I’ve always been taught to “walk with beggars and with kings,” which basically means that no matter who you’re dealing with, they have some nugget of information that could greatly improve your life. Here are some gems I picked up along the way about hygiene.

Strippers – After I graduated from college, my parents moved to Italy and they let my brother and me stay in their house as we adjusted to becoming adults. From their perspective, we were going to stay rent-free in a familiar place while we scoured the internet all day long looking for recession-era jobs. From our perspective, we were going to get wasted and lounge in the jacuzzi, preferably with strippers. Since we were occasionally-funny and good-looking mulattos with a grown up house at our disposal, getting strippers to the crib was much easier than we thought.

One night we were all wasted at the house and the pole dancer crew came through after their shift. Despite their claims to be “working on their real estate license” or whatever, they immediately started doing a ton of drugs and everyone put on weird military helmets and shit was getting really rad. I probably should have been focused on the big titties all around, but instead I noticed a common characteristic of all the girls and blurted out, “All good strippers have good skin.” Now I realize this is a given – No one wants to spend a couple hundred bucks to stare at a pimply ass gyrating in your face – but at 3:52 a.m., this was like a divine revelation.

Especially, since all stippers do is exercise at the gym, dry-hump losers, and spin on poles, you’d expect their skin to get irritated. But no, their bodies are always so soft and blemish free. Their secret? Shower gloves. Conceptually, I guess they’re the same as loofahs, but the ability to have individual fingers cleaning away lets you be more precise when you’re applying pressure to different points of your body (less for neck, more for back) and help you get into hard to reach nooks (your butt). Precision leads to clean skin.

(Extra credit fact, strippers also keep their bodies sweat-free and their vaginas dry with liberal dousings of baby powder between routines.)

Gay Dudes – I used to work at American Apparel about three years ago, when the store was exclusively staffed by gay guys and hot girls. Babes are awesome to work with, but after a couple weeks its like “OK I get it you’re hot, we are/aren’t going to hook up. It’s time for me to dust the floorboards now.” Once the novelty of new girls wore off, I got more and more interested in learning about the dynamics of gay sex from gay dudes. Especially really good looking gay dudes, since they’re raging balls of testosterone and they look good and the basically get to fuck whenever they want.

So while doing inventory, I asked my friend Rodney how him and his boyfriend avoid having shitty sex. First, he told me that I didn’t know anything about gay sex, which is true. They he revealed to me that to keep your butt clean enough for another dude to lick it, generously use baby wipes. At first I was like, “No way,” but they I got some Pampers Flushable wipes and was like “Damn, gay people know everything.”

Go ahead and try it. You know after you poop and you wipe your butt a few times and you look at the toilet paper and you’re like “OK, no streaks, my butt must be clean.” WRONG. Now take a baby wipe and run it from your taint to the top of your ass and look at the baby wipe. See all those dingleberries and brown streaks? Yeah, that’s what’s been on your butt for the last 24 years before you started using baby wipes. Now I keep that shit in my crib all the time and my ass is so clean you can eat a steak off it (no homo).

Military People – My dad’s used to be in the military and he’s super compulsive about changing his socks. I noticed that he’d always change his socks no matter what and would occasionally change them multiple times per day, especially if it was raining. As a kid, I started doing the same thing, not for any logical reason, just because I was emulating my pop’s military procedure.

When I was 19 and studying philosophy in college, I started asking the big why’s: Why are we here? Why should I believe in God? Why am I so fucking insane about changing my socks? I still haven’t answered the first two questions, but it turns out that if you don’t change your socks you get trench foot. Military people learned this the hard way in World War I. Soldiers would stand in trenches during the rain, which would fill with water eventually soaking their shoes and socks. After a couple days, their feet would get numb and voila – trench foot & gangrene. To make the bummer of ugly feet even worse, the only way to fix trench foot is to cut off your feet! Once people realized that getting your feet chopped off makes dancing to ragtime music really awkward, military people decided that they’d change their socks instead.

– Jonathan [name redacted] also heard that egyptians drank piss to keep their teeth clean, but has not personally verified its efficacy.