The Stewed Apricots

"Your teeth will go and your strength and nobody will be afraid of you anymore...the young ones will just push you around and use you for sex when they feel like it. All you'll get to read is what you write on the wall. You think the court will care? You've seen the old ones. They cry when they don't like the stewed apricots."

My esteem for Thomas Harris has cooled considerably since my college years, but I'll never forget this passage.

Of course you know Hannibal the Cannibal, Harris' most iconic creation -- a devastatingly intelligent, perceptive, and cultured man who just happens to be an insane serial murderer with a focus on the culinary side of life (and death). In this scene, the dastardly Dr. Chilton is attempting to manipulate and torment our hero into helping to apprehend Buffalo Bill (you may remember the more abbreviated version of the scene from the film). So the good doctor describes the life that awaits Hannibal as one of the elderly patients in a state mental institution.

God damn, but that quote is some good words. Mmmm boy. They go directly to, and grab hold of, a specific and widely-shared fear that lurks in many of us. Not me, though; you can't really call it lurking when you're looking it in the face.

You don't have to be an improbably-intellectual serial killer to respond to those words. Nor do you need to be facing a life sentence in an institution of some kind (though in a sense, aren't we all?). You just need to be getting older -- and since we all are, we all can understand the hideous pathos of this quote.

It's lived with me since (let's check) 1989 or so, when I first read the book. A minor nightmare, recurring every time I found myself to be more emotionally affected than the circumstances seemed to call for. Every time I didn't like the stewed apricots, so to speak.

This morning I shat myself. A new low. Yippee.

Oh, the odd skidmark is not uncommon in my shorts. My wife would testify to this, if she ever did the laundry (but we'll stop that particular tangent before it starts). I don't really know how common such things are, but I'm willing to bet that a sizable portion of the male (and possibly female) population gets some brownage in the back-crotch, so to speak, on a fairly regular basis.

But this was something more substantial. This was the dramatic result of misinterpreting my body's signals. Or maybe my body's signals aren't what they used to be. I really have nobody to blame but myself, so I will. And I'll punish myself too, for being such a dirty dirty little boy...

...but enough of that sort of talk. Here's the story:

I have a fairly regular morning routine. I hit the snooze button once, get up either right then and there...or ten minutes later when the alarm goes off again. I make my way downstairs, take a piss (yup, that upstairs bathroom STILL hasn't been fixed), make the coffee, drink an Instant Breakfast™ while I read the news and let the percolator work its dusky magic, drink some coffee while I read some more news, feed the dogs, put some food in a bag for my lunch, take the dogs outside, drink more coffee and read more news, then see that it's starting to get late and jump in the shower. It is usually almost enough time to wake up and summon a little enthusiasm for the onrushing day.

The routine isn't set in stone. Sometimes I'll run out of news or be so disgusted by the world that I'll read comic books instead. I'm trying to make up for two whole decades of being too old to read comic books -- it really set me back. I'm up to 1992, so my favorite years are behind me, but there's still some stuff ahead that I'm excited to see. Wait, am I still talking about comics?

Oh, and the routine changes slightly when my wife is working. She usually comes down for a wake-up piss after I've been up for about a half-hour or so. While she's getting ready upstairs, I'll usually throw some of her clothes into the dryer to freshen up. When she's on vacation, as she is now, she'll stay asleep until I'm about ready to leave. It's not much of a difference either way.

Whenever possible, I take a decent morning dump. Sometimes there's just no time, and sometimes the poop ship is just not ready to weigh anchor just yet. But with a full workday ahead of me, and an aversion (fairly common, as I understand) to shitting in a public restroom whenever I can avoid it, you can see where I might prefer to crap prior to my morning commute.

This morning I was able to get the shit out of the way first thing. A nice healthy unburdening; my bloated bowels felt comfortably relived and I had every reason to think that I wouldn't even have to think about pooping until the workday was done.

Yet 15-20 minutes later, during coffee and the news, I got the message from below that told me there may be more to come. I wasn't really surprised; sometimes that happens in the morning. Half of my crap is an early riser, while the other half needs that special alarm clock that only coffee and cigarettes can provide.

So no big deal. It was obviously nothing more than a 'distant early warning' signal -- the kind that you can feel in the middle of a workday and put off more or less comfortably until you're safe and sound back at home. I planned to get up, bring my empty coffee cup to the kitchen (as long as I'm getting up anyway), and then head to the bathroom for a follow-up crap at my leisure.

Good plan, but my bowels didn't get the memo and couldn't wait. As I stood in the kitchen, setting down my coffee cup, I could feel the insistent surge of wet shit burst through my asshole and emerge from between my cheeks.

It wasn't that it was unstoppable, exactly -- actually, it was all over before I could even consider whether stopping it was even an option.

As one sometimes does in such situations, I momentarily stood completely still. Perhaps I was dimly reasoning that the crap critters would go back into their cave if I didn't startle them with sudden (or any) movements. Perhaps I was worried that I would cause more poop to pop out if I started moving -- which is, in fact, exactly what happened.

And my kitchen is five to seven steps from the bathroom. You might think that even a assfull of Jamaican Jerk chili and Dulcolax™ would be willing to wait that long, and all I had in me was half of a turkey sandwich and some cranberry juice.

Well, there's not much else to tell. I got rid of the rest of my crap in the usual way, and then did a bit of necessary laundry.

Stewed apricots.

Getting dressed for work, I discovered that one of my new shirts (which were purchased online two weeks ago and delivered just yesterday) didn't fit, which made it a perfect match for the three pairs of new pants, which also didn't fit.

My wife got up just in time to see me not wearing any of the new clothes that she'd picked out for me. I suppose that's preferable to seeing me with wet shit dripping down my leg.

Stewed apricots.