Before I get down to the res, I just want to note that I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a fart experience and got, like, 15 comments, give or take, and then last week I wrote about a death and a good kid off to Iraq and I got 4.  Priorities, people!  I am just saying…

I am not really going to give you nine reasons why you should or shouldn’t do anything.  I am satirizing, rather heavy-handedly, the whole mindset that rules the nation these days.  I am not, of course, talking about my Shaggers, who are a remarkably bright and literate bunch, but about everyone else.  But I do have a question: can you really say a person is literate just because he or she can read, if the ability is applied only to reading lists of things?

I have let my subscription to Time magazine lapse after many years, and I’ll tell you why.  It stopped being a news magazine, and started being a paper version of the home page of an internet provider, so I can get the same non-news on-line or at the grocery check-out and save a forest.  Ten reasons this is true; seven people to watch, the ten states with the best whatever.  Then it reduced most of its world coverage to two pages called something like 'the Dashboard' or some buzzword of the moment and, presuming everyone already knows all the news, it prints many of the major news events of the week as a line of small photos with captions across the top of the two Dashboard pages.  I think the turning point came for me when a recent flood displaced one hundred twenty million people in China and this event received one small picture with a six-word caption.  That is one word for every twenty million people left homeless.  I too can count, and unlike nine out of ten cashiers at the checkouts I pass through, I can also do simple math.  If one presumes that everyone already knows the news, prithee, why would one publish a news magazine at all?

I admit that my eye is caught by headings like “Six mistakes retirees make” or “The twenty-five best films about auto maintenance”.  But just because something catches the eye, doesn’t make it worthwhile or news.  Rather, it makes it the home page of Yahoo! or the latest teen magazine.  I used to love Time, and already I miss my weekly issue.  But the thing is that I already missed it when I was still reading it.  What I miss are the actual large and small news items I used to find from places like Brunei or some town in Alaska.  And there used to be largish stories on half a dozen news-worthy events in politics, education, finance, foreign affairs and so on.  The gossip or obit sections once confined themselves to a single page, whereas they seem to have become Time's raison d’être.  Now there is a “Ten questions for…” section where the questioned person is someone slightly off-center or edgy, sort of like the selected hosts of Saturday Night Live, and the questions are posed by you, dear readers, just like those posed in those TV listing inserts in the Sunday paper you don't read, either.  News articles without bylines have given way to opinion pieces with the face and name of the writers thereof blazoned across the upper half of the page.  I can get mind fluff or opinions on the TV networks (which tacitly admit their evening news is a superfluity by cancelling or truncating it whenever some sports event runs overlong), or the homepage of Yahoo!  Can you believe that every day Yahoo! (or is it MSN or one of the others?) provides a list of “suggested searches”.  One gathers, probably correctly, that their readers haven’t a clue what they logged on for.  And what is in those suggested searches?  Well, usually gripping topics such as Kevin Federline.  Somebody shoot me. 

However, mention of Mr. F. does lead me to the general topic of his ex, and a number of other young men and ladies who are making news with entirely typical adolescent behavior.  People go on and on as if the misfortunes and childish decisions of Lindsay and Paris and their ilk are tantamount to the Fall of Western Civilization.  No, they are not, at least in and of themselves.  At their age I was walking off jobs to take surf trips, and having beer parties on the roof of my house in Hermosa Beach and so on.  So were a good many of you doing similar things, whatever you may pretend to the kids and grandkids.  The difference is that our every move was not headline news.  And it is not Britney or Paris or Lindsay or Nicole who are destroying everything this nation stands for; it is those who report on it, and even more so, those who eagerly read it so they can be shocked and feel superior and not have to think about anything that is hard to make decisions about.  Time has discovered that people don’t want to know about death and suffering and cures for cancer.  People want one-liners about what’s up with twenty-year-old actresses.  And what is up with them is the same thing that would be up with most of us if we had twenty million to spend and we were 23 years old and still looked terrific. 

