Growing up I had a friend that came from an abusive home. Let’s call him Wesley. Wesley was a rape baby, technically speaking, and his mother, bless her soul, well… if she had an act she couldn’t ever get it together. Drugs. Pills. A constant rotation of dubious boyfriends with criminal histories. You know the type. The thing is everybody is a philosopher by nature. We are all always trying to understand the world and our place in it and so we make up stories and myths and theories to help ourselves get a grip on things. Wesley did that too and, like everybody, his philosophy, his view of the world, was built upon his experiences. When you think about it, how could it not be? As such Wesley developed the only coherent worldview I’ve ever encountered that was scatologically based. To be blunt, he’d had a shit life. In response, he’d constructed a worldview around same.
“Pooping.” He once told me as we gambled over cards in the cafeteria after school. “That’s what life comes down to. When you think about it.”
I put two dimes and a nickle into the pot, looking around to make sure none of the teachers saw us. Card playing was okay, gambling wasn’t. It was the era before smartphones and so we were indulging in the older delinquencies kids used to get involved in before they all developed attention deficient disorder. Robbie was playing too. He was a black kid who’d smoked cigarettes since he was thirteen. Turned out later he was gay.
“What are you talking about dude?” I said.
“Think about it!” Wesley insisted, putting down a straight flush. “Look, why do we go to school? To get a job one day. Why do people want a job? So they can have money. Why do people want money? So they can eat. Why do people want to eat? So they can poop. It all comes back to that.”
I’d lost again. Wesley took the pile in the middle for himself, as he often did. Two dollars and thirty-three cents. Robbie shuffled and redealt.
“Just because something is a by-product of other stuff doesn’t mean that’s the point,” I countered. “That’s like saying the purpose of driving a car is to make gas fumes.”
“Isn’t it?” Wesley asked, raising one large bushy eyebrow as he often did when trying to seem profound. “Everything we do makes waste, right? Everything. Even the good stuff. But not everything we do makes anything useful. Yeah? You can spend your time trying and fail to make anything but waste. So, if it’s the only constant, must be the point.”
In a way it was hard to refute. He was, after all, correct in the basic premise. Everything we do has an unintended byproduct. Even breathing. We want the oxygen but in so doing we can’t help but make the CO2. But not every intended product comes to fruition, so, on the whole perhaps, the balance sheet of life is weighted more towards waste and byproduct than it is towards fruit and productivity. From that perspective, maybe, one could say that excrement was the point of life. Or at least the center of it.
“But that’s not what you’re trying to accomplish.” I stated. “Like I said, when you drive a car the point is to get somewhere, it’s not to make the fumes. That has to happen if the car moves but it’s not the purpose of driving.”
“And yet,” Wesley answered, “it always happens. Just like pooping. Don’t poop long enough and you’re dead.”
“Don’t eat long enough and your dead!”
“Exactly.” Wesley sorted the cards in his hand. “But eating leads to pooping. Pooping doesn’t lead to eating. So pooping’s the end goal.”
“Robbie,” I said, “this is ridiculous. Can you please tell him this is stupid.”
“Maaaaaaannnn…” Robbie said shaking his head. “Everything stupid really. I don’t know.”
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