Let’s get really immature here: taking a nice, relaxing number-two in your own home is one of the great small, daily joys in life. In our own homes, around everything that makes us comfortable, that’s where we drop our best deuces. When we’re away from home, say, at the mall or at someone else’s house, we can never seem to find the same level of comfort. Some of us have an easier time adjusting to the new poop environment than others; but ultimately, at least you have a pot to shit in. We can’t always be so lucky.
Every once in a while we all find ourselves in our car or on the train and the sudden urge to poop strikes. We all understand that horror too well. Unlike your normal at-home poop urges, this one is a true urgency. You don’t have a toilet within easy walking distance. You have to transport yourself a long distance to relieve yourself. In this case, this “long distance” may only be less than a mile as you’re driving yourself home. But that less-than-a-mile will seem like an eternity when you’ve got to hit the head.
In situations like these we go through stages of panic and fear as we race to the toilet we call home.
The Drive
At some point in our trek home, The Urge hits. It’ll start off small. You may even think you’ll have plenty of time. “It’s cool,” you’ll think. “I only left home to pick up a sandwich from the deli. I’ll be back in time to squeeze this sucker out, wash up, and chow down.”
You, of course, are lying to yourself.
It’ll start off innocently enough. You’ll feel a gurgle of movement in your belly. You’ll feel your butthole clench. You may even feel the first inklings of sweat forming on your brow.
About 20 seconds later you know, for a fact, that you’re going to shit all up inside of your car. Or on the sidewalk. Or on the bus, which really wouldn’t be that unexpected if you did.
Within a matter of seconds this situation went from normal to manageable to emergency. That’s the same thing meteorologists say about F5 tornados.
After The Urge has officially struck, it then becomes a race. It’s your mode of transportation’s speed and efficiency versus the strength and willpower of your sphincter.
It’s around this time that everyone in front of you wants to make turns. Slowly. With measure and responsibility – the turns we’re all taught to make in driver’s-ed, but never actually make in real world driving. People use blinkers; they’re making sure there’s no one crossing the street; they’re making hand signals. Everyone is doing everything just short of getting out of their cars and personally and politely informing you that they will now be making a turn at this juncture.
You want to shit in their face.
This is no time for rules. When poop is involved, all of the rules of society are discarded and replaced with the rules of primitive Darwinian survival.
The Run
You’ve made it home, or to your shitting location of choice. Now comes the foot race to the toilet. This is where The Urