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Scatlogical Conclusion

by Dorothy Parka

Whenever I start working on a project with other people, at some point some suggests calling it something feces-related.

I can still hear the voice of Steve in my head (whch is weird, because I recently found out it was Bianca imitating Steve), "Let's call it DooDoo; let's call it CaCa, heh. heh. heh," his (or her) strange silly laugh hovering above the table in the coffee shop where we were meeting to discuss... what? What were we naming? It's gotten to the point where I've worked on so many failed zines that I'm getting the stories confused. I believe we were discussing the naming of what became Asylum, a publication we tried to do in college. I say tried because we approached the college publications board for money, gave them a very realistic budget, and were awarded half. Which was about half of what we needed to produce this zine. Other people who padded their budget with magazine subscriptions, sprees at record stores, pizza for layout night, and trips to Belize for their editors, also got half. Which was enough to take their editors to Belize. It was producing this publication that I learned the Scotty principle: tell them you need 24 hours when you only need 2.4. Then everyone thinks you're a genius, or a scottish engineer of a starship.

This time around, when I asked the others involved what they thought of some of my possible names (drunkenscrawl.com; lowlifescum.net; hamhand.com; haileris.com; gorgonize.com; troglobite.com; snollygoster.net; lollygag.org; friedeggsandwich.com; thepooka.net; tellingtales.net), I got an email back from a Brent Sclisizzi who shall remain nameless, suggesting I call this online zine "Anal Gravy." I was suddenly depth-of-fielded back to that college coffee-haus meeting where Bianca as Steve did some scat-singing.

And this reminded me of an entire series of evacuatory references in my pop-culture life. Like when a group of us were playing Dungeon & Dragons once, our nemises were a death-metal band called Human Fecal Matter. Or the time one of my cats tried to hoax the others by making crap circles in the litter box (he claimed they appeared at a time when no cat could have been in the box, insisted that there were no pawprints, and that the litter was changed on a cellular level from high-intensity radiation). For a while, this same cat was calling his brothers "crappybaras." Then there were my two cartoon characters, Whiney the Poo, a complaining pile of excrement, and Bee Jesus, who gave a sermon on a mount of shit. OK, that's not so many, but probably more than the average person.

What would this mean in Freudian terms, one wonders. I suspect that sometimes a pile of shit is just a pile of shit.