Guest Post: A Guide to Shitting Your Pants

Today's a special day! Here at DDB HQ, we received a thoughtful piece of advice from writer Poopy Longstocking. Take it away Poopy!

A Guide to Shitting Your Pants

The last time I shit my pants was three weeks ago, and it was hardly even a surprise. Here is the thing about my poops. They are urgent and solid like a train, always. They build up quietly over days and nights and then, a couple of times a week, they come hollering out of my bowels with little warning. The whole affair takes about five seconds. They are often large enough to beach themselves half out of the toilet water. I consider myself very lucky to have a life full of exciting, dramatic poops. The downside is that I shit my pants with surprising frequency.  So, for all of you who have never had the indignity of pooping in your pants at work, or in a train station, or while on your way back from the grocery store, here is a simple how-to:

Step 1: Stem the flow. Do not give up when you realize you’ve lost the battle. Continue to fight. A grape-sized poop in your pants is better than a tangerine-sized poop in your pants any day. Strengthen your resolve, tighten your butt-cheeks together, and, if you can, walk around a little. Our bodies were not designed to poop and walk at the same time. 

Step 2: Make a break for it. Wait for a lull between waves of urgent panic and waddle discreetly to a bathroom, ideally one with a lock on the door and a sink. Poop the rest of your poop, assess the damage, and take off your underwear. It’s dead.

Step 3: Dry clean. Use wads of toilet paper to scrape the area dry. This is not a time to worry about being environmentally friendly. Keep going, there’s always more. 

Step 4: Wet clean. Make a trip to that sink and get some paper towels wet and soapy because it’s time for a tiny bath. Take your time, be persistent, and make your butt clean and beautiful. The worst part about pooping your pants is worrying that your butt smells. Abolish that worry. 

Step 5: Dispose of the evidence. Take your shameful poopy underwear and mummify it in toilet paper until it is a mysterious package. Bury it in the bottom of a trash can. Shhh. 

Step 6: Move on. Spray some air freshener on the butt of your jeans if you want, or trust the work you did in step 4. You’re beautiful and spontaneous and now you’re not wearing any underwear, you minx.

the voice from inside the booth

A cinematic thing that often happens to me when I'm wiping my ass:

I do the first few wipes (I usually do a double square of singly ply, I don't like the thick stuff, it rips too easily when you're using my methods), and you know it's getting cleaner. And at this point you do another wipe, and it comes back clean, and the rational voice in your head, the authoritative man in the control booth as it were, says, okay, you can stop now, your asshole is clean.

But you're like I meaaaaaaan I'm not sure and you do another double square rip and wipe. And the voice is like okay good work cleaning the shit off your asshole, let's wrap it up and go to the next thing. But you detect something, some moisture, something that feels particulate. And there you go again, ripping another double square.

The voice - maybe it address you as sir, or maybe it's cadet, it depends on your mood and personality if this voice is your superior making demands, or if it's someone you boss around - the voice is pleading. Bargaining maybe. Sir, this is a clean asshole. You're wasting paper. Let's flush and get out of here. You wipe again.

You start to get up (I sit down when I wipe), but then you reconsider and go for one more. The sirens are going off in the control room. Cadet, you're out of control, you're gonna run yourself raw and ragged! Get a hold of yourself. Et cetera.

Eventually you get to a place where you're sure there's no discernible shit left on your asshole and you pack up and go home. If you're having a week like mine where it's 4-5 shits a day, you in fact do find yourself a little worn down and ragged.

songs to sing

Recently when I have to take a dump at work, I will sing, to the tune of the intro to "Puddin' N' Tain'" words along the following words:

dumpin guy
dumpin guy
hey look at me I'm a
dumpin guy

or it might be

doo doo cheese
doo doo cheese
hey look at me I made
doo doo cheese

It's pretty satisfying. Give a try if you're into that kind of thing.

dieting tips

...and then for dinner, I just have a nice bowl of diarrhea with some uric acid...

on a skewer

I took a dump today where it came out in distinct chunks. I couldn't help but think about kabobs, like I was shitting little kabob cubes out. The more obvious metaphor I guess is horse shit, but no, this was more like kabobs. Think about that next time you take a shit that comes out in similar cubes/spheres/chunks.

might as well dump

Some how it never occurred to me until today that you can easily modify a popular song to psyche yourself up to take a shit in the following way:

Might as well dump
DUMP!
Go ahead and dump
DUMP!

