Thank you. Sedaris is one of my favorites, so I appreciate that a lot! I had a feeling the subject might freak some people out, so I’m glad you stuck with it.
Humor/Satire / Let Me Tell You Something (Analysis)
My brother is obsessed with excrement. Specifically with his own, although his interest does extend to his wife’s and his newborn son’s as well. If Laura would allow it, Curt would probably examine her shit each morning and then lecture or praise her based on his assessment. “It’s floating! That’s great, honey!” he’d say, kissing her on the cheek while she washed her hands. Or “Better ask Carmen to pick up some broccoli and prunes, I don’t think you’re getting enough fiber. This looks too dense.” Much to his frustration and disbelief, she doesn’t desire this kind of intimate spousal analysis of her defecation and so he has to content himself with thoughtful perusal of his own poops and those of the baby’s. Curt fancies himself somewhat of a fecal expert. But then, he is expert in a wide range of things: exercise and workout related issues, how to start up your own business, how to make your home theatre system the envy of all your friends, how to landscape your backyard, how to deal with credit card companies hassling you, etc…so poop is just one of many things that he can convincingly wax on about. More often than not he actually knows what he’s talking about, so people tend to listen.
“Let me tell you something,” he’ll say, leaning forward and looking at you intently so you know that what he’s about to tell you has tremendous import. “Your small intestine is 20 feet long and there’s gunk lining it and blocking it that has gone undigested for your whole life. There’s like gum in there that you swallowed in 6th grade! Seriously.” He pauses for effect here, watching the dismissive smile on your face disappear as the potential impact of the 25 year old wad of Juicyfruit stuck in your gut sinks in, then when your brow crinkles a bit and he sees that you’re considering this minor catastrophe, he goes on from there.
The dookie fascination seems to have taken root about 7 years ago when Curt found himself at the tender age of 25, sitting on the toilet and pushing so hard to expel a turd that he was about to lose an eyeball from the sheer force. Instead, he busted out a painful and mysterious hemorrhoid. Mysterious because he didn’t know that something of this nature could happen to an ass, certainly not his ass anyway and although it did not literally scare the shit out of him (unfortunately), it did cause him tremendous alarm.
He told me of this traumatic episode in his personal development while we were driving Mulholland late one night. It was during one of my annual visits home and we were playing catch-up as the car wound through the hills. Curt explained that the suffering was too much to consider enduring ever again and after this hideous and excruciating incident, he had turned to a strict regiment of Metamucil every night for the past year. His stools became manageable and even pleasant. They were reliable and this pleased him immensely. He could count on an easy and ample turd upon waking each morning, just as one could count on the sun shining or the arrival of the weekly Val-Pak coupons in the mailbox. His outlook on life improved and he began to preach the virtues of the “Mucie” (as he called the magical orange powder) to anyone who would listen, which now included me since I was trapped in the car with him.
The whole account was hysterically funny. I suppose my favorite parts were the descriptions of his agonizing pain. I don’t want to laugh at others pain, mostly because it’s patently inappropriate to giggle uncontrollably when someone does a face-plant in the gutter wearing their finest evening garb or stumbles on a spiral staircase and misses the railing when they reach for it, but I can’t help it. I was also feeling oddly victorious. Sibling rivalry, perhaps. Although no contest had ever been officially announced and pooping wasn’t a competition, I still felt that I had won. Despite my bankruptcy or failures in love, I could be proud that at least I had never had a hemorrhoid. My younger brother may have more money and a better job but I had one thing going for me: I pooped regularly and without undue strain. Curt wasn’t in the least offended by my obvious amusement. All his painful poops were behind him now and he only wanted to share a cautionary tale.
Now, Curt’s fecal sermons are a staple of his personality. I asked him the other day whom, if anyone, he would not speak of shit with. Was there anyone? Laura’s grandmother perhaps, or a mortgage broker, maybe? He glared at me in the way he does when he thinks I am judging him. I looked at him innocently and he softened and then answered “No. Because everyone does it, so what’s the big deal?”
While he and Laura attended pregnancy and childbirth classes, the instructor had been trying to get her male students to understand the immense effort that giving birth entails. She told them to liken the effort to pushing out a particularly stubborn bit of excrement from one’s ass. While everyone laughed, Curt interjected “You’re kidding, right? You don’t push. You never push!” The dread hemorrhoid had retreated years ago, never to return, but the lessons learned were deadly serious to him, even now.