Sadly, for a large number of younger (and older) people who really have had their fill of adolescent misbehavior as news, the only place to get any kind of serious discussion of topics other than gossip are often in religious settings.  This is usually equally mindless, but at least has the virtue of attempting to, or pretending to, deal with issues a tad deeper than whether actresses are wearing underpants.  It is small surprise that people who cannot or do not wish to participate in mindless gossip and obsession with fashion or sports in other parts of the world are turning to fundamentalist Islam, just as it is not surprising that people here are turning to the local equivalent.  Whatever happened to the intellectual life of this nation?  Increasingly, it seems that the outlet for those of college age and thereabouts with a drive for meaning in their lives seem to be finding it, when not at some Bible study group,  in the most polemic of politics.  What we need, it seems to me, is another JFK with his fifty mile hikes and, more important, his Peace Corps and his “Ask not…” leadership.  I am not referring to his political views, or his personal life or any such – I mean we need someone to inspire us to be better.  In my generation, the best of us flocked to the Peace Corps (that, of course, did not include me) and it has been my observation that an outsize percentage of the people of my general age group who have done good and meaningful work in the last decades in all sorts of fields have been people who spent time in the Peace Corps, just as the best people of the generation before us seemed to have served in World War II.  In both cases, young people attempted to do good and in the process found out there was more to the world than their home town and Hollywood.  Indeed, during World War II, even Hollywood discovered there was more to the world than Hollywood, and that is saying something. 

I am not advocating mandatory national service, although it might not be a bad idea.  Who am I to be laying down mandatory activities for people who are younger than me?  What I wish we had was someone who inspired us to want to do these things.  Instead we are fiddling about haircuts, and the way people laugh and people’s marital histories.  If that is what we care about, then what does one suppose we will get? 

What we get from people who avoided any sort of meaningful thought or action as young people, and who seem never to have gone anywhere with a view to seeing what was there other than cheap booze and great shopping, is a completely skewed view of the world.  The world is us, strong and right and just plain lovable, and them, a bunch of folks who, just to be contrary, chose to be born elsewhere and whose only hope in life is to be as much like us as possible, and to wait on us and hear our views on matters internal to their societies.  But, people are really the same everywhere.  They may hate the local regime, but they sure as hell don’t want someone else telling them how to live.  Remember those great days of bitching about everything your folks did, and then someone else maligned Mom or Dad and suddenly you were ready to punch noses and kick asses?  Well, surprise, surprise, Lozis are like that and Yemenis are like that and Finns are like that and Sri Lankans are like that.  I am not amazed so much at things we do here in the Land of the reputedly Free, but I am surprised that we are surprised when people react exactly the way we would do if the shoe were on the other foot.  Good grief, I am even boring myself here.

I took a day off work to come up to Reedville so I could go into the City and get a pre-LASIK evaluation.  I am sick of glasses, which I didn’t need till I was about 40, and now I need trifocals.  Plus everyone I know who has had LASIK has, within a couple of months, lost about 75% of the wrinkles around their eyes (I freely admit I am vain and shallow).  When you wear glasses, you squint constantly, although most people don’t seem to realize it, and that causes you to wrinkle up around the eyes like an elderly elephant who has seen it all.  The worst thing about glasses for me is that they are never clean.  No matter how well or often I clean them, my body seems to spew oil onto them as I walk away from the lens cleaner.  They are always smeared and smudged and splattered, and often fogged up just to add that certain je n’ai sais quoi.  Actually, I DO sais quoi, the quoi in question is an inability to see anything clearly.

Anyway, in a sharp break with custom, I actually planned ahead on this – though not well – and I began in January to have a couple of thou extra taken from my pay in small amounts in to pay for the procedure in tax-free money.  I thought I had to wait till it accumulated, but now I am thinking I probably could have done the procedure earlier and sent the bill later, but whatever…  Anyway, I went to the doc, who has a great rep hereabouts – man, I did everything by the book for once - even made inquiries, and of course it all turns out suckingly.  If one is a helter-skelter, whim of the moment type, one should never try to act wisely, because one just doesn’t know how.  It is always a mistake.  So the doc hemmed and hawed and peered and dilated and said he thought I’d be an excellent candidate, but… I have the tiniest little hemorrhage in my retina and I should see a specialist first to get the go-ahead just to be sure.  And - oh, yes - did I have diabetes or high blood pressure, since those are the two most common causes of such hemorrhages?  Well, I have had low blood pressure all my life until a few years ago it rose to normal.  And I tested a tad high for sugar when I lived in Wisconsin, but that was three years ago – I went on a year-long strict diet and it receded to normal.  And, of course, so did I – normal being no veg, but lots of ice cream to compensate for lack of them.  But I had a thorough check-up 3 months ago and all seemed OK. 

