Yes, I’ve wet myself again. Well observed, on your part. But, I believe I am using the word correctly in saying “whatever”, or “big deal” as my grandchildren prefer. Yes, the study you find yourself in rather belies an incontinent man, for who would suspect that a man who owns so many leather bound volumes would be one accustomed to the warm embrace of a moist groin?

But it is true; I am a man of leaky valves, as a plumber might put it. My tap is unpredictable, and when it opens, it releases not a meager stream, but a mighty waterfall, rivaling Angel Falls in splendor and the Niagara in quantity, although, it must be said, neither flows with the rivers of gold that I do.

But does it really matter? Am I suddenly someone for whom the world has no use? Do my bewetted trousers cradle nothing but an old man, whose senses and juices have fled? Hopefully not. Self-restraint or no, I fancy I can offer my worth. It is said that Bertrand Russell had a horrendously stinky breath, but they still listened to him when he published his Principia Mathematica. So, if a stinky Brit could get somewhere, surely a mildly dampish me could as well.

Unrestrained faculties inhabit an unrestrained mind, and mine run wild. Continence is a sign of placidity, that most heinous of crimes to the intellectual.

Indeed, does it not, in fact, say much of me that I have allowed my more immediate needs to dominate my decisions? I am so involved in thought that I have no time for petty functional desires, like emptying some internal sac. When my bowels cry out for relief, I say “Nay!” for I am thinking, a noble pursuit for any man. The acrid stench you twitch your nose at is the stench not of a messy grandfather, but of studiousness, of concentration, my friend. Yes, I leak, but I leak more than fluids; I leak thought, originality, and knowledge, you leak nothing, from your mind or elsewhere, and that is your shortcoming.

Still, you cringe. Perhaps my presence is, for whatever unthinkable reason, unwelcome. Well, I cannot claim with complete truth that yours wasn’t starting to get a bit ragged around the edges. Before you leave, might I adapt a quote from that old Prime Minister?
For you might say, “You’ve soiled yourself sir!”
And I would reply that yes, I have, but that you are dull. “And in the morning, I shall have bathed.”