When I was an student between my junior and senior undergraduate years, I worked a shit job in a Friendly’s fast food restaurant. It was, as I say, a shit job, but we had some fun. After hours we would let in our friends, lock the doors, smoke pot, and gorge ourselves on ice cream. No matter how much we pilfered thus, we could not make a dent, a fact which struck us as hilarious as we continued to devour the cold sweet substance until satiation.
I was working in the back room one day when I suddenly found myself charged with the task of clearing handfuls of dishwater-logged coleslaw from the drain of an immense sink, as deep as my arm was long. Undignified and messy though the work was, I regarded it with equanimity because I understood that this was very probably the nadir of my employment career, and from this point forward things would improve. My optimistic intuition has proven correct, sort of. I have since had moments in my working life where I thought I might rather be back at Friendly’s with the dishwater-logged coleslaw, but no moments quite as messy in the literal sense.
Besides this insight, there were other benefits to be gained from Friendly’s. Early in my short career, one of the other employees explained to me how to replenish a paper napkin dispenser. My instinct told me to stuff it to capacity and beyond, so that refilling would be as infrequently necessary as possible, and began to do so. But my wiser colleague pointed out the correct way to fill a paper napkin dispenser: leave a little space towards the front. If you overstuff it, the napkins cannot easily be withdrawn cleanly, and the customer will inevitably pull not one or two napkins, but an entire cluster. You have surely noticed this yourself when dining at downscale establishments. Besides being wasteful, overstuffing has the ironic and paradoxical effect of making the Friendly’s employee have to refill the dispenser sooner rather than later.
Everywhere you go, you see these dispensers overstuffed. Filling them properly is a lost art. Fortunately for me, I have not needed to apply my napkin-dispensing knowledge in the workplace, because as I said, the coleslaw prophecy has proven true. But it has given me the authority to second-guess paper-napkin-dispenser-fillers across the land.

See, this is why you need to have a blog. So you can announce to the breathlessly waiting world important news such as this: I took my first shit in three fucking days this morning. Hats off to my dear wife for pushing the Citrucel at me. Not that I needed convincing. What brought on this bout of constipation, you are dying to know? Fuck if I know. I did nothing different; been following my customary fruit- and vegetable-rich diet, with the usual alcohol abuse on the weekends. Maybe it’s comes with the territory when you are pushing fifty years of age. Anyway, I am glad the discomfort is over and I know you share my relief.

When your personal life is absolutely in the shitter;
When all your alarms and sirens are wailing disaster;
When your brain kicks into full crisis mode;
When the pain is more than you can bear;
When your pain is mixed with raw fear of the magnitude and likely duration of the pain itself;
When you keep collapsing in a sobbing heap, and just barely manage to bathe and dress and leave your house for work in the morning;
When you haven’t slept adequately more than five times in the last four months;
When you know there are not enough drugs and alcohol in the world to ease your suffering;
When you wish there were some way short of suicide to escape from your own head, but you know there is none, so you can either do yourself in or suck it up:
Isn’t it grand to be alive?

I am not a literary scholar by any stretch, so whatever I have to say about it should be presumed amateurish, subjective and naive. But I have wondered about the meaning of this poem for decades. The other day I googled and found this discussion and realized how far off the learned mark I am. The scholars go on and on about the imagery and how “three modest prepositions — upon, with, beside — place these barnyard minims in visual apposition, or a kind of contingent spatial rhyme…”

Get the fuck outa here. Sure it’s painterly, and the way the words are spaced is no accident. Bla bla bla. But here’s what it’s about as far as I’m concerned: you can identify a particular thing, or event, or moment in your life as having enormous importance, make it a turning point of the utmost significance. And that event is more likely to have been a random accident than the result of some conscious decision on your part.