Toward a Unified Crap Theory

Most of you are, I take it, all too familiar with crap. I'm not talking about the crap you pick out of your navel or the crap on Fox News. What I mean is the crap from which memories are made--souvenirs, collectibles, kitsch; the crap of commerce, the detritus of dealings, the effects of experiece, the muck of modernity. Whether it's your complete set of NASCAR collector's plates, your Sports Illustrated football phone, or the scrap book containing all the ticket stubs and bills from your days following around the Dead: we've all got crap. How else would we remember anything we've ever done?

I've had occasion to reunite with most of mine recently. After cordoning off clothes and essentials for the trip back stateside, I packed my Oxford crap away for Christmas storage. No sooner had I recovered from my cavity search at Newark "Liberty" International Airport than did my mother present me with fresh piles and stacks of New Jersey crap and long-forgotten George Washington crap to be sorted and dealt with. The girfriend's house offered no respite--there's always girlfriend crap.

All this got me thinking about crap. "I'm a rudimentally trained philosopher and social scientist", says I. "For crap's sake, I ought to to be able to come up with some practical solution to this crappy problem." And that's when it hit me: Second-Order Crap. In meta-mathematics, second-order logics allow quantification over subsets or functions of a domain; in other words, they allow one to operate on complexes or classes of objects instead of nickel and diming them one at a time. In meta-ethics, "second-order desires" or volitions refer to desires about desires. For instance, if I have two first-order desires--one to take a crap and one to give a crap--my second-order volition would consist in my desire to make one of those two first-order desires my effective will, e.g. the desire that moves me to action.

So what does the concept of Second-Order Crap entail? Well, if first-order crap are material signifiers we use to remember, then we use Second-Order Crap to signify these signifiers and remember to remember. So far so good, in theory. But what of Second-Order Crap in practice? Well, unlike that hack Guillotine, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and test out my invention myself. So I gathered up all my crap, and parsed it into 'sentimental objects', 'souvenirs', 'trinkety gifts', 'assorted chachkes' and 'paperwork issued by bureaucratic agents who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes!' I then took 5 megapixel digital photos of each pile, labeled them accordingly and uploaded them to the harddrive of my laptop. Ergo, Second-Order Crap. Now, every time I want to remember to remember my deeds, friends, and creditors, I just let Microsoft take me on an electronic slideshow down memory lane.

What of the first-order crap? Well, let's just say that I'll be saving handsomely on firewood and kindling this holiday season. How could I be so cold and calculating about the coffee spoons I measured life with? All in the name of science, friends.

Foster 2.0