When I lived in Toronto, Canada for two years, I heard more Canadian colloquialisms than I remember hearing anywhere else. My time in Canada was an interesting few years that was a mixture of how to survive a remote distance existence (the kids were still in the Metro NYC area) and yet I needed to be onsite and resident in Toronto and all the other big cities in Canada (Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver, primarily, but also Winnipeg, Regina and Edmonton…though not so much Halifax or St. John). It was an interesting two years of getting to know a similar yet quite distinctly different country that pretty much operated within 80 miles of the U.S. border across a span of 3,600 miles give or take a klick or two. I enjoyed my time in Canada and I particularly enjoyed getting to know a good number of Canadians. From what I could tell and with a great deal of probably unjustified generalization, there are two types of Canadians; the type that really wants to be American for all the opportunity for the big leagues that it represents and then the Canadians who recognize and appreciate the value of being very different from Americans. It was the latter category that I found the most interesting, and one of the interesting things was their unique turn of phrase for a number of things.
I was in a meeting in Toronto with my team in the early days of my being in Canada and One of the guys needed to take a break to use the bathroom. When I asked him where he was going he said he was going to spill the dill. Apparently, that was a folksy way of saying he was going in to take a pee. Clearly the combination of the vague reference to urine combined with the obvious rhyming nature of the worlds made the expression a cute and somewhat polite way to describe a ubiquitous bodily function in a reasonably sophisticated expression. In London he would have gone to take a slash. That seemingly dramatic expression, which began in WWII is considered crude, but not really rude. Back in the good old U.S.A. the expression has most often devolved to taking a leak, which is mildly humorous when you think about the machinery of the body, but also not very poetic, dramatic or very refined.
The issue of urination is on my mind this morning for several reasons. Men of a certain age tend to suffer from enlarging and sometimes problematic prostate glands and those little (hopefully) endocrine organs that are tasked with producing semen fluid surrounding the urethra so as to be right where they are needed for an active male reproductive life, tend to enlarge and cause restrictions to the urinary track for older men. Despite all the stories an little blue pill ads on TV, the reality is that as men age, nature forces the libido to wane and the prostate is less needed. My version of anatomy is to say that the prostate doesn’t appreciate early retirement as much as most men do, so in revolt it puffs itself up and tends to interfere with ones ability to leak, slash or spill the dill. Those of us who are blessed with no genetic predisposition to cancer (at least not one that has yet shown itself anywhere in my family tree) and have an equally low PSA (prostate-specific antigen), don’t necessarily have that problem.
Instead, those of us who battle with higher than optimal blood pressure (don’t get me started on why blood pressure measurement is just one notch above witchcraft in scientific accuracy) are often plagued with medical prescriptions that include a diuretic. 47.7% of the population of the United States is deemed to be hypertensive (51% in the case of men). Of those, approximately 45% are prescribed a diuretic to help reduce the pressure by releasing fluid from the system. That means that of the 170 million men in America, 87 million are hypertensive and about 40 million of us take a daily diuretic. The most powerful diuretic is what they call a loop diuretic called furosemide. I take 20mg in the morning and it has the effect of pushing as much as 3 liters of fluid out of my system by supercharging my kidneys to dispel water and salts. I used to take 40mg, but could not stand how my day was disrupted by the constant evacuation needs. To put this into perspective for non-diuretic prescriptees, you would have to drink twelve cups of coffee to have the same effect since we all know that coffee is a mild natural diuretic. So, instead of my low PSA prostate sending me to spill the dill all morning long, its that furosemide in my kidneys that does the same or worse to me.
If I have an intense business meeting or court testimony to give or if I plan to be traveling, I tend to forego my daily dose of furosemide for the sake of lifestyle needs. I remember my aging step father, Irving, who at 6’4” and weighing 240 pounds at age 95 had enough congestive heart failure to need a diuretic to remove fluid buildup in his ankles (just like I have). He would regularly skip his prescription because he didn’t like the way he felt, which I translate to that he didn’t like the extreme inconvenience. We all used to think that was a feeble excuse and that he should take the medicine as directed. I now completely understand his perspective, now that I have to walk at least a mile or two every day in his shoes.
Given the nature of the weather out here on this hilltop and my natural biorhythms, I tend to want to do whatever outdoor work needs doing in the morning. That means I am often out in the gardens or on the back hillside in the morning when the furosemide is working its magic on my kidneys. I think if I catheterized myself there would be a continuous outflowing of liquid from my system thanks to that little 20mg pill. Thankfully, my pelvis and urethral muscles are reasonably strong (even without Kegelling) and I only have to spill the dill every hour or so. nevertheless, I have decided that, taking a lesson from Burt Munro in The World’s Fastest Indian, I prefer to pee on my lemon tree and any other nearby plant or bush rather than waste the fluid and nutrients that the garden can easily use. It has become a thing on this mostly private hilltop. I generally go outdoors to spill the dill and quite prefer it to risking messing up whatever bathroom is nearest to me. I do make sure not to focus too much attention on one spot since I do not want to create any nasty spots or to risk burning any parts of the garden with excessively toxic minerals that I might be releasing. The whole process has a very healthy back-to-nature feel to it for me. It does not embarrass me to tell people that I pee in my bushes, and it does not make me feel any less civilized. I remember when I worked at the Cornell Plantations in college and was outdoors all day every day working in one very vast garden, we always peed in the bushes. The most painful days were when we were clearing out the gorges of winter tree fall. The combination of all the hikers on the narrow stone trails and the constantly rushing gorge water made the whole peeing in the bushes process much trickier while equally much more urgent.
I once saw a very cute little note over a toilet that admonished the users of that facility to please be careful with their aim. The note was signed by The Floor. No one likes to actually spill the dill and make a mess and that is a basic tenet of civilized life that one should be careful with one’s bodily functions. To me that just reinforces that the height of civilized male behavior, especially for us aging retired males might well be to spill the dill outdoors whenever and wherever we can.