Struck's Big Buddy session: glossing the continence dilemma

texture · 3 Nov YDAU

• When: 3 Nov YDAU, the Big Buddy period, in Jim Struck's group.
• What: In Struck's Q&A with his Little Buddies (Struck "very formal in B.B. group-sessions," standing "like an Oxford don"), the cross-eyed Carl Whale raises the cohort's vexing question: what do you do when, mid-play, you have to fart — "the kind that's real hot nasty pressurized," which might not impossibly be "a need to go to the bathroom, instead, masquerading as a fart." Amid the empathic murmurs, "Josh Gopnik is nodding very intensely" — and it is Gopnik who sharpens Whale's anxiety into its exact dilemma: "Carl's saying the kind where you don't know what to do. What if you think you have to fart but it's really that you have to shit?", then draws the conclusion — "'So out of caution you don't,' Gopnik says." ("—fart," Philip Traub finishes.) When Struck delivers his iron-rule answer (nothing escapes my bottom during play; Thank You Sir may I have another), "Gopnik and Tallat-Kelpsa are writing this down." Earnest, literal, and already the group's precision instrument.