My Shitty

My brother has three toilets in his house. Three. The downstairs toilet was always my favorite due to its secluded, cozy nature. That toilet was my friend; I unloaded many a monstrous dump into his bowl and I was always kind to him. I never believed he would do anything dishonest to me, but boy, was I wrong…

I remember it well. I took my normal, morning dump at my house and felt as if I had finished the job, but in the back of my mind I knew that at some point my digestive system might ask for seconds. Sometime during that warm afternoon I decided to visit my brother at his house, and it was during the visit that my fecal matter caused my lower intestines to growl furiously at me, commanding that I empty my poop tank entirely. I had to deposit a secondary load since I obviously did not achieve digestive nirvana during my first attempt.

I squatted and placed my hands on my knees, expecting the familiar plop and the sound of urine tickling the white, adored toilet bowl. The plop was firm and robust; however, I did not hear the connection between the pee and the porcelain. This worried me, and the worry turned to confusion when I felt a warm sensation on the back of my knees and upper calves. Mystified, I glanced down to observe the source of this warmth.

Ouch! I felt it, like a dagger in my heart. This toilet, whom I had considered a dear, dear friend, had betrayed me. Instead of valiantly directing the flow of pee down into its cool, clear water, it allowed it to shoot right through the gap between the bottom of the seat and the top of the rim, dousing my legs in warm, salty nastiness.

That was approximately ten years ago. I am still haunted by this, and on every toilet since then I have learned to aim my urine down with the help of my hand as a guide. I do not believe this was my
fault; it was the toilet that killed the relationship. He was my friend, but ever since “the incident” my cheeks have not rested on his warm, cozy seat. Someone please give me words of encouragement so that I may one day absolve him and deposit a fresh, forgiving load into his depths.

Poop Report

I am an American living in Peru. This point is crucial to the story; while Peru is no India or China, its bathrooms are still severely lacking in their equipment. Toilets often don’t have a seat. Paper is on a bring-your-own basis. Only American chains such as Starbucks or McDonald’s will have a well-stocked bathroom.

I had recently acquired a large quantity of marihuana. Smoking this most wonderful herb produced a severe appetite, one which I proceeded to satiate throughout the weekend. I’m usually a daily pooper; time varies, but either late at night or early in the morning. I’m typically able to carry on with work and such with no fear of a surprise dookie. Having consumed a mega personal banquet at KFC, a full-sized Dominos Pizza with bread sticks, a large plate of Chinese food, assorted fruits for breakfast, and multiple bags of chips over Saturday and Sunday, my colon was full on Monday. Anticipating a morning deuce I woke up a bit early; however, nothing came about. I figured I’d empty my swollen bowels at night. Unfortunately the pain struck while at work.

Bombing my work was not an option. I’m a teacher and there is no teacher’s only bathroom, and the one we have is so small that I feared being seen by my students. I held in this monster of a deuce all evening, from six to ten p.m., suffering in pain throughout the night. We are encouraged to stand throughout classes but I stayed seated, hoping the additional pressure of the firm leather chair would support my failing sphincter. I managed to finish work, but now getting home was the concern. I rely on public transport. In this case I’d have taken a taxi in a heartbeat, but as I was without any real money this was not an option.

I stumbled onto a bus and was forced to stand in the midst of multiple people. Gas proceeded to exit my bowels and people began to open windows, something uncommon in April, as it is the Peruvian winter. Peruvians will not open a bus window from April to November despite temperatures of seventy degrees – they are terrified of anything below seventy-two. Hearing some fellow passengers mutter obscenities in Spanish made me smile momentarily. But the knowledge that I still had five more minutes in the bus, followed by a five-minute walk home concerned me. No public bathrooms worthy of this waste were within walking distance.

I nearly fell out of the bus and proceeded home. This part was arguably the toughest. The delicate balance between clenching one’s cheeks and walking quickly is hard to maintain. I finally arrived at home but still had five floors of stairs to climb, and everybody knows climbing stairs when you have a turtle head is akin to walking through a minefield. It’s dangerous.

As I hit the last flight of stairs I bolted upward in full sprint and opened my door. Charging forward toward the bathroom at maximum velocity I finally arrived. At this point something started moving out of my ass and I managed to drop my drawers. Part of a log was still anchored to my anus and it tapped the toilet seat, leaving a streak that would affix itself to my inner thigh. I then released. The amount of excrement was enough to cause my blood pressure to change immediately. I felt as though I had given birth from my ass. I almost fainted.

I believe my internal pressure dropped so much that I became light-headed. The deuce had been dropped in as little time as it had taken to start, and that it was over in such a short time was a bit of a disappointment. But I was relieved at last. Over two – possibly three – days of food was deposited in the bottom of my toilet. And now the moment of truth: Would this pure solid pile of dense matter go down the impossibly small hole toward freedom? Or, would I have to man the plunger and attack?

