Spitball Army

I really must concentrate my energies on reading a substantial book, a novel, maybe that Steve Martin autobiography.  Too much aimless browsing through magazines and oddball books does little to develop my focus.

That said, here’s the excerpt that has been stuck in my head all day, from Astonish Yourself! 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-Pol Droit:

#13  Drink While Urinating
Duration:  1 to 2 minutes
Props:  toilet and glass of water
Effect:  wide open

For hundreds of thousands of years the vast majority of humans have lived and died without trying the following experiment.  It is, however, both extremely straight-forward and extremely interesting.

Like everyone else, you urinate.  And at other moments you drink.  What you do not know is what it feels like to do both at the same time.  This experiment will show you.

So, just have a large glass of water at hand.  When you begin to urinate, start drinking.  As far as possible, you should try to drink the water straight down, without pausing.  You will feel quite bizarre sensations almost immediately.  The water you evacuate seems to be synchronized with that entering your mouth.  You will then visualize, and above all feel, your body to be organized in a way which until then you had never imagined possible.  The water you are drinking seems to exit directly from your bladder.  In a few seconds you will feel directly wired, from throat to urethra, from stomach to bladder – a physiology that is impossible but that you intuit, directly and unquestionably, to be real.

It has taken no more than a few moments for you to discover this wonderfully simple body, and you feel there can be no other.  No more intestine, no kidneys, no filtration time, no waiting.  Water pours through you vertically, a cool liquid washes through you in a peculiar and palpable way.  Your system seems to have opened inside out, with the water flowing smoothly from inside to outside.  It is like – take your pick – the cosmic flux or an automatic washing machine.

This experiment, which can be repeated indefinitely, which costs nothing, and which is likely to procure ever new sensations and surprises, has not hitherto been considered a thermal cure.

I have always felt, since I was a small child, that inside me there was an automatic washing machine just yearning to be set free.

[audio:Hank_Williams___Cool_Water.mp3]
Hank Williams, Sr. (1949)