Nov 18 2007
Booga Face’s Revenge
Last March, although he couldn’t make it to babygirl’s first birthday party, our friend booga face nevertheless provided a wonderful gift, Taro Gomi’s book Everyone Poops:
Or rather, we thought it was a gift at the time, not knowing that it was a ticking time bomb that would eventually rule our very lives. You see, an elephant makes a BIIIIIIIIG poop. A mouse, on the other hand, makes a tiiiiiiiiiiny poop. I know this because I am forced to read these relatively obvious statements of relative shit sizes sixty times a day on average. babygirl looks around confusedly and then announces “Poo booo’k,” meaning that she demands, then and there, yet another reading of Everyone Poops. No medieval theologian studied the intricacies of the Holy Scriptures with the same care and breathtaking commitment that babygirl devotes to the “Poo booo’k.” Which side is the snake’s behind? What does whale poop look like? These questions are never answered by Gomi, but they serve as spurs to endless speculation. When Gomi advises us that he’s “just kidding” about his assertion that “a one-hump camel makes a one hump poop” while a “two-hump camel makes a two-hump poop,” it’s good for a laugh, but we feel perhaps the joke is on us, after all.
And so I note in this public forum, for whole the world to see, that we hereby pledge vendetta against booga face and his progeny.
I have finally stopped convulsing in laughter in response to your plight, partially because I believe in the chain of things, I may be responsible for all this. You see, I gave boogaface this book as gift some time ago.
You know something – I really do empathize – both with the endless re-reading of Everyone Poops and with the apparently universal desire to curse me – not my unborn children though – please spare them – innocent and unborn as they continue to be. (And, in response to earlier posts, I hope you notice that I’ve changed my syntactic habits from Whitmanesque ellipses to Dickinsonian hyphens.)
I too have read and re-read this global children’s classic – published first in Japan by Gomi Taro – the pen name, a pun that sounds in Japanese like Trash Boy – a perhaps intentional play on the famous Japanese superhero MomoTaro (Peach Boy) – an archetypal source for the American Superman – and now, like Superman, Gomi has been translated into many languages and read by children world-wide – he too is America.
Two years ago – it must have been that, at least that – my grrl-comrade bought this endless source of inspiration for me and insisted that I read it to her repeatedly, just like your babygirl – or perhaps I have this backwards – ass-backwards you might say, like the snake – and often times like a baby – perhaps it was I who insisted on us re-reading it, insisted on plunging its depths for secret wisdom.
Vendetta is, by its nature, aimed at all future generations. As for your bedtime reading with grrl-comrade, that’s just strange. But to each his and her own, I guess!
By the way, Superman was Jewish. Everyone knows that.