Code Brown: Here I Sit, Broken-Hearted...
Seeking the truth, however offal, about stalled sofa-removal projects...
Today, we retail a story whose subject is of vast national, international, and even interstellar importance.
No, I don’t mean Elon Musk’s merciful disappearance from the political/cultural landscape, although this is to be roundly celebrated, maybe with parades and a profusion of plaques and/or other commemorative items. (In keeping with the example of unabashed grift set by the current Oval Office occupant, these items could be sold for a reasonable fee, their proceeds donated to a worthy charity—for example, me.)
Rather, I am speaking of a subject close to each of us, usually daily, sometimes less so, but always near to our hearts and also, it must be said, to certain of our holes.
I refer, of course, to:
Poop.
Here, custom dictates delicacy. One doesn’t want readers, their sensitivities affronted, to run screaming.
Doubtless my hesitancy arises from an incident which occurred a couple of decades back. At the time, I wrote for a mainstream daily newspaper. Does anyone remember newspapers? If you are young, you do not. If you are old, like me, you do not either, because you do not remember anything anymore, including, quite often, your own name.
Anyway, one night I trundled down to a San Francisco gay bar to socialize. Late in the night, an eye-watering stench began to permeate the dance floor. Someone had—how do I put this gracefully?—dropped a deuce into their lower-region garments. Dancers couldn’t have fled faster if the DJ had suddenly spun Nickelback.
I thought the incident funny in a, “Boy, I’m glad that wasn’t me” way. I decided to write it up for my weekly column, which was read by thousands. Thousands of San Franciscans, mind you. At the time, these good folk evinced, en masse, a sense of humor which cheerfully coupled the whimsical and the weird. I drafted a piece that tiptoed gingerly around grotesqueries. I thought the tiptoeing made the piece funny.
A copyeditor disagreed. She found the column tasteless. (Go figure.) Without informing me, she complained to my editor’s supervisor. He killed the piece. I wasn’t surprised, but I thought it a lame move. Some readers would have complained, sure. But some readers grumbled about everything, even then, even in good-time San Francisco. I was sure that others would have laughed, even if they had done so after blowing chunks into their morning coffee.
But I didn’t fight the decision. You learn the battlefields on which to plant your flag. Some drunk dope crapping himself at one a.m. on a weeknight at a south-of-Market queer bar was not, to me then, one of them.
Still, I felt diffident when I considered writing the piece you’re reading. Would it offend? Then I realized that we’re a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century. Things have changed. Delicacy and sensitivity have gone the way of many another now-anachronistic item, such as the land-line telephone and the functioning democratic institution.
And so, on we press with the story of my recent foul movements.
Wait—where are you going?
First, it seems imperative to touch on (but not actually to touch) the type of poop I’ll be discussing.
As you may know, feculence comes in many forms, including one which festers in your colon even now. Incredibly, at least to someone raised with a modicum of modesty, there exists a well-known scale delineating varying poop sizes, shapes, and consistencies.
It is called The Bristol Stool Chart. Researching its history in the “internet” of my mind, I learned that it was developed by a man named Charles “Miss Charlie, if You’re Nasty” Bristol. Throughout childhood, Miss Charlie felt undermined by his father’s incessant scolding of his fascination with all things fecal. Enraged, he worked feverishly to develop the chart. For years he struggled in vain to convince doctors and scientists of the chart’s worth. (Proctologists can be a snobbish lot.)
But Missy Bristol’s fury with his father drove an obsessive persistence. In time, the chart gained wholesale recognition and popularity. Worldwide fame and untold riches came to “Miss Charlie” Bristol, facts which he gladly shook in his father’s face every chance he got, often while sticking out his tongue and crying, “Nyah-nyah-nyah!”
In time, the well-meaning if scat-averse father admitted the error of his early outlook. He and Charlie hugged it out. Released from resentment and suffused with a newfound generosity, Charlie Bristol gave away most of his fortune to charities, including but not limited to: .
