My Shitty

I was living in downtown Richmond and had just been evicted from my apartment. I was pretty bummed about it, so I stayed up all night with my friend Marshall, drinking straight vodka. Around seven the next morning Marshall had to go to class, so I was all like, “Damn, what the fuck am I gonna’ do now? Where am I gonna’ go?” Feeling nostalgic, I decided to walk back to my apartment and sit on the stairs and reflect on how life had gotten so shitty, so quickly, from the crappy mistakes I had made.

So there I was, sitting on the steps outside of my old apartment, when I feel this rumble in my stomach. It wasn’t anything too serious, but I knew pretty soon that I was going to have to take a pretty big shit. And since I didn’t feel anything knocking at the back door, I decided to sit there a little while longer, reflecting. Well, about two minutes later I felt another rumble. This wasn’t just any rumble, though, this was a DEFCON-fucking-Four.

Several drops of sweat started to form on my brow, and an all-too-familiar cold chill ran up and down my spine, like a fucking blast from Captain Cold’s freeze ray. “Aw, FUCK,” I thought. It was now or never – I had to find a bathroom. STAT. I stood up faster than Wally West playing Duck-Duck-Goose and started to make my way down the steps and across the street. I took a quick mental scan of all the public bathrooms in the area and came to the conclusion that it was going to be a Hardy’s toilet that felt my wrath. “OK, three blocks isn’t too bad,” I reasoned with myself, “I can make it.” But it was too late.

Three steps into my journey crossing the street my ass fucking exploded. I’m not talking about a little accidental turd poking out and saying hello, either. I’m talking about Mount Saint Fucking Helens Butt Magma erupting from my ass. This was shortly after seven AM, and all the VCU college kids just happened to be walking to class. Enemy territory. Charlie all over the place and no backup in sight. As I made my way across that street I looked up and noticed a young guy walking straight toward me, smiling his fucking face off. He gave me a friendly nod as we were about to pass. I tried to give him one too, but a huge glob of chunky liquid shit ran right down the leg of my shorts and plopped onto my shoe. I unintentionally kicked it off in his direction as we passed. Looking back on this moment I now realize it must have been Satan himself – or some weird incarnation of some evil demigod or spirit put there just to mock me with that smug-ass grin. “Fuck it,” I thought, and I kept going. Can’t stop now. Gotta’ keep moving.

Two blocks later I felt the warm globs continue to plop out of my butthole, no matter how tightly I squeezed, and with those globs Hershey’s Syrup poured down my legs, covering my socks and shoes. As I made my way through an alley and towards the Hardy’s that had now become my Holy Grail, I noticed a homeless man standing on the left side of the alley staring at me. “Are you OK?” he asked me kindly. I must have looked alot worse for wear than I thought. Usually the homeless people around here are asking me for some help, not the other way around. I stopped briefly and looked over at him.

“Man, we’ll help you out,” came a voice from the other side of the alley, where two other homeless guys were standing.

I started walking over to them when one of them yelled, “SHIT! HE GOT SHIT, MAN! SHIT!” Frightened out of their minds, the three of them then proceeded to run at full fucking speed out of the alley and down another street. I have never before or since seen anything remotely like this happen with the Richmond City homeless. It was as if Mercury himself granted them access to Speed Force.

By this time the chocolate river that was coming out of my ass had briefly let up. There was still hope. I continued to the Hardy’s, power walking, as what was once a warm stream began to turn cold. And then I was there. I’d finally made it. The mystical Hardy’s was real, and here I was. I pulled open the door and took the immediate right turn straight into the bathroom.

I looked around. No one here. That’s at least one good thing that happened to me today. I went straight into the only stall and began taking off my shoes, my socks, my shorts… It was as if I had jumped right in to that fucking chocolate river, clothes and all. “I’m completely fucked,” I thought, as I scraped chunks of dark chocolate butt fudge from my legs. I had to abandon the socks and my boxer shorts there, draping them on the back of the toilet as I looked at my shoes. Not going to be pretty, but I had no other choice. Walking around any city barefoot is never a good idea. I may have been covered in my own shit, but there was no way in hell I was getting cut up feet or worse on top of that.

My pants were totally soaked; a huge brown stain now completely covered the entire back and sides of my shorts. Cleaning them would be a hopeless endeavor, but I attempted to anyway, swishing them around in the sink. Standing there butt-ass-naked in only my anti-Limp Biscuit shirt, I prayed no one would walk in. I was shown some a small amount of pity, because no one did. Trying to keep myself calm, I put just my shorts and shoes back on and walked out. I was a man against nature – I was going to have to ride this strange torpedo all the way to the end. As I exited the building and made my way back to the alley I had previously walked, I knew I needed to find something – anything – to wear other than these shorts. I might have been able to pass off the shitty brown shoes, but there was no way I was going to be able to walk around in those soaked, brown-stained shorts.

