Bladder Quotes

I took a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom and found myself in a beautifully proportioned room I had never seen before, containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamberpots. When I went back to investigate more closely, I discovered that the room had vanished. But I must keep an eye out for it. Possibly it is only accessible at five thirty in the morning. Or it may only appear at the quarter moon - or when the seeker has an exceptionally full bladder.

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

I've got to go." "Go where?" "To go. I'd have just taken care of it myself, but it looks like you want to come along." Mott cursed. "Wait for morning." "Wish I could. I've been cursed with my mother's pea-size bladder.

I moved up beside Jamie."I have to go." She frowned at me. "Where?" I pressed a hand to the bottom of my belly. "My bladder.It-" Ah." She gave a small laugh. "We interrupt this life-or-death situation for a pregnancy pee break. Don't see that in the movies, do you?

I think this man might actually possess supernatural powers. He makes people lose their minds and I’m sure some of them do lose bladder control as well." "I see. And who is this author" "Neil Fucking Gaiman." "His second name is Fucking?" "No Leif that’s the honorary second name all celebrities are given by their fans. It’s not an insult it’s a huge compliment and he’s earned it.

Please, by all the blessed saints and their bladders, tell me you two didn’t…Have you lost all semblance of intelligence? (Syn)

Any situation was better faced with an empty bladder, a clean body, and a lack of morning breath.

Your brother beat him almost to death, Temujin. He held him and kicked him until he cried like a child. He is afraid of you, so he hates you. It would be wrong to hurt him again. It would be like beating a dog after it has loosed it's bladder. The spirit is already broken in him.

You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage. Imagine how happy I felt when I got relief from bladder pressure. How long did that happiness last?

The bladder-pipe, a local Highlands speciality, is to music what warthogs are to mathematics. Largely unconnected.

I told you not to drink that much water on the drive,” Sarah told her. “You never listen to me.” “Sorry I don’t have the bladder of a freaking sloth.” “You mean camel,” Sarah corrected. “I meant sloth,” the other girl said. “I read somewhere they only have to go once a week.

You know, I have always believed that humans do have some amount of free will. Of course, this free will is absent if your bladder is full or if you want to rush to the toilet to have a dump. But once things are normal, a certain amount of leeway does exist.

I'm going to go pee. If the universe is bigger and stranger than I can imagine, it's best to meet it with an empty bladder.

The fuller your bladder, the more intense your orgasm, Ana.

Life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurts, but you had to tough it out.

Love is a compulsion you can’t subdue; an irresistible force, one can’t restrain! It’s not in our control, no matter how hard you try; like trying to curb and hold back when your bladder is full. There is no free will, you see.

After they left the office, Peabody shoved her hands in her pockets. "These nicknames are pissing me off." "But you're not I'm-Too-Good-to-Pee-Body. Harris is." "It's my damn name. And now I have to pee. It's like my bladder has to prove something." "Pee at the bank. Consider it a deposit.

I have keen eyes. I once caught a leprechaun you know." I looked at him skeptically. "Aren't those Irish?" "Sure. He was over in the homeland on an exchange basis. We sent the Irish three turnips and a sheep's bladder in trade." "Doesn't seem like much of a trade." "Oh, I think it was a sparking good one, seeing as to leprechauns are imaginary and all. Hello, Prof. How's your kilt?" "As imaginary as your leprechaun

She’d never been any kind of camper, never had been good at relieving a full bladder on a whim. Never had quite figured out that squat; it seemed like she’d always wet her right foot.

Aurora,” Mom sharpened her tone, “I thought you were having dinner. Why are you in the parking lot?” A new voice on the phone snorted, “Parking, obviously... Sorry. This pregnancy is frying my motherboard. And speaking of babies—” Here it comes. “—that’s what parking with your boyfriend leads to, Aurora. Save yourself the agony. My bladder will never be the same.” “I’m not parking with my boyfriend!” I screeched.

Just as if I was one of those true knights you love so well, yes. What do you think a knight is for, girl? You think it's all taking favours from ladies and looking fine in gold plate? Knights are for killing...I killed my first man at twelve. I've lost count of how many I've killed since then. High lords with old names, fat rich men dressed in velvet, knights puffed up like bladders with their honours, yes, and women and children too - they're all meat, and I'm the butcher. Let them have their lands and their gods and their gold. Let them have their sers.' Sandor Clegane spat at her feet to show what he thought of that. 'So long as I have this,' he said, lifting the sword from her throat, 'there's no man on earth I need fear.

this is an unnecessary gesture.' 'All the best ones are,' Troy Said. 'Now open the doors. My bladder is about explode,

College mostly makes people like bladders— just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em.

You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time." Thank you. Do you want something?

There was a time—until very recently in the scheme of things—when there were no wild animals, because every animal was wild; and humans were few. Animals, and animal presence over us and around us. Over every horizon, animals. Their skins clothing our skins, their fats in our lamps, their bladders to carry water, meat when we could get it.

If breakups are like deaths, then ex sightings are like seeing a ghost: you feel goose bumps, near loss of bladder control, and the sensation of your heart bursting in your throat. The distinction is that the ex is alive.

How lucky country children are in these natural delights that lie ready to their hand! Every season and every plant offers changing joys. As they meander along the lane that leads to our school all kinds of natural toys present themselves for their diversion. The seedpods of stitchwort hang ready for delightful popping between thumb and finger, and later the bladder campion offers a larger, if less crisp, globe to burst. In the autumn, acorns, beechnuts, and conkers bedizen their path, with all their manifold possibilities of fun. In the summer, there is an assortment of honeys to be sucked from bindweed flowers, held fragile and fragrant to hungry lips, and the tiny funnels of honeysuckle and clover blossoms to taste.

for it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that once overboard it must drown

It was amazing. Terror cannot actually stand up to a full bladder. I was about to be hauled up on murder charges, and all I could think about was oh god I have to go so baaaaad…

Remorse is not for the elderly. When it comes to them it is not purging or uplifting, but merely degrading and wretched, like a bladder disease.

Who needs an alarm clock you you have a bladder

We’re all proud of you, Donnie. Your mother and me, Katie—” “Right,” I snorted. “She said I’m dumber than her bladder-challenged dog.

She says, he is a great soul.—A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

and somehow halfway through a bottle of vegan wine (because apparently most wine contains fish bladder for some fucking reason),

They never say, I love you with all my kidneys. I love you with my liver. They never say, my gall bladder is yours and yours alone. No one says, she broke my appendix.

There’s a difference between being a class act and being classy. Peeing off the side of a jeep doesn’t mean you’re not classy, it just means you’re a free spirit with a small bladder.

It won’t be long,’ said Philippa cheerfully, her mother’s ring in her voice. ‘You know what Bess says. There’s nothing in this world a drop of aqua-vitæ in a sheep’s bladder won’t cure. Stop the Somervilles with a knife! It needs artillery.’ And she blew her nose hard.

I long for the simplicity of theatre. I want lessons learned, comeuppances delivered, people sorted out, all before your bladder gets distractingly full. That's what I want. What I know is what we all know, whether we'll admit it or not: every attempt to impose the roundness of a well-made play on reality produces a disaster. Life just isn't so, nor will it be made so.

The organs of Venus are familiar to all, but oh, my brothers, the organ of Saturn is the bladder.

Her bladder felt painfully, solidly full, as though it would burst and release not urine but the garbled prayers she was muttering.

There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors. p.116

There are few moments of clarity more profound than those that follow the emptying of an overcharged bladder. The world slows down, the focus sharpens, the brain comes back on line. Huge nebulous difficulties prove on close calm examination to be merely cloud giants.

The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the water.

They made him [Stephen] a little canvas boat, and it was thought that if he were obliged to wear two sea-elephant's bladders, blown up and attached to his person, he could not come to harm in such a placid sea; but after an unfortunate experience in which he became involved in his umbrella and it was found that the bladders buoyed up his meagre hams alone, so that only the presence of Babbington's Newfoundland preserved him, he was forbidden to go unaccompanied.

Death is the heritage of life; a man’s vitality is like air in a bladder. Poinct this bubble and away, away, away, flees life, like the color of fading dream.

At this point in my life, beaming confidence is largely a matter of mind over bladder control

The function of suspense is to put the reader in danger of an overfull bladder.

No pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man. A red-throated diver, sodden and obscene with oil, able to move only its head, will push itself out from the sea-wall with its bill if you reach down to it as it floats like a log in the tide. A poisoned crow, gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on to the descending wall of air, if you try to catch it. A rabbit, inflated and foul with myxomatosis, just a twitching pulse beating in a bladder of bones and fur, will feel the vibration of your footstep and will look for you with bulging, sightless eyes. Then it will drag itself away into a bush, trembling with fear. We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.

I stay in bed for as long as possible, but eventually my bladder wins. When I come back from the bathroom, he's looking out my window. He turns around and laughs. "Your hair. It's sticking up in all different directions." St. Clair pronounces it die-rections and illustrates his point by poking his fingers up around his head like antlers. "You're one to speak." "Ah,but it looks purposeful on me. Took me ages to realize the best way to get that mussed look was to ignore it completely." "So you're saying it looks like crap on me?" I glance in the mirror,and I'm alarmed to discover I do resemble a horned beast. "No.I like it.

I work for a few at home who are devoted. People who are up now. Either they have some sort of bladder problem or they're extremely drunk. This is my crowd, these are the people I hope to get.

But until this night, she had never once actually wet the bed. And now that she has, we just lie there in the accident, and the minutes of the clock keep changing, and the love I have for her keeps growing, and we both keep drawing breath. What was so horrible about it? Why had I always been so angry? What was my need to always be right? To win every argument with her? To out-stubborn a dog? And just like that, all the anger is gone. Released like the emptying of a bladder into soft cotton sheets as we lie in the wetness.

SPRING POEM It is spring, my decision, the earth ferments like rising bread or refuse, we are burning last year's weeds, the smoke flares from the road, the clumped stalks glow like sluggish phoenixes / it wasn't only my fault / birdsongs burst from the feathered pods of their bodies, dandelions whirl their blades upwards, from beneath this decaying board a snake sidewinds, chained hide smelling of reptile sex / the hens roll in the dust, squinting with bliss, frogbodies bloat like bladders, contract, string the pond with living jelly eyes, can I be this ruthless? I plunge my hands and arms into the dirt, swim among stones and cutworms, come up rank as a fox, restless. Nights, while seedlings dig near my head I dream of reconciliations with those I have hurt unbearably, we move still touching over the greening fields, the future wounds folded like seeds in our tender fingers, days I go for vicious walks past the charred roadbed over the bashed stubble admiring the view, avoiding those I have not hurt yet, apocalypse coiled in my tongue, it is spring, I am searching for the word: finished finished so I can begin over again, some year I will take this word too far.

