July 16, 2010: The Shiver July 16, 2010

Yesterday, I ventured out for tennis lessons and I baked.  I mean BAKED!  It was at least 115 degrees on the court.  I had never remembered the San fernando Valley being that hot in July and running around on a tennis court for an hour and a half was just plain hell.  I was dreading the tennis lessons scheduled for today if the weather was going to be anything comparable to yesterday.

I was en route to the court when I noticed puddles on the ground getting more extensive as I drove.  By the time I got to the halfway point, I received a call saying the lessons were cancelled.   And so I decided to have my morning workout at Starbucks.  Yeah, I know, I am not burning as many calories as an hour and a half of tennis, but I could suck down some iced tea which would eventually lead to a flushing of my bladder which is in itself healthy in a different way.

Well, as I sucked down my Venti black tea with 1 Sweet and Low, sure enough, the urge to purge came on.  I made my way to the urnial.  All went swimmingly well.  No stray splashing, steady stream, good color.  Even the anticipated shiver came at the right spot.  Tap tap tap; back to the table.

But then I got to wondering… why the hell do I shiver at the end of my evacuation?  Now although this thought will probably turn off my friend Christine who reads this, it very well may intrigue my friend Donnna who is in the medical field.  I got to wondering, WTF is up with the shiver?  It’s always been there but I never really thought about it until this morning.

I started my research online.  Apparently, there has been none done.  It just isn’t worthy enough to research it.  Wouldn’t it be a hoot if the pee shiverers of the world had some unique antibody that cures cancer or reverses aging?  What, our disability is not good enough for the medical community?  I bet the people who don’t feel the need to research this are not shiverers.

I started to think about the social implications of the pee shiver.  I mean us guys stand at the urinal and we tend to not consciously pay attention to the dude alongside us.  But the truth is, we actually are quite aware of what is going on inside the crapper.  There is an unwritten, unsaid etiquette that when you enter a commode, you should leave a urinal open between you and the next person whenever you can.  And if perchance there is that God awful stainless steel trough where you just hang out like horses in a summer scorcher, you give ample distance accompanied with looking up and away so as to not catch the other guy’s junk in your peripheral vision.  And of course, when sitting on the crapper itself, you wait until there is someone utilizing a hand dryer or there is a conversation going or there is no one else in the water closet to let out that blast of methane and last night’s dinner that has been storing up for the past 8 hours that would scare most little kids and pets alike.  And let’s not forget, we opt to maintain radio silence during the deed so as to not break the moment and hex the task at hand making it an aborted moment having you to suffer another 1/2 hour for you to make another trip back to the men’s room.

But the shiver is something very physical that I wonder, are the other dudes around me noticing my convulsion?  Did they blink and miss it?  Do they share in my affliction and can relate?  Is there group therapy for pee shiverers like myself?  And do non pee shiverers just think that the shiver they just witnessed was just something this side of an orgasm, and can only WISH they had something that gloriously pleasurable as a shiver, when in reality it is not even close to either of those two adjectives.

My research revealed nothing.  So I can only give my own theories, the first scientific, the second, science ficition.

1) The nitrogen found in urine reverses in the urethra, reverse flows back up to the bladder releasing inside it causing a shiver.  My evidence that this is happening?  Absolutely none other than I can spell the word “nitrogen” correctly.

2) The aliens that keep stealing my shit have implanted a non detectable microdot in my bladder wall and I am now part of some twisted interplanetary subscription web service where members get to send a shiver into any implantee of their choice.  If that is the case, then where do I sign up because I think it would be a blast to make the dude in the next urinal have a shake because well, there was an empty urinal between us available when he came in and he broke men’s room etiquette!  A good shiver or two could perhaps teach him a lesson!