While going through my quarterly What Is Wrong With Me? list in my head this morning, I came to a startling realization: I am a spitter.  I spit.  Well, not anywhere, but as long as I am outdoors.  I can't say to have given it much thought.  Not that I'm a talented spitter, just average really, for instance I can't go long distances or shoot it across an alley with clinical precision, but I spit nonetheless.  Constantly.  After realizing this, while on my morning constitutional, I tried to refrain from spitting.  It was really hard to do.  I really have an aversion to swallowing that stuff, I guess. 

Perhaps it is a flaw in my upbringing.  Raised in a rural community, with lots of polluted ground (chicken shit, cigarette butts, watermelon seeds) in which to ply our trade, spitting was the norm, a matter of course.  We were told that it was rude, but examples being what they were, the lesson maybe never sank in as it should.  But today, today, hmmm, i tried to imagine all the men my age with nice clothes, nice cars, nice haircuts, and no inner life, and I could see what I could never see before: they don't spit, at least not publicly.  Of course, this all has to be balanced by the other thing they all have in common with each other: they're all assholes.

All of which leaves me with a conundrum: to continue as a spitter - loose, confident, lacking in manners, sure, but also lacking in self-consciousness and that needy urge to please and impress a bunch of people I've never met, or to recognize a disgusting habit for what it is and not try to assign more meaning to it than it deserves.  After all,  I'm not spitting to be rebellious.  There's no innate political message in my expectoration.  It's just a bad habit.