Fulfilled desires, like pleasures (even of the intrinsic kind), are states of achievement rather than default states. For instance, one has to work at satiating oneself, while hunger comes naturally. After one has eaten or taken liquid, bowel and bladder discomfort ensues quite naturally and we have to seek relief. One has to seek out pleasurable sensations, in the absence of which blandness comes naturally. The upshot of this is that we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life. There are moments, perhaps even periods, of satisfaction, but they occur against a background of dissatisfied striving. Pollyannaism may cause most people to blur out this background, but it remains there.

Aurora,” Mom sharpened her tone, “I thought you were having dinner. Why are you in the parking lot?” A new voice on the phone snorted, “Parking, obviously... Sorry. This pregnancy is frying my motherboard. And speaking of babies—” Here it comes. “—that’s what parking with your boyfriend leads to, Aurora. Save yourself the agony. My bladder will never be the same. “I’m not parking with my boyfriend!” I screeched.

You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and the building doorman. ou no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing aid calibrations.

The thing is, I was so bursting for the loo that I thought my bladder was going to explode. I could hardly speak, let alone make it up your stairs. When you threw the key down and I had to bend over to pick it up, I thought that was it, I was going to flood the road! And I’m not even exaggerating. I’ve never been so desperate in my life.

it makes no difference whether a hundred or a thousand flagons go through your bladder – all you are is a strainer.

KIDNEYS: I seek only good everywhere. Right action is taking place. I am fulfilled. BLADDER: I release the old and welcome the new.

In my dreams a small wolf slept inside of me and it wasn’t comfortable. It moved it’s heels and elbows and paws, struggled to make space between my lungs, stomach, bladder. Occasionally a scrabbling claw punctured something and I woke. What were you dreaming? Arabella wanted to know. I knew what it was dreaming. It was dreaming of being born. The form and scale of its occupancy shifted. Sometimes its legs were in my legs, its head in my head, its paws in my hands. Other times it was barely the size of a kitten, heartburn hot and fidgety under my sternum. I’d wake and for a moment feel my face changed, reach up and touch the muzzle that wasn’t there.

I invited him over and he stayed forever. I feed him all my bread, the old peppers turned to mush & fluorescent mold, the chicken thighs unthawed & boneless. He ask for more so I give him my left leg. He ask for more & I give him my lungs & lips. More still, and there goes my bladder. He eats it all, all of me, eats the whole damn house, & I live forever in him or maybe it's the other way around. I swallowed. I swallowed him whole & didn't even notice him thrashing inside me.

No. It’s Dandilion this time, your fellow. That idler, parasite and good-for-nothing, that priest of art, the bright-shining star of the ballad and love poem. As usual he’s radiant with fame, puffed up like a pig’s bladder and stinking of beer. Do you want to see him?" "Of course. He’s my friend, after all.

When Khubchand, his beloved, blind, bald, incontinent seventeen-year-old mongrel, decided to stage a miserable, long-drawn-out death, Estha nursed him through his final ordeal as though his own life somehow depended on it. In the last months of his life, Khubchand, who had the best of intentions but the most unreliable of bladders, would drag himself to the top-hinged dog-flap built into the bottom of the door that led out into the back garden, push his head through it and urinate unsteadily, bright yellowly, inside Then with bladder empty and conscience clear he would look up at Estha with opaque green eyes that stood in his grizzled skull like scummy pools and weave his way back to his damp cushion, leaving wet footprints on the floor. As Khubchand lay dying on his cushion, Estha could see the bedroom window reflected in his smooth, purple balls. And the sky beyond. And once a bird that flew across. To Estha - steeped in the smell of old roses, blooded on memories of a broken man - the fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle. A bird in flight reflected in an old dog's balls. It made him smile out loud.

you've probably noticed that after the first half-century practically everybody gets leaky, they can't keep it in ... hence the cruelty of long drawn-out meals and drinking sessions ... ships and apartment houses are the same ... everything starts to leak ... sphincters, bladders, drain pipes, bowels ... the half-century is merciless for ladies and gentlemen ... worse for dogs and cats! ... with them it comes sooner! ... five ... six years ...

Latchkey! I mean . . . I want to talk to you . . .' He fell silent, glancing behind him and shifting from foot to foot, his waterproof trousers rattling like the bulls' bladders that boys use to learn swimming. Sterlingov angrily spat out his cigarette. 'Well? What about?' 'A . . . about a secret matter ,' Alyoshka whispered. Dozens of ears floated around them in the dust waves; the whisper was heard, and it ran on like a spark along a gunpowder wick. Alyoshka's secret message, the mysterious special clothing, the deacon's catastrophe-all this was too much. The atmosphere was charged with thousands of volts, and something was needed to discharge the electricity, to clear the air. ("X")

The consumption of food was a sacrament of success. A man who carried a great stomach before him was thought to be in his prime. Women went into hospitals to die of burst bladders, collapsed lungs, overtaxed hearts and meningitis of the spine. There was a heavy traffic to the spas and sulphur springs, where the purgative was valued as an inducement to the appetite. America was a great farting country. All this began to change when Taft moved into the White House. His accession to the one mythic office in the American imagination weighed everyone down. His great figure immediately expressed the apotheosis of that style of man. Thereafter fashion would go the other way and only poor people would be stout.

Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They’re six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I’m getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What’s to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there’s enough down there to support whales, there’s enough to support sharks that big. Just because we’ve never seen a hundred-foot white doesn’t mean they couldn’t exist. They’d have no reason to come to the surface. All their food would be way down in the deep. A dead one wouldn’t float to shore, because they don’t have flotation bladders. Can you imagine what a hundred-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?It would be like a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives.

Fear had an anatomy. A curious thought. It had genitals, a bladder and bowls. That was where you felt fear. Not in your head. It was between your legs. It affected your excretion. It emptied you. It turned your bowls to water. It is disgusting.

What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper's stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder,viciously,tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost?

When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.

... Well, some day i'm going to get in with that wild artistic group. It's the only thing that makes this town different." "The 'wild artistic group,' as you put it, has an average age of fifty-seven, and most of us have heart disease and bladder trouble...

Nothing burns one up faster than the affects of ressentiment. Anger, pathological vulnerability, impotent lust for revenge, thirst for revenge, poison-mixing in any sense—no reaction could be more disadvantageous for the exhausted: such affects involve a rapid consumption of nervous energy, a pathological increase of harmful excretions—for example, of the gall bladder into the stomach. Ressentiment is what is forbidden par excellence for the sick—it is their specific evil—unfortunately also their most natural inclination.

I call these types of interventions, like wearing cotton underwear or emptying your bladder after sex, the burden of “well, it can’t hurt”. But they truly are a burden. Every time we make a woman jump through a useless hoop to get better, we add a burden, be it financial, or emotional, or the exasperation of doing so many things and yet realizing that you are running very hard but not getting anywhere.

I have to pick up my kids. I have to register them for school. I have to pack their lunches and get their Hep B shots and wash their hands. They must be spotted on the stairs and potty trained and broken of the binkie. And if that relentless work runs right alongside gauging the risks of bladder surgery on a seventy-four-year-old, well, what did you think was gonna happen? What did you think being an adult was?

Emancipor stood in front of the small bush,listening to the birds chirp to greet the morning whilst he emptied his bladder. “Look wel on that yelow, murky stream, Mister Reese—” The manservant started at the voice beside him. “Master! You, uh, surprised me.” “Thus reducing you to a trickle.

Sometimes my bladder is the only reason I get up. Not even hunger can shift me – the only time I can stand to be hungry is when I'm in bed. I've discovered that if I lie still and count to about ninety, the hunger pangs go away. They're like heartbreak: you just have to acknowledge the pain and wait until it passes.

Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past–no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.

Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating. Have you given up this primary business as obsolete in your own writing? What fun you are missing, then. The fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of loving and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard. Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto.

In high school, I confided in a nurse that I was trying to be sexually active, but bladder and bowel incontinence were affecting my ability to be intimate with my then-partner. Their only solution was to suggest that there would be people who would be “into that.” My dating pool was instantly reduced to people who would fetishize me.

So our food’s safe, right? But what if it acts more like a slow poison, like cigarettes—one won’t kill you, but ten thousand consumed over ten years might? Unlike Salmonella, you won’t be feeling the effects immediately. But eventually, you’ll feel it . . . everywhere. In your heart, muscles, bladder, brain, and especially your wallet.

Cammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city’s waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered? What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper’s stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost?

His bladder was the thief of sleep.

No one ever considers the question of bladder when dealing with matters of subterfuge.

You still there?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time.

You have the heart of a Palantine,” Samson said. “And the bladder of an old man.

They explained that most Lyme patients’ gall bladders cause major issues, because when they are not working properly, they act as a toxic magnet.

for checking the fullness of his bladder.

Serena had to cross her legs: in moments of dire amusement her bladder tended to play tricks.

Don't worry girls ... I have the bladder of a camel ...

The removal of a healthy gall bladder is often just a part of a diagnostic process.

For once, mam, my bladder isn't near my eye and why isn't it?

She seemed to be wearing frozen fish bladders for shoes. But

Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto.

We are ruled by our bladders and bowels.

Who needs a bladder when you need an alarm clock

Remorse is not for the elderly. When it comes to them, it is not purging or uplifting, but merely degrading and wretched, like a bladder disease.

But I didn’t lead you anywhere, did I? You stumbled upon across the whole thing because of Joe’s bladder.

She says, he is a great soul.—A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!" said Mrs. Cadwallader.

He was blowing up the bladder.

Emptying your bladder after sex does not reduce infections.

Control? This is the grand illusion. I can barely control my bladder. Money doesn’t give you control, it buys you a nicer coat.

Her bladder disagreed. It increased the pressure and reminded her of all of that champagne she’d drunk and those bottles of water that had closed out the night. Oh God, she really had to

A true adventurer needs a keen wit, a stout heart, and a strong bladder. Though luck can stand in for the wit and the heart, but I have never yet found a good substitute for the bladder.

Whenever someone shoulders past me or cuts me off, I feel like rooting for them instead of getting angry, and I hope they’re able to make it to the toilet before disaster strikes. I cheer for the steadfastness of their sphincters and wish them long life and clean underwear. People think I am patient, but not really; I just get it. We are ruled by our bladders and bowels.

Such artistic forays into the countryside had been made easier by the invention, in 1824, of metal tubes for oil paints, which replaced the messy and awkward pig bladders in which artists of previous generations had kept their paints; and by the introduction of collapsible three-legged stools and portable easels, both of which could be carried into the countryside by the artist.18

He polished the mud off the coin—little enough even if gold—and pulled out his own purse. Now there was an empty bladder. He dropped the thin disk of metal into the leather mouth and stared down at its lonely glint. He sighed and tucked the pouch away. Now he had a hope for bandits to steal again. Now he had a reason to fear. He reflected on his new burden, so great for its weight,

be one of those parents huddled over a table in Starbucks with a latte and a babycino, listening to one another moan about weak bladders and chafed nipples. Instead, I’ve never felt so lonely.