So I go to the specialist – do you believe I got a same-day appointment?  As I said, my doc has a great rep, and when he asks a colleague to squeeze me in, in is exactly how I am squeezed.  Well, the specialist also shone lights and covered one eye and another and took photos and all this was done with pursed lips and tiny shakes of the head.  And now he wants me back in four months (when I will have lost the tax-free dollars I saved) and he doesn’t like the look of any of these veins or arteries in my retinae and definitely doesn’t think I should get LASIK.  Apparently the worst thing for vascular pathways is pressure, and – who knew? – to do LASIK properly the pressure in the eye must be temporarily ramped up to get that nice round eyeball to work on – and hey – how the hell do they do that?  I am picturing something like a bicycle pump being inserted into my eye and some nurse pumping vigorously off to the side while my eyeballs swell ominously, protruding from my head like those of Bette Davis in one of her later psychotic roles involving large, sharp knives. 

So the upshot of my planned self-improvement is, like that of all such efforts in the past, totally negative, and I am walking around hourly expecting the stroke that leaves me babbling mindlessly (and I know what you are thinking; don’t even go there) or even dead before I retire which would piss me off well beyond all bounds of prior pissed-offness – and these bounds are many and far-flung.  Something tells me there are vegetables, and worse – exercise - in my near future, goddamnit.  And on top of that I have to come up with a way to get $2,000 worth of medical procedures done before December 31, 2007 or I lose my money.  I wonder if it can be used for cosmetic stuff?  There isn’t a square inch of my body that couldn’t use at least $2,000 worth of improvement – although the doc’s nurse did tell me I had beautiful skin (the phrase ‘for your age’ hovered in the air unsaid).

Well, I look at it like this; I got an extra day off work this week, and even if I had spent it being run down by a bus, a day off can’t be all bad. 

I like writing quite a lot and it is somewhat of a mystery to me why I don’t do more of it lately.  As far as I know, the basic problem is that I drive home to Reedville every weekend, and this means I find Saturday, which was the day I was accustomed to write, to be given over to all the have-to’s and want-to’s that a visit home entails.  While George, who lives in my house all week long, does most of the lawn-mowing, gardening, and house-keeping (a lucky thing for me, because he is astonishingly meticulous and neat, whereas I am tolerant of squalor to a degree that would have me removed to 24-hour care if I were to let things go as much as I would do if left to my own devices), there are still some things that I have to do – banking, some shopping, and a good deal of lying about.  I have ever been a believer that days off are days off, and not opportunities to put in a full day’s work around the house.  There are two things I do which are for pleasure, and which are not entirely passive; one is gardening and the other is writing.  Both these would be ruined for me, if I were governed by a feeling of obligation.  To write, I need open-ended time, which generally means mornings and if later in the day, vacation time.  Despite all the complaints I get about the length of my entries here from those who move their lips as they read, it takes me a good deal longer to write this than it takes others to read it.  It has to be fun, and that includes pauses for coffee, and pacing around, and looking out the window at the odd flicker that might be tapping on a dead limb, looking for stray members of the class insecta. 

And this summer has been amazing; since the beginning of July there has been only one weekend that was not sunny and warm and beautiful, and to sit indoors has seemed like casting away unwonted treasures that will not be found again, at least not for many months.  George put up a hammock; need I say more?  All these years while I worked in cities, I endured the traditional urban summer, whereby Monday dawns bright and lovely, and all the natives proceed to generate all kinds of pollution over the course of the next five sunny days, generating just enough air particulates to reach critical mass by Friday evening and bring cleansing rains during Saturday and Sunday, so that we could have another lovely morning on Monday.  I have read a couple of articles or studies or whatever, saying that this actually happens in urban microclimates, and that the perception that it always seems to rain on the weekend is an accurate one.  Apparently god, who is as much a master of finding loopholes in a deal as any of his adherents, feels that it in no way impinges on the old rainbow and Noah deal, to send just enough rain each weekend to make our lives miserable.  Which is only fair, since all the faithful seem hellbent on cutting down, poisoning or paving over all of his better ideas.  Hurray for the rural areas where folks confine their destructive impulses to shooting deer, an animal which really can be classed with tornadoes, floods and earthquakes as a natural disaster to be reckoned with. 