So, thanks DLR and EVH and co. I personally am fond of the alteration of the 80s rap opener, "I wanna dump right now...".

Options! Just giving you options!

philharpoopic

I'm working in a new office. There's a men's room nearby with four stalls, three urinals, and two sinks.

Yesterday I went to take a shit there. I chose second stall from the right (from the shitter's perspective). Eventually, all four stalls were full. It was wonderful. I was reveling in the sounds of it all. My shit was kind of a soft one, the only real sound was the sound of the feces hitting the water, and not in an explosive way, in a gentle letting it down kind of way. One of the other shitters was similar.

There was the separate sonic color of the adjusting feet squeaks, the paper tearing, the guttural sounds, and the flushing. I was all so symphonic and I felt like I was part of a piece by one of the Russians who was a master orchestrator, Rimsky-Korsakov of Stravinsky, or maybe Bartok. It was perfect and beautiful and I look forward to more orchestral shits in this bathroom.

don't even talk to me before

I am not a coffee drinker, it's been probably nine years since I last ordered a coffee. Coffee seems great but it's not for me, and neither is caffeine in general. I wake up pretty easily, once I'm up, I'm up, I can do complex things within a few minutes of rolling out of bed (often doing creative stuff at that time is real good for me). So, the bumpsticker/mug/t-shirt mentality of "don't even talk to me before I've had my coffee!" is something I don't relate to. Nor do I relate to the "it's always 5 o'clock somewhere!" mentality but that's another thought.

That said, this morning, waking at 7am on a Saturday and working the annual shift I do for my CSA, I left the house before taking a shit, which is rare. If I'm going to work and this occurs, usually I'll make a b-line for the crapper. Unable to slip away for 45 minutes after I started working this shift, I felt that feeling coffee people might feel of don't even talk to me I can barely function until I take this shit how are other people doing it I'm so fixated. And then you take the shit and wow everything's pretty cool all of a sudden, as if by some fecal magic.

the penguins who poop in private*

While pooping at work, I tend to try to seclude myself as much as possible. For my second shit of my work shift today, I mixed it up and used the multi-stall room. And what a delight! There was someone (I think? or the idea of a person was enough anyway) in the next stall, I rather than trying to hide my shit from them, I gave them some insights into what's going on with me. They got to learn about how my guts are doing and how I wipe from the sonic evidence. What a grand and intimate portrait we give of ourselves when we take care and share a bathroom! Sure, the isolation is great to say your piece privately sometimes, but think of what you might share, think of what you might learn!

*This was one of a series of parties vying for power in a fantasy world that a babysitter of mine created for/with me & my brother when I was maybe 6-8 and my brother was 8-10. My brother liked to poop with a large amount of privacy, and Penguins hockey was a big deal back then & there

that coffee smell

Is a coffee shit a thing? I'm not a coffee drinker so I don't know.

At work this morning, I went into a single stall bathroom that had recently been occupied by someone for a length of time appropriate for a shit. A bit later I went in to wash my hands. The smell was redolent of coffee mixed with shit. And I thought, oh, when you drink coffee, I think it promotes shitting (I remember a UCB sketch to this effect, maybe that's not real either), and if it does that, maybe it changes the chemicals in the shit to smell like coffee. Or maybe some coffees do this with some guts. I like that this could be totally a real thing or something that I completely made up. Help?

scrapies pt 2

Q: what do we like?
A: we like poo poo scrapies!
Q: why do we like them?
A: it's hard to say!

Five years ago I said that it might be hard to be dignified when someone's seen the turd marks you left on a toilet bowl. But now I don't know if I agree with that. I think there's an intimacy to it. It's like when someone you know takes a shit before you go into the bathroom; it's not so much unpleasant as it is intimate, you know an intimate smell that that person makes. So too with the visual fecal remnant as the olfactory one.

