My Shitty

Bacon-wrapped hot dog venders are culinary angels. On any given evening in Los Angeles, you will find a little flat-top cooker cart emitting a sweltering aroma of sizzling bacon and hot dogs. Some of these cooks are colorful characters. I’ve seen many turn over the dogs with quick tong action while pitching the product like a medicine man from bygone days. When they add onions, bell and jalapeño peppers topped with mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup, the aroma hits nirvana. Not much salesmanship is needed. There’s usually a salivating line waiting to suck down a dog.

Within a few minutes, the creation in my hand is devoured. One wasn’t enough. I see another cart fifty feet away. This time I skip the onions and bell peppers. The bacon dog disappears soon after. I hop on the Red Line subway. I exit and escalate onto Santa Monica and Vermont to another sweltering aroma – a Mexicatesson with outside barbecues cooking rows of whole chickens. I’m still hungry.

I arrive home with a sacked chicken burrito. Tired, I take a few bites then tuck myself into bed for the passout. Did I mention the five strong craft beers I consumed pre-bacon dog devouring?

My alarm is set to six a.m. Deep sleep brings deep dreams. Somewhere in my dream, I’m racing against a clock. I’m at my mother’s house watching her and my two brothers clean the garage in the early morning. A garden hose is involved. The spray smells like bacon dogs. My family does not see me. I’m invisible as I call out over and over for someone to give me a ride to work. No one hears. When I call out once more, the silent response becomes an eerie echo. Abandoned in the garage, time is now desperate.

As I toss and turn in my bed with a sour stomach, the abrupt end of the dream wakes me up in a confused stupor. My neighbors must have heard the desperate cries from my sleep. Analyzing will make matters worse. All I know is that it’s three a.m. and I have to shit.

“Was the desperate nature of the dream a courtesy notice? Don’t analyze! You just told yourself this. Go! Get out of bed and shit, boy!” It goes well. I still have a few hours until alarm chime, and I fall back to sleep.

Wake up time has me in hustle to make the earliest bus. I’m out the door quickly. As I walk, my bowels adjust to a stretched stride and blood flow. I cross the traffic light and wait, but the bellowing rumble is too great. I contemplate.

“If I board the next bus, there are plenty of outs in case I can’t hold on.”

There is no way in hell I’m going anywhere. I have one choice – to get my ass back home.

I do the Chaplin back up the street. When one is in trouble, instincts dictate preparation: a loosening of the belt buckle, clicking the right key in a fist of palm sweat to quickly unlock the front door. Door open, I hurdle half my queen bed with the graceful finesse of O.J. in those Hertz commercials. My eyes bulge as I make the approach.

The sphincter belches a slew of goo before my ass hits the seat. While in an out-of-breath-head-slumped-in-hands ecstasy, I reach for toilet paper. My smoker’s cough kicks in as another round of mushed bacon dog knocks and exits my anxious and throbbing anus. It stings. Ecstasy gone, this is the last of it. I don’t look in the bowl this time, for my focus is on clearing my bloody nose after a sneezing fit.

I sit there, in all my shitting, coughing, sneezing, and wiping, contemplating the City of Angels, bacon dogs, crapping, dreams, life, and a beloved athlete disgraced by his raging temper. I know I need to get back on the road to work, but not before a thought of dietary concern: would the consumption of soy-based bacon dogs affect the consistency of my bowel movements? I take the thought in another direction. I am now serving soy-based hot dogs to drunken hipsters swaggering out of a chic, bourbon bar at two a.m.

As I finish wiping my ass, I realize the great potential for luring trust funded, hipster grubbiness toward the sweltering fumes of my hot dog cart. I exhale my sales pitch under a breath of contempt:

“Step right up for a healthy dose of colon-cleansing, soy-based and peppered indie-rock bacon dogs. And for the meat eaters among you, I’ve got your Kosher beef wrapped in greasy pig blankets. Bon Appétit!”

As I head back out for another commute attempt, the rush of thoughts reinstate the absurdity that is my life. I realize the true degree of separation between me and my fellow humans: zero. Socrates wrote that “the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing”. This is true, but it sure as hell felt good knowing my instincts met with reason when my bowels said, “Fuck you, here it comes!”

Poop Report

I had split up with my girlfriend a couple of weeks ago, and I was feeling down when a good friend called and invited me out to the local pub. “Great!” I thought, “I could use some relief and friendship.” It was not long before we chatted up two alluring young women at the bar. One thing the led to another, and before long we were dancing and drinking way too much.

