a few points

1. I have "pooped" about seven times today.  I'm defining pooping in this sense by the act of taking down my trousers, sitting on the john, and having something happen with my ass.  In the last two or three attempts, it's been just gas, no stool, that comes out.

2. This used to happen to me more.  Most memorably, one time when I was I'd guess 11, I shat 11 times in a day, including multiple times at a Pittsburgh Pirates game.  I remember bragging to my friend about how many times I'd shat.  Three Rivers Stadium did NOT have particularly nice bathrooms.  But that's not why the built the thing.  It's like the Guggenheim.

3. I can't remember the last time I shat more than 4 times in a day.  But 3 is really not unheard of.  This is just the upper edge of my range.  Maybe I'm not done yet, today I mean.

4. My tummy's been rumbly a few days.  I've been getting spikes of "oh go sit on the john now" since Sunday or so.  Actually on Sunday I got one in a rehearsal space in Williamsburg and had to go shit in the dark.  I turned the flashlight on my phone on and went into the bathroom, which lacks a working light, and it was totally fine.  But that is not a nice bathroom.  Nicer than the bathrooms at Death by Audio, when that was a thing.  But not objectively nice.

5. Tonight, I was at BAM, which has pretty nice bathrooms all told.  When people were applauding, I snuck out and went to the bathroom tucked 1/2 a floor below the mezzanine.  I let beautiful, enormous farts peel in chorus with the raising of numerous curtain calls.  THAT was a fun game.

6. Hopefully things'll calm down tomorrow.

labyrinthine

Let me ask you a question.

No.  Let me tell you about myself.  Here is how I feel.

I take a shit, and I'm wiping my ass.  I use small bits of TP, like ~2 squares at a time (I prefer one-ply).  And the first few wipes are where you get the big cleaning done.  After the 3rd wipe, let's say, it's really just fine detail cleaning work.  And a relatively clean shit, you might only need 2 or 3 wipes.  But then, there are more frustrating ones, where you think you've got it all covered, and you discover another pocket of remaining fecal matter.  And you're going like 10 wipes deep on that.  Because you don't want to be incomplete and get shit on yourself and your clothes, right?

I'm no doctor, I don't know exactly how the stuff that you're wiping up gets there etc.  But sometimes I feel like either I pooped it out all wrong that these little reserve pockets keep presenting themselves afresh when I already thought I was in the end game, or that I just have particularly labyrinthine lower bowels.  Both may be true.

Do you ever feel this way?  It's a lousy feeling because it's the feeling of having finished something being revoked, like, you weren't diligent enough.  And I don't really like editing, I'd rather just get the idea out all at once and not have to revise.  And this is a form of revising.  So nerts to that.

Regal Hierarchy

My morning dumps of late have me thinking that the morning dump is like a king, where other dumps throughout the day are mere princelings.  Something like an 18th Century map of Germany could be made every day from the reality of my dumps.  Or maybe farther back in Italy with el papa being the morning dump and the others being smaller dukedoms or what have you.  All hail the morning dump, rex imperator.

Just once

I have only shat in a garbage can once, to date.

That is all.

P.P. Buster

I know this isn't a blog about pee, but I can't help myself.  This was really remarkable:

I'm in Nashville, I'm in a bar that rewards people for drinking its full selection of beers with something on the wall.  I, for the record, had had one cider to drink, but as usual I had to pee a lot.  Clear and copious, as wise friend used to advise me.

Anyway, I'm at the urinal, letting out a rather generous stream of urine, and a gentleman comes up next to me, also starts peeing.  He does that thing that many guys do these days - he spits when we starts peeing.  As far as I can tell, he missed his dork with that spit (something I always wonder about when I see men do this).  I keep peeing, but I notice he spits again.  And ten seconds later, again.  And then by the fourth spit, I'm like WHAT'S GOING ON HERE, MATE?  All I can think is, will he go to five?  Will he go to five?  And at last, yes, he does, he spits for a fifth time, whilst urine is still leaking out of him.  That was all he had, no more spits after the fifth.

But seriously, what the fuck are guys doing when they spit while they pee at a urine?  If they were doubly aiming for something, I could get that, but I just don't know.  Many spitters, many reasons, but if you've got some insight, do let me know.

