Rant #1,734: Diarrhea of the Mouth

It is funny how one Rant can bring back memories of something deep down in your subconscious, something that was so buried that you cannot believe that it was still in there in the first place.

I am referring to yesterday's Rant, about bird poop.

Just the simple use of that term conjured up memories of more than 40 years ago, and it has nothing to do with bird poop.

It has to do with the term "diarrhea of the mouth," which was a phrase used quite extensively by a gym teacher I had at I.S. 72, my junior high school, when I lived in Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York.

Caught in the middle of a number of cultural cataclysms--including the civil rights movement--and many other cultural abysses that were being dug into the New York City school system and the city as a whole--this school was probably the worst school I ever attended.

The school had lots of problems, and it became the center of the cultural powder keg that that community I lived in became.

I have talked about it extensively in previous posts, and I won't go into it again here, because this post really has nothing to do with that.

I was in what I guess you could today call the "honors track" of my school, being in the SP class, and we had our gym classes with the other honors track classes.

The school's gym, as I recall it, could be accessed through several different doors, but when we went as a class to the gym, we had to squeeze into this fairly long corridor, without windows or much fresh air, to get into the locker room, and that is where we lined up to go to gym class.

And when you put 12- and 13- and 14-year old boys into such a situation, you know that you are going to get a somewhat unruly environment, yelling and screaming and loud talking and pushing and shoving.

The gym teachers would come in--three of them, as I recall, and yes, I know their names, but I won't use them here--and they would try to calm us down.

Of course, they threatened us, saying that we would not be able to enter the locker room area, and then the gym, unless we shut our traps.

"Shushes" followed, and some kids kept on talking, but eventually, we would be let into the locker room and gym, having just enough time to change into our gym shorts.

One of the gym teachers, when he tried to calm us down in that corridor, often said that we had "diarrhea of the mouth," because we simply could not stop talking, it kept coming out of our mouths at a rapid pace without end.

And that is where the term was first introduced to me, and for the first time in a while, I thought about it yesterday when I talked about bird poop.

I guess the two phrases are linked in a way, but one is real, the other is something of a metaphor.

I kind of liked gym, as it was something of a release for me, but I did not like the gym teachers, who played favorites with the boys who were better athletes.

They got picked for everything, while kids like me, who loved sports but were lousy athletes, usually were on the side.

Remember, this is way before today's PC environment, where kids in gym class are supposedly treated equally, no matter what their aptitude for sports is.

I could not climb the rope, and when I went on the parallel bars, the gym teachers helped me do a maneuver, and I fell flat on my back, without any apologies from them.

They gave me a chair to sit in. That was it.

I remember one semester, I actually failed gym, getting a "U" on my report card for "unsatisfactory."

This was a big deal, because again, I was in the honors track, and a "U" in any subject was something crucial. Heck, I even managed better marks in typing.

Anyway, on open school day, my mother met with the gym teachers, who said that yes, I tried everything that was put in my way to do, but since I couldn't do anything, they gave me a "U."

They told my mother that she, and I, shouldn't worry about it.

Very nice of them. You couldn't get away with that today.

I also remember that one of the gym teachers was physically brutal to one of my classmates.

We had an episode where as a class, we were being unruly, because we were playing a game called "Ga Ga"--a bizarro blend of volleyball and dodgeball--and our class won this particular contest, but because we won every contest--most of my class were good athletes, but not me--the gym teachers took the win away from us on purpose.

We became admittedly impossible, staging our own mini-protest in the gym and in the locker room.

I remember one of the gym teachers came in--yes, the "diarrhea of the mouth" guy--found who he thought was the "ringleader" of this uprising, and threw him against the lockers as if he were a garbage bag being husked into the incinerator.

He didn't do this once, but several times, until the kid fell to the floor.

I know the kid's mother came to school the very next day, and this was somehow settled, but in today's world, the gym teacher would have not only been suspended, but he would have probably be brought up on legal charges with the police for his inappropriate actions.

But back then, you didn't do stuff like that.

But again, that term "diarrhea of the mouth" was somewhere stored in my head, and the bird poop thing brought it all out again, as it did all the stuff that went on in gym class more than 40 years ago.

Who knows what else is stored in my brain that I will suddenly remember, being sparked by talking about something else.

The brain really is our most wonderful, natural machine.

And if it takes "diarrhea of the mouth" to demonstrate that to me, then so be it.