“If any cops see me, they’ll fucking bust me, thinking I’m some crazy dude wandering the alleys,” I thought. I made my way over to a dumpster and began rummaging through it, hoping for something, anything, that could pass for pants, and Eureka! The Lord must have been smiling on me this day, even though it may have been the kind of smile that’s half sympathetic and half Fuck You, Asshole, for what I found could not really be described as pants – it was a neon pink Speedo bathing suit. “Well, it’s better than shit pants,” I thought, and I quickly changed from my fudge shorts into the bathing suit bottom.

That was not to be the end of my adventure in Poo-Poo Land, but the rest is better left for another time. The moral of this story is that shit happens to anyone at anytime, and you should pray that it doesn’t go down as bad for you as it did for me.

Poop Report

As hundreds of millions of children across the world head back to school this fall and you prepare your back-to-school stories, something critical will be missing for more than half of those children. It’s not
teachers or text books or even desks; it’s toilets.

Each year, 272 million school days are lost to absenteeism caused by diarrhea; in some areas, over forty percent of diarrhea cases result from transmission in schools, rather than homes. Over half the world’s schools lack toilets and a place for children to wash their hands, and fifty percent lack safe drinking water. It doesn’t matter how good the education is if children are forced to miss school.

That’s why this October, a coalition of nearly thirty organizations, including UNICEF, will organize a series of events in Washington DC to demand that the US Government, the World Bank, and others involved in the education of children across the globe, no longer forget the crucial fourth R: the Restroom. No future school should ever be built without safe water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities, nor should any student be resigned to the disease and indignity of a school without a restroom. That fourth R makes a monumental difference to education:

• In one school in Ghana, Mohammed Yahaya, a teacher, proclaimed, “I’ve been teaching here for eight years. Before the borehole well we had 46 students now we have close to 400 students!”
• In Bangladesh and Tanzania, studies show school attendance increases fifteen and twelve percent respectively, when water is available within a fifteen-minute walk compared to one hour or more.
• In Alwar District, India, the school sanitation program increased girls’ enrollment by one third, leading to a twenty-five percent improvement in academic performance for both boys and girls.

The impact is lifelong and also affects the generation that follows. Women who have been to school are less likely to die during childbirth, and each additional year of education is estimated to prevent two maternal deaths for every one thousand women.

We invite you to begin your back-to-school reporting in advance of the October events. We can help you identify programs that are tackling this issue and improving lives. We can direct you to WASH and education experts to interview about this issue. We can connect you to US organizations, teachers and students that are directly involved with solving this problem through service learning programs (US schools matched to developing country schools). The coalition has a global network of on-the-ground partners that will help you meet the students, teachers and parents affected by this issue so you can hear their stories directly. For more information, feel free to download this pdf from Unicef – Raising Clean Hands.

Poop Report

If it is poop you have to go.

So your pants you won’t blow.

Just run out of the class,

And relieve your ass.

Once you’re on the pot,

Go ahead and squat.

Or you can enjoy the cold seat;

It takes just seconds to heat.

If someone stumbles in,

Just lift up your chin.

Take pride in what you made,

The magnificent log you laid.

If there arises a stink,

Run away and don’t think.

But before evading doom,

Flush twice: It’s a long way to the lunch room.

Poop Report

After a stint in the Navy, I went to a Big 10 school on the GI Bill. Since the GI Bill did not cover all of my expenses I found a part time job with the university custodial staff for some extra money. Evidently on my first day at work I must have rubbed the supervisor the wrong way, as she teamed me up with the most revolting person on the team. This guy was missing a majority of his teeth, and on the rare occasions that he shaved, the end result was great swaths in the hair on his neck or face. He had body odor and flatulence issues, and for some strange reason, never wore socks? Frequently, he would make a big production of coughing up phlegm and swallowing it.

Whenever he talked to or about a woman, he would start this heavy creepy wheezing. Same thing when he would tell an off color joke; after delivering the punch line he would start wheezing like he was going to get off on it. This person was to be my working partner for the entire semester.

And yet, it actually turned out rather well. Since the supervisor was too disgusted to even talk to him, she never called us to task for only having done minimal work during our shift.

One evening this guy introduced me to the freakiest game of Tic-Tac-Toe I have ever witnessed. Now you may be wondering how such a lame diversion as Tic-Tac-Toe could ever be anything to write about…

That particular evening we were assigned to clean a room in the Biology building. As usual, we did absolutely nothing that was even remotely cleaning related. For my part, I walked over by the window, fired up a joint, and kicked back to listen to my radio while he started rifling through the cabinets.

A half hour into our shift, he called me over to a cabinet to look at some of the stuff he had found. In one jar he had found Human Breast Tissue. The label on the jar indicated it was tumors excised from human breasts. Of course, since this was female related, he started his wheezing. He is the only person I have ever met who could get aroused by breast tumors.