Preserved from decay by alcohol, pig bladder, and lead, they warn not so much that all flesh perishes--what sane adult forgets this truth for long?--but that immortality comes at a steep price.

People declare as much, without, apparently, looking into the matter very closely. They seem able to dispense with the conscientious observer's scruples, when inflating their bladder of theory.

You know what wine and liqueur tastes like. It makes no difference whether a hundred or a thousand bottles pass through your bladder—you are nothing more than a filter.” —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 77.16

Then let’s rock and roll!” she said. “But first, I’ve got a bladder full of passion fruit lemonade that needs a download, and I warn y’all, the walls in here are real thin. You might want to go outside.

Oh I would never dream of assuming I know all Hogwarts' secrets, Igor," said Dumbledore amicably.n"Only this morning, for instance, I took a wrong turning on the way to the bathroom and found myself in a beautifully proportioned room I have never seen before, containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamber pots. When I went back to investigate more closely, I discovered that the room had vanished. But I must keep an eye out for it. Possibly it is only accessible at five-thirty in the morning. Or it may only appear at the quarter moon — or when the seeker has an exceptionally full bladder.

The past twelve weeks had been a blur, and now she was about to meet her baby via ultrasound, go home with a picture of an alien baby that people would pretend was beautiful, and here she sat after drinking a liter of fluid, her panties moist from a bladder that gave up control right around the time her shoes stopped fitting. A light breeze could make her pee at this point. A sneeze would unleash a tsunami.

Suffering seems to destroy so many things that give life meaning that it may feel impossible to even go on. In the last weeks of his life, my father faced a great range of life-ending, painful illnesses all at once. He had congestive heart failure and three kinds of cancer, even as he was dealing with a gall bladder attack, emphysema, and acute sciatica. At one time he said to a friend, "What's the point?" He was too sick to do the things that made his life meaningful- so why go on? At my father's funeral, his friend related to us how he gently reminded my father of some basic themes in the Bible. If God had kept him in this world, then there were still some things for him to do for those around him. Jesus was patient under even greater suffering for us, so we can be patient under lesser suffering for him. and heaven will make amends for everything.

I’ve got to go.” “Go where?” “To go. I’d have just taken care of it myself, but it looks like you want to come along.” Mott cursed. “Wait for morning.” “Wish I could. I’ve been cursed with my mother’s pea-size bladder.

The words “Ask Your Doctor” parked across the top of the screen, as if the advertisers had anticipated everyone turning off the sound. Franny wondered if the drug was for depression, an overactive bladder, thinning hair.

LOGOMACHY, n. A war in which the weapons are words and the wounds punctures in the swim-bladder of self-esteem—a kind of contest in which, the vanquished being unconscious of defeat, the victor is denied the reward of success.

I asked an indifferent copywriter what books he had read about advertising. He told me that he had not read any; he preferred to rely on his own intuition. ‘Suppose,’ I asked, ‘your gall-bladder has to be removed this evening. Will you choose a surgeon who has read some books on anatomy and knows where to find your gall-bladder, or a surgeon who relies on his intuition? Why should our clients be expected to bet millions of dollars on your intuition?

Another marine example is the Portuguese man-of-war, which can measure more than 150 feet from its air bladder to the tips of its tentacles. Many think of it as a jellyfish, but in fact it is a siphonophore—a colony of minute individuals.

And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth. My high-blown pride At length broke under me and now has left me, Weary and old with service, to the mercy Of a rude stream that must forever hide me. Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate you. I feel my heart new opened. O, how wretched Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favors! There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to, That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin, More pangs and fears than wars or women have; And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, Never to hope again.

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place. Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side. He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work. Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.

December 24th MEANINGLESS . . . LIKE A FINE WINE “You know what wine and liqueur tastes like. It makes no difference whether a hundred or a thousand bottles pass through your bladder—you are nothing more than a filter.” —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 77.16

Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

For most of the day and night, time oppresses me. It is only when I am at work on the innards of a clock-or a lock-that time stops." "The clock stops, you mean." "No. Time stops, or so it seems. I do not sense its passage. Then something interrupts me-I become aware that my bladder is full, my mouth dry, my stomach rumbling, the fire’s gone out, and the sun’s gone down. But there before me on the table is a finished clock-" now suddenly a snicker from the mechanism, and a deft movement of his hands. "Or an opened lock.

So how do you feel about it?” “I’m not upset, but my mom was crying and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen her cry. Dad always wanted whiskey poured on his grave, so my brother said, ‘I just hope he doesn’t mind me filtering it through my bladder first.’” Mystery

I have the sick fantasy that whatever I see at the movies is going to happen to me at home. My bladder capacity increased tenfold after I saw "The Shining" because I was sure that if I went into the bathroom late at night, there would be a dead woman in the bathtub.

Suddenly, political sucksters and realistic insectivores, shoving to the front, puffed up their stomachs and blew lies out of their fingers! A parade was formed! It was now an assembly on the arch, an enthusiastic troop of dunces, pasquil-makers, populist scribblers and lick-penny poets, anti-intellectual hacks, modernistic rubbishmongers, anonymuncules of prose and anacreontic water-bibbers all screaming nonce-words and squealing filthy ditties. They shouted scurrilities! They pronounced words backwards! They tumbled along waggling codpieces, shaking hogs' bladders, and bugling from the fundament! Some sang, shrill, purposely mispronouncing words, snarping at the language to mock it while thumping each other with huge rubber phalluses and roaring out farts! They snapped pens in half and turned somersaults with quills in their ears to make each other laugh, lest they speak and then finally came to the lip of a monstrously large hole, a crater-like opening miles wide, which, pushing and shoving, they circled in an obscene dance while dressed in hoods with long earpieces and shaking firebrands, clackers, and discordant bells! A bonfire was then lit under a huge pole, and on that pole a huge banner, to hysterical applause, was suddenly unfurled and upon it, upsidedown, were written the words: "In The End Was Wordlessness."

A naturalist should look at the world with warm affection, if not ardent love. The life the scalpel has ended ought to be honored by a caring, devoted appreciation for that creature’s unrepeatable individuality, and for the fact that, at the same time, strange as this may seem, this life stands for the entire natural kingdom. Examined with attention, the dissected hare illuminates the parts and properties of all other animals and, by extension, their environment. The hare, like a blade of grass or a piece of coal, is not simply a small fraction of the whole but contains the whole within itself. This makes us all one. If anything, because we are all made of the same stuff. Our flesh is the debris of dead stars, and this is also true of the apple and its tree, of each hair on the spider’s legs, and of the rock rusting on planet Mars. Each minuscule being has spokes radiating out to all of creation. Some of the raindrops falling on the potato plants in your farm back in Sweden were once in a tiger’s bladder. From one living thing, the properties of any other may be predicted. Looking at any particle with sufficient care, and following the chain that links all things together, we can arrive at the universe—the correspondences are there, if the eye is skillful enough to detect them. The guts of the anatomized hare faithfully render the picture of the entire world. And because that hare is everything, it is also us. Having understood and experienced this marvelous congruity, man can no longer examine his surroundings merely as a surface scattered with alien objects and creatures related to him only by their usefulness. The carpenter who can only devise tabletops while walking through the forest, the poet who can only remember his own private sorrows while looking at the falling snow, the naturalist who can only attach a label to every leaf and a pin to every insect—all of them are debasing nature by turning it into a storehouse, a symbol, or a fact. Knowing nature, Lorimer would often say, means learning how to be. And to achieve this, we must listen to the constant sermon of things. Our highest task is to make out the words to better partake in the ecstasy of existence.

Now, what is the comparative loudness of a man's flicking the corners of a few banknotes in the middle of his room with the same man's pissing furiously from a bursting bladder into a stainless-steel sink in the corner of his room nearest to a pair of huddled, listening females?

It is understood that, for next year's remembrance ceremony, the prime minister's tear ducts are to be surgically altered so that he can cry French benedictine on demand, lick it off his own face, and then transubstantiate it in his bladder, to wee out the holy tears of the fallen.

Younger people just don’t seem to realize that time eventually shows up for a payoff, and the longer it gives you, the more it will ask for , Bessie thought and nearly said aloud. I’ll take your memories, your ability to walk. How about your bladder? Good old Father Time, Bessie mused to herself. Bastard

I noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the former Counselor of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a weapon.

For a Christianity preached by royal functionaries who are paid and made secure by the State and employ the police against other people, such a Christianity has the same relation to the Christianity of the New Testament as swimming with a cork float or with a bladder has to swimming, that is to say, it is play.

They all watched as Genya checked his pulse, his breathing. She shook her head. “Zoya,” said Sturmhond. His voice had the ring of command. Zoya sighed and pushed up her sleeves. “Unbutton his shirt.” “What are you doing?” Kaz asked as Genya undid Kuwei’s remaining buttons. His chest was narrow, his ribs visible, all of it spattered with the pig’s blood they’d encased in the wax bladder. “I’m either going to wake up his heart or cook him from the inside out,” said Zoya. “Stand back.” They did their best to obey in the cramped space. “What exactly does she mean by that?” Kaz asked Nina. “I’m not sure,” Nina admitted. Zoya had her hands out and her eyes closed. The air felt suddenly cool and moist. Inej inhaled deeply. “It smells like a storm.” Zoya opened her eyes and brought her hands together as if in prayer, rubbing her palms against each other briskly. Nina felt the pressure drop, tasted metal on her tongue. “I think … I think she’s summoning lightning.” “Is that safe?” asked Inej. “Not remotely,” said Sturmhond. “Has she at least done it before?” said Kaz. “For this purpose?” asked Sturmhond. “I’ve seen her do it twice. It worked splendidly. Once.” His voice was oddly familiar, and Nina had the sense they’d met before. “Ready?” Zoya asked. Genya shoved a thickly folded piece of fabric between Kuwei’s teeth and stepped back. With a shudder, Nina realized it was to keep him from biting his tongue. “I really hope she gets this right,” murmured Nina. “Not as much as Kuwei does,” said Kaz. “It’s tricky,” said Sturmhond. “Lightning doesn’t like a master. Zoya’s putting her own life at risk too.” “She didn’t strike me as the type,” Kaz said. “You’d be surprised,” Nina and Sturmhond replied in unison. Again, Nina had the eerie sensation that she knew him. She saw that Rotty had squeezed his eyes shut, unable to watch. Inej’s lips were moving in what Nina knew must be a prayer. A faint blue glow crackled between Zoya’s palms. She took a deep breath and slapped them down on Kuwei’s chest.

The countless tight squeezes you have been in during the course of your life, the desperate moments when you have felt an urgent, overpowering need to empty your bladder and no toilet is at hand, the times when you have found yourself stuck in traffic, for example, or sitting on a subway stalled between stations, and the pure agony of forcing yourself to hold it in. This is the universal dilemma that no one ever talks about, but everyone has been there at one time or another, everyone has lived through it, and while there is no example of human suffering more comical that that of the bursting bladder, you tend not to laugh about these incidents until after you have managed to relieve yourself—for what person over the age of three would want to wet his pants in public? That is why you will never forget these words, which were the last words spoken to one of your friends by his dying father: “Just remember, Charlie,” he said, “never pass up an opportunity to piss.” And so the wisdom of the ages is handed down from one generation to the next.