Two other perks about poo poo scrapies are that there's a kind of archeological experience to finding and understanding them. What happened? What can it teach us? And if you are a standing urinator, there's a great game to be played there in trying to remove them. So let's give a cheer for minor fecal remnant on a toilet bowl aka poo poo scrapies!

120 months of doo doo

Haven't been sure how to note this fact, but as of this month, this blog has been steadily pooting away for 10 years. There's no other creative activity I've done for so long in such a consistent format.

When you read the first ever post on this blog, it refers to a wall paper that's not there anymore, so it's not a very interesting post. Before starting this blog, I had initially made a Twitter account where I was going to tweet every time or at least most times I pooped and just note that, but I wasn't ready for Twitter in 2009 (took me til 2014).

Anyway, in that spirit, I'm not gonna attempt any nostalgia or grand summation, but will simply relate that this morning, when defecating, I did a rare kind of shit for me, which is one that is much wider in the part that exits first, and then tapers. It came out rather forcefully. That was a novelty at 7:30 this morning.

Hope you're shitting well, and I plan to keep talking about how I'm shitting.

Yours,
Dave

when venturing away from home

Was just in the city of my birth this weekend. Shitting a lot too. Something odd that I've noticed is that when I'm away from my apartment a lot, I have a greater tendency to look more directly at my shit. Even like curving around and trying to get a peek as it hits the water. At home, I would never do this, but in novel-ly shaped toilets, I often have an urge to see how it all accumulates at the bottom of the bowl.

under lock and key

I was at my parents' house this past week. It's a house that I lived in for ~4 years, and the last long stretch I was there was 2005. It's pretty similar to how it was then but a few things have changed. It's a large house, and there are five bathrooms. Recently, a few of the bathrooms were redone. Curiously, even with that new attention, only one of the bathrooms locks (more correct: latches).

In a large house populated by two people with five bathrooms, I guess the need for locking is low. But when you have nine people staying there, the need goes way up. It just seems like of all the features you'd want in a bathroom, the privacy that a lock/latch provides is really high up there, and easy and cheap to add to boot.

And yet: there's something a little exciting about dumping when you know that someone could walk in. Particularly if you're amongst friends. It's like a little prank to everyone, the dumper and the walker-inner. It didn't happen over the course of the week as far as I know, but it's an interesting wrinkle to the dumping situation.

small thought

Older guys, wearing New Balance sneakers (you know which ones), taking dumps and making sounds in bathrooms with multiple stalls. That is all.

poop scoop

When you live with other people, and you only have one bathroom, there is the inevitability that one of you will be pooping while another person feels the pangs of needing to. It's rough stuff, but you get through it.

Recently, the timing of things has worked out such that my partner & roommate of many years has been scooping me on the bathroom, has been getting in there just as I find myself needing the shit the most. There is no blame, it's just something to pay attention to in the way sabremetric baseball people analyize hit clusters (if you hit 9 singles in an inning, you'll score a lot of runs, but if you hit 9 singles spread out over 9 innings, you probably won't). Pooping analytics.

work perk

Something I like in a working set up, not just an office, but a place you work, broadly defined (could be a coffee shop, a library, someone across the street whose apartment you can see into, etc), is when you have a perch that helps you be aware of who's dumping and when. It's none of my business, and I'm not gonna say anything, but it makes me feel like I know people better when I get a little sense of their dumping goings-on.

DDB endorses

I have been made aware of the cool thing that is Buttcon, to be held once again this summer in Detroit. Buttcon Buttcon Buttcon. Lots of art and thoughts and feelings about butts. A hearty endorsement over here from Doo Doo Bloggin for the work they're doing! And they're making a zine that may well have some writing from a familiar source in it... stay tuned! And read up on Buttcon!

doo doo grillin

I'm thinking of starting a spin off lifestyle blog to Doo Doo Bloggin called Doo Doo Grillin.

teenage fears

The way that your memory compresses things decades back is nothing strange. I'm thinking about how many years other people wipe your butt for you, and then when you do learn, how many years it takes you to be consistently good at it. Once you are entrusted with the responsibility of wiping your own ass and adult undergarments, there's gonna be some years with the occasional skid mark. It just takes some time to perfect.