It didn’t take much persuasion for “Sarah” to invite me to her apartment. When we got there, we flopped on the couch and exchanged niceties until she leaned over and whispered a proposition in my ear.

“Yes!” I cried. I stood up and she divested me of my pants and underwear and began to give me, um, er, oral ministrations. My legs were shaking so much that I had to sit on the couch. Her expertise had me on the edge for a long time. Finally, the ministrations reached a crescendo, and we disengaged.

After a while, I dressed. It was then, with rising horror, that I saw a shit stain on “Sarah’s” beige couch, exactly where I had been squirming a few minutes before. The stain was about half an inch wide and maybe four inches long. I immediately grabbed a pillow and positioned it over the stain, hoping this would give me time to think what to do. Should I tell her, or try to escape unnoticed? Should I beg for forgiveness and clean it up?

She came back into the living room and remarked, “That pillow doesn’t go there.” I recognized in her a neat and clean freak, and felt a rising wave of nausea as she grabbed the pillow.

She shrieked and the pillow fell from her hands. “Was it you who made this stain?” she implored. I knew right then I had to confess.

“No, it was your dog that did it.”

“I don’t even have a fucking dog!”

“Yes, it is mine,” I allowed.

“Well, then clean it up, for fuck’s sake!” she shouted.

“Alright,” I croaked, “Give me a toothbrush and some Lysol.”

Well, I scrubbed the stain and some of it was coming off; but shit on beige? Good luck. “This is the best I can do,” I moaned. Soon, I was banished from the apartment and onto the street.

Several weeks later, I saw her dancing and drinking with a new guy. “Heh,” I thought, “he`ll probably soil the other side of the couch. Great revenge!”

Poop Report

The kind of shit where you eat really spicy food and your asshole feels like the inside of a cigarette lighter.

The kind of shit that yanks out the hair of your ass as it pushes its way out.

You wish you’d gotten a spinal block before you shit.

Hey, Poopers! We are in need of Poopreport of the Year nominations. So far our forum members have nominated two stories: Pop Wouldn’t Stop, by veteran Poopreporter G Ras, and The Trucker And The Janitor: A Choose Your Own Adventure Story, by former Poopreport of the Year award winner Gasputin.

Please, search our 2010 front page submissions for what you consider to be the best of the past year and send the nomination to daphne by clicking on the name link.

There are a few categories of Poopreport submissions, and you can check them all out by checking out the MAIN SECTIONS on the top upper left hand corner of every front page.

We genuinely need your help to field a full set of stories for this past year’s accolades, so don’t delay! I will accept story nominations until Friday, March 18, 11:59 p.m. pacific standard time.

Thanks so much, and Happy Pooping!

Poop Report

I have autoimmune hepatitis, which means that my white blood cells see my liver as a foreign body, and they try to destroy it. One morning I woke up to excruciating abdominal pain. I When I felt that pain, I thought that my liver had given out and I was going to die. I crawled over to the bathroom to see if a hot shower would help ease the pain, but it didn’t, and I collapsed. I yelled to my friend to call 911. My muscles locked up, I was dry heaving, and hell, I couldn’t even move to get dressed.

After arriving at the hospital, I was hooked up with enough pain killers to fell a horse, and yet I still felt the horrendous pain. As an ultrasound was performed, the tech looked at me in shock.

“When did you have your last bowel movement?” she asked. I told her it was the day before and she informed me that I was backed up. Seven hours later, I was released as high as a kite, but still in horrible pain, and sent home. My muscles were still locked and I couldn’t even pee, let alone poo! The doctors didn’t know what was wrong because my disease is not common.

After a few days of not using the toilet, I was finally able to pee but still not poop. Later, in a glorious moment where I could have sworn Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus played from the heavens, I finally pooped. It hurt like hell coming out, but it came out!

After that, I didn’t poop for a couple weeks. I was terrified that I had IBS and that if I didn’t poop I would experience the same agony that I’d experienced before. By this time I looked like a woman who was six months pregnant since my stomach was so bloated, therefore I took a dose of castor oil. It worked, too; liquid poop rained down for the next three days. Relieved, I didn’t take castor oil again.