After forty years of selling wholesale industrial deodorizing supplies, one establishment is forced to open its doors to the public. In the lingo of the trade, a salesman explains why their large institution buyers have gone elsewhere. Who wants to stand downwind of the League o' Nations every time some freshman with a bladder infection pulls a Nebuchadnezzar?

For me, there's nothing better than when I become the funnel, and have that out of body experience where I'm not the one writing anymore. At that point, it's all about bladder control. Sitting back and watching scenes, characters, and dialogue appear out of nowhere, and fear of breaking the spell makes you hold in your pee for six or eight hours is the best thing about being a writer.

When I flew back to Chicago that fateful day in 1954, I had a freshly signed contract with the McDonald brothers in my briefcase. I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.

After years of intense research, I could come to only one conclusion: People whose diets are high in animal protein have significantly higher rates of chronic diseases: hypertension, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and many, many others, including cataracts, diverticulitis, diverticulosis, inflammatory bowel disease, gall bladder disorders, gout, hypertension, irritable bowel syndrome, kidney stones, and rheumatoid arthritis.

It was the seventh time that week someone felt compelled to inform her that her life was about to change and she was sick of it. She’d lost her job, her research, bladder control, a clear view of her toes, restful sleep, normal skin, a pain-free back, not to mention all the little assorted freedoms everyone else who is not pregnant takes for granted—like being able to fit behind a steering wheel. The only thing she’d gained? Weight.

Whale bones were honed into chisels and barbed tips for harpoons and spears; dolphins’ jawbones made fine combs. The skin and sinewy tendons from seals and whales offered string for bows, slingshots, and fishing nets. Seal bladders served as pouches. Plants were woven into baskets. Bark was carved into containers—and used as torches. Shells became everything from scoops to knives sharp enough to cut through bone. And the hides from seals and sea lions provided

You can't fix a problem by targeting its victims. Even if you hate fat people with all your heart, if you actually want to get us out of 'your' armrest space, defending out humanity is the only pragmatic solution. Because no matter how magnificently you resent them, you cannot turn a fat person into a thin person in time for the final boarding call (nor a full bladder into an empty one, nor a crying baby into a baked potato). The only answer is to decide we're worth helping.

The itch of it, the pressure of it, is across the front of her torso, down through the muscles of her stomach, into her pelvis, around her buttocks. It is like simply not passing water when your bladder asks you to. It is like holding your breath for a few seconds longer than is entirely comfortable. It’s no wonder that the baby girls can’t do it. It’s a wonder they’ve found any adult women at all with this thing. Margot feels herself want to discharge, and doesn’t. Just doesn’t.

Scientists suspect that by eating chicken and other meat, women infect their lower intestinal tract with these antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can then creep up into their bladder.1182 Commonsense hygiene measures to prevent UTIs have included wiping from front to back after bowel movements and urinating after intercourse to flush out any infiltrators. Commenting on this body of research, Science News suggested meat avoidance as an option to “chicken out” of urinary tract infections.

Only this morning, for instance, I took a wrong turning on the way to the bathroom and found myself in a beautifully proportioned room I have never seen before, containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamber pots. When I went back to investigate more closely, I discovered that the room had vanished. But I must keep an eye out for it. Possibly it is only accessible at five-thirty in the morning. Or it may only appear at the quarter moon — or when the seeker has an exceptionally full bladder.

“You still taking him for his house-breaking lesson tonight?” I flicked an eraser at him. He ducked it and threw me a grin. While I was getting my Changes under control, we’d decided I should try once a week. While Simon was joking about house-breaking, that’s kind of what it was like—take me outside regularly, where I’d attempt to perform a bodily function, and hopefully train my body to do it on a schedule. So far, I felt like a month-old puppy, struggling to control my bladder before it was ready to be controlled.

So, yes, I might look like I’m doing okay after my week’s holiday, like I’m thriving and happy, but nobody saw what I was like during it. Nobody asked how many times I had to tiptoe to the toilet because my bladder hurt from how long it took me to gather the strength to go wee. Nobody saw the clean sink in the kitchen and wondered if I’m just really good at cleaning up after myself, or if I’ve not eaten in a week. People only see what you show on the outside, and when you come across as a cheery, upbeat person, you don’t give people any reason to look deeper.

Lord, here's what we need today, right away, or as soon as we can get it: we need world peace, prosperity, security, life without risk, pleasure without pain, happiness without cost, and discipleship with no cross. That's why we're here, at church, to get our needs met. Our church tries to be user-friendly and seeker sensitive. That's why on Sundays we serve espresso with a dash of amaretto before our services, a little caffeine boost until we get to the main point of our worship: the prayer requests. So like we were saying, we need a quick recovery from gall bladder surgery, an effortless cataract removal, a happy marriage, obedient and chaste kids, and a reason to get out of bed in the morning. If you love us, you'll meet our needs. Now then, is there something that we could do for you? You're thirsty? Well, if you're the Messiah, why don't you fix yourself a divine drink? We've got needs of our own, thank you. It's our job to have need; it's your job to meet need. For this and all other needs, spoken and unspoken, felt and unfelt, incipient and obvious, personal and corporate, immediate and long term, we pray. Amen.  

All of us are now "no-longers" while the excited mind of Richard Kliman believes that his heart, his knees, his cerebrum, his prostate, his bladder sphincter, his everything is indestructible and that he, and he alone, is not in the hands of his cells. Believing this is no soaring achievement for those who are twenty-eight, certainly not if they know themselves to be beckoned by greatness. They are not "no-longers," losing faculties, losing control, shamefully dispossessed from themselves, marked by deprivation and experiencing the organic rebellion staged by the body against the elderly; they are "not-yets," with no idea how quickly things turn out another way.

Relying on our acquired knowledge, we have ventured to discuss the question: Whether the soul is created before us? Whether it arrives from nothing in our bodies? At what age it came and placed itself between the bladder and the intestines, "cæcum" and "rectum"? Whether it received or brought there any ideas, and what those ideas are? Whether, after animating us for a few moments, its essence is to live after us in eternity, without the intervention of God Himself? Whether, it being a spirit, and God being spirit, they are of like nature? These questions have an appearance of sublimity. What are they but questions of men born blind discussing the nature of light?

I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen —the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly— I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. —It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip —if you could call it a lip— grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels—until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

The women’s bladders filled remarkably fast during sexual stimulation. There was urine before orgasm and their bladders were empty after squirting. The squirted fluid was identified in the lab as urine. Why does this happen? It is possible when women report squirting that they are simply having an orgasm strong enough for the pelvic floor muscles to empty their bladder, which is why it is associated with heightened pleasure. It is also possible that a more intense sexual response could result in a faster filling of the bladder. It is also possible that some women have a lot of transudate—meaning they get very wet—during sex. When they orgasm, that fluid could come out all at once.

He was staring at the woman who stood holding the door open into another room . He weaved to his feet, lurching as he came near her, then he caught a whiff of perfume. The gray eyes seemed as big as saucers, like the eyes of a kitten when you hold its nose touching yours. He looked at the small mouth, the full lower lip, carefully tinted but not painted. She said nothing. As he started to push past her he seemed to fall; he found his arm around her and held on knowing that he was a fool, knowing something terrible would strike him dead, knowing he wanted to cry, to empty his bladder, to scream, to go to sleep, wondering as he tightened his arm around her…Stan lay sprawling on the floor.

What on earth did you get up to while we were all away?” “Nothing. Just a bit knackered” was the mumbled response, only half coherent. Tristan’s voice was rasping and low, and the look of thorough misery on his face was enough to give Callum a secondhand migraine. “Sauced, too, by the looks of it.” Normally Tristan was better about holding his alcohol; it was one of the primary reasons Callum liked him. There was much to be said about a man who remained habitually upright. “Absolutely fucking bladdered,” confirmed Tristan, pivoting slowly to face Callum and holding a hand to his head. “I’d do something about it, only the prospect of managing anything at all sounds positively exhausting.

I took a glass retort, capable of containing eight ounces of water, and distilled fuming spirit of nitre according to the usual method. In the beginning the acid passed over red, then it became colourless, and lastly again all red: no sooner did this happen, then I took away the receiver; and tied to the mouth of the retort a bladder emptied of air, which I had moistened in its inside with milk of lime lac calcis, (i.e. lime-water, containing more quicklime than water can dissolve) to prevent its being corroded by the acid. Then I continued the distillation, and the bladder gradually expanded. Here-upon I left every thing to cool, tied up the bladder, and took it off from the mouth of the retort.— I filled a ten-ounce glass with this air and put a small burning candle into it; when immediately the candle burnt with a large flame, of so vivid a light that it dazzled the eyes. I mixed one part of this air with three parts of air, wherein fire would not burn; and this mixture afforded air, in every respect familiar to the common sort. Since this air is absolutely necessary for the generation of fire, and makes about one-third of our common air, I shall henceforth, for shortness sake call it empyreal air, [literally fire-air] the air which is unserviceable for the fiery phenomenon, and which makes abut two-thirds of common air, I shall for the future call foul air [literally corrupted air].

He was forever wallowing in the mire, dirtying his nose, scrabbling his face, treading down the backs of his shoes, gaping at flies and chasing the butterflies (over whom his father held sway); he would pee in his shoes, shit over his shirt-tails, [wipe his nose on his sleeves,] dribble snot into his soup and go galumphing about. [He would drink out of his slippers, regularly scratch his belly on wicker-work baskets, cut his teeth on his clogs, get his broth all over his hands, drag his cup through his hair, hide under a wet sack, drink with his mouth full, eat girdle-cake but not bread, bite for a laugh and laugh while he bit, spew in his bowl, let off fat farts, piddle against the sun, leap into the river to avoid the rain, strike while the iron was cold, dream day-dreams, act the goody-goody, skin the renard, clack his teeth like a monkey saying its prayers, get back to his muttons, turn the sows into the meadow, beat the dog to teach the lion, put the cart before the horse, scratch himself where he ne’er did itch, worm secrets out from under your nose, let things slip, gobble the best bits first, shoe grasshoppers, tickle himself to make himself laugh, be a glutton in the kitchen, offer sheaves of straw to the gods, sing Magnificat at Mattins and think it right, eat cabbage and squitter puree, recognize flies in milk, pluck legs off flies, scrape paper clean but scruff up parchment, take to this heels, swig straight from the leathern bottle, reckon up his bill without Mine Host, beat about the bush but snare no birds, believe clouds to be saucepans and pigs’ bladders lanterns, get two grists from the same sack, act the goat to get fed some mash, mistake his fist for a mallet, catch cranes at the first go, link by link his armour make, always look a gift horse in the mouth, tell cock-and-bull stories, store a ripe apple between two green ones, shovel the spoil back into the ditch, save the moon from baying wolves, hope to pick up larks if the heavens fell in, make virtue out of necessity, cut his sops according to his loaf, make no difference twixt shaven and shorn, and skin the renard every day.]

