Tuesday, April 17, 2018

WHAT'S SO BAD ABOUT PEE?


Valier is known as a pretty little town with nice people.  Recently the new postal worker who instigated a recycling bin had to move it inside the counter office because someone peed in it.  This is strange because most folks around here — at least the younger ones — are pretty loose about peeing outdoors.

Tonight I watched a detective show in which a wine competition was, uh, contaminated because someone peed in the previously prize-winning merlot.  The judges called it “rancid.”

I once preached about pee.  I’d been at a conference out in the country and drank too much coffee before I drove to the next venue.  There was no place to hide and drenching was immanent, so I took as much cover as I could and was as quick as I could be on what I hoped was a deserted landscape.  Almost immediately the local Church of England officiant, his wife and his mother-in-law, appeared, gawked and drove on in shock.  After the sermon an earnest young man came to tell me how grateful he was that I’d talking about something human, something real.

Once I had a bad cold and was working for a woman from down South.  She assured me that her grandmother always cured a cold by gargling with her own urine.  I didn’t do that, but tried to find out whether it might work, but got no evidence.  People are not objective about bodily fluids.  Their main reaction is to close the subject.

Now that we have pee in a context, let’s talk about mattresses.  Fluids often flood them.  Kids with nightmares.  People who have breakfast in bed and spill the coffee.  Lovers who get carried away and spill the champagne.  Drunks who don’t wake up enough to get where they ought to go.  Any housekeeper with sense covers the mattress with something waterproof, esp. in hotels where there might be anything, including vomit. feces, and blood -- menstrual or murderous.

Bodily excretions are all symbolic, to different intensities and degrees, depending on one’s experience, what one learned from observation.  For some, every mess is a kind of violence, for others every stain is about sex, and for a few excretions are simply what they are: possibly unpleasant but part of existence.  Medical people, parents and lovers might be that way.  (There’s no accounting for kinks.)

Now let’s talk about sex workers.  They know that the vulnerable easily confuse everything between the legs, the “junk.”  Sex=violence=dirty.  It’s pretty much a given that a man of a certain age, class, and upbringing is going to buy-in to specific taboos.  Harsh potty training.  Aspiration to respectability.  The qualities a hired nursemaid values.  Cleanliness.  Sans affection or even care.

These are times in which the markers for respectability, esp. sexwork, have been changed, moved way out wider.  Now we are aware that sexworkers at a certain level are good psychologists.  And know a lot of tricks.  Little bladders of this-and-that to hide in clothing and use when necessary as imitations of the real thing: semen, urine.  They might know about that legendary citadel of defiance called “Mineshaft,” a bar/club/event invested in turning all those baby hygiene things upside down.  Much of it was about seeing what is normally hidden.  The health department closed them down.

Let’s imagine Russia.  First the two ladies of the night who were sent in by power-mongers look at this seventy-year-old American from a hidden peephole.  He’s clearly a little scared, his orangish face beaded with sweat.  He would need a little”framing.” Give him the idea that he was in charge, that he was truly damaging someone he hated.  peepee=insult=damage.’’  That will activate the right spot on his brain, inflame it with emotion.

“This guy is into power,” said W1.  “We need to let him continue thinking that he’s in control.”  Of course, it was the sexworkers who “owned” the scene.
__________

Tempest Storm, no Spring chicken.
It's not the nudity, it's the elegance.

(Maybe I should take a moment to explain how I knew about Tempest Storm, a predecessor of Stormy Daniels.  In the '70’s when I was doing PR for Multnomah County Animal Control which serves Portland, OR, a couple of PPD officers came to do a consultation with us.  Tempest Storm was in town and had an act with two Great Dane dogs.  The cops had been startled to realize that there was no law against “bestiality.”  They wanted to know if they could use the cruelty law, if it fit the definition.  We were stumped, and could only suggest that it depended on the expression of the dogs’ faces.  

Since then, we wrote a new law and spent time trying to include everything possible (which is impossible).  As far as I know, none of we AC people attended the show.  I never did figure out what the act actually was.  “Actual” is not relevant.  The strategy is to activate the consumer’s mind to the point that they are doing all the work.

In case you’re still curious here are some facts. (Wikipedia)  Tempest Storm (born Annie Blanche Banks, February 29, 1928), and dubbed the Queen of Exotic Dancers is a burlesque star and motion picture actress. Along with Lili St. Cyr, Sally Rand, and Blaze Starr, she was one of the best-known burlesque performers of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Her career as an exotic dancer spanned more than 60 years and she was still performing in the early 21st century.

Tempest Storm was born in Eastman, Georgia.   She left school in seventh grade and in 2016 recalled she had been sexually abused around that time.  At 14, she worked as a waitress in Columbus, Georgia, where she quickly married a U.S. Marine in order to emancipate herself from her parents, and had the marriage annulled after 24 hours.  At 15, she married a Columbus shoe salesman, whose sister worked with her at a hosiery mill. 

Three weeks after being hired as a chorus dancer at $40 a week, Storm accepted a promotion to $60 as a stripper.  A week afterward, she recalled in 1968, Hunt said a stage name was needed:  “I asked her if she had any suggestions. She said, what about Tempest Storm? I asked her if she had any other suggestions. Well, she said, what about Sunny Day? Well, I said, I guess it might as well be Tempest Storm.

________________

Sex is one of the categories of human imagination that can only be pursued by the law, never caught.  The minds of individuals paint unique pictures and some can’t quite get enough focus to move on to the next thing.  I notice that out of all of Comey’s long and meticulous accounts — very much like algebra equations of principle and theory except in terms of morality — what sticks with the reporters is the unconfirmed porn event, even though it’s not confirmed.  Pee is the baby term used.  Or “Golden Showers” as though everyone who is anyone knows the slang.  

We are casual about urine these days because so many people are so constantly tested for drug use.  There’s a secret market in “clean” urine and scientists work at creating “faux pee.”  Supplying the right containers and analysis is a small industry.  Chemical analysis can make or break an athlete.

In the ’70’s a man called up Animal Control, complaining that the next door neighbor’s dog came over on the caller’s porch and he . . . he. . . he . . .  The caller, like all the news anchors, could hardly bring himself to say it enough for us to understand the problem,  Finally he blurted, “The dog tinkles on my porch!”  We took him more seriously after he explained further that the dog was a St. Bernard with a major capacity bladder.  Tinkled?


If two women “tinkled” in front of Trump, it means nothing except that there may be worse out there.  What are you imagining?  What’s your porn?

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