When I was, let's say, 12-18, that period of non-mastery really stuck with me. It was a decade or less since I had figured out wiping my own ass. The last time I shit my pants was age 10. I probably had an occasional skid mark here or there, as even still as an adult, sometimes I do a less than bang-up job.

But the thing about ages 12-18 or so was that I was constantly worried that I'd wiped insufficiently and there was still some shit residue. I felt I was singularly bad at wiping, and that as a result I always smelled kind of like shit. I have always been a sitting down wiper, but I might end with a couple standing up "power moves" to make sure it's all gone. I actually still do that some times. I overwipe these days not uncommonly, I know I'm fine but I keep going.

I remember being around a friend when I was 14 who had a bad smell and thinking, oh, he must also be bad at wiping his ass. I made fun of him to project these insecurities, it really got to him. I probably smelled fine.

In high school, I thought about who was sitting behind me, and how they must smell my ass-smell. I'm pretty sure they didn't. It was also a time when I had long hair and I wanted very badly for my hair to retain shampoo smell (I used Herbal Essences, they advertised a lot then) the way female friends of mine's hair did. I wanted the good hair smell to stay, but thought only the shit particle smell was there. It was a very smell sensitive time.

My freshman year of college, I remember being mooned through a large pane of glass by a friend. I jokingly yelled at him "you should learn to wipe properly", conveying one of my own secret concerns. But then this fear just kind of fell away later that year. No precipitating incident I can remember for that, it just fell away. There is no perfect ass wiping, but I do a good enough job and I feel solid in that now. The memory of the fear is something that's lurking in the back of my mind.

a great euphenism

At a record fair yesterday, a friend and I agreed that "putting out a seven inch" would be a great euphemism for taking a shit, a large shit. "Putting out a twelve inch" just seems preposterous given how shit comes out of me, but hey, others do things their way. After you were done, you could say "I just dropped a seven inch".

shortage

I'm truly not accustomed to constipation in any way. Earlier this week, I acquired what appears to be a stomach bug of some variety. These things, they happen. I had a fever for a couple days, and then on Wednesday I shat liquid all morning. By the early afternoon I had gotten all the stuff out of my gut that needed to get out, or that could. From like 1pm on Wednesday to 7pm on Thursday, I had one pathetic little shit. Not shitting for like 12 or 15 hours is vexing. How do people do that?

It's still pretty quiet at 10am on Friday. One shit in over 40 hours. Granted, the input was low, I lost my appetite for a day or more. Probably not best framed as constipation. But how do you measure time, measure that you're alive, if not by shitting?

current mood

Since last night I've been in a head space where Dickey Ride by the Southern Players has been kicking around. It's a catchy song. Very successful as a dance track. Also pretty sophomoric and stupid on some other levels. I shared the fact that it's in my head with my friend AL who introduced me to the song, but I feel the need to broadcast slightly louder that this is happening, hence, I'm posting about it here.

The connection to Doo Doo Bloggin is the line:

"Lemme' see that doo-doo brown"

For those of you who've read Doo Doo Bustin, the book that pre-dated this blog, you'll know I reference "doo-doo brown" as a possible concept in that book. So, maybe, I was just ripping the Southern Players off, or, you know, great minds, etc.

memory from the cage

I grew up in Pittsburgh. I never lived in Squirrel Hill, but I spent a lot of time there. It was my favorite part of town. Plenty of important associations relating to construction of culture, diet, identity down there on Forbes and on Murray. Big place in my life.

