Only going to be here for a little butt. At the other library. The last one started sounding like a K-Mart. A librarian got on the PA telling the mob of kids I had not noticed forming in the place to go to a certain room. Didn’t catch the details but the place had a party atmosphere that i didn’t find conducive to talking about cunt and thinking about fleshing out the rest of that story. Just another note, though: I never knew another word of it until the Pia Zadora incident, when “pussy” first came across to me as being a synonym for that. Except I didn’t quite get that. I thought the woman was generally being called “pussy” like a hip individual might be called a “cat”. “Nice pussy” was the expression, one which gained worldwide acclaim after a certain presidential candidate might have used such terms. But it was the whispered way the word “cunt” was uttered, as if respectfully, almost churchly. No one wanted to say it too loud, like we were cursing in church. I may have interpreted it as being a gesture of deference to the girls on the bus, except that they didn’t care. For the longest time the word was a respectful one to me. Later I would learn it to be the worst thing you could call a woman, at least in the U.S., while in other countries the word is bandied about like “jerk”.

TAKE ME TO CHURCH!

Always remember a high school friend who swore he did not know the toilet was called the toilet until he was in high school. Until then he thought it was called “The Throne.”

Page 61 of Walter Dean Myers’ Antarctica, Journeys to the South Pole is itself subtitled “The Discovery Expedition”. A previous reader had dog-eared this page, making it seem that it must contain meritorious content. The dog-eared page happens to introduce the subject of dogs in the Antarctic, and commences an overview of what Myers described as an “interesting” chapter by Sir Leopold M’Clintock from The Antarctic Manual. The chapter is about how the author had found that dogs moved heavier loads ad much as 25% faster than men would, with no need to stop and rest. Published in 1901 I guess that gives some insight into the state of antarctic canine research.

In the mid-1990s I endeavored to get a cruise ship to the end of the world, this at a time before passenger cruises to Antarctica became something of a trifling distraction for the monied class. At the time cruises did not seem especially expensive — lest I would not have bee considering one. But like anything interesting it becomes a fashion, too many people start going there, and the next you know it’s like Portland, Maine, becoming the next Hamptons.

Long ago I was in touch with someone in Antarctica. He sent photos of the continents only payphones, at McMurdo Station. He was an acquaintance of a globetrotting woman I thought I was was dating at the time. Good times. I get out of her.