What about, one might ask, those long evenings of doing nothing in the apartment in Smallville, where I am entirely bereft of anything else to do?  Certainly there are no friends to interrupt me, no family to deal with, no garden to dig in.  Ah, but has anyone forgotten the addiction to network television?  It is insane – if I am forced to miss a program I like for two weeks running, I lose total interest in it.  Yet I am addicted to the habit of watching certain things at certain times, more to the habit of watching, I think, than to the programs themselves.  I am a prime example of the outcome when a parent bans TV from the home, as did my father during his religious, or kids-these-days periods.  Having been deprived of Lucy and Beaver in my youth, I have become a TV omnivore, although I DO draw the line at reality crap.  I have entirely enough of spite, whining, and pettiness in my work life, without watching more of it at night on the telly.  And although I have an incredible level of tolerance when it comes to sitcoms, there are some I just can’t take.  I suddenly realized the ones I do not care for all fall mostly into the ‘Dad is a boorish boob’ category.  I did like Archie Bunker, but since then – no.  Raymond, King of Queens, World According to Jim and the like just don’t work for me.  Why isn’t the mother in these shows ever fat or loud or dumb – OK there was Roseanne, and I did like that.  Apparently the fat, loud and dumb women are all busy shopping in the same aisle as me.  And anyway, Roseanne was never dumb.  I think I am most drawn to comedy where basically nice men and women are surrounded by all the same weirdness that surrounds me, only slightly exaggerated.

Speaking of fat and dumb; how about that woman who bought her son three of the many assault weapons he had assembled in his room for the opening of the fall student hunting season?  It is nice to have the year broken into seasons, the student shooting season seems to precede the deer hunting season, and I hope skills are being sharpened, because if one more deer appears on my property there will be no room whatever left for me here.  They aren’t even afraid of me anymore; they will go on munching on whatever expensive tree or shrub I have just planted, graciously allowing me to watch.  I am mentally reviewing the catalog of redneck relatives and friends I have around who might enjoy spending a week in November at my place replenishing the old larder with venison. 

One tradition that does not exist, and I can’t think why not, is that of public slappings.  I think there should be a space reserved in each municipality – much like chop-chop square in some Saudi cities - where people who have proven themselves worthy of a good slapping would be brought on a festive day to be slapped by all who passed.  I saw this week a story on TV, including an interview with the subject thereof, concerning a woman who was so astonishingly slap-worthy that I could hardly believe the reporter did not avail herself of the opportunity to administer a good sharp buffet then and there.  Whyever has the boxing of ears gone out of fashion?  This story told of a woman who is suing a ticket scalper who charged her $1050 for four tickets to see Hanna Montana live and in the flesh.  Merely paying $1050 would seem punishment enough; while I deplore the various scams that mulct the vulnerable: “You have just won the Canadian lottery, send $1000 to get your prize”, etc., I do feel that if someone walks down a public sidewalk waving $1050 and crying, “Here’s some money!  Someone please take it”, then someone should.  No, paying $1050 to see the next Brittany is not, in itself, deserving of a hearty slap.  Where this woman strays deep into slap territory is her reasoning.  She paid the money because she didn’t want her daughter to be disappointed by missing the concert.  Her daughter is – are you ready for it? – six years old!  Wait – I err in saying Hannah is the next Brittany - this woman’s daughter surely has that honor in her not-too-distant future.  Where is Children’s Services when we need them?   This woman is such an egregiously bad mother that she makes women who merely sell their daughters into prostitution look like Marmee in Little Women.  This woman is a bad human.  I cringe to think of the sad life a child of such a creature will have.  No limits, no boundaries, no preparation whatever for life’s disappointments.  And my guess is that everyone around her will end up the worse for her presence. 

Although few will rise – or sink – to the slapworthiness level of this dreadful woman, I do welcome here nominations for persons requiring a good public slapping.  And let’s stay away from the obvious (i. e. politicians), shall we? 

