Intimacy

A weird thing about being human is the care we take to seem less so. We tend to invest a lot of time in separating ourselves from the aspects of our own humanity that we have collectively decided are unpleasant.

We purchase cosmetics to hide physical imperfections, we style our clothes to fit the ever-changing personality we have created for ourselves, we fabricate guidelines of politeness and propriety which serve to regulate our behavior. This is neither new, nor particularly interesting. Just watch the movie Fight Club, or, less likely, read the book and you’ll get the same approximate message. We can blame corporations and shadowy marketing teams for trying to control our minds; but isn’t it weird how eagerly we seem to fall for it? If they are exploiting something, it means there is something to exploit.

Flatulence is gross, body odor is offensive, you should be embarrassed that you just left the stall and now we all know what your bowels smells like. When did we decide that certain normal bodily functions were unappealing? I can’t tell you how many times I have walked into the bathroom and someone embarrassingly put their head down and quickly walked away from a stall they just used. It’s ok dude, I knows what your shit smells like now, that’s likely a very exclusive club, we are like family at this point, don’t be embarrassed.

I find those little fractures in our system of rigid social norms to be delightful reminders of what we are. Much like layers of concrete and asphalt often prove impotent against a single blade of grass growing through the cracks, so too do these little human behaviors break through the crevasses of our artificiality.

I should note however, there are some animals out there who do not give a fuck. My observations do not apply to those people. Those people will be the ones left behind to re-populate the Earth after the bombs fall. I have heard men loudly release a combination of gases, liquids, and solids from their insides; loudly, and simultaneously. And I have seen these men calmly exit the public stalls leaving behind a trail of tragedy and horror, with not a single fuck to give that everyone around them has been witness to this atrocity. I’ve seen them smile even! I have seen men. Grown. Fucking. Men. Stand at a urinal and lift the leg of their shorts to pull their dick out from the side of their leg to pee. Not over the waist band. Not through a zipper like a normal person. How big could your dick possibly be that there is more space to be traveled going over the shorts or through a zipper, than the space it takes to reach the bottom of your shorts? Do you have to reel it back in to put it away like a Fruit Roll-Up? Does it unpack in sections like one of those weird wooden rulers I used in shop class back in high school, you fucking animal? The number of guys with that big a hog is undeniably smaller than the number of psychopaths doing this. I am not talking about those people, they are the worst among us and outliers tend to skew averages.

The majority of us try regularly to maintain our perceived decency. Most of us, think dignified looks good, smells good, and sounds good. Dignified does not sound like the grumble of a hungry stomach in a quiet room or a phlegmy cough punctuating a laugh. Dignified does not smell like garlic breath or armpit. Dignified does not look like sweat stains or swelling pimples. And dignified seems to be what we are going for when we stiffly present ourselves to the public. Yet we regularly seem to betray this purpose. This is most apparent in the little intimacies we share with total strangers.

My superiors often wear suits. They were them like ornate armor was once worn by noblemen to denote their status. Not all of them are like this, but enough to be a trope. They carry themselves as if they were above wiping their own ass. But I know what it sounds like when their urine strikes a puddle of water. I have heard their stomachs growl in the middle of meetings. I have seen some without their notice, pick their nose and examine whatever clung onto their finger. I have seen them be human. That’s a little intimate isn’t it? That I know these things about people I don’t really know.  Weirder still is that despite knowing the sounds and smells that perhaps only their spouses and relatives know, I am still expected to treat them as if they are of a higher caste, rather than like the human they are trying to dress up. I am supposed to take these people seriously as authority figures, I am supposed to treat them with a certain level of respect earned by years of education, experience, and wealth that has elevated them to higher socio-economic status, because we decided at some point that some people are better than other people and should be treated accordingly. We decided at some point, without consulting me mind you, that if I am not part of their pre-determined group, then I need to treat them like they are separated from me in some fundamental way, yet I know that some of them could use more fiber in their diet and I am not even their doctor.

Intimacy is simply feeling comfortable enough with someone to show your humanity. Some aspects of humanity are more intimate to some, and less important to others. For example, my superiors don’t seem to conceptualize that it’s weird to know what their shit smells like, yet have to interact with them as if they weren’t the same thing I am. To them, intimacy might look a little bit more like their dick. To others, bodily functions are a little more private, sacred, or precious. Take my wife for example.

I didn’t know what my wife’s urine sounded like until months after dating her. I wasn’t even entirely sure she had bowel movements until days after that. I knew what her labia tasted like, long before I knew what her farts smelled like. That’s kind of strange isn’t it? One would think that having sex is the ultimate sign of intimacy. I mean; you are literally entering a person. But in reality, it was hearing her pass gas that signaled to me that we were past that stage of maintaining societal inhibitions. Of course this varies from person to person. But these bodily functions are deeply intimate to some people, they were to her.

Which begs the question: why are we doing this? We all know we do these things, we all know that behind closed doors we are as undignified and weird and gross as anyone else. We all know that Lisa picks her nose. Or that John sticks his hand almost uncomfortably up his ass to get to that itch that has been nagging him all day. Or that Pedro doesn’t really have a cold sore in July, yet we all pretend that’s what it is, but we all know he got it from a 42 year old hooker in Guadalajara. Just say its herpes, Pedro. I rather hear that story than listen to you act surprised for the 8^th time at how weird it is that you got a cold sore in mid-summer.

I think it might be a factor of population density. Small groups of people living in tight quarters develop and share these intimacies regularly. After a while, they become normal. After you know a friend long enough you don’t feel weird about telling them you need to take a shit. But when you are talking about a scale of millions, then everyone looks like something that you can either kill or get killed by, or something you could fuck or get fucked by. I don’t think we rationalize it in such crude and basic terms. We are obviously much more complex than a “kill or fuck” binary of identifying social groups. And I also don’t know what the fuck I am talking about. But somewhere deep in that lizard brain, in those dark alleys of unfathomable violence and depravity we are all capable of; somewhere in there is a scared monkey with an erection. Is this analogy going anywhere? We all are that monkey, and we pretend not to be because of complex social, historical, and biological reasons I can’t hope to ever explain because I am a hack and a fraud. But I do recognize that we all come from the same basic model. To pretend we are not the same, is to deny that you sleep, shit, or masturbate. We are all more alike than we are different, so eat more kale.