The Last Word On Nothing

I have been paying attention to poop and where I find it.

This isn’t a passing interest, I’ve been noting for years where animals choose to squat. In the out of doors, you can’t help noticing because they squatted to get your attention, like a billboard that reads GOTCHA!

With a little chub of scat would come all sorts of information: sex, fertility, health, virility, strength, what was eaten, and where. The way the poop is positioned, which end is tapered off, tells you which direction the animal was heading. A coyote had to feel pretty damn good about things to lay one right in the middle of a clean white sidewalk, knowing there would be no hiding it. This is pure animal pride.

When I come to a confluence of canyons and there on a boulder in the middle is a shit of coyote or fox, I can’t look away. The animal knew this was the spot.

The last couple months I’ve been snapping photos of well-placed predator scat. Whenever I see one, my mind flies to wherever that animal has gone, effectively leaving a proxy of itself, as if being cloned, leaving a dark one like a sentinel. It is a graffiti scrawl, I was here, which may be pertinent information, letting competitors know that the fight isn’t worth it, letting potential mates know who’d come by, the tinder of the wilderness.

Finding these poops always puts me in my place. I’m walking along thinking I’m the one, my species the only real, the only sentient thing happening on this earth, when I suddenly become aware than animals are thinking and plotting all around. Forget the videos of a bird sledding down snow-covered roofs, or cats painting, this is everyday contemplation, a bobcat squatting in a canyon floor on a plank of rock knowing it’s got a lot to tell someone else.

We probably do the same, habitual animals that we are, throwing a beer can out the window, grinding out a cigarette on a sidewalk, unzipping and pissing at the bottom of a tree. We are leaving signs behind us everywhere we go. For the most part, we’re squatting over plumbing, or at least burying it a regulation six inches in the bush, carrying out toilet paper in a Ziploc bag. Good thing, too. You don’t want 7+ billion people defecating on the ground sending signals to each other. As if we weren’t chattering enough with the internet, radio waves, and every other way we’ve imagined to employ our magical, sentient ways of communicating.

In 2013 a group of scientists and entrepreneurs put together a platform called Lone Signal, sending personal messages in binary code into space, in particular to a distant star system known as Gliese 526, 17.2 light years away in the constellation of Boötes.

I think also of a golden disk sent out with the Voyager probe only recently departed from our solar system. On this disk were encoded a series of images meant to decode themselves to the mathematically brilliant in some distant space; binary code, distance of us to prominent galactic pulsars, etc. Electroplated onto the disk’s cover is a small patch of uranium-238. The decay of this uranium creates a default radioactive clock, half of which will decay in 4.51 billion years. Anyone out there with half a brain, the logic goes, would receive this mysterious, alien space probe and comprehend that the remaining uranium-238 would determine the time elapsed since it was placed aboard the spacecraft, this grasping that our civilization had long since passed, billions of years ago, but damn, we were something.

This is how we took shit of ours and ejected it into space.

The coyote was thinking the same thing when it squatted on a sidewalk: I’m gonna tell somebody out there about myself.

It’s what we do, storytellers, every last one of us.

Both poop images from the author, golden Voyager disk from NASA.