Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Celebrity Pee


My understanding of human urine is that the clearer it is, the better. If the pee is a vivid Mountain Dew-ish color, the urinator is dehydrated. I can't help but feel cheated when my urine is clear though. When I eject a nuclear gold fluid from my body, it seems appropriate that it was supposed to leave my body. When clear pee leaves my body, it seems like simple water. Our bodies are 60 percent water, why bother peeing
that stuff?

I talked to my sister about celebrities and the desire of some people to keep a piece of celebrities for themselves. I don't have this desire, but my sister does. I'm uninterested in meeting most celebrities. The odds are just too string that they're nothing like their public persona and their public persona is the only reason I like them in the first place. Why mess with that?

My sister disagreed. She said she would take anything if it came from one of her favorite celebrities. An old tee-shirt. An inkless pen. Chewed gum.

My sister's favorite celebrity is U2 frontman Bono. I asked her if she would take a Dixiecup filled with Bono's pee. She accepted this hypothetical with an alarming lack of questions, asking only if it were a regular store-bought Dixiecup and how high the pee would be filled within that cup, which I found funnier than anything I could come up with. I decided that Bono's pee would be in a regulation tiny paper cup filled to the brim. Additionally, it would be verifiably Bono's urine (no funny business with ripoff artists eating a bunch of carrots, peeing into cups and passing it off as Bono's pee, Tom Hanks' pee or Hillary Clinton's pee).

Unbelievably, she said she would totally take the Dixiecup.

Now look, I understand this isn't discovering cold fusion, but sociologically speaking it's kind of fascinating. My sister grew up almost exactly as I did and yet feels completely different about the whole human excrement topic as I do.

Axl (not Axel) Rose's sweaty concert shirt gets encased in glass. Mickey Mantle's glove gets a place of honor on the mantelpiece and the autographed photo of Spiro Agnew gets framed. What happens to a Dixie full of celebrity pee? Admittedly, she hadn't thought that far ahead. We both agreed that a small paper cup is no way to display a collectible from a celebrity as famous as Bono. Which leads to the awkward acknowledgment that at some point, the pee must be transferred to a more showcase appropriate artifact.

Spilling will almost certainly occur in this transfer, which changes this hypothetical to whether or not you would accept 3/4 of Bono's pee in a cup and 1/4 of Bono's pee splashed on your forearm?

And what would the introduction of the pee sound like to people seeing it for the first time? Would my sister really say something like, "This was my first place trophy for square dance in high school, this is my blue ribbon for my doggie treat recipes and this is a mason jar full of Bono's urine."

When I brought up my concerns to my sister, she didn't answer and, in fact, refused to acknowledge that I was even talking to her.

I guess she realized I was going to continue the conversation with or without her. I can't be sure what my sister was thinking because she moves in mysterious ways. Perhaps she knew that none of her explanations were good enough and that I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

I can't think of any more Joshua Tree references so I'll stop now.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

First of all, it's AXL Rose (not Axel) and second of all, I stand by everything I said in the past.