I had a cousin – we’ll call him Howie – whose parents had agreed not to have children when they married.  However, either Aunt Esther wanted a child all along, or else, back in those pre-pill days, she found herself pregnant, and discovered that she did after all, want a child.  And so she undertook to ensure that the boy, Howie, would never have any impact on her husband.  Aunt Esther was Mom’s oldest sister, who had done a lot of the raising of her seven younger sisters because my grandmother had died at 49.  Not only was Esther the eldest, but she was older by a bit of a margin, because the next two girls had died in the flu epidemic of 1918.  She had been a wonderful mother to her younger sisters, but had been strict as hell.  When the sisters reached dating age, the swains dreaded sister Esther, because, believe me, there was no rannygazoo in the car when the boys brought these girls home after a dance.  Manners were minded and chores were done.  She extended this sternness to her nieces and nephews.  Most of us feared her until we were about 12, then we adored her – or at least I did.  She was the funniest woman I have ever met, with a lively sense of the ridiculous.  She’d go off into gales of laughter, and seemed always to wind up in situations that were almost like a bad sitcom.  Once on a trip to Alaska, back when that was truly frontier territory, she and her family were forced to stay at a huge hotel which catered to railroad men – she was the only woman there – she took a refreshing stroll in the night just outside her room in her nightgown and robe, and the door locked behind her.  The hotel was a huge affair and she quailed at walking all around it in dishabille to find an entrance that was unlocked.  Finally, she did find a way in, only to realize that she had no recollection of her room number.  So there in the night, she made her way in her nightdress from room to room, peeking through the keyhole of each room trying to recognize something in the room that marked it as hers.  And this was one of the milder of her adventures.

I digress; my point here is that this normally wise and funny woman had one appalling blind spot and that was Howie.  She believed that it was absolutely essential that Howie not be a bother to her husband in any way.  She had married late – although my mom was ten years younger than Esther and had married in her mid-20s, I was already two when Howie came along, and I guess Esther had the mindset common to many women who feel that their guy was their last or only chance (which often ends up with them marrying abusers, although my uncle was not one of those) and that any little thing could undo the marriage.  Her method of keeping Howie quiet and not a burden on my uncle was to give him whatever he wanted.  And of course, Howie wanted plenty.  When other kids had bikes, Howie had a horse.  When other kids got horses, Howie got a motorcycle.  When other kids got motorcycles, Howie got a car.  No kid had a car at that age in those days.  They lived in Florida in the 1940s and 50s and in those days Florida was about as backwoods as one could get.  I think Howie was driving around age 14.  This was a very bad idea, and the result was about what one might expect.  Howie became a heartless criminal.  Of course, as long as I was more or less forbidden to play with him on his yearly visits to Reedville, he fascinated me and I accompanied him on several of his lesser escapades.  But once I was old enough to spend all the time with him I wanted (his dad died when he was still in school and they eventually moved back to Reedville, I think one step ahead of the law in Howie’s case), I found him crass and boring.  Howie’s father was a clever man – he fixed things and built things and liked trying out new things, and despite being an extremely honest man, he had become fairly wealthy.  Upon his death, his money went half to Howie and half to Esther.  Howie ran through his half in a couple of years.  He bought a farm, and walked away from it.  He bought a gas station, and walked away from that, too.  It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to succeed at these things, he just didn’t feel like it.  He married a very young girl in Florida and soon had fathered Howie Junior; he moved Ginnie, his wife, in with his mom and pretty much walked away from her and Junior, too. 

Howie’s real talent was for all sorts of petty crime, and some not so petty; at a fairly young age he recounted to me with great relish how he and a pal teamed up to lure homosexuals to remote areas to rob them.  He dealt in stolen cars and eventually drifted – thank god – further west and out of my life.  He soon had gone through Aunt Esther’s inheritance as well as his own, and yet, he made certain that any money she received wound up in his pocket.  Another cousin recounts with a certain relish, that the note in a card he sent Esther when she was in her 80s and seriously ill in the hospital, when he was in his 40s, ended with “Where’s the check?”  Occasionally Aunt Esther would scrape up the money to visit him, and he invariably left her stranded and moved away once he had gotten her cash.  She once had to send for busfare home from Arizona to NY, and made the entire trip without anything to eat.  When she died, he did not come to the funeral, though he made sure to instruct his relatives by mail and phone where to send any money.  The very last any of us heard from him, he sent a card to Aunt Bertha, and stamped on the envelope in red letters was the name of a jail. 

So, I am thinking of making sure that a six-year-old is not disappointed to the tune of $1050 is probably not the best parenting technique.  While I look forward with equanimity to seeing this foolish mother reap a harvest similar to that which my aunt reaped, my heart goes out to those folks whom her overindulged daughter will probably rob or abandon or cheat, as my cousin Howie did to everyone who crossed his path. 

