You cannot separate limericks from crudity. My late and ex, firmly of the pre-silicon generation, added a riff by compounding technology with scatology. He was both repelled and fascinated by the things that people could do with electronics and acutely sensitive to the way that connectivity allowed people to do better, faster and oftener a lot of things that probably shouldn’t have been done at all.
Hence:
There was an ambitious young nerd
Who learned how to e-mail a turd.
“For,” he said, “as you know,
UPS is too slow,
And to send it FedEx is absurd.”
This pleased him so much that he tried a second riff on it:
A quirky inventor named Prine
Has a way to send feces online.
He says “It’s my vision
To speed up transmission,
But downloading works out just fine.”
In a final ethereal salvo he penned:
There was an inventor named Martz
Whose whim was to fax all his farts.
With his ass greased with Crisco
He sent one to Frisco
After several erroneous starts.
While not one of those males who enjoy breaking wind as a competitive sport, the idea of creative flatulence appealed to the man. I once asked him if he wanted to come along with me to my gym, which is near a quaintly named shopping center, and spend the time while I worked out “farting around Seven Corners.” “I’m not that agile,” he said.
I like the last one best
ZOMG, this was hilarious. I won’t probe the sore spot and ask the obvious question, “Why is this witty fellow an ex?”
You can ask, it doesn’t hurt now. He had the heart of a little boy, but unfortunately that eventually extended to a little-boyish don’t-wanna-not-gonna refusal to do things like have a job, bathe, see a dentist or even apply for benefits that were his to claim. Something was very wrong there, at a deep level, but he was still sui generis and even if no one could have stayed married to him, I looked out for him the best I could for the rest of his life. A number of people asked me why I was still bothering. You can see why.