Perhaps, if I had a new fountain pen instead of this wreck, or a fresh bouquet of, say, twenty beautifully sharpened pencils in a slim vase, and a ream of ivory smooth paper instead of these, let me see, thirteen, fourteen more or less frumpled sheets . . . I might start writing the unknown thing I want to write; unknown, except for a vague shoe-shaped outline, the infusorial quiver of which I feel in my restless bones, a feeling of shchekotiki . . . half-tingle, half-tickles, when you are trying to remember something or understand something or find something, and probably your bladder is full, and your nerves are on edge, but the combination is on the whole not unpleasant ( if not protracted) and produces a minor orgasm or 'petit éternuement intérieur' when at last you find the picture-puzzle piece which exactly fits the gap.

Here is a creature, one little pig, who came into the world as livestock, wrung from creation in a vast godlike system of inscrutable darkness and clattering machinery infinitely beyond his understanding. Yet even he, who has never known the warmth of the sun and the breeze and the cool water, yearns for them. He liveth, yearning for the things of life. He was deprived of companionship, sunlight, a name, any concern whatsoever as a fellow creature, allowed only the breath of life until that, too, would be abruptly withdrawn. Then the moment came and he was herded out into the somber procession, poked with electric prods, hit, yelled at, driven toward the devilish clattering and godawful squealing, losing control of his bladder from the horror of it, everywhere around him the smell of death and panic and, as even an uncomprehending little pig or calf or lamb must feel it—utter damnation.

Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die My skin is in blazing furore I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse In to the sun-coloured bladder I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me I'll destroy and shatter everything draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger Shubha will have to be given Oh Malay Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self My power of recollection is withering away Let me ascend alone toward death I haven't had to learn copulation and dying I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness Have not had to learn the usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh China-rose matrix Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm I am failing to understand why I still want to live I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors I'll have to do something different and new Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born I want to see my own death before passing away The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide Shubha Let me enter in to the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora In to the absurdity of woeless effort In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra? Why wasn't I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition? Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum -flux or in the phlegm? With her eyes shut supine beneath me I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize S

Today temperament continues to be a major focus of researchers in the fields of psychology, anthropology, physiology, and neurobiology. While they agree about the reality of temperament and the important role it plays in how children experience their world, they tend to use a variety of names to describe the temperament traits. I choose to use the terms coined by Dr. Stella Chess and the late Dr. Alexander Thomas because of their positive, parent-friendly approach. They include not only our typical energy level but also our speed in adjusting to new situations; the intensity of our emotions; our sensitivity to sights, sounds, smells, feelings, and tastes; and more. A child who is temperamentally active not only likes to move but needs to move. Telling this child to sit still for extended periods of time, and that he could do it if he really wanted to, is like telling you to ignore a full bladder. The pressure builds—a need that is inside and real.

They only kidnap elven pups and only harm elves, which is good in itself, for the more harm is done to non-humans, the greater the benefits for real folk. But she-foxes are monsters, and monsters should be exterminated, destroyed, should be wiped out as a race. You live from that, after all, Witcher, you contribute to it. And I hope you won’t bear us a grudge either that we’re contributing to the extermination of monsters. But, it seems to me, these digressions are in vain. You wanted explanations; you’ve got them. You know now what you’re being hired to do and against what … against what you have to defend us.” “No offence, but your explanations are as foggy as urine from an infected bladder,” Geralt commented calmly. “And the loftiness of your expedition’s goal is as dubious as a maiden’s virginity after a village fête. But that’s your business. It’s my job to advise you that the only way to defend yourself against an aguara is to stay well away from it. Mr. van Vliet?” “Yes?” “Return home.

One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe—that ours is just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call “a false vacuum” or “a scalar field” or “vacuum energy”—some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. Or it may be that space and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang—forms too alien for us to imagine—and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can’t understand to one we almost can. “These are very

This was the gastronomic heartland of Italy, where every inch of the fertile soil was cultivated. In Parma he visited shops festooned with hams, each one postmarked with the stamps of a dozen different inspectors---the regions of Italy are fiercely protective of their produce, and only a handful of towns between the Enza and Stirone Rivers are allowed to designate themselves as true producers of prosciutto di Parma. Because the huge lofts in which the hams are aged are always left open to the wind, the villages of the Enza valley seemed scented with the aromatic sweetness of the meat as he drove through them. In the valley to the north of Parma, he sampled culatello di zibello, perhaps the greatest of all Parma's pork products and for that reason almost never exported, even to other parts of Italy: a pig's rump, marinated in salt and spices, then sewn inside a pig's bladder and aged for eighteen months in the humid air of the flat river basin, a process so delicate that almost half the hams are spoiled before they are ready, but which leaves the rest incomparably delicious.

I ventured to place my hand on the large wings that lay folded on his breast, and in doing so a slight shock as of electricity passed through me. I recoiled in fear; my host smiled, and as if courteously to gratify my curiosity, slowly expanded his pinions. I observed that his garment beneath them became dilated as a bladder that fills with air. The arms seemed to slide into the wings, and in another moment he had launched himself into the luminous atmosphere, and hovered there, still, and with outspread wings, as an eagle that basks in the sun. Then, rapidly as an eagle swoops, he rushed downwards into the midst of one of the groups, skimming through the midst, and as suddenly again soaring aloft. Thereon, three forms, in one of which I thought to recognise my host’s daughter, detached themselves from the rest, and followed him as a bird sportively follows a bird. My eyes, dazzled with the lights and bewildered by the throngs, ceased to distinguish the gyrations and evolutions of these winged playmates, till presently my host re-emerged from the crowd and alighted at my side.

Basic elements of human care underpin how we regard and respond to others—our ethics as people become sicker and more physically dependent: Shelter from the elements. A caring society metaphorically says to the frail or dying person, “We will keep you warm and dry.” Help with personal hygiene. The community reassures the person who is too frail to care for himself or herself, “We will keep you clean.” Assistance with elimination. Family or, on behalf of society, clinicians (typically nurses or nurse aides), say, “We will help you with your bowels and bladder function.” Provision of food and drink. We can say, “We will always offer you something to eat and drink—and help you to do it.” Keeping company. Society can say to people who are dying, especially those who are “unbefriended,” “We will be with you. You will not have to go through this time in your life entirely alone.” Alleviating suffering. Certainly today, society can say, “We will do whatever we can, with as much skill and expertise as available, to lessen your discomfort.” Yet it is only this final element that is dependent on clinical expertise.

As I grow longer in the tooth, I find myself shaking off for greater and greater stretches of time, and I always use this time to fret morosely about my health in general, and about the likelihood that a grave illness, conceivably located in the bladder region, will overtake me in the future, maybe imminently. In this way a pleasurable, natural act becomes the catalyst for somber reflections and an unnatural, incipient depression. So much of life follows this pattern exactly, I think, We begin to lose ourselves in a joyful or gratifying act - it can be a creature comfort or something complicatedly emotional like stimulating conversation or the solitary immersion in a poem, a beautiful landscape, or a work of art - and we forget, in the moment of serenity, all the pain and trouble of life. Until, quite suddenly, and as a rule, shockingly, this very forgetfulness, our fleeting holiday from care, becomes nothing more than another occasion to remember how truly infrequently happiness comes to us, and how likely we are to die in some hortible way. Then, disgusted with ourselves over our inability to enjoy life, we halt the pleasurable activity and move on, as speedily as we can, to other business.

The next day we booked a three-hundred pound sow for a most unusual photoshoot. She was chauffeured to Hollywood from a farm in Central Valley, and arrived in style at the soundstage bright and early, ready for her close-up. She was a perfect pig, straight from the animal equivalent of Central casting: pink, with gray spots and a sweet disposition. Like Wilbur from Charlotte's Web, but all grown up. I called her "Rhonda." In a pristine studio with white walls and a white floor, I watched as Rhonda was coaxed up a ramp that led to the top of a white pedestal, four feet off the ground. Once she was situated, the ramp was removed, and I took my place beside her. It was a simple setup. Standing next to Rhonda, I would look into the camera and riff about the unsung heroes of Dirty Jobs. I'd conclude with a pointed question: "So, what's on your pedestal?" It was a play on that credit card campaign: "What's in your wallet?" I nailed it on the first take, in front of a roomful of nervous executives. Unfortunately, Rhonda nailed it, too. Just as I asked, "What's on your pedestal?" she crapped all over hers. It was an enormous dump, delivered with impeccable timing. During the second take, Rhonda did it again, right on cue. This time, with a frightful spray of diarrhea that filled the studio with a sulfurous funk, blackening the white walls of the pristine set, and transforming my blue jeans into something browner. I could only marvel at the stench, while the horrified executives backed into a corner - a huddled mass, if you will, yearning to breath free. But Rhonda wasn't done. She crapped on every subsequent take. And when she could crap no more, she began to pee. She peed on my cameraman, She peed on her handler. She peed on me. Finally, when her bladder was empty, we got the take the network could use, along with a commercial that won several awards for "Excellence in Promos." (Yes, they have trophies for such things.) Interestingly, the footage that went viral was not the footage that aired, but the footage Mary encouraged me to release on YouTube after the fact. The outtakes of Rhonda at her incontinent finest. Those were hysterical, and viewed more times than the actual commercial. Go figure. Looking back, putting a pig on a pedestal was maybe the smartest thing I ever did. Not only did it make Rhonda famous, it established me as the nontraditional host of a nontraditional show. One whose primary job was to appear more like a guest, and less like a host. And, whenever possible, not at all like an asshole.