Next to this jar was a jar of colons I presumed to be human, although it wasn’t marked as such, just Colons. He opened the lid, and I let my morbid curiosity get the best of me and peeked inside. Floating around in formaldehyde were six or seven colons. They resembled what you’d see if you ever go to a convenience store in the early morning hours and take a look at the hot dogs that have been roasting all night.

Here’s where things started to get weird. This guy reached into the jar with his bare hands and retrieved a couple of these colons. He then walked over to the sink on the lecturer’s island and squeezed one as if it were a baker’s icing tube. Out squirted a stream of watery-human shit, which he then deftly used to form a Tic-Tac-Toe cross. He drew the first X and offered the colon to me to make my move. I was actually frozen in place out of disgust and just stared him in slack-jawed amazement. He just shrugged and finished the Tic-Tac-Toe game by himself.

At the end of the game, he started laughing, raised the colon up by his mouth and began to make farting sounds. Then, he placed one end of the colon to his lips, took a huge breath, and blew into it, spraying the remainder of the shit into the sink. And then, as if he had just taken the shit of his life, he said, “Ahhhh.”

It was quite possibly the most disgusting thing I had ever seen. To wind things up, he returned the colons to the jar and tidied up the cabinet. But instead of cleaning out the sink, he just laid some brown paper towels on top of the mess, neatly lined up as if they were miniature Japanese Tatami mats.

I have since willed my body to science, and it fascinates me that someday my colon may provide someone with that much merriment.

Poop Report

Because both my parents worked from nine to five during the summer when I was eight years old, I spent the days at the house of a neighbor who babysat me. She had two teenage daughters and two toddler sons of her own. Her two year old, Kevin, was in the process of toilet training; he was often put into big boy pants but had frequent accidents, and so was usually kept in diapers.

One afternoon I was watching television in the living room with Kevin beside me on the couch. His mother had put a pair of big boy pants (tightie-whities) on him, and— because the day was so hot – nothing else. She asked him several times if he was sure he would remember to tell her if he had to go to the bathroom, and reminded him repeatedly to do so. Kevin assured her that he would; the assurance of a two year old, however, is not something that one can always consider truly reliable.

Kevin and I were watching The Love Boat while his mother was in the kitchen feeding Kevin’s younger brother, Eric, and I was lost in episode. Kevin sat next to me quietly, sucking his thumb. When I happened to look over at him I saw a stream of pee running down the front of his tightie-whities and onto the couch.

Kevin took his thumb out of his mouth and called, “Peein’, Mom! Peein’! Peein’ now!”

Of course, his mother was none too happy. Exasperated, she snatched him up and hauled him upstairs to clean up. She shouted angrily, “You said you would tell me when you had to go! Why didn’t you tell me you had to go, Kevin?”

Bewildered, Kevin insisted that he had told her.

A few weeks later, Kevin, had been relegated once more to wearing diapers around the clock. He had dropped a really nasty load into his diaper and was taken upstairs to be changed by his sister, Teresa. I could hear her. She exclaimed in disgust the entire time. I don’t know what the kid had eaten for breakfast that day, or for supper the night before, but Kevin had truly dropped a bomb.

From the living room couch, I could see Teresa and Kevin, who were at the top of the stairs. She had put a fresh diaper on him and was carrying him down the stairs, swinging him gently by his arms as they went. When they arrived downstairs, Teresa sat down on the couch next to me with Kevin on her lap. Kevin sucked his thumb while the three of us watched whichever cheesy eighties Aaron Spelling show happened to be on that afternoon. A few minutes went by and then Kevin let out a grunt, followed by a wet-sounding fart. Teresa looked down at her lap and gasped, and she then lifted Kevin and stood up abruptly. There was poo oozing from Kevin’s diaper, and there was a fair amount of it on her jeans.

Poo continued to drip out of Kevin’s diaper and onto the carpet in lumps as Teresa rushed him toward the staircase, all the while yelling, “Oh no!” and, “Kevin!” over and over. By this time Kevin’s legs were really muddy and covered with brown streaks. Chunks of that brown continued to break loose and land on the floor.

Teresa rushed him up the stairs, and from the way it sounded put Kevin into the bathtub, and then she turned on the water. And as is my habit, I howled with laughter. I could hear Teresa freaking out from upstairs, heatedly, and apparently Kevin could hear me as well, because he laughed when he heard my laughter – the way little kids will sometimes do. His laughing made me laugh all the harder and the two of us carried on, howling, hooting, and giggling, for several minutes. Teresa was none too pleased with Kevin, nor with me.

I can’t say that I blame her. It sucks to get pooped on, and then to have to clean up doody from the floor (the poop trail ran through the living room, all the way up the stairs, and into the bathroom), one’s jeans, and one’s small brother. It probably sucks more still when people are laughing about it, especially when one of them is the perpetrator of the mess, and the other is a kid who has absolutely no intention of helping clean it up. I don’t know when Kevin ever learned to control his bodily functions, because the summer ended before he was given another chance to wear big boy pants.

Poop Report