I haven’t spent much time in Pittsburgh as an adult. I was there for professional/creative purposes back in 2013 and 2014. I was staying in the East End both times, but not exactly in Squirrel Hill. Nonetheless, I ended up at the Squirrel Cage on one of those visits, right in the heart of the neighborhood. It was probably a Friday night, not too late but not early. I would’ve been off beer by then, maybe I was DD. We had a solid hang at the bar, which it was assumed I knew well as I’d grown up there (I moved away when I was 14, and I didn’t regularly drink alcohol til I was 18, or frequent bars til I was 21). It was foreign to me, as was bar culture in Pittsburgh. I think it’s fair to say Pennsylvania has a bar culture that’s robust and distinct from other states, and maybe Pittsburgh specifically so within that.

Anyway, as a long travel day often is, it was a weird day vis a vis shitting. You get into town and you start meeting up with people and doing stuff and you might not take care to defecate with the speed or attention you would if you were at home. So I had some tokens saved up. I went to the bathroom of the Squirrel Cage to shit.

There was a urinal right when you walked in and a little swinging door to a toilet. The swinging door didn’t lock, but the outside door to the bathroom did. I paused and evaluated the options:
a.) don’t lock the door and essentially be shitting with the door open, anyone can walk in on me
b.) lock the door and possibly start a small queue, no one will walk in on me

I went with b. Apparently that was a bold choice for the patrons of the Squirrel Cage. Pretty quickly after I started, someone came to open the door, saw it was locked, and let out a “huh?”. A couple more people gathered, all of them trying to do a quick piss, presumably, and all of them baffled by the door. “What’s happening in there?” “What’s going on?” “Why’s the door locked?” “I need to piss” “I don’t understand” etc.

I don’t think of myself as being a “words are precious, only talk when you have something to say” kind of person. I like idle talking, I like all the things you measure or articulate with words that are, strictly speaking, unnecessary, that are extra. But these were just comically so. All of these grown men couldn’t figure out that someone was probably shitting in the bathroom. I mean, there are lots of different reasons/activities that could result in a locked door, but shitting is just a really basic and central reason there’s a door in the first place. Their befuddlement was simultaneously very entertaining and a little threatening.

It wasn’t a long shit. I was quick, washed my hands, got out and didn’t look back. No drama at the end, just puzzles in the middle.

There’s related stories to this. I can think of NYC bars that are like this where there’s capacity for multiple people in the men’s room, not just in urinal form, but if someone’s gonna shit, or moreover, not piss, it’s really capacity of one. That’s a totally fine model for a bathroom, but it’s vexing for drunk men with full bladders. I have also witnessed the “I’m so drunk I’m going to shit in this tiny room, staring at you while you’re at the urinal” move. I don’t like it, but I respect it I guess. Ultimately, I’m not a bar person.

dreamy guest post

We're very pleased to have some high quality guest-post content to share with you! This post comes from long time reader, first time doo-doo-blogger Jeffrey Young, and it is as poem. Here goes:

A Poem About Dreaming About a Poem About Poop

I dreamt about a poem about poop and struggled to remember it when I awoke

The poem was in five stanzas

The first stanza was about a particularly large poop back in maybe September

And how the toilet must have been flushed since then because we couldn’t see it in there anymore

The second and third stanzas were perhaps odes to particular poops since then

Which were probably still in there

The fourth stanza was on the wonders of the composting toilet

The fifth stanza was about how there are many rivers to cross

And how I look forward to fording all of them

Thank you so much Jeffrey for this defecatory gem. Many happy turds to you!

short form answer

The past couple weeks, my shits have mostly come quickly, in low volume, and pretty unsatisfyingly. It's like a couple little bits in the morning, or before bed, or really any time in the middle. Once in a while, this is punctuated by a large, urgent shit around 10am. For many years, I've been a 2-4 shits a day kind of person, and that's fine, but this nibbling around the edges is just no fun.

thinking about regularity

I don't think that much about the regularity with which I shit. It occurs in roughly similar patches. Whatever. If it didn't, I wouldn't be too bothered.

I was thinking today that I care more about posting about shit on this blog is the kind of regularity I'm most attached to. I haven't been very regular given my more recent pace, but given the pace of the last 10 years, maybe this is actually more normal. Regularity fluctuates is the lesson I guess.