We put the dogs in a play and invited the parents, since there was no one else to be an audience. But the pets were poorly trained and failed to take direction. There were two soldiers and a fancy lady we’d dressed in a frilly padded bra. The soldiers were cowards. Deserters, basically. They ran away when we issued the battle cry. (A blaring klaxon. It went hoh-onk.) The lady urinated. “Oh, poor old thing, she has a nervous bladder!” exclaimed someone’s chubby mother. “Is that a Persian rug?” Whose mother was it? Unclear. No one would cop to it, of course. We canceled the performance. “Admit it, that was your mother,” said a kid named Rafe to a kid named Sukey, when the parents had filed out. Some of their goblets, highball glasses, and beer bottles were completely empty. Drained. Those parents were in a hurry, then. “No way,” said Sukey firmly, and shook her head. “Then who is your mother? The one with the big ass? Or the one with the clubfoot?” “Neither,” said Sukey. “So fuck you.” THE GREAT HOUSE had been built by robber barons in the nineteenth century, a palatial retreat for the green months. Our parents, those so-called figures of authority, roamed its rooms in vague circuits beneath the broad beams, their objectives murky. And of no general interest.

claque, aka canned laughter It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s nothing new under the sun (a heavenly body, by the way, that some Indian ascetics stare at till they go blind). I knew that some things had a history—the Constitution, rhythm and blues, Canada—but it’s the odd little things that surprise me with their storied past. This first struck me when I was reading about anesthetics and I learned that, in the early 1840s, it became fashionable to hold parties where guests would inhale nitrous oxide out of bladders. In other words, Whip-it parties! We held the exact same kind of parties in high school. We’d buy fourteen cans of Reddi-Wip and suck on them till we had successfully obliterated a couple of million neurons and face-planted on my friend Andy’s couch. And we thought we were so cutting edge. And now, I learn about claque, which is essentially a highbrow French word for canned laughter. Canned laughter was invented long before Lucille Ball stuffed chocolates in her face or Ralph Kramden threatened his wife with extreme violence. It goes back to the 4th century B.C., when Greek playwrights hired bands of helpers to laugh at their comedies in order to influence the judges. The Romans also stacked the audience, but they were apparently more interested in applause than chuckles: Nero—emperor and wannabe musician—employed a group of five thousand knights and soldiers to accompany him on his concert tours. But the golden age of canned laughter came in 19th-century France. Almost every theater in France was forced to hire a band called a claque—from claquer, “to clap.” The influential claque leaders, called the chefs de claque, got a monthly payment from the actors. And the brilliant innovation they came up with was specialization. Each claque member had his or her own important job to perform: There were the rieurs, who laughed loudly during comedies. There were the bisseurs, who shouted for encores. There were the commissaires, who would elbow their neighbors and say, “This is the good part.” And my favorite of all, the pleureuses, women who were paid good francs to weep at the sad parts of tragedies. I love this idea. I’m not sure why the networks never thought of canned crying. You’d be watching an ER episode, and a softball player would come in with a bat splinter through his forehead, and you’d hear a little whimper in the background, turning into a wave of sobs. Julie already has trouble keeping her cheeks dry, seeing as she cried during the Joe Millionaire finale. If they added canned crying, she’d be a mess.

But it is in this that young people go so often and so badly astray. It is in their nature to have no patience, so they throw themselves together when love comes over them, and spend themselves just as they are in all their disorder, confusion and perplexity. What is to happen then? What is life to do with the heaps of half-battered life, which they call their fusion, and which, if possible, they would gladly call their happiness and their future? Each one loses himself for the other’s sake and loses the other, too, and many others who wanted to come afterwards. And each loses the immensity of his possibilities, and exchanges the coming and going of delicate things full of portent for a fruitless perplexity, of which nothing more can come; nothing but a little nausea, disappointment, poverty and flight into one of the many conventions which have been set up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous of paths. No sphere of human experience is so well provided with conventions as this. Life-belts of the most different devices are there, boats and air-bladders. The conception of society has been able to create all kinds of refuges, for, as it was inclined to take the life of love as a pleasure, it had to make it easy, cheap, secure and safe, as public pleasures always are.

Honest to God, I hadn’t meant to start a bar fight. “So. You’re the famous Jordan Amador.” The demon sitting in front of me looked like someone filled a pig bladder with rotten cottage cheese. He overflowed the bar stool with his gelatinous stomach, just barely contained by a white dress shirt and an oversized leather jacket. Acid-washed jeans clung to his stumpy legs and his boots were at least twice the size of mine. His beady black eyes started at my ankles and dragged upward, past my dark jeans, across my black turtleneck sweater, and over the grey duster around me that was two sizes too big. He finally met my gaze and snorted before continuing. “I was expecting something different. Certainly not a black girl. What’s with the name, girlie?” I shrugged. “My mother was a religious woman.” “Clearly,” the demon said, tucking a fat cigar in one corner of his mouth. He stood up and walked over to the pool table beside him where he and five of his lackeys had gathered. Each of them was over six feet tall and were all muscle where he was all fat. “I could start to examine the literary significance of your name, or I could ask what the hell you’re doing in my bar,” he said after knocking one of the balls into the left corner pocket. “Just here to ask a question, that’s all. I don’t want trouble.” Again, he snorted, but this time smoke shot from his nostrils, which made him look like an albino dragon. “My ass you don’t. This place is for fallen angels only, sweetheart. And we know your reputation.” I held up my hands in supplication. “Honest Abe. Just one question and I’m out of your hair forever.” My gaze lifted to the bald spot at the top of his head surrounded by peroxide blonde locks. “What’s left of it, anyway.” He glared at me. I smiled, batting my eyelashes. He tapped his fingers against the pool cue and then shrugged one shoulder. “Fine. What’s your question?” “Know anybody by the name of Matthias Gruber?” He didn’t even blink. “No.” “Ah. I see. Sorry to have wasted your time.” I turned around, walking back through the bar. I kept a quick, confident stride as I went, ignoring the whispers of the fallen angels in my wake. A couple called out to me, asking if I’d let them have a taste, but I didn’t spare them a glance. Instead, I headed to the ladies’ room. Thankfully, it was empty, so I whipped out my phone and dialed the first number in my Recent Call list. “Hey. He’s here. Yeah, I’m sure it’s him. They’re lousy liars when they’re drunk. Uh-huh. Okay, see you in five.” I hung up and let out a slow breath. Only a couple things left to do. I gathered my shoulder-length black hair into a high ponytail. I looped the loose curls around into a messy bun and made sure they wouldn’t tumble free if I shook my head too hard. I took the leather gloves in the pocket of my duster out and pulled them on. Then, I walked out of the bathroom and back to the front entrance. The coat-check girl gave me a second unfriendly look as I returned with my ticket stub to retrieve my things—three vials of holy water, a black rosary with the beads made of onyx and the cross made of wood, a Smith & Wesson .9mm Glock complete with a full magazine of blessed bullets and a silencer, and a worn out page of the Bible. I held out my hands for the items and she dropped them on the counter with an unapologetic, “Oops.” “Thanks,” I said with a roll of my eyes. I put the Glock back in the hip holster at my side and tucked the rest of the items in the pockets of my duster. The brunette demon crossed her arms under her hilariously oversized fake breasts and sent me a vicious sneer. “The door is that way, Seer. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.” I smiled back. “God bless you.” She let out an ugly hiss between her pearly white teeth. I blew her a kiss and walked out the door. The parking lot was packed outside now that it was half-past midnight. Demons thrived in darkness, so I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’d been counting on it.

With language he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them! With fitted, harmonious words the magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats and spirits from the elements. Their descendants, the literary men, still go on with the process, morticing their verbal formulas together, and, before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe. Rabbits out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds. Formulated by their art the most insipid statements become enormously significant. For example, I proffer the constatation, 'Black ladders lack bladders.' A self-evident truth, one on which it would not have been worth while to insist, had I chosen to formulate it in such words as 'Black fire-escapes have no bladders,' or, 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie.' But since I put it as I do, 'Black ladders lack bladders,' it becomes, for all its self-evidence, significant, unforgettable, moving. The creation by word-power of something out of nothing—what is that but magic? And, I may add, what is that but literature? Half the world's greatest poetry is simply 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie,' translated into magic significance as, 'Black ladders lack bladders.' And you can't appreciate words. I'm sorry for you.

A couple of years later, I found out an angry hog is even worse than an angry beaver. My buddy Mike Williams invited me to go hog-hunting with him on a cantaloupe farm. Wild boars were destroying the cantaloupe crop, and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries gave the landowner permission to have hunters kill the hogs. They even let us chase the boars and shoot them from the back of a truck while the game wardens watched the proceedings from a distance! Now, I’d never hunted hogs, but a few of the guys I was hunting with claimed they were experts. We shot one or two hogs apiece and then chased a 360-pound boar into an adjoining cotton field. My buddies convinced me to go into the overgrown cotton field and attempt to flush the hog out into the open. About a hundred yards into the thick brush, I heard the hog grunt. The hog was so close to me that when I put my scope on it to shoot, I couldn’t tell if it was its front end or rear end! I fired my gun. Unfortunately, I shot the hog in the rear, which only made it madder! The hog turned around and charged toward me. I turned and ran out of the cotton field. I felt its tusks clipping at my ankles as I ran. Fortunately, I stayed ahead of the hog until we reached the cantaloupe field, and then to my surprise the hog fell into a heap. It was dead. I looked at my buddies and they were laughing and rolling on the ground. I thought it was a very strange response to my almost getting devoured by a vicious wild hog. I didn’t know I’d lost control of my bladder during the chase!

The evening was a string of miserable minutes strung together in tiny clusters. Three minutes for a man shot through the shoulder; Ellis put first a finger in the entry wound and then another in the exit and when his fingers touched, he decided the man was only lightly injured and didn’t need a surgeon. Three minutes to set a broken wrist and splint it with a strip of cowhide and a piece of wood from a sycamore tree. Two minutes to tourniquet a leg, then extract a piece of wire deep in the meat of it. A minute to peek under a pink, saturated bandage several inches below a slender belly button; he saw thin, red water leaking from a hole and smelled urine, knew the ball had breached the bladder. It would either heal or it wouldn’t, but nothing to do about it so he set the soul aside, a case not to be operated upon. He turned a man’s head looking for the source of a trickle of blood and had ten terrible minutes trying to stop torrential bleeding from under his clavicle; frantic moments during which he could get neither a finger nor a clamp around the pulsating source. All bleeding stops eventually though, and the case did not violate the rule. He took two minutes to settle his own breathing, then four minutes sewing a torn scalp, and half a minute saying a prayer over a fat, cigar-shaped dead man. After awhile, he had the impression he wasn’t seeing men, but parts—an exploded chest, a blood swolled thigh, a busted jaw with its teeth spat to the wind or swallowed. It was more than a man could take and a lot less than there was to be seen.

He carries the past around like a bottle of antacids in his pocket. You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and building doorman. You no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing-aid calibrations. Every sports coat you own is too big because you continue to shrink, your shoulders like a rumor behind all that fabric. You are waiting to die without ever thinking about death itself. It's a face at the window, peering in. You live in three rooms of your twenty-room triplex, whole areas cordoned off like cholera wards. You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you'd been decent and loving and talented and brave. Instead you were vain and selfish, capable of love but always giving less than everything you had. You held back. You hoarded. You lived among beautiful things. The paintings on your walls, the Dutch rivers and kitchens, the Flemish peasant frolics, they give off fumes and dull with age, but connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and bankers who stared up at them as their own lives tapered off. Like trees, they have breathed in the air around them and now they exhales some of their previous owners' atoms and molecules. They could last for a thousand years, these paintings, and that buoys you as you drift off, a layer just above sleep. Skimming the pond, Rachel used to call it, or was that something you once said to her? You should turn everything off in the room, but you don't. You let the lamps burn all night.

