[WARNING: There is a bad word in this post, and it shows up a few times. It’s the word meant to describe poop, and it begins with “shi.” If this is the sort of thing that you don’t want to encounter, then you should definitely back away now.]

Every morning, Jack did the same thing.

Or at least he tried to do the same thing. Some mornings, he was constipated, and that stopped him from doing the thing that he always tried to do.

When he wasn't constipated, though, Jack succeeded.

Crawling out of the doorway, or the gutter, or the grass, or wherever he happened to wake up in the morning, usually around 4:00 AM or so, Jack walked within a foot of the edge of the sidewalk, dropped trou, and defecated there on the public concrete. He then moved about five feet away, directly in line with his own personal steaming pile of excrement, and went back to sleep, waiting for the city to come alive.

A couple hours later, pedestrian traffic began to pick up, and Jack engaged in his trade, which was, of course, panhandling.

Jack had learned a long time ago that there were three types of people who walked on sidewalks.

There was the type of person who noticed that you were panhandling and came over to give you some change. Those were Jack's favorite, as they kept him in business.

The second type was the sort of person who simply walked by without allowing his life's path to be affected by the gravity of the dirty beggar. Jack didn't like or dislike these people. They weren't customers, but they weren't out killing babies either. They were neutral.

The final type of person was Jack's enemy. This was the person who, rather than helping, and rather than simply ignoring, veered completely out of the way, choosing instead to walk on the edge of the sidewalk, often while gabbing on a cell phone and giving Jack the evil "Why don't you get a real job?" look.

In spite of their status as Enemies of the State of Jack, Jack loved them. He loved them because they were usually too preoccupied with their little goings-on to notice that, roughly fifty percent of the time, they walked right through Jack's shit.

They got his shit on their shoes. They got it on their low-hanging skirts. It got stuck to the oversized pants that are currently the fashion.

In this way, a little bit of Jack followed these people wherever they went. He was in their businesses, their cars, their fancy restaurants, and their homes. Jack was a new type of graffiti artist, operating from one location, but signing the entire city, and in some cases, tourists who took his shit back to their own countries with them.

Somewhere in China, Jack knew, was a man who wiped his shoes, covered in Jack Shit, on the mat outside his apartment. Jack’s feces and personal breed of bowel disease were international travelers, hitching rides where they could and setting out into the unknown. For all he knew, his strains of hepatitis might even have made it into the space programs of various countries. He’s been at it for decades, actually, and a smidgen might, just might have gone out on one of the Voyager probes.

Jack imagined a Voyager probe being picked up by an alien race somewhere far beyond the solar system, many, many years from now. Somewhere along the edge of the golden record carried by that probe, engraved with images and recordings of the human race that sent it, was, Jack mused, a little fleck of his homeless bum crap.

Jack didn’t know much about science, but had read a few pages from a comic book adaptation of Jurassic Park, and he let his imagination lead him to believe that the aliens could clone him from that little brown speck of human waste, and that the clones might also have Jack’s love of going to the bathroom in public places. The obvious conclusion here was that there might one day be a whole galaxy teeming with Jack and his shit, the stuff carried by strange creatures getting it stuck to their feet, pads, claws, springs, suckers, or whatever in the hell it is that aliens walk on, and that they would inadvertently carry it back to their own planets and homes.

And this satisfied Jack.

Jack the panhandler.

Jack the international defacer.

Jack the interstellar voyager.

Jack who pooped on an entire universe from one city block…