April 15, 2003
As we humor columnists often say: The following is a true anecdote that really happened, cross my heart and all that crap.
I was driving to work this morning when I noticed the pickup in front of me was weaving erratically and going slower than other traffic. Thinking that the driver was drunk or stoned or something, I carefully passed the pickup. As I drove by, I looked over to see what was going on.
It turns out the driver, a man who looked to be in his 40s, apparently was neither drunk nor stoned. Instead, he had an index finger shoved up a nostril almost to the second knuckle, and he was intensely rooting around inside -- apparently to the point of distraction.
Being the mature, careful human being that I am, my response was to let out a snorting laugh and almost run off the road and into a ditch.
After I calmed down and decided that this nose-picking man had to be the biggest dork currently driving west of the Rockies, it hit me: I am no less of a dork than he is. After all -- and this is embarrassing to admit -- I have caught myself picking my nose while driving, too.
OK, maybe I am a little bit less of a dork; I have never been so distracted while picking my nose that I drove as if I were hammered. But I have indeed picked my nose while operating a motor vehicle. After all, you HAVE to clear out the passage way lest you suffocate, right?
Now, before you emit a snorting laugh and almost fall off your chair, thinking I am the biggest dork currently writing west of the Rockies, stop and think of some of the embarrassing crap YOU do. You know, the little things that you think nobody knows you do, the things you would be MORTIFIED about if anyone caught you doing them.
If you claim there are no such things, you're a damned liar or you're completely without shame. We ALL do stuff like this, because we are all, at our basic level, goofy animals with bodily functions and stuff. Yes, even Tony Armstrong and Cher and the Queen of England. ALL of us.
I'll give another example: I come from a long line of prolific farters. For whatever reason, I didn't pick up this trait -- something my friends are quite thrilled about, I am sure -- but I am positive it's hiding somewhere in my recessive genes. My father is known for proudly letting 'em rip on occasion, and then blaming the resulting noise on passing woodland creatures such as elk, this despite the fact that there are NO elk in the Sparks-Reno area. And while my dad often seems quite proud of these outbursts, another family member of mine -- also prone to such outbursts -- was not so proud.
My grandmother on my mom's side, bless her soul, died when I was 3. I barely remember her, but my memories -- backed up by my family's recollections -- paint her as a small, dignified, classy lady -- who tended to have gas on occasion.
While I do not have any such memory of this, on occasion, my grandmother would let loose with a wall-shaking thunderboomer at the most unexpected of times, causing her such embarrassment that she'd turn a shade of red usually reserved for fire hydrants. But being the classy lady that she was, she'd try to lighten the mood with the following axiom:
Better to let it out and bear the shame
Then hold it in and feel the pain.
Now, that's poetic.
Anyway, we all do things like this, and if they're unavoidable, I say hey, just deal with it. I was once engaged to a woman who also tended to have bouts of gas, except it came up the other way, causing her to belch loud enough to register on the Richter Scale. Her response to this was to embrace the quality and belch for sport.
Yes, I was a lucky man. And can you imagine if we had gotten married and had kids who got both her benching genes and the flatulence genes from my family? It would have been like a frat house on beer 'n' beans night!
It's such a tragedy we didn't work out.
Anyway, the moral of the story: We're all weird animals with bodily function issues. But if it affects your driving, then dammit, pull over, OK?
Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan in exile in Arizona who wishes everybody a happy tax day. Jimmy's column appears here Tuesdays, and a recently updated column archive may be viewed at www.jimmyboegle.com.