Sometimes I fall in love with the smell of my own poop. Right now is one of those times.
I'm pooping less of late, sometimes even just once a day. And when I do the big poop, in the morning, I think to myself, wow, how fragrant, how refreshing!
I know it's dangerous to think your poop smells like roses, and I don't think it's floral or anything like that. No roses here. It's just distinct and comforting, this poop. It smells like a kind of home. I like this phenomenon.
Listen, you're an adult and I respect you, so I'm going to level with you.
They can't all be poops.
I wish it weren't true, but we don't live in that edenic world where it's just poops all day long. We're not there... yet.
Joni was right, you don't know what you've got til it's (temporarily in this case) gone.
Spending two days pooping not at my own home is tough! Bad poops! I don't care for it. The angles for wiping were weird, the TP was not my preference, the angle for feet/knees was suboptimal.
This is no one's fault, but gosh what a pleasure to be able to customize your toilet set up to your own body! Awfully glad to be home and dumping right.
I had a dream last night just before I woke up at 7:45am. This dream ended with me going into a bathroom stall and being about to dump. I woke up and had to do a gassy quasi-dump tout de suite.
I've had a few similar dreams recently where in the dream I really had to pee or shit. When I was a kid, there was lots of talk about "if you pee in a dream then you piss the bed in real life", and the same for poop. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it is interesting that I'm putting the idea to the test in my 40s. So far, I have not excreted whilst dreaming, and hopefully it stays that way, but I'll let you know if it changes.
I think it would be really satisfying to shit out mucus. Seems like sensually, physically, that would feel really nice. What the mucus would be doing there, that's another story, but come on, it would be cool, right?
You know that Phish song "Silent in the Morning"? It's not about me. I don't fart that much these days, but in the 30 min after I wake up (and before I do usually my largest dump of the day), I tend to let out some healthy farts. Not sure who that song is about, maybe Page is an SBD in the AM kind of guy or something.
My morning routine has changed in the last month. Instead of being able to bide my time with eating, bathing, and dumping, I am now in a cycle where I rise, then eat, and then... wait. My partner is usually in the shower when the need to dump first hits me. I will usually go through a cycle or two of dump pangs (aka dangs) before I can actually get in there (ah, the pleasures of the single bathroom household with more than one resident!).
But boy, when I do finally get in there, and it all comes out in a rush, what a joy. I can report I am feeling really alive from these big, cathartic morning dumps. It would be less edgy if I could do them when I first need to, but there's a certain excitement to the building of the suspense, you know?
I had a nice thing going for a while. Or, a different and remarkable thing for me.
I have remarked on here in recent times that the morning dump has for me become when I excrete most of the feces that I excrete in a day. It used to be more meted out over the course of the day. This remains true.
What changed for a couple weeks there last month was that the morning dump became one very large and solid log. I can't recall in my life having such a consistent run of non-separated turds. I imagine for many people, this is how it is all the time.
To be honest, I'm not sure it was better. I think the long, unbroken turd is more photogenic, it's more known. It's the charismatic megafauna of the feces world. But when you get right down to it, I'm someone who prefers a bundle of smaller logs to one giant one. It's just what I'm used to. Maybe it's the underdog? There need not be a value judgment for these things, but ultimately I do have one.
Anyway, I have regressed to the mean. Things are more like they were before now, but I figured I'd mention the little change.
Somehow
Magically, and also in the most pedestrian, quotidian way
The food that you have not yet eaten, but will eat some day
Is already your stool
Even though it's yet to go into your mouth, it's going to be grown, harvested, processed, etc
And then you'll find your way to it, it to you
You have a beautiful (or wretched) time of intersection with it in your mouth
Your body does the work it does on it to make it a dump
The butt ejects it from its day or so inside of you, having stripped it for parts aka calories
Food no longer, but dump, and specifically, your dump, and also, some remnants remain part of you
And it was always this way
You were a bullet heading for the food even as it was growing
A story told by bards and poets for centuries of the intertwining
If, hypothetically, I could have the option to control how my dumps came out, I would not choose to have them all be perfect, resistance-free, fair-smelling affairs. No. I would want them to reflect my moods.
Sometimes, I would want a clean & long one-piece shit. Sometimes I would want a loose & messy one. Sometimes, I'd want it to take a while, other times it would come out comically fast. Sometimes I'd want no smell, other times I'd want something funky to dress things up. A loud dump can be a clarion call some of the time, other times you want stealth.
Dumps: they're the spice of life 🌶
I was in Europe last week for the first time in seven years. Specifically, I was in Ireland. The toilets, they're a little different over there as you may have noticed yourself. Here's my feedback on a week of Irish shitting:
- It's a little thrilling and a little chilling how much farther the poop falls to the water. Splashes sound bigger and can be bigger, it echoes more. I like the less water usage, but also maybe it could be a shallower bowl? It's exciting but not always in a good way, I'd say.
- It's really hard to see your stool in those toilets! I didn't used to do this, but these days, I like to look at my stool and see what color it is, how hard/soft, etc. And in those deep Irish toilets, it's harder to perceive. Five demerits. Show me my own work!
- Another five demerits for the design change from standard US toilets that makes it harder to kind of tuck up your junk in the battlements of the seat/bowl when you're wiping. I felt like I was all over the place and undirected and flopping everywhere. I didn't care for that. I'll stick to my own crapper, thank you.
For the last three months, my stool was of a loose quality, and it was coming frequently, like 3-6 times a day. Why? I was on meds. A rheumatologist put me on some anti-inflammation meds to try to address my long term health stuff (it didn't help), and the side effect most notable was shitting a lot, and loosely.
I stopped those meds five days ago and it's been nice to watch my stool return to its more familiar form. It's cohering more, it's in larger formations, it's calling me to action fewer times a day. What a relief solid stool is when it's been a stranger in your house for oh these many moons!
Over the last year or so, I've become really attached to elevating my feet and legs whilst pooping. I didn't seek this out. My partner got a cute little yellow trash can for our bathroom, and it sits right in front of where legs go for poopers. One time, I was having a hard time getting it all out, and so I gave it a whirl. It was the right height to improve the angle. I guess I liked it and particularly for the big morning dumps, I starting making use of it. Gradually, gradually, it's gotten so dumping without elevating the feet just seems stupid, and when I go somewhere and can't elevate, it's like, what the hell?
I stand here before you a changed man. I now enjoy for to have the better angle while dumping. Maybe you do too?
I made a chocolate sourdough cake this week. I make a lot of cakes but I rarely ice or glaze them. Who needs to add sugar to a cake? Eww.
I thought I'd be entertaining, so I iced this one. Chocolate icing. It was okay. I ended up having a Covid rebound from two weeks ago and didn't host anyone. So I ate a lot of the cake. It was pretty good in the end.
I've noticed my stool has been particularly dark this week, and I'm pretty sure it's the chocolate from the cake and icing. How cool! Maybe I should ice my cakes more to make this effect more a more regular part of my life?
So, what, does fruit make you poop or something?
Or vegetables?
I have never understood this.
Dried? Fresh?
Everything makes you poop, it's such a weird thing to think about.
Huh?
I really like conceptual versions of the talking game "kill, fuck, marry". Doing it with actual people is weird mostly, especially if you know them, but with concepts it's a great game.
I realized today that to me, the ultimate KFM trio is: piss, shit, vomit
So I'll put it to you. Which would you marry, which kill, and which fuck? Hmm??
I think I've said it before on here, but I don't really know what the phrase "swamp ass" is meant to apply to. I tend to think about it as those times where you take a shit so gnarly that it feels as though nothing can clean your butt hole.
I had such an experience today right before I was leaving the apartment. I was out for a couple hours, and when I got home, the first thing I did was wash my butt in the shower and change my underwear. I feel 95% certain that my butt was in fact pretty clean and I had nothing to worry about. But that feeling of murkiness, of dare, I say, swampiness, just wouldn't leave me alone until I took things to another level.
I really hate changing my clothes in the middle of the day, so it really takes a big commitment for me to do this. But such was the magnitude of the swamp today.
I hope that your ass is grass rather than swamp, that's my hope for you.
Might I recommend that when you have to verbally indicate that you're going to defecate, say: "I'm gonna go see what kind of stool is in my colon"
Okay so I wrote a first draft of a verse the other day for a play on "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" that would be called "Blood Gets In Your Stool":
They
Asked me how I knew
The color of my poo
Maybe it was blue?
As I learned in school
Always keep your cool
When blood gets in your stool
tbh I didn't check and make sure that fits the form of the original but I'm just gonna leave it here, feel free to add to it
ALSO I can report that my shitting has gone a bit haywire of late. Instead of the status quo of one large turd sesh in the morning and 1-2 others the rest of the day, they're all smaller. Not loose per se, but it's like the total mass that can come out at a time is reduced. I have a number of visits to the loo a day where I have large gas and a small bit of solid stool emerges, or many a moderate amount. My butt hurts cause it's been so frequent and much wiping. I don't love this new model and I hope it ends soon and I can poop bigger poops again.
