A Clean House Is A Life Misspent

Fecal transplants is one of the new boutique health procedures which may be counter intuitive to lay persons but as described by Mary Roach in her new book Gulp it seems to make for a new healthy gut.  It means putting a healthy person's intestinal bacteria into a sick person's digestive tract. Makes one laugh to think that maybe it is possible to make a case that there are positive medical reasons for rimming.  I remember when we had little children and two large golden retrievers and five black cats.  The dogs lay about licking their private parts with an obsession equaled only by their bestowing big wet tongues on our tots' mouths and faces.  Their golden hairs mingled with the black cat hairs to make a kind of angora sweater like cover on all the pillows on our sofas.  When toddlers were still crawlers they edged across the kitchen floor through the spill from cat dishes and dog dishes which seemed to be everywhere.  Maybe they even sampled bits and pieces.  I do know that when they could walk their habit was to take a handful of kibbles out of the fifty pound bag we had in the back hall, but snacking on kibbles, our pediatrician told us, was a good thing, since they were devoid of any of the sugars and salts that the food industry uses to beguile and destroy us at the same time.  These youngsters are now healthy hearty men and women in their early fifties.  My wife and I were never keen on keeping house, and I was happy to learn from a friend whose house is immaculate, that her mother, a woman of my age, and, thus, one would assume, that old time kind of housekeeper, always told her daughter: "A clean house is a life misspent."  When I was a teenager I was obsessed with long hot showers, the perfect location for serious masturbation, and I am sure why all boys who resist washing up to their pubescence take up long showers with a vengeance thereafter.  Long hot showers were abandoned by my husband and me when my doctor brother, then our dermatologist told us that a shower once or twice a week is best, that water destroys your skin, and it's enough that the aging process turns you into bits of tissue paper clinging to bone without giving water its clout.  I suddenly  discovered that kind of musky smell I have always found so sexually attractive when standing around males who have been working hard, and while I had certain misgivings about the auto erotic nature of my new love of my own smell, it made not bathing take on another attractive aura.  I already picked up the habit of not shaving every day before the cute young male models made it the facial style of the day, although in my case the grey and often white hairs sprouting from my face say "homeless" or "bum" rather than "stud" which is why, I guess, that store detectives sometimes follow me in ritzy Fifth Avenue stores.  The other day Stanley Fish wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times about getting rid of his library of many thousands of books.  I did that about a decade ago, moved into smaller quarters, and find that the big fight it so keep from piling new things into the house.  So hard not to be a shopper, hoarder, accumulator in the heart of the consumer society.  The only virtue to "things" is they can be used to hide the dust on counter tops.  Ah, well, . . . .