The Good Shit
Perhaps it's time to explore the stinkier aspects of ourselves and the world.
A couple years ago, I started a Strava running club called Got the Runs. The group is a central place to communicate and organize events with my Boulder trail running friends. The name was meant as an antidote to the profound self-seriousness that afflicts many amateur runners in and outside Boulder. It’s also a nod to the unique relationship runners have with their GI systems.
More recently, I started a satirical real estate newsletter called Feces Driven. Again, the name was meant to undermine the self-seriousness of the real estate industry —one that finds every conceivable way to fleece homeowners and renters under a smokescreen of jargon and pseudo-expertise. It’s also a play on the name of a popular real estate newsletter, Thesis Driven, which was started by someone I have a long history with—someone who deserves far more derision than he currently receives.
Shit occupies a special place in my heart…and rectum. I’ve waxed scatalogically about my love of a good dump on this newsletter before. I’ve also riffed on Milan Kundera’s thoughts about shit in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera specifically calls out the concept of kitsch and how it attempts to de-shittify reality, writing:
Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Our collective consciousness has been largely de-shittified in the Information Age. Most online media, which is basically all media, is staged, filtered, or fabricated —largely denuded of the stinky shit within and around us. There are no Instagram reels of the Kardashians crapping, no ads about the pomade Bibi uses to keep his combover in place. Yet our refusal to accept shit doesn’t protect us from its rankness. Shit is everywhere. One might say it’s omnishitent.
I have a theory that most people are literally full of shit. The majority of Americans are overweight or obese (global citizens are hardly doing better), and it’s safe to say that their guts are brimming with undigested fecal matter —the logical outflow (infill?) of sedentary lifestyles alloyed with ultra-processed, low-fiber foodstuffs. Our guts play vital roles for processing information; this is why we trust our guts, not our kidneys or pancreases. But really, would you trust a shit-filled gut?
We can carry this denied-and-hidden shittiness to almost every facet of modern reality: politics, business, media, entertainment, sports, social dynamics, etc. In each case, the slick and sanitized official story can’t be trusted because it still wafts of shit.
Most days, I poop 2-3 times. Though I don’t need to get more detailed about my shit than that, I am not afraid, nor embarrassed by it—unless it smells really bad and someone enters the toilet right after me. I think it’s time we collectively stop denying shit and get transparent about what’s actually happening in and outside us. And maybe find reasons to chuckle at it all while we’re at.