It has been a week, and since then I haven’t pooped. I don’t want to have to continually take castor oil and mess up my digestive system. Do you think it’s all mental, or should I bring it to the attention of my primary care doctor? Was that excruciating pain due to the amount of poop in my intestines? Before that horrible incident, I pooped once a day. If all those painkillers didn’t diminish the pain, could I be suffering from something other than constipation? I can’t eat gluten, either, and I’m very careful of what I eat. Thank you so much for your time.

Poop Report

How about it, mate? Have you and the other chaps been cursed with a mob of rampaging kangaroos eating your veggies before you have a chance to harvest them yourselves? Are gangs of bandicoots cavorting on your lawn, leaving it full of holes? Has your newly arrived Middle Eastern neighbor’s vast heard of goats become problematic? Put that AK-47 back in the closet! Forget blasting away with that twelve gauge! Relief is no further away than the closest zoo that houses large predators, so go there and get some shit.

Researchers at the University of Queensland have made the discovery that most herbivores are discouraged from entering a garden that has been anointed with tiger feces. The feces are even more effective when the tiger has recently feasted on the species that you are trying to repel. I can almost hear the discourse between two garden invading goats:

Goat One: “Damn Joe, that lettuce sure looks delicious.”

Goat Two: “Oh my God. Run for it, Elmer!”

I hate to deny the Australians any recognition for their work, but I read a similar article here in the USA several years ago. The benefits of this method are multiple. The pests are kept from the garden. The predator poo is composted rather than being sent to a crowded landfill to make methane, which we don’t really need more of. And the garden gets a good shot of nitrogen, which helps it produce fine fruits and vegetables.

Keep in mind that a synthetic poo may be eventually stocked in your local garden shop right next to the more conventional fertilizers and pest repellents.

photo taken by user The Essence of Life, on Yahoo Flicker

Poop Report

I took a year of three-dimensional design while I was in college. I attended a small Tennessee school where, it would seem, the staff was not up on the most modern materials in which we students could ply our vocation. We did the usual sculpting with clay and a little free-form building with plaster of Paris, but no one ever thought about the possibilities of making likenesses in dung. It certainly wasn’t because of a lack of that odoriferous material; we were in a somewhat rural setting where pig poop, cow patties, chicken shit, and goose turds could have been bagged and brought to the studio in great quantity. The one poop that was in short supply in the local area was, of course, the one that has proven the most profitable for aspiring artists to use in creating their masterpieces – panda poo.

In its homeland of China the giant panda can still be seen, mostly in reserves that have been established for the perpetuity of the species. Famed Chinese sculptor Zhu Cheng of Sicuan province helped children gather panda poo and sculpt it into a likeness of the famed Venus De Milo which unfortunately, possibly thanks to the ultimate disdain of the sculpting material used in the project, still has no arms. The fact that the statue was a great success can be attested to by the fact that a Swiss art collector has shelled out the tidy sum of $59,000 to claim ownership of the work.

“Isn’t the statue stinky?” you may ask. The answer is a resounding no. Pandas are mostly vegetarian and the poo of animals that dine on herbaceous materials have little objectionable odor. Most people would object strenuously to a likeness rendered in dog or cat shit sitting on an end table in their living rooms, but the relatively odor free feces of a cute panda? Well, that’s just okay in almost anyone’s mind. The art connoisseurs who have viewed the poo masterpiece have even commented that it actually smelled good, a few going so far as to say it smelled rather like tea. (Excuse me while I go dump this steaming cup of green tea I just brewed.) I might try to capitalize on the poo aroma by creating a line of poo-based scents. How about an eau de cologne called Tapoo, its motto could be “A dab of poo will do ya”.

The art crew that made the statue did not even wear gloves they were so unconcerned about the source of their art medium. The poo contained little twigs of undigested bamboo that, when reinforced with plaster and glue, made a durable material with which to sculpt.

We are mere amateurs compared to pandas when it comes to pooping. The average adult panda poops about forty times per day and squeezes out a total turdage of approximately forty pounds daily, or over a year’s period, an impressive seven tons per animal. With resources like that is there any doubt as to the financial future of China?

Poop Report

I keep seeing references for anxiety causing people to poop, but I have the opposite problem. I have an anxiety disorder and it acts up with slight changes in my body. So, if I have to poop my anxiety kicks in. I am not scared to go; it’s just the actual feeling that triggers a small anxiety attack. What is this?

Poop Report