(talk on bodily functions and the vocabulary for them, sometimes in street language, so not to everyone’s taste; also more than you might want to hear about Arnold’s Wonderful Whizz World)
About my current medical regimen, which involves significantly large doses of the steroid prednisone, intended to treat serious kidney problems (resulting in fluid accumulations in several parts of my body, quite visibly in my feet and legs) while staying under the dosage that, historically, makes me (to put this in the plainest terms) crazy. It’s a balancing act.
Yesterday, when I was overloaded with household revisions (including a new computer and printer) and had little time to sip my green tea pleasantly, the tide turned: I began, as we say, pissing like a racehorse, really quite remarkable amounts (also, I have to say, enormously pleasurable). For years now, I’ve lived with urinals scattered everywhere, so I can take quick whizzes without disrupting whatever I’m working on (if I’m laser-focused on what I’m doing, I can go for an hour without a whizz, but that’s pretty much my limit).
The immediate effect was that my feet and legs quickly began shrinking back to their normally lanky state. I have to say that this is just fuckin’ cool to experience. Body magic. (But urinals need to be emptied and rinsed all the time.) I’ve done today’s application of coconut oil on my extremities, and my fingers can feel that they really are back to normal. In a week I’ll get another round of lab tests to see if my urine chemistry is getting back towards normal. For the moment, though, I get to enjoy the subjective effect, which is truly delightful. Without any kind of craziness I can detect; in particular, no memory lapses at all.
Long, satisfying sleep last night, with pleasant sexual interludes, so pretty much everything I could wish for in that department. Morning vital signs good. I brim with optimism.
And then, of course, there are the linguistic and lexicographic notes.
Note 1: urinary similes. From my 7/17/13 posting “Brief notice: urinary similes”:
Piss like a mink was new to me, and I get no ghit for it and its variants. The standard comparison animal for pissing is the horse: piss like a horse, piss like a racehorse / race horse (elaborating on the simile a bit), piss like a Russian racehorse (introducing alliteration, for fun), piss like a Russian racehorse at the Kentucky Derby (spinning the thing out still more). (All of these have variants with the euphemistic verb pee.) I don’t think there’s any rational basis for any of the elaborations past the simple horse — though people are of course happy to concoct stories that would make sense of them.
But horse makes sense. Horses are large animals, so they piss quite substantial volumes, and the display is particularly impressive for male horses. (There are, of course, quite a few YouTube videos of male horses pissing.)
Note 2: alternatives to obscenity. For some time I’ve been struggling to find effective substitutes for taboo vocabulary (fuck, piss, shit, jack/jerk off, suck cock) and its nursery alternatives (pee, poo), technical terminology (urine, feces, masturbate, fellate), and circumlocutions (go to the bathroom, go down on). What I’m looking for is ordinary or colorful vocabulary that’s free of the connotations of these other possibilities but still does the intended denotational work.
I am, so far, happy with stroke for jack off, whizz for piss, and prong for fuck; it pleases me to be able to say I haven’t been pronged since the last century, and I really miss it without frightening the horses in the street; the referent is notably edgy, but the vocabulary isn’t actually offensive. (Yes, I know, if lots of people adopt my locutions, then they too will become offensive; there’s no winning at this game.)
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