October 14, 2002

• Today, Gentle Readers, I shall blog about a subject close to all of us–shit.  As a word, shit is one of the most potent metaphors of our time.  For instance, if you are very worried or scared, you shit bricks.  If you throw something away, you have shit canned it.  Bad shit is a consumable of very poor quality, usually street drugs.  Someone who is overly worked or overly competant is said to be able to eat sawdust and shit 2x4s.  Someone who is totally clueless can’t tell shit from Shinola.    Someone in a bad situation is up shit creek.  If the situation is very bad, he is up shit creek without a paddle.  If the situation is truely terrible, he is up shit creek without a paddle in a lead-bottom canoe.  One can take a shit, take shit, have the shits, or be shit out of luck.

  
  

  In addition, it is a well-known fact that flight recorders often record these common last words of pilots–”Oh shit.”  And just to class up this little essay, I must mention John Ciardi, who observed in his introduction to his most excellant translation of Dante’s Inferno, noted that Protestants usually use shit as an expletive, while Catholics usually use profanity,i.e., God damn it, or somesuch.(Oh and by the way, I understand that the last words of rednecks are usually “Hey, watch this!” ) Anyway, shit–or the disposal thereof–is a major issue here in the Frozen North.Offhand, I can’t think of anyone I know who has an indoor shitter.  Outhouses rule!  Except for many villages, where it is too cold for outhouses.  (This is for a couple of reasons.  For one thing, when it is 60 below zero outside, you don’t really want to be hanging your naked ass out, outdoors.  Plus, once you use an outhouse for any length of time in the winter, the frozen feces tend to pile up like a nasty brown stalagmite–we call this a shit-cicle.)  Where there are no outhouses, honey buckets prevail.  A honey bucket is a five-gallon bucket that  one shits in until it is full.  Villages usually have someone whose job it is to collect and  dispose of the contents.  That person really earns his pay, I should think.

  
  

  Now critter shit is a totally different issue.  I have the honor of cleaning our three-cat litter box.  It sometimes astounds me that such huge turds could come out of such little tiny butts, but that is just the way it is.  Dog shit is ubiquitous. One of the least pleasant aspects of break-up is the miasma that comes from a winter’s worth of dog shit coming to light and thawing as the snow melts.  And then there are those of us who make money by literally selling shit–moose shit, that is, commonly known as moose nuggets.  Moose nuggets are about as inoffensive as shit gets–no bad smell, no smeary quality, moose nuggets are more like pellets of sawdust.  Strong-stomached entrepreneurs make them into jewelry, put them on small dowels and sell them as swizzle sticks, and what have you.  One of the big tourist items is a wooden moose that you fill with candy nuggets, which come out of the moose’s posterior.  I probably mentioned before that Alaskans tend to have robust senses of humor.  (Around our house, a fart joke is ALWAYS good for a laugh.)

  
  

  I was gonna add some stuff, but I gotta run to the outhouse.  But first (he wrote, manfully clenching his cheeks), I need to give credit to Kathleen Meyer, author of How to Shit in the Woods,  who compiled a wonderful glossary of shit.

  
  

  Then again, who gives a shit?

  • 4:11 pm
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