I have yet to discover the spelling and grammar checkers in this blogging software. I hope my own editing skills are up to the task if there are none.
BOYS AND PISSING. I had just begun to cross a street at the edge of the Night Market in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand when I heard giggling and glanced to my left. There were several adult women there looking at a little boy--probably about age 3--who had pulled up the leg of his shorts and was arching a stream of urine that actually topped his head and landed farther away from him than he was tall. I was impressed at his prowess and secretly wished that my bladder and sphincters were as effective as his. The women, all of whom seemed to be family members or good friends, looked on with amusement. None of them said a word of criticism to the boy. I think they were not only tolerant, but were proud of him. I had often heard how loving and tolerant the Thai people were toward their children, and I felt I was witnessing it first hand. I doubt that I would have received the same response had I done the same thing in the middle of my home town shopping district when I was three.
I had a cousin who lived just across the street from me when I was growing up. He was two years younger than I, but we spent a lot of time together exploring around our end of town. We were close enough to be brothers and we played and fought like brothers. We learned new things together, and we got into trouble together. Most of the time we could extricate ourselves from the thorny situations we got into; in fact, I can't remember one when we didn't. However, we did some stuff that only kids without a lot of life experience would do. One one particular day we were walking along a fence line at a local farm. There was a bare wire running along the inside of the fence near the top. It wasn't part of the regular fence, but was actually wrapped around white ceramic spools attached to the fence posts. I was pretty sure that it was an electric fence, so we tried running our pocket knives along it to see if it would produce a spark. It didn't, so we concluded that it must not be working. For reasons known only to him, and I'm sure completely forgotten in the fog time, my cousin decided it would be great fun to relieve himself on the fence. Apparently the handles of our pocket knives had insulated us from completing the grounding necessary to receive a shock when we ran them over the electric fence wire. That was not the case, though, when my cousin's urine stream hit that wire. He was perfectly grounded, and, boy, was he surprised. I could barely stop laughing. He was not amused until much later. I believe that was our first lesson about electric circuitry.
Why do boys take such joy in peeing on things? There is no doubt that draining one's bladder can be a joyous experience, but that is not confined to just boys. No, there is something else that is operating, something that gets translated into a certain disdain for things deemed inconsequential and culminating in the expression: "Piss on it." Still, it just makes sense to be careful where you piss.