The finishing touch - dude finished his pee and the next guy after him immediately stepped up and spat before whipping it out to relieve himself.  Maybe it's that urinal.  And yes, I had a colossally long pee during which to watch all of this take place.

bathroom haiku

This morning at work
a lavender-scented dump
I didn't make it

(came into my head just before I peed a little on my belt)

gradient

I just took a dump, a dump that had been building for a while.  It was voluminous.  It was made of little finger-length segments.  And it was all greenish-brown.

Now, I've had the occasional BM where there's a texture gradient - it starts really loose and then there's a hard packed gem following it up, or more likely the other way around.  But what I've never seen, and what this voluminous turd got me thinking about, is that I've never had a poop where it started one color and ended another.  It's funny, there must be some aggregation of very different foods taken in that gets combined into a single dump, but is there a process of chromatic homogenization that takes place in the colon or something?  You produce different looking dumps at different times, but at one time, you rarely see something heterogenous.  Why is that?

At Souen on 6th Ave, one goes to the men's room, and one notices huh, there's bunch of toothpicks next to the sink.  And with a dump coming, one thinks, I could kill two birds with one throne.

And then one keeps this thought to oneself.

steamy

When I have to take a dump particularly much, or the dump that I take is remarkable somehow, the word that usually comes to mind is "steamy", as in, man that was a big, steamy dump.  Probably it comes from here.  I don't think I really said it before I saw this clip years ago, but I definitely use it a lot now.  Usually "big" or "meaty" might also be involved.  No, just big, not meaty.

But dumps aren't steamy unless they're in the snow or something.  So what gives?  Where am I getting this from?

There's something kind of empowering, after you've taken a heinous crap that you wanted very badly to get out of your body, to think of it steaming like it came from hell or something.  Maybe that's where it comes from.  Smelly and steamy are not unrelated in a cartoon vision of smell having little steam lines.

One thing to notes is that dumps can be steamy, but not poops or shits.  Maybe turds.  But steamy & dump just go together so well!

We're Not Like Dogs

I walk into the bathroom at work and it's a nice laboratory.  It's a lab for poop smells.  I walked in later in the day today and the dump smell that existed there was really refreshing to me.  You could use words and could compare it to other smells but why?

I'm just thinking that it's funny how other people's dumps sometimes smell great and sometimes the worst.  I think the floor is way lower than the smell of your own dumps, but the ceiling isn't higher.  My own dumps smell more interesting/refreshing/cool than anyone else's, and I think that's not because of my diet, it's not objective.  But walking into a shit smell that makes you happy and that you had no hand in producing is a pretty cool feeling.

dump stations

My routine these days is to wake up at 8:15, shower, eat, and then drop a dudley between 8:35-8:50.  I don't force it, it just consistently comes up in that window.  This morning, nothing was pressing at that hour.  I thought about forcing it, but then I remembered that my new work place (I'm two months in) is much more dump friendly than my old work place.  In the old place, there was no aural privacy, you could hear everything.  I don't really go for that with work-level acquaintances.  In the new places, there's two bathrooms on the floor and they're pretty far from anyone's desk.

Side gripe: of the two work toilets, one flushes very easily and the other, which is closer to where I sit, you have to hold the handle a good 5-10 seconds to get everything to go down.  It'll go, but you gotta give it some time.  So a lot the people who work on my floor don't know this and there's a lot of remaining bits of toilet tissue or excretion left behind.  C'mon people.  At the old job, it was large wads of toilet paper that wouldn't go down.  I had to pee the wad into the water (I was the only guy).  It gave me the willies.  I actually mind flushing other people's waste less than that wad task.  I hate wet paper.  Fun fact: people who don't flush well correlate closely with people who let the door slam.

Anyway, this morning, no early dump.  No work dump.  I got home at 6pm and dumped for the first time.  Not a usual day, but a day nonetheless.

Unpleasant Confirmation

It's been years since I had a confirmed sighting of a shit stain that I had produced myself.  And yet, just the other day, there one was, staring back at my from the pajamas I'd been leaning on pretty heavily of late.  Et tu, pajama pants?