Broadly speaking, components of processed foods and animal products, such as saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol, were found to be pro-inflammatory, while constituents of whole plant foods, such as fiber and phytonutrients, were strongly anti-inflammatory.938 No surprise, then, that the Standard American Diet rates as pro-inflammatory and has the elevated disease rates to show for it. Higher Dietary Inflammatory Index scores are linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease939 and lower kidney,940 lung,941 and liver function.942 Those eating diets rated as more inflammatory also experienced faster cellular aging.943,944 In the elderly, pro-inflammatory diets are associated with impaired memory945 and increased frailty.946 Inflammatory diets are also associated with worse mental health, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, and impaired well-being.947 Additionally, eating more pro-inflammatory foods has been tied to higher prostate cancer risk in men948,949,950 and higher risks of breast cancer,951,952 endometrial cancer,953 ovarian cancer,954 and miscarriages in women. Higher Dietary Inflammatory Index scores are also associated with more risk of esophageal,955 stomach,956 liver,957 pancreatic,958 colorectal,959 kidney,960 and bladder961 cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin lymphoma.962 Overall, eating a more inflammatory diet was associated with 75 percent increased odds of having cancer and 67 percent increased risk of dying from cancer.963 Not surprisingly, those eating more anti-inflammatory diets appear to live longer lives.964,965,966,967 But how does the Dietary Inflammatory Index impact body weight? Obesity and Inflammation:

But nothing has ever expressed the general, gut-felt moral revulsion against city-bombing better than a virtually unknown article, from firsthand experience, by America’s most famous writer at the time, Ernest Hemingway, in July 1938. It’s still little known because he wrote it, by request, for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, which published it in Russian; his manuscript in English didn’t surface143 for forty-four years. It conveys in words the same surreal images that Picasso had rendered on canvas the year before. His lead sentence: “During the last fifteen months I saw murder done in Spain by the Fascist invaders. Murder is different from war.” Hemingway was describing what he had seen of fascist bombing of workers’ housing in Barcelona and shelling of civilian cinemagoers in Madrid. You see the murdered children with their twisted legs, their arms that bend in wrong directions, and their plaster powdered faces. You see the women, sometimes unmarked when they die from concussion, their faces grey, green matter running out of their mouths from bursted gall bladders. You see them sometimes looking like bloodied bundles of rags. You see them sometimes blown capriciously into fragments as an insane butcher might sever a carcass. And you hate the Italian and German murderers who do this as you hate no other people. … When they shell the cinema crowds, concentrating on the squares where the people will be coming out at six o’clock, it is murder. … You see a shell hit a queue of women standing in line to buy soap. There are only four women killed but a part of one woman’s torso is driven against a stone wall so that blood is driven into the stone with such force that sandblasting later fails to clean it. The other dead lie like scattered black bundles and the wounded are moaning or screaming.

I am excited to report that I may have gotten a job as an elevator attendant. It's a three-flight elevator, and my primary objective is to push one of three buttons, 1,2, or 3. I know, it seems complicated, but I am sure I am intellectually mature enough to handle it. I feel confident that I have this job because the owner of the elevator operating company, Mr. Pushkin, of Pushkin Push-button Services, shook my hand, winked at me, examined my index finger for button-pushing capabilities and then licked my armpit. It was very flattering. Since he is obviously a man who is continually rising in the elevator world, I asked him for some life advice. And do you know what he told me? He leaned in close so that his blue eyes were about two inches from my face, and then he leaned around to my ear and whispered, “Some men never leave the ground floor, and some men rise to the top. Still other men, like myself, enable these penthouse executives to reach the pinnacle of their company. But I never carry on conversation in an elevator, or at a urinal, and I’d never install a urinal on an elevator, for fear that men would be more inclined to converse freely as they traveled and emptied their bladder.” And without hesitation I replied, “Mr. Pushkin, I never shake a man’s hand after he just got done pissing, or shake my penis more than three times after pissing, but I am certain that I could operate an elevator equipped with a urinal. I know how to keep both my mouth and my pants zipped shut.” That’s when he glanced down and noticed that my fly was down. I was so embarrassed until he reached his hand down to my crotch and zipped me up as he winked and said, “It happens to the best of us.” And that’s when I noticed that not only was his fly unzipped, but his penis had been hanging out the whole time he’d been talking to me.

Curtis Bane screamed and though I came around fast and fired in the same motion, he’d already pulled a heater and begun pumping metal at me. We both missed and I was empty, that drum clicking uselessly. I went straight at him. Happily, he too was out of bullets and I closed the gap and slammed the butt of the rifle into his chest. Should’ve knocked him down, but no. The bastard was squat and powerful as a wild animal, thanks to being a coke fiend, no doubt. He ripped the rifle from my grasp and flung it aside. He locked his fists and swung them up into my chin, and it was like getting clobbered with a hammer, and I sprawled into a row of trash cans. Stars zipped through my vision. A leather cosh dropped from his sleeve into his hand and he knew what to do with it all right. He swung it in a short chopping blow at my face and I got my left hand up and the blow snapped my two smallest fingers, and he swung again and I turned my head just enough that it only squashed my ear and you better believe that hurt, but now I’d drawn the sawback bayonet I kept strapped to my hip, a fourteen-inch grooved steel blade with notched and pitted edges—Jesus-fuck who knew how many Yankee boys the Kraut who’d owned it gashed before I did for him—and stabbed it to the guard into Bane’s groin. Took a couple of seconds for Bane to register it was curtains. His face whitened and his mouth slackened, breath steaming in the chill, his evil soul coming untethered. He had lots of gold fillings. He lurched away and I clutched his sleeve awkwardly with my broken hand and rose, twisting the handle of the blade side to side, turning it like a car crank into his guts and bladder, putting my shoulder and hip into it for leverage. He moaned in panic and dropped the cosh and pried at my wrist, but the strength was draining from him and I slammed him against the wall and worked the handle with murderous joy. The cords of his neck went taut and he looked away, as if embarrassed, eyes milky, a doomed petitioner gaping at Hell in all its fiery majesty. I freed the blade with a cork-like pop and blood spurted down his leg in a nice thick stream and he collapsed, folding into himself like a bug does when it dies.

Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after his lung cancer was diagnosed, he continued the activities that he considered important, marching against crackhouses, campaigning against the demolition of the Ford Auditorium, organizing Detroit Summer, making speeches, and writing letters to the editor and articles for the SOSAD newsletter and Northwest Detroiter. In 1992 while he was undergoing the chemotherapy that cleared up his bladder cancer, he helped form the Coalition against Privatization and to Save Our City. The coalition was initiated by activist members of a few AFSCME locals who contacted Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings who in turn contacted us. Jimmy helped write the mission statement that gave the union activists a sense of themselves as not only city workers but citizens of the city and its communities. The coalition’s town meetings and demonstrations were instrumental in persuading the new mayor, Dennis Archer, to come out against privatization, using language from the coalition newsletter to explain his position. At the same time Jimmy was putting out the garbage, keeping our corner at Field and Goethe free of litter and rubbish, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, picking cranberries, and keeping up “his” path on Sutton. After he entered the hospice program, which usually means death within six months, and up to a few weeks before his death, Jimmy slowed down a bit, but he was still writing and speaking and organizing. He used to say that he wasn’t going to die until he got ready, and because he was so cheerful and so engaged it was easy to believe him. A few weeks after he went on oxygen we did three movement-building workshops at the SOSAD office for a group of Roger Barfield’s friends who were trying to form a community-action group following a protest demonstration at a neighborhood sandwich shop over the murder of one of their friends. With oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable oxygen tank by his side, Jimmy spoke for almost an hour on one of his favorite subjects, the need to “think dialectically, rather than biologically.” Recognizing that this was probably one of Jimmy’s last extended speeches, I had the session videotaped by Ron Scott. At the end of this workshop we asked participants to come to the next session prepared to grapple with three questions: What can we do to make our neighborhoods safe? How can we motivate people to transform? How can we create jobs?

There is no fault that can’t be corrected [in natural wine] with one powder or another; no feature that can’t be engineered from a bottle, box, or bag. Wine too tannic? Fine it with Ovo-Pure (powdered egg whites), isinglass (granulate from fish bladders), gelatin (often derived from cow bones and pigskins), or if it’s a white, strip out pesky proteins that cause haziness with Puri-Bent (bentonite clay, the ingredient in kitty litter). Not tannic enough? Replace $1,000 barrels with a bag of oak chips (small wood nuggets toasted for flavor), “tank planks” (long oak staves), oak dust (what it sounds like), or a few drops of liquid oak tannin (pick between “mocha” and “vanilla”). Or simulate the texture of barrel-aged wines with powdered tannin, then double what you charge. (““Typically, the $8 to $12 bottle can be brought up to $15 to $20 per bottle because it gives you more of a barrel quality. . . . You’re dressing it up,” a sales rep explained.) Wine too thin? Build fullness in the mouth with gum arabic (an ingredient also found in frosting and watercolor paint). Too frothy? Add a few drops of antifoaming agent (food-grade silicone oil). Cut acidity with potassium carbonate (a white salt) or calcium carbonate (chalk). Crank it up again with a bag of tartaric acid (aka cream of tartar). Increase alcohol by mixing the pressed grape must with sugary grape concentrate, or just add sugar. Decrease alcohol with ConeTech’s spinning cone, or Vinovation’s reverse-osmosis machine, or water. Fake an aged Bordeaux with Lesaffre’s yeast and yeast derivative. Boost “fresh butter” and “honey” aromas by ordering the CY3079 designer yeast from a catalog, or go for “cherry-cola” with the Rhône 2226. Or just ask the “Yeast Whisperer,” a man with thick sideburns at the Lallemand stand, for the best yeast to meet your “stylistic goals.” (For a Sauvignon Blanc with citrus aromas, use the Uvaferm SVG. For pear and melon, do Lalvin Ba11. For passion fruit, add Vitilevure Elixir.) Kill off microbes with Velcorin (just be careful, because it’s toxic). And preserve the whole thing with sulfur dioxide. When it’s all over, if you still don’t like the wine, just add a few drops of Mega Purple—thick grape-juice concentrate that’s been called a “magical potion.” It can plump up a wine, make it sweeter on the finish, add richer color, cover up greenness, mask the horsey stink of Brett, and make fruit flavors pop. No one will admit to using it, but it ends up in an estimated 25 million bottles of red each year. “Virtually everyone is using it,” the president of a Monterey County winery confided to Wines and Vines magazine. “In just about every wine up to $20 a bottle anyway, but maybe not as much over that.

