The 30 Gland: John Biando

I wish I knew John Biando better at Bard. We didn’t have any classes together or belong to any of the same student groups or anything so I had to wait until after we both moved to his hometown of Philadelphia to become friends. I recently had the pleasure of attending John’s 30^th birthday party where German cuisine and drinks were consumed in honor of this solid human being. In addition to being a creative writing Master (literally), John is a talented artist in the mediums of digital illustration (see below) and Halloween-themed food creation.

Check out his Philly sports blog Crying Eagles, Noble Turkeys, Red Glares at: http://nobleturkeys.blogspot.com/.

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Beautiful Josephine was the most depressed dog at the pound six months ago. I wanted a three-legged dog and Josephine had four, but after a troublingly toothy encounter with tripedal Tony, I settled on bashful and beautiful Jo. She was priced to move at three cents a pound. Some of those pounds were intestinal worms.

Little sleeper cells of U. stenocephala. They caused a lot of abdominal unrest in Beautiful Josephine. But since nobody knew about the hookworms, everyone assumed that the unrest was just Josephine’s disposition, that the dog was just a farter.

I didn’t know if I could live with Josephine’s gas. I got a dog, a depressed dog, because I was depressed and I thought a depressed dog and I could help each other work things out. Her effluvium set a more or less constant dark, choking, overwhelming tone to our time together. It was embarrassing and undignified to be 29, unemployed, and struggling with an unseeable sickness. It was embarrassing and undignified to be 29, unemployed, and struggling with an ethereal emanation. This confluence of smells and feelings felt almost unconstitutional. It felt like double jeopardy.

While we coped with Josephine’s aromas, she developed another affliction. She got very itchy. She started to scratch herself raw. I took her to the shelter’s veterinarian. He thought it was seasonal allergies. Allergies are just as impalpable as depression. I took her to the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary Hospital. They’re very thorough. I wanted a cure.

As the Ivy League Veterinarian greased up Josephine’s finger, she talked about how she swore she’d never express a dog’s anal glands again when she finished Vet school. She complained that anal glands were an evolutionary dead end, that there was no reason for them anymore. She said this as she milked a juice out of Josephine’s butt that made me yearn for our salad days of smothering toots. They smell of anal gland fluid is deeply wounding. It smells like a sweating metal hinge on a coffin filled with decaying possum meat.[1]

I don’t know that anal glands are indisputably unnecessary, but it sure seems like they’re at a wooly mammoth-meets-tarpit moment in history. Cursory internet research indicates that dogs’ anal glands are used to mark territory, show fear, and help with identification. Today’s dogs don’t live a life in which a trailing scent is very important. They sleep in our beds. They have to eat diet pet food. They take Yoga classes. There just isn’t much occasion, or, at least, proper occasion, for anal gland dispersal in a dog’s daily life. If we can just get dogs off anal glands and on android apps, well, I feel like there can be a pretty seamless transition from funky to 4G. Because it’s untoward to anally juice up one’s own Yoga mat.

I’m 30 today, and I’m seeing parallels between Beautiful Josephine’s anal glands and what it means to enter one’s third decade. Thirty is an identifier, one so potently sensible it might as well be a glandular secretion. Culturally, 30 marks territory and is a display of fear. Thirty squirts in an upward trajectory and the display is a fearful one in that it’s going to land hard and rottenly. Thirty means the pressure of getting somewhere, knowing that one’s deeds will echo in Bingo Valhalla. Thirty makes a statement. A very fetid statement.

So I have to ask. Should 30 be going the way of Beautiful Josephine’s anal glands, which should be going the way of the tin can and string? Today, on my 30^th birthday, my answer is: no. I don’t want 30 to be a useless nozzle in my rectum; I want it to be important. That’s why I prefer to think of 30 as a mysterious nozzle in my rectum. Let’s leave it alone in there and let it be some kind of third eye, a pineal gland, the “seat of the soul” as Descartes might say. The 30 gland isn’t something to be expressed by a Veterinarian. No good ever comes of squeezing something dry.

Without the outside pressure, malodorous 30 is like my Beautiful Josephine, ringing me in blithe circles when I come home to her.

Josephine’s worms are all dispatched, by the way, and her intestinal tract doubles as a life model for Master Cleanse classes. She and I enter our 30s together. We’re working on our happy chops. We’re letting ourselves get there. We’re getting there.

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[1] If you ever want to experience a facsimile of canine anal gland odor, and you live in the Philadelphia Area, go to the foyer of the Target on Aramingo Avenue. I’m not sure how it happened, but it smells exactly like Josephine’s anal glands.