I’ve seen the bit he does on Colon Hydro-Therapy a few times now. Once he has you pondering the petrified piece of pink Bazooka clogging your bowels, he tells you the only way to get rid of it is through Colon Hydro-Therapy. CHT involves inserting a clear plastic tube into one’s anus and then flushing out the intestine with water or some kindof saline solution. Some kind of pseudo nurse type of person attends to you and your embarrassed, exposed ass and then examines what comes sliding back down the tube. She describes it to you, and she sometimes shows you the stuff, presumably for educational purposes. It’s all, in Curt’s mind, a perfectly lovely way to spend an afternoon. Now, as unappealing as this sounds to most folks, Curt has such unbridled enthusiasm for the whole endeavor that he generally manages to elicit at minimum a “Well, maybe someday” from his audience. However, this response usually comes before he tells you about how the really intense stuff doesn’t come gurgling down that tube until maybe your 5th or 6th session. Aghast at the notion of having to endure this humiliation multiple times, I usually crinkle my nose and look disgusted. “You don’t understand” he’ll say, lowering his voice a little for emphasis and leaning with his elbows on his knees and his hands steepled in front of him. “When I had my breakthrough, a huge chunk of absolutely black, rock hard shit came out of my body. Dude. I heard it like break away from the wall of my intestine like gggrrrrsssttchhhh” He says this with a wild look in his eyes, reliving the moment of his exorcism with a combination of awe and excitement. “Afterwards, I wanted to skip down the street!” Now, he jumps up and begins skipping around his home office, all 6’4” and 225 pounds of him. He stops skipping to confront you with a wild grin, grabbing you by the shoulders and gleefully shouting in your face “I’m free! I feel incredible!” and then he continues to dance wildly about the room while grinning maniacally. Despite his large frame, my brother is actually quite a nimble dancer, so when he’s suddenly doing the running man or the cabbage patch with abandon in between skips with a huge smile plastered on his sweaty face, it actually does look like a pretty nice way to feel.
“Isn’t it expensive, though?” you might ask, once he has stopped shaking you by the shoulders. Despite your initial horror, you’re coming around to the idea now.
(”Maybe I too can master the forgotten dances of the 90’s if only there wasn’t petrified gum clogging my intestinal tract”, you think.)
“It’s a little spendy” he says, taking a seat again and loading a bong-load “But it’s worth it for sure because it’ll make you feel like 50 pounds lighter not to be carrying all that crap in your body.”
Next he starts recommending good places to go and offering to call for your appointment.
When he remodeled his bathroom last year, along with the Kohler 6’ x 8’ shower with 19 shower heads, steam capability and temperature control, he also installed the toilet of his dreams.
Among other features, the toilet will raise both its lids and its seat to greet you when you approach it head-on and remain standing. If you turn round, then the seat comes back down again and when you sit upon it’s finely contoured U, you’re pleasantly surprised to find it pre-warmed for you. Once done with the business of evacuating, the toilet has a bidet function that sprays your nether region with warm water and then blows warm air on you to dry you thoroughly. So much cleaner than the rudimentary spool of toilet paper that most of us underprivileged peons have to put up with. And, good for the environment too, Curt will tell you, as you waste less paper! Nevermind the extra use of water and power…
You would think that Curt had now reached the pinnacle of the poop experience: climbed the Everest of Evacuations or the Mt. Fuji of Feces, perhaps. And he’ll admit he’s come close.
Yet, there’s one thing he longs for more than anything else. A trip to a Poo Spa. Well, I call them Poo Spas, but really they’re spas that offer luxury accommodations, privacy, healthy delicious dietary diversions, beautiful surroundings and colon cleansing. Rather than lying butt to attendant in some strip mall in the San Fernando Valley, being afforded a cursory glance and pithy comment about your feces as it travels down a clear tube and disappears, these Poo Spas offer to whisk your poop away to a lab for careful analysis and proper pondering while you’re relaxing in a shower out of an Irish Spring commercial after your colon cleanse. So as you bathe in a sunlit outdoor (but miraculously private) waterfall, surrounded by palm fronds, ferns and the best plumbing money can buy and as you close your eyes and lift your head to the skies in a rapture of post-colon-hydro-therapy bliss, verging on floating up and away from the earth from the sheer unadulterated relief of being rid, finally, of that Denny’s cheeseburger you ate in 1987, some schmuck in a white frock in a sterile room is presumably sifting through your turds and jotting down very scientific suggestions and observations. All this can be yours for the cost of a small economy car.
I’m glad Curt has something to look forward to, because once you obtain a toilet that blow-dries your ass, it’s not that easy to know what the next step is in your upwardly mobile march to true happiness.
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NovemberDisaster reviewed Version 1 -
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Well, since I just spent a portion of my evening reading about poo, Im at a loss for words.
I am not quite sure what to say about this, it was funny at the begining but then kind of seemed like a lecture. I did not find anything to nit pick about, I was just amazed at how many different ways you could describe terds.
It was however written well, considering the subject.You made the story actually seem as if somebody were sitting here telling me about it. I think that that in itself is an accomplishment. The title really goes well with the writing as a whole. Its amusing like that.
It is well written and very real. I know people who talk about terds all the time but more common the whole fart ordeal. Im surprised you did not mention that. Ha!
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adadelaney reviewed Version 1 -
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This piece was humorous but left something that needed explaining.
JaCarloHairston reviewed Version 1 -
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I think this is a very funny piece if you can stomuch $*&t like this. For the average reader they would have stopped reading at the second page in my opinion because with an opening the bold they probably feel like they’re being grossed out on purpose.
FrakKevin reviewed Version 1 -
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I don’t find poop jokes funny, but you did it in the right way. You made an actually story out of and every part had a meaning. You didn’t rely so much on poop to make this funny, the hemorrhoid scene was funny also the part in the birth class. I must admit around the part of about the Colon Hydro I lost interest. I did gain it back though, because your description of the poo spa was great. I was drawn into your description as if you were describing the ninth wonder of the world. Good job with this
roguescholar reviewed Version 1 -
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I’m not a big fan of poop and fart jokes, but you did a really good job of making it funny and light, without getting into enough detail about poop to chase me away from the story. Your voice reminds me a bit of Sedaris, I could see him writing something like this…This piece was well written, flowed smoothly and had a good pace. Great job.
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