The first flush pushed a large quantity of fecal matter down. However, so much was still in the bowl that it appeared as if someone had just shit anyway. The second flush proved ineffective. Apparently, this darkness had become impacted and was now solid as a rock blocking the hole. In fear of the rising water and minimal effectiveness, I had to do something. It occurred to me to try and break up this solid grapefruit-sized mass, so I inserted a pencil into the middle to try and destabilize it. This seemed to work, and the third flush caused it to implode into itself, and this removed the majority of the waste. A fourth flush would clean it out. Subsequent brushing was necessary. Remarkably, the dookie dissipated, and I turned to wipe and found nothing. A pure, solid, hearty deuce dropped without a stain. I cleaned my inner leg and then slept like an infant.

Poop Report

It was a late Tuesday afternoon in January of 1998. I was seven years old, and had supposedly started clogging toilets two years earlier, but I had no memory of any of those times. I still don’t. The first thing I remember about that day was feeling the urge to poop around 4:00 p.m. I went into the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and started pushing.

I was extremely constipated that day, and after pushing for ten minutes, nothing had emerged. I rose off the toilet and looked in the bathroom mirror – my face was as red as a chili pepper and I could see the turd beginning to tent out of my anal canal. Happy for this this progress, I sat back down on the toilet and pushed again. Little by little, the turd emerged and finally dropped into the toilet. It was six inches long and two inches wide; pretty large for a 45-pound, three-and-a-half foot tall seven-year-old.

At this point I had already been in the bathroom for 20 minutes, so my mom came back to make sure I was alright. She told me to just wash my hands and she would take care of the toilet.

She tried flushing, but the turd immediately became lodged in the hole. My mom slammed her fist against her other hand and yelled, “Dammit! The goddamn toilet is clogged again!”

“Sorry,” I responded in my sweetest little girl voice possible. My mom told me to leave the bathroom at that point and tried resolve the issue. She tried to chop up the turd with the hard end of a toilet brush, but the turd was too hard to cut through. Plunging did not work either – even after 20 minutes.

My mom eventually stormed into the basement and grabbed a toilet auger that we kept down there. Needless to say, the auger did not work either, despite her wriggling it around in the bowl for ten minutes. Eventually she gave up and told me, “You have to start eating better so you make softer poopies. We’ll let daddy deal with this when he gets home.”

As we finished dinner that night, my mom told my dad about the turd and how all of the usual methods to unclog the toilet had been unsuccessful. “Well, I am just going to have to get it out myself by hand,” my dad muttered. I found this to be hilarious at the time, but my parents clearly thought otherwise.

My dad put on yellow rubber gloves and grabbed a handful of paper towels. He also grabbed a huge kitchen-sized garbage bag to dump the turd into. Of course I wanted to watch everything. Despite my mom’s telling me to stay out of my dad’s way, I followed him into the bathroom. To this day, I will never forget the smile that he forced and the laughter that he tried to hold back as he extracted the turd from the toilet. I will also never forget the sound of the water dripping off of the turd as it fell back into the toilet. The turd was tossed into garbage bag, which was subsequently tossed into the garbage can in the garage. My poor parents had to spend the next six years chopping my turds and extracting them until they eventually just let me extract them myself, shortly after my thirteenth birthday – their present to me for becoming a teenager, I guess you could say.

Poop Report

I was in my freshman year of college at an all-women’s institution. It was only the second month into the semester, and barely any of us knew each other up close and personal. We did, however, have an idea what characteristics came of each of the four floors in St. Mary’s Hall. Now I know what you’re thinking – we’re all just pretty college girls who are always clean and smell nice, right? If you think that, you are most likely delusional.

I lived on the first floor, the Social floor. The floor where the most people in the building knew each other. We had a pretty tight connection with folks from the third floor and would often wander up to some of their many room parties. I remember one night one of the girls gossiped about the fourth floor:

“They’re all social outcasts,” she had said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. She went on to tell me how they kept moving out on each other and switching room mates because no one got along. She knew for a fact that three of them transferred out of that college within the first semester, two of them were excessive drinkers, and many were disrespectful of each others’ belongings. I knew little about the fourth floor except for the rumors, and that one girl I met on move-in day was already drunk. Sure enough, there were some sad cases up there.

Once in a while people would use each others’ bathrooms for various reasons. As a shameful shitter, I had many choices from which to find some shitting solitude. Same thing with the showers. For some reason, some girls went to other floors to shower. Now the bathrooms were huge! There were two doors, a huge vanity, one hall for toilets, and the other side was full of showers – maybe like seven per floor.

