I drove down to the gym in darkness today. My wife left early for a business trip, so I was up and at’em at 5:00 a.m. Time to make use of the day.

Last night we practiced yoga at the same facility. For once my mind was relatively calm. Achieved some sort of focus. That was a shred of sanity in a mixed up world.

Yesterday morning I ran as the sun was coming up. For once I felt great going out the door. More often I feel creaky at the start of my runs. My Achilles are tight. My left knee without the ACL and a snip of missing meniscus talks to me too. Finally after a mile or so there’s a feeling of relative bodily cooperation going on. But by then I usually have to take a dump. So I plan for that. I point my route toward the forest preserve where there’s a potty. Or swing back around the house and get things done. And if things really get desperate, I know where to hide in the deep woods and find grape leaves for toilet paper.

Because no one should go where the Pooperintendent chose to go.

Pooperintendent

That poor dude they now call the Pooperintendent must have had the same bowel rhythms that so many runners experience. Ten or fifteen minutes in, you just gotta go. Granted, he used immensely poor judgement dropping his pants to  repeatedly defecate next to the high school track.

But I bet there are millions of endurance athletes who at least understand the urgency of that matter. Every big event from triathlons to cycling races to running races to swim meets provides porta-johns for that exact reason. The Pooperintendent was just unfortunate enough to lack those facilities when he needed them most.

Mixed up world

So it would be a sign of human decency for a school district or any facility that owns a running track to set up a portable toilet knowing that people who run often need to go to the bathroom. More often these days, running tracks are surrounded by eight foot fences to keep people out. That means the very people who pay for the facilities through their taxes are not allowed to use them.

I find that a mixed up situation. And in this mixed up world it is far easier to pick on the bad judgement of one individual with a problem than take responsibility for the fact that millions of Americans are obese as hell doing nothing about it. So our public track facilities are locked up while America grows fatter and fatter. Makes no sense.

Fast food grandiosity

Much of the America’s elective grandiosity (is it to Make America Great Again?) is the result a fast food diet compounded by bad habits and sheer laziness. The President of the United States even claims that exercise shortens your life. The Atlantic carried excerpts from a book titled Trump Revealed, that stated: “After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted. Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, “You are going to die young because of this.”

Trump also believes that fast food is the most desirable option on America’s menu. Thus the President of the United States regular chows on McDonalds both out of appetite and also out of fear that he might be poisoned to death if he doesn’t order pre-made food.  This is now what passes for normal in a mixed up world.

But Trump also seems eager to hedge his bets and cover his tracks on the exercise and diet front. In 2015, sensing that his rotund shape and odd appearance with an orange face and combover hairdo to hide his baldness might be a detriment in his campaign for President, The Donald ordered an actual raid on his personal physician’s office to steal his health records. he then forced the doctor to issue a public opinion that he would be the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

The baboons take charge

Perhaps you’ve noticed that it’s hard to even get away from insane and questionable stories like these. We’re splattered with weird and bad news every day. It batters us like baboons smacking shit on the logs at the local zoo. I watched that very thing take place at the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago. Members of the baboon clan would crap on a log, wait for groups of people to walk close enough to be in range, then smack the poop hard with their hands. The shit would splatter in all directions, and the humans would shriek and run. That amused the baboons quite a bit.

Those animal instincts are alive and well in America. Some citizens seem to thrive on smacking shit for the sake of what it does to society. They love the reaction, the chaos and the drama it causes. Mass shooters enter schools and fire into crowds at concerts and churches and public places for the same reasons that baboons smack shit. They’re bored and have some redirected aggression to assuage.

The same holds true for avowed racists who gather in public places to splatter their hateful shit over the rest of society. It’s all a matter of ugly tribalism. A civilized society knows better. But when the baboons take charge, smacking shit to attack society on tribal grounds (blood and soil!) is considered fine art and good politics.

But the more disturbing sign is when the zookeepers actually encourage the behavior of such baboons through praise and support in their attempts to divide society.

Getting back to normal

It’s a mixed up world that confuses all that shit for truth and roots for the baboons because they deserve a ‘voice’ like the rest of us. To be sure, it’s time for a shakeup at the zoo that is America, but throwing shit around like there’s no tomorrow is not the answer.

Yet that’s the world we live in right now. We’ve all been dragged down to the level of a spiteful baboon using his small hands to smack shit on a Twitter feed in aggressive attempts to smear the world with what comes out the back end of a life spent smacking shit and telling people “You’re fired!” on reality TV.

It’s the same damned thing.

Back to normal 

Which is why this madness will soon pass. Like the kid who slipped into the deep latrine in the movie Slumdog Millionaire, America will step outside the range of the shit baboons soon enough. Perhaps we needed the story of the Pooperintendent to realize we’re all just a video away from having our own shitty habits exposed. “There but for the grace of God go I,” some wise person once said. Because would we rather swim in a daily shit pond or spend our time in a relatively clean, clear pool like normal people do?

So we’ll have to watch our President drive on the golf greens for a while, and smack shit on Twitter when he gets back to the clubhouse. In the meantime, those of us with common sense will make use of the potty at the local gas station before showing up to the high school track to run. We’ll hide behind a group of trees while taking a whizz during a long bike ride. We’ll simply refuse to pee in the pool, instead hauling ourselves out to do our business so that others won’t have t swim in our piss, or be pissed when they find out what we’ve just done.

We’ll take care of business in fine liberal fashion by resorting to respectful, considerate, normal behavior in a world full of selfishly absorbed baboons who think that chaos is the only way to get things done.

But as the Pooperintendent and the President of the United States both now know, when you air your shit in public it eventually comes back to haunt you.