday so she could see the mountain town where she was born.

  Then she was gone.

  I sat on my bean-bag chair in my dorm room pondering this new experience.

  In walked my roommate Dax.

  “You have a dumbass look,” said Dax.  “You stoned?”

  “No, man,” admittedly the next words I said…I should’ve run them through the word editor in my brain, because I really didn’t say what I meant…

  “I just found out girls fart,” I said.

  Dax burst out laughing.

  “WHAT?” said Dax.

  “I mean I just heard a girl fart for the first time,” I said.

  “You’ve…never…heard…a…girl…fart?” Dax was still laughing.

  “No, man,” I said.

  “What’d you think?  They save them up and then once a year they go out in the woods and blow out one gigantic fart?”

  “No, man, of course not…I…I just never heard a girl cut one before.”

  Me and Dax shot the breeze about it for a bit and resolved that a really great relationship with a girl was one where you could freely pass gas in front of each other.

    Now there was that time that my grandmother and her sister, Aunt Maude, were out in the yard and Aunt Maude bent over and let one fly.

  I laughed and laughed.

  Aunt Maude turned, pointed at me and said, “Now boy, when you’re old that’ll happen to you and you’ll be embarrassed.”

  Yeah, there was that time, but I guess I didn’t relate to Aunt Maude being a girl…she was Aunt Maude, she was like…from another branch of the human family tree.

  After that fall day, when Kirsten came by, it seems like I heard girls passing gas all the time.

  One memorable time was the next summer when I went out with Nancy who would go on to be a doctor.  I just mention that because it’s kinda funny thinking about a farting doctor.

  We had gone to a movie and returned to my grandma’s house where we sat on the back porch shooting the breeze, telling stories.

  I reckon I told a pretty funny story, Nancy started laughing hard and then……..

  “FFFFRAAAPPPPPP…” Nancy farted.

  Nancy promptly jumped up, ran out in the yard, turned around, pointed at me and said, “Don’t you EVER tell anyone I did that.”

  “What?” I said, “It’s perfectly natural.”

  “Girls aren’t supposed to fart in front of boys,” said Nancy.

  Well, Nancy has “done gone on to Glory” so I reckon it’s okay to tell you she farted in front of me on that summer night over 40 years ago.

  It would be years later that I would understand why, as a young boy, a farting woman was a mystery to me.

  It was in the 80’s and I was hanging around with a woman I’ll call “Darcy.”

  We were out on the town and decided to go pay a visit to my mom who lived nearby.

  Darcy had been enjoying a few alcoholic beverages that afternoon so when we got to my mom’s house Darcy was talky, giggly and flat-out drunk.

  So as we sat in mom’s living room talking Darcy began to pass gas.

  Loudly.

  And every time Darcy did she broke out laughing.

  “Come help me in the kitchen,” my mom said to me.

  I got up and left Darcy on the sofa farting proudly and laughing at herself.

  In the kitchen my mom turned and pointed an index finger at my nose.

  “I just want you to know that in the 40 years your father and I were together we never did that in front of each other or in front of you children,” said mom.

  I stood there and smiled.  I started laughing.

  “You don’t know how much you’ve cleared up a great mystery in my life,” I laughed.

  “FFFRAAAPPPP,” came the noise from the living room and more laughter.