Should a child be allowed to “decide for himself” on matters related to God? Aren’t we forcing our religion down children’s throats when we tell them what to believe? Let me answer with an illustration from nature. A little gosling (baby goose) has a peculiar characteristic that is relevant at this point. Shortly after it hatches from its shell it becomes attached, or “imprinted,” to the first thing seen moving nearby. From that time forward, the gosling follows that particular object when it moves in the vicinity. Ordinarily, it becomes imprinted to the mother goose which hatched the new generation. If she is removed, however, the gosling settles for any mobile substitute, whether alive or not. In fact, a gosling becomes imprinted most easily to a blue football bladder, dragged by on a string. A week later, the baby falls in line behind the bladder as it scoots by. Time is the critical factor in this process. The gosling is vulnerable to imprinting for only a few seconds after hatching from the shell. If that opportunity is lost, it cannot be regained. In other words, there is a critical, brief period in the gosling’s life when this instinctual learning is possible. There is also a critical period when certain kinds of instruction are easier in the life of children. Although humans have no instincts (only drives, reflexes, urges, etc.), there is a brief period during childhood when youngsters are vulnerable to religious training. Their concepts of right and wrong are formulated during this time, and their view of God begins to solidify. As in the case of the gosling, the opportunity of that period must be seized when it is available. Leaders of the Catholic Church have been widely quoted as saying, “Give us the child until he is seven years old and we’ll have him for life.” They are usually correct, because permanent attitudes can be instilled during these seven vulnerable years. Unfortunately, however, the opposite is also true. The absence or misapplication of instruction through that prime-time period may place a severe limitation on the depth of a child’s later devotion to God. When parents withhold indoctrination from their small children, allowing them to “decide for themselves,” the adults are almost guaranteeing that their youngsters will “decide” in the negative. If parents want their children to have a meaningful faith, they must give up any misguided attempts at objectivity. Children listen closely to discover just how much their parents believe what they preach. Any indecision or ethical confusion from the parent is likely to be magnified in the child. After the middle adolescent age (ending at about fifteen years), children resent being told exactly what to believe. They don’t want religion “forced down their throats,” and should be given more autonomy in what they believe. If the early exposure has been properly conducted, children will have an inner mainstay to steady them. Their early indoctrination, then, is the key to the spiritual attitudes they carry into adulthood.

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what’s called at home. But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until--later or sooner-- perhaps--no, not perhaps--quite certainly: it will come. Fear tweaks the vagus nerve. A sickish shrinking from what waits, somewhere out there, dead ahead. But meanwhile the cortex, that grim disciplinarian, has taken its place at the central controls and has been testing them, one after another: the legs stretch, the lower back is arched, the fingers clench and relax. And now, over the entire intercommunication system, is issued the first general order of the day: UP. Obediently the body levers itself out of bed--wincing from twinges in the arthritic thumbs and the left knee, mildly nauseated by the pylorus in a state of spasm--and shambles naked into the bathroom, where its bladder is emptied and it is weighed: still a bit over 150 pounds, in spite of all that toiling at the gym! Then to the mirror. What it sees there isn’t much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here’s what it has done to itself, here’s the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into the during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds. The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative. Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face—the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man—all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us—we have died—what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I’m afraid of being rushed. It stares and stares. Its lips part. It struggles to breathe through its mouth. Until the cortex orders it impatiently to wash, to shave, to brush its hair. Its nakedness has to be covered. It must be dressed up in the clothes because it is going outside, into the world of the other people; and these others must be able to identify it. Its behavior must be acceptable to them. Obediently, it washes, shaves, brushes its hair, for it accepts its responsibilities to the others. It is even glad that it has its place among them. It knows what is expected of it. It knows its name. It is called George.

Stark Electric Jesus Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die My skin is in blazing furore I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse In to the sun-coloured bladder I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me I'll destroy and shatter everything draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger Shubha will have to be given Oh Malay Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self My power of recollection is withering away Let me ascend alone toward death I haven't had to learn copulation and dying I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness Have not had to learn the usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh China-rose matrix Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm I am failing to understand why I still want to live I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors I'll have to do something different and new Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born I want to see my own death before passing away The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide

By this stage, your puppy has bladder control. Urge them to stay in their crate 15 to 30 minutes longer each morning by waking them up with a bone or food-stuffed hollow toy, until they’re content sleeping in until your ideal target time.

The waitress, a blonde beauty with just a hint of a goiter, smiled at him. “What’ll it be?” “Beer milk shake,” said Doc. “What?” Well here it was and what the hell. Might just as well get it over with now as some time later. The blonde asked, “Are you kidding?” Doc knew wearily that he couldn’t explain, couldn’t tell the truth. “I’ve got a bladder complaint,” he said. “Bipalychaetorsonectomy the doctors call it. I’m supposed to drink a beer milk shake. Doctor’s orders.” The blonde smiled reassuringly. “Oh! I thought you was kidding,” she said archly. “You tell me how to make it. I didn’t know you was sick.” “Very sick,” said Doc, “and due to be sicker. Put in some milk, and add half a bottle of beer. Give me the other half in a glass—no sugar in the milk shake.” When she served it, he tasted it wryly. And it wasn’t so bad—it just tasted like stale beer and milk. “It sounds awful,” said the blonde.

When Judas Schariot hanged himself, so that his guts ripped, and as happens to those who are hanged, his bladder burst, then the Jews had their golden cans and silver bowls ready, to catch the Judas piss (as one calls it) with the other relics, and afterwards together they ate the shit and drank, from which they got such sharp sight that they are able to see such complex glosses in Scripture.”38

This bit is supposed to send you on your way with a warm feeling. A good warm feeling, that is – like after a glass of brandy, not a lapse in bladder control.

The oil of Lady’s Mantle, taken internally, eases colic, expels wind, and opens obstructions of the kidneys, ureters and, bladder, expelling gravel, stones, and sand, “cleansing them from any Tartarous Mucilage lodged therein.

As I travel through the chilly night with the rain drizzling on to my windscreen, a bladder full of piss and a belly full of hunger, there is one thought plays around in my head again and again with no signs of stopping. My mother is dead. The woman who carried me in her womb for nine months is gone forever. She’s dead, buried and now little more than food for the worms, maggots and flies that will slowly but surely devour her and yet one thing comes back to me. My mother is dead and I couldn’t be happier.

Other women say they can climax best with the application of pressure deep within the vagina, which led the gynecologist Ernst Grafenberg and his partisans to propose the existence of a Grafenberg, or G, spot, a sort of second, internalized clitoris. The G spot is said to be a two-inch cushion of highly erogenous tissue located on the front wall of the vagina, right where the vagina wraps around the urethra, the tube that carries urine from the bladder. Some have said that the G spot is embedded in the so-called Skene’s glands, which generate mucus to help lubricate the urethral tract. Others have said that the gee-whiz spot is actually the sphincter muscle, which keeps the urethra clamped shut until you’re ready to void. Still others question the existence of a discrete G spot altogether. Let’s not bother inventing novel erogenous loci, they say, when the existing infrastructure will do. The roots of the clitoris run deep, after all, and very likely can be tickled through posterior agitation. In other words, the G spot may be nothing more than the back end of the clitoris.

The whips fell onto June Dey’s chest now, but as on his back, his skin did not break. Instead, each time he was struck his strength grew. Each time they whipped him, he became more infuriated and they sensed it in him. While beating him, the helper with the other whip looked down at his trousers as his bladder weakened and poured onto his clothes and shoes. Embarrassed and pale with trepidation, he lifted his gun from his belt. The maids screamed at the sight of the gun and the helper immediately fired it. The bullet soared toward June Dey and Darlene. It flew toward his chest. They expected that it would kill him on impact, expected that this would be his end and the boy would go from them as mysteriously as he had come. But the bullet, as if repelled by his skin, fell to the ground. The slight puncture where the bullet would have made its permanent hole quickly healed in their sight, and the helper dropped the gun and ran away from them like a bullied child.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal. Line infections are so common that they are considered a routine complication. ICUs put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that after ten days 4 percent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States and are fatal between 5 and 28 percent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care. And this is just one of many risks. After ten days with a urinary catheter, 4 percent of American ICU patients develop a bladder infection. After ten days on a ventilator, 6 percent develop bacterial pneumonia, resulting in death 40 to 45 percent of the time. All in all, about half of ICU patients end up experiencing a serious complication, and once that occurs the chances of survival drop sharply.

It was Timothy. He took a spot beside me, opened his robe, revealed a surprisingly sizable…uh, wand…and started emptying his bladder as well.

The big, musclebound henchmen threw away their swords and collapsed on their backsides in the blink of an eye. The heavyset man and his flashy followers, on the other hand, were so overwhelmed by Fel’s and Gon’s murderous auras that they couldn’t speak at all, and simply fainted on the spot, though not before a few of them voided their bladders, disgustingly enough.

Adorned in a cloak of long, matted, dark brown hair that shimmered under the gentle touch of rain, the Sasquatch intimidatingly stood its ground. Its chest and shoulders were reminiscent of a massive barrel, spanning well over four feet in width. Its legs, akin to large and sturdy tree trunks, exuded raw power. The creature's sheer muscularity and appearance were enough to render any man's nerves shaky. And sure enough, Carter felt his stomach queasy and his bladder on the verge of surrender.

She was still there when Ramsey Knight arrived twenty minutes later to find her covered in vomit and gore, kneeling on a floor soiled by the blood and guts of two corpses while Cai thrashed and howled in her arms. Arterial spray slathered the room in ropey strings of blood, more of it pooling and congealed. Matley had lost bladder control and lay placid in his piss-stained trousers. Still alive, somehow.

Contrary to popular belief, a nursing mother’s breasts are not full of milk. They’re swollen, sure, sometimes to the point that they resemble fleshy water balloons, but they’re full of blood, fat, and glandular tissue. There’s no bladder in a breast that holds a sloshing cup of milk that empties as the baby nurses and then gradually fills up again, ready for next time. Even a dairy cow’s udder isn’t the bag of milk you might think it to be; like us, a cow’s udder is a visible mound of mammary tissue, along with a few nipples.[*10] The ductwork of a nursing human breast can hold, at most, a couple of tablespoons of milk at a time. It’s the act of suckling that normally triggers a breast’s “let-down reflex”—a cascade of signals that tell the milk glands to kick up production and dump fresh milk out the front door.

The basic definition of interoceptive awareness is our ability to perceive physical sensations that arise from within the body. This includes bodily states such as a full bladder or racing heart, and satiety and hunger cues. Every emotion has a unique felt sensation in the body, like a physical fingerprint. When we listen to our bodies via interoceptive awareness we have a treasure trove of information to get our biological and psychological needs met! In other words, our wants, needs, and emotions are very much tied to the direct experience of sensations in our here-and-now bodies.

He was very debilitated as time went on by the series of strokes that had come to him so prematurely, then near the end by bladder problems, constipation, failing eyesight. Near death, he was in a wheelchair, then mostly in the chair and bed in the bedroom of the small house he’d bought in Camden. He complained of becoming more sensitive to the cold. His room, though, was apparently knee-deep in paper, those unanswered letters, notes for poems, scribbled manuscripts—pleasant to think of him afloat on it all. He never had much money, and when contributions came to him from wealthy friends and admirers, of which he had quite a few, he saved it up for his grand cemetery monument.

Her bladder loosened, her lap becoming wet and warm.