While I am dwelling on unfortunate topics, I will depart from custom and recount a very vulgar story from my own dissipated youth, which however much I tried, never approached Howie’s in sheer scope of misdeeds.  In general, I really dislike vulgarity in writing or in movies – nothing is funnier to me than a raunchy tale when I am with some pals, but somehow there is something so lacking in intelligence in putting it into print or film or whatever, for the general public.  I am feeling particularly unintelligent lately, and this incident has crossed my mind a number of times, and I am ashamed to confess, made me laugh inwardly a little, so I shall get it off my chest. 

You know how, when you drink a great deal in one evening, you sometimes wake the next morning with something inside you having gone so wrong that you are little more than a container for a gas so noxious, so sulfuric, so evil, that were you to release it on a plane you’d be taken into custody no questions asked?  A gas that actually raises the median atmosphere of the entire city within which you dwell to levels of unpleasantness that bring warnings from the authorities to the old, infant or ill members of its population to remain indoors for its own safety? 

Well, some years ago when Tumwell and I dwelt in San Francisco, I woke one morning after a particularly convivial evening in just such a condition.  There are hangovers that I find so very unpleasant that they can only be relieved – and then only slightly - by the ingestion of a particular brand of strawberry soda that seems to contain a good deal more fizz than most.  On this particular morning, I found I had not had the forethought to purchase a quantity of this soda ahead of my need for it, and I was forced out into the early morning sunshine to walk to our local corner grocery to purchase same.  Actually the ‘corner’ grocery was not actually on the corner; it was a small narrow but deep establishment in the middle of the next block, run as such stores usually were in San Francisco, by an Arab man.  This guy was a very peasant man who fell into that category between friend and acquaintance as do so many one deals with.  We were always glad to see each other, but never saw each other outside of business.  Ali was a fairly young guy with a big smile and a generally humorous outlook on life, which I was shortly to dim considerably.  As is customary, the coolers containing soda and beer in Ali’s store were at the back, and although there were several people in line at the front counter, the back of the store was mercifully empty of humanity; I was glad for this because I had a sudden onset of pain in my lower abdomen that signaled either a) I had come down with a fast acting and virulent form of colon cancer or b) a very nasty change for the worse was about to take place in the atmosphere of that humble grocery. 

Have you ever noticed that there most be some powerful pheromone-like substance in human eruptions of the sort to which I am –ever-so-delicately - referring?  You can be alone at midnight in a building in the middle of a desert (stick with me; I am waxing metaphorical here) and you can step into an elevator going up or down 30 floors or so, and – alone at last – you can give rein to one of these intensely relieving passages of unpleasant air – and the damned elevator will invariably stop at the very next floor to admit one or more people who will proceed to look balefully at you for the next 29 floors, there being no other possible source of the shameful effluvium that is slowly strangling you both?  Thus it was on that morning; no sooner had I committed irrevocably to relieving myself in a manner utterly indifferent to the public weal, than a couple hurried into the shop and made its way rapidly to the back coolers dimly visible amidst an extremely localized smog attack. 

I grabbed my soda and made my shamefaced way to the front; but there was no escape; besides having fearsome attractive powers, these post-alcoholic effluvia have some kind of adhesive quality that science would do well to investigate.  Like Pigpen in Peanuts, or Joe Btfxsplk in L’il Abner, I carried with me my own cloud.  Ali was engaged in opening a can of smoked oysters for a SF Muni bus driver who had stopped his bus outside to run in for a quick snack.  For this purpose Ali was using one of those hand held mechanical can openers and as I stood amongst the small group assembled by the cash register, he began to turn the handle of this faster and faster with an air of desperation more usually seen in someone attempting to flee a ravening bear.  About me the crowd as one took on the fixed expressions of people engaged in that great human tradition of Acting As If Nothing Had Happened. 

Finally, Ali got the can of oysters open, handed them to the driver, took his money, then reached beneath the counter and brought out a can of air freshener spray.  (One wonders why this lay so easily to hand; the place must been a hotbed of customers as fragrant as me.)  He sprayed the air wildly in every direction as he marveled, “I don’t know how anybody can eat that stuff!” 

I was exonerated: I had achieved that acme of every public flatulant’s ambition; I had ruined the mornings of a number of folks and somebody else had gotten the blame!