WARNING – DISCUSSION OF POOP AHEAD!
DON’T SAY YOU WEREN’T WARNED!
I have to poop.
Well, it’s not yet a fully formed, completely intact turd (had to add the word “turd” to the Word dictionary just now). More like a hard mush still congealing. Don’t ask me how I know this, because it’s not like I’m currently sitting on the pot looking between my legs to see what my poo looks like.
No, I can tell this primarily from the gurgling discomfort in my bowels, the distended feel of my gut, and the obnoxious (or just plain noxious!) smell of the occasional fart I decide to let go free, just to amuse and offend my own sense of smell.
I know the consistency of my poo (had to add the word “poo” to the dictionary, also) before it is even born because I know my own body and how it reacts, sometimes not very well, to various kids of food. You see, yesterday I ate black beans in a delicious casserole my wife made, for the second day in a row. Today the beans are finally lubricating my entire waste management system.
The offensive farts are usually the first warning that a major corrective poo is on its way. These farts could be considered the harbinger of a bad fate, a complete tainting of the atmosphere around me for several whole minutes at a time. It is an almost evil smell, as if to smell such farts is to know the scent of Satan himself, the choking acridity of sulfur and brimstone, the nauseating stench of death and decay. It is also, in a way, a foretelling of the pleasure and comfort that awaits me once I finally relinquish this poo and set it free.
You see, I basically enjoy pooping. It is a simple pleasure of sitting and contemplating, usually reading or writing, and sometimes listening to the radio, as well. It is personal time, Me time, a chance to be all alone with my thoughts and smells. It is the smell, in fact, which allows me to be alone, since one’s own gaseous emanations tend to be fatal to anyone save yourself, a kind of natural defense system against other members of your family – or, if you’re really foul-bowelled, against everyone else around you beyond your family.
In fact, I believe that farting and the often times accidental and unavoidable act of smelling another’s fart may very well be the human equivalent of dogs smelling each other’s butts. Instead of sharing the scent of one’s hind end as a form of greeting, we slyly let loose a silent cloud of “Hi, how are ya” to announce our presence and, in some regard, to say “With this fart I am announcing my dominance over everyone who smells it.” At least, until someone else lets loose with an even more pungent fart, thereby exerting olfactory dominance over the proceeding farter.
So I go off to poop, trying to free the beast writhing in my bowels, straining to pass this devilish creature with less blood and agony than the alien birthing in the “Alien” movies. It feels nearly as violent and sounds nearly as deadly. There are explosions and noises that would frighten a six year old, accompanied by unearthly smells. I’m afraid to look in the bowl, so, for now, only those two senses – hearing and smell – are assaulted.
After twenty minutes, much of that time spent waiting and passing only the occasional six second fart, the beast finally emerges, it’s birth marked by slight pain, a little blood, and a resounding plop, like a heavy rock being dropped into a pond, advertising to all others in the men’s room with me that this Hell has passed and I have given birth. The splash from the beast reaches my bum like a lousy bidet.
It is done. The beast is both born and died in the same event, slain by the flushing lever, doomed to travel to its own watery version of Hell, the sewage treatment plant, where it will finally die in a violent and watery chemical death, damned to dual-finality as both drinking water for someone downstream and fertilizer for some neighbor’s vegetable garden.
And in that cycle, my beast will rebirth itself in someone else, reincarnating in a sinful cycle that has played out for eons and will continue to pass until someone invents a toilet that vaporizes poop with lasers.
We all live downstream from where someone else poops!