The bad luck always came from fourth. There was a night I recall going up there to use the bathroom; I don’t remember the reason. It was late at night and a drunk girl followed me in but went over to the showers – without a shower caddy or towel.

“Huh, strange,” I thought.

While I was doing my thing, I heard the shower curtain open and then close, but I was done and out before she left, apparently. It was the next day when I heard about a girl up on the notorious fourth floor who found a surprise in the shower.

“Did you hear what happened to Stacey?” asked my friend Michelle.

“Uh, no.”

”So apparently, one of our friends went in to take a shower on third, and half the hallway heard her scream and then shout, ‘Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!’ She flew out of the shower covered with a towel nearly weeping! ’What? What is it?’ I asked her. She told me that someone had shit in the shower!”

“What do you mean someone shit in the shower?” Michelle had asked her. (Some of us assumed it was someone’s boyfriend, as it’s hard to believe women would do anything so gross.)

Stacy had told her, “As the water got hot, I smelled something really bad and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from!” Stacy continued to tell her that the drain cover had been moved slightly off, covering maybe half of the drain hole. She looked down, and the water was backing up and flooding the shower stall with chunks of brown turds that had bubbled up from below! It was as if someone had gotten drunk, pooped in the shower, and tried covering it up to hide the evidence! It was all sounding very familiar now. Needless to say, we had a floor meeting about it.

The floor meeting, to me, was absolutely hilarious! Our RA was some stuck-up chick with little or no sense of humor – a major feminist. When the story was re-told at the meeting there were lots of people saying “Ew!” and “Gross!”, but no one came close to laughing as hard as I was. That’s when all eyes were on me, when my face was red and I was doubled over.

“It was YOU, wasn’t it?” someone accused. And I had to spend the next ten minutes trying to convince everyone it wasn’t me playing some disgusting practical joke, but that I just found it incredibly funny. I’ve had this problem with tactlessly laughing out of place my whole life.

Like I said, this is nothing compared to some things that have happened to certain people, but never underestimate what can happen at a women’s college!

Poop Report

I share a bathroom with my younger brother, a slightly atypical teenager whose cleaning and organizing habits rival those of a certain obsessive-compulsive detective featured on TV. He keeps his bedroom in pristine condition, and he does his share of the bathroom cleaning on a precise schedule.

However, he refuses to plunge the toilet.

Being the non-prissy, not-easily-grossed-out person that I am, I have no qualms about plunging toilets. I’ve spent a lot of time around toilets in my relatively short life. I can even install one, thanks to my master-plumber’s-license-bearing father. Plunging them isn’t a problem. That is, when it’s my own mess.

Now don’t get me wrong; I can handle other people’s poop. I do it on almost a daily basis at work. My job involves assisting people with developmental disabilities – or for those of you still stuck in the fifties, people with a diagnosis of mental retardation. Developmental disability is the preferred terminology now, for obvious reasons. Some of the people I work with are completely incontinent, and others have accidents from time to time. Needless to say, I see a lot of crap, and I clean it up without complaining. There’s a big difference, though, between toileting those who are incapable of doing it themselves and cleaning up after people who are capable but lazy.

My brother is a strapping young man. He is six years younger than me but already at least four inches taller, and much stronger. He is more than capable of plunging a toilet; but he won’t. Hence, every time our toilet is clogged, the burden of unclogging it falls on me. And because Little Brother is a growing boy and eats mass quantities of food, clogs are generally a weekly occurrence. When they occur, the following usually happens:

1. I watch in dismay as the water and its contents spin around futilely, refusing to go down.
2. I mentally curse the garbage disposal that plugged up the toilet.
3. I find the culprit, ask him to take care of it, and mutter to myself on the way back to the bathroom after he refuses to do so.
4. I spend five to ten minutes pumping the plunger up and down, side-to-side, and diagonally with my twig-like arms, flushing multiple times in a carefully thought out manner, lest the mess in the bowl backup onto the floor.
5. Once some kind of flushing power has been achieved, I find Mr. No-Plunge-For-You again and regale him with tales of my woe.

The best parts of this ongoing source of frustration, though, are my brother’s bullcrap excuses. For example, “I don’t know how”, or “It doesn’t work for me”.

The last excuse he gave me takes the cake. Our toilet had recently begun leaking water around the bottom, and my father determined that a cracked wax ring was the malfunction. He replaced the ring, and all was right as rain until, of course, the bro plugged up the toilet. When I confronted him about the blockage and asked him to fix it, he refused as usual, telling me that Dad said my over-aggressive plunging broke the wax seal. 

I look forward to the day when someone invents a stainless steel toilet ring.

Poop Report