The GoodNature Stool Donation Program, which pays people to poop;
Poop Saves Lives (“Be a poop donor today”), which utilizes donated excreta in key research aimed at solving infections;
The People’s Own Organic Power (POOP) Project, which, according to its website, employs “art, theater, and education to promote critical conversations about sustainable sanitation for the person, planet, and world community.” (Motto: “Because how are we supposed to fix all the super-complex problems in our world if we don’t know shit about shit?”)
Here I must pause to make a confession. None of the above is true, save the existence of the Bristol Chart and the charities. The “internet” of my mind is polluted with deepfakes and disinformation.
Funnily enough, I could have Googled the chart’s history and written it out in, like, five minutes. Hell, I could have asked ChatGPT to do it for me in two. Instead, I’ve just wasted spent an inordinate amount of time researching poop-donation sites.
It's true what they say: you learn something new every day—and, I’d add, at least some of it may be oriented toward the defecatory.
Anyway, the Bristol Stool Chart displays seven distinct poop types:
As you can see, Type Seven refers to your more watery iterations, aka diarrhea. We will not be dealing with Type Seven today. We will be dealing, alas, with Type One, because so has my rectal region in the past week.
To preserve the sensitivities of delicate readers, I will refer to the Type One poop state by a pseudonym. Let’s call it “gonstipation.” If you are unfamiliar with gonstipation, well, lucky you; but the following analogy may help you to understand it.
Imagine a house. Like most houses, this one has front and back doors. Because this is a magic house, things come in via the front door, remain for a bit, and then are expelled through the back door by “movers”—gremlins, leprechauns, elves, unicorns, pixies, what have you. (Hey, it’s your fantasy house. I’m just sketching outlines here.)
Electronic sensors, which outfit the doors’ frames, relay sensations to you in the upstairs room where you spend most of your time. This room is known as your “mind.” (When you leave that room, you go “out of your mind.”) Each time the movers expel unneeded items through the back door, the sensors transmit mostly pleasant sense impressions.
Occasionally, however, complications arise. Things that have entered the house outstay their welcome. For example, let’s say a stool comes in. (Ha ha. See what I did there?) Normally, it would easily fit, later, through the back door. But this one remains in the house for so long that it morphs from a three-legged stool into a four-legged chair. Then it changes into a bulky divan. Finally, it turns into a full-sized couch, maybe with festive pillow accents. In proctological circles, this is known as a “Type One Sofa.”
This proves taxing to the movers. They are not accustomed to hoisting such sizable items, principally because they top out, height-wise, at roughly two-foot-three. But they’re dedicated. So, they huff and they puff and they lift that sofa and transport it to the back door.
But—yikes. The sofa is too wide to fit through the frame. The movers push and shove, but to no avail.
Meantime, the frame’s sensors no longer send pleasant sensations. Instead, they transmit emergency warnings. Red lights flash and bells clang in your upstairs room. This has you, at least if you’re me, nearly weeping, when you’re not shrieking in pain.
Which brings me to my story.
This story begins a couple of months ago.
To extend the analogy, the story does not start at the house’s back door ( although it sure ends up there), but at the front door—actually, at the front door’s white picket fence.
To end the analogy, that fence is known as “my teeth.”
I have kept my original teeth for more than sixty-eight years (save a decade, plus or minus, of baby teeth). Still, like most folks, I’ve not been without dental issues, especially in latter decades. I’ve undergone procedures requiring ten-day antibiotic courses to prevent infection.
Companies which produce these medications are legally obligated to list side effects. Mainly, the cynic thinks, this is done to forestall lawsuits. Also, it may be a Big Pharma lark, scaring you witless about a medication your provider considers absolutely essential.
Anyhow, one of the (many) side effects of antibiotics is gonstipation. In the past, I laughed—Ha ha!—at this side effect, because I never suffered it.
That changed a few months ago. An upper-right back tooth required extraction. (You think my writing about gonstipation is bad? Be glad I’m sparing you dental-procedure details.) I duly gobbled antibiotics. I was surprised that they stopped me up. It was a first.
Lights blinked and bells tinkled in the upstairs room. Expelling the sofa—maybe it was just an armchair—proved more than mildly difficult. Afterwards, my doc recommended daily probiotics to re-establish healthy “gut flora.”
Lesson learned, you’d think. But have you met me?
Came a time a few weeks ago for a periodontal procedure involving a deep-cleaning and bone graft on an upper-left implant. (These details you need not know, but I give them to you freely. You’re welcome.) The periodontist prescribed antibiotics.
I vaguely recalled post-extraction poop travails. The next sentence, then, should read: “And so, to ensure that I would not suffer another Bristol Chart Type One situation, I stocked up on stool softeners, medicated wipes, enemas, and more.”
Sadly, it does not. Instead, it reads: “But I forgot to do anything about it.”
This is where things got—and here I do not mean to plant any kind of perturbing image in your head—hairy.
Jump cut to last Friday (July 25).
I’d suffered no little pain in the treated gum area after the July 8 procedure. Suture removal a fortnight later greatly ameliorated things—just in time, ironically, for the pain to move from the front door to the back.
Late Friday afternoon I felt a bit of lower-belly rumbling. This seemed a positive sign. The movers had not rid the house of anything in many days. I’d already had a rather difficult expulsion before then. So, I was glad to know that the movers were on the job. Relieved by the reduction in gum pain, I blissfully believed that all would also be well out back.
Not so much, as it happened. In fact, not at all. Not by miles. Evidently, I was not internally harboring a mere sofa; more like an armoire. As I sat, the movers pushed. Lights flashed and bells clanged. I felt not a little freaked out. Nothing got expelled, and I took a break.
Tim, my partner, arrived home from work. (He is, and this is not a fabrication, a dentist. Lucky me.) I explained my predicament and told him I might require a few items to help the movers get the sofa armoire out. Because he is not only a dentist but also a really good boyfriend, he immediately raced to the nearest pharmacy. Sometime later he returned bearing an assortment of Type One-addressing items.
We’ve now reached the moment when I would describe the main event. But I find I can’t do it. The trauma-memory is too fresh. I’ll just say this. It took three or four attempts before something happened. These were spread over many hours; were interspersed with the application of unguents, pads, and other medical detritus; and involved, on my part, a great deal of grimacing, crying out, and shouting.
Finally, feeling defeated, I considered suicide. I figured that I’d already lived a long and productive enough life; anyway, you know, fuck this fuckin’ pain.
At that exact moment, the movers gave one final push—lights flashed, bells clanged, I screamed—and the armoire dropped into the metaphorical sea beneath me.
Whew.
Now I would like to take a moment to address our female readers.
That thing you all say about guys not having a clue what it’s like for you to give birth? And about how the world would be different if we had to do it? I won’t say that I get it. Indeed, it would be insulting to say that.
But if what you experience as you produce tiny little humans is anything close, pain-level-wise, to what I experienced producing an armoire—and I believe it’s likely ten times worse—I have a profoundly deepened respect for you. In fact, I gladly bow down to your obviously superior courage and toughness.
Which, I suppose, is as good a lesson as any to learn from this event.
I cannot express—and here our women friends may identify—the joy and exhaustion that followed the armoire’s evacuation. I felt born anew, even if I was not able—or, honestly, eager—to hold my newborn.
Instead, I just wanted to sleep. I tumbled into slumber that night, waking a few hours later to pee. Befogged, I forgot that I’d earlier passed the armoire. I felt muted terror as I planned how to gingerly get myself to and from the water closet. Only when I returned to bed did I remember that my “house” was, metaphorically, furniture free. Relief made me giddy.
That was three days ago. I’m not altogether healed, but I’m better. My spirits are notably elevated, my mind full of plans.
After all, there’s nothing quite like the new lease on life which follows when poop-related toil and trouble are brought to a satisfactory resolution.
Don’t believe me? Go ahead—ask “Miss Charlie” Bristol.
