Poisoned! Left for dead.

Everyone’s heard the stories about people who fart and accidentally shit their pants. And sure, everyone’s heard the story about the person who had to take a shit but there wasn’t a bathroom anywhere so they just said “fuck it” and shit their pants. I’ve heard more stories about “sharting” and shitty drawers than there are stones in a pond. I’ve heard ones about people shitting their pants at the store, in the woods, from laughing too hard, and from people mistaking a wet clump of dung for a fart and pushing it out without hesitation. These ol’ yarns are a dime a dozen. And my whole life, I’ve laughed gleefully at these stories. You know why? Because none of it’s ever happened to me. I’m fucking EXEMPT! I’ve made it through my whole life without ever “sharting” or running out of time on the way to the honey bucket. But yesterday… things changed. It was a close fucking call…

It all started during lunch. I ate some old leftovers. Five days old to be exact. It was food from my graduation party, buffet items that sat out all day. Things like BBQ chicken, cole slaw, and fruit salad. Anyway, I spent the whole week picking at these leftovers. By the time Thursday rolled around the food was looking pretty fucking depressing. Shriveled fruit. Shriveled cole saw. And chicken that smelt rather questionable. And here’s the mistake I made: I ate it anyway. Bad idea. Rotten idea.

Later that day after work I was out running. I decided to take the long route. I started at my house on 57th and took side streets up to the top of Rocky Butte out past 92nd. It’s about a 4 or 5 mile run total. Well I got all the way to Rocky Butte and started to turn around to head back when I felt some really violent digestion take place. My stomach started to turn. And sure enough, the first warning sign set it in. The sharp pain. The warning. The cramp of doom. Food poisoning. It’s that feeling when you know you’ve got a four alarm emergency on your hands. It's the point of no return.

The damnest part was, I was two and a half fucking miles from home. I had what felt like 2 gallons of diarrhea that was ready to come blasting out at any waking moment. There was no way I could run anymore. I started power walking. There weren’t any decent public bathrooms to speak of on the way home so the way I saw it, I had two options: 1.) Walk all the way home, or 2.) take a shit in a bush… I wasn’t about to take a shit in a bush. There were no woods or reasonable cover anywhere. Only dense neighborhoods. I decided to choose the latter option. I began to hustle home as fast as my shit-ridden body would take me.

Anybody driving by me on the road could see the concern spelt out on my face. I was fucking scared. I knew I didn’t have long. Maybe 5 minutes… maybe less. I had two and a half miles to go. And the more I walked, the worse the pain got. By the time I was a mile from home, the pain was unbearable. I could see myself in the reflection of car windows as I passed and the expression on my face scared me. I looked like a man marked for death, speed walking for life, limb, and soul. And things got worse. Pain started happening in waves. Every thirty seconds it would feel like someone held a tommy gun to my stomach and fired a whole burst of hot steel into my gastrointestinal system. It was an intolerable, savage, primeval pain. The kind of pain a possum feels when it gets run over by a MAC truck on 1-5 and has to drag its broken lower half back into the woods. This terrible cycle of pain repeated more times than I care to remember over the course of about 30 minutes. The worst moment was when I was within 5 blocks of home. Isn’t it always the hardest when you’re almost there?

It felt like my insides were a cheap balloon filled with two gallons of diarrhea and the only thing keeping it all in was an unreliable punk kid (my butthole) that his parents pay ten cents an hour to hold shut. I was ready to blow shit all down my legs. But 100% of my attention was kept on keeping my butthole and the rest of my organs flexed as tightly as possible… and I’d been doing the same the whole way home. If I’d have let go for a MILLISECOND, I’d have dropped a bathtub worth of hot shit all over the sidewalk in front of dozens of people, cars, and businesses. Make no mistake people, the stakes were high. I wasn’t about to let my pride go. All I could keep saying to myself was “I’m not 65, I’m not 65…”

And of course when I finally made it to the sidewalk in front of my house, I was nearly in tears. I felt like a man on the most important mission of his days... There was no time for fucking around. I needed to get to that god-damned toilet. Just then, my girlfriend came bouncing out of my house to greet me, assuming that everything was fine, and tried to give me a hug. Once she got a look at my permanent grimace, she realized there was trouble and backed away. I looked her directly in the eye and simply said “I’ll catch up with you in a minute” and power walked straight through the bathroom door, slammed it behind me, and threw myself on the mercy of the porcelain man.

I won’t even mention the ensuing relief. And I also won’t mention the amount, color, or consistency of my excrement. Let’s just say it was inconsequential.

I spent the whole rest of the night reeling in horror from my harrowing experience. I wouldn’t wish that kind of pain and misery on my worst enemy. “Not even Hitler” as I told my girlfriend later that night.

So America… this Blog post is for you. I wish 99% of the bathrooms in America weren't privatized. But you know what? That’s okay… I probably wouldn’t use them anyway. I’m a germ-o-phobe. I love my home toilet… it's my comfort zone and it shows! I walked 2.5 miles through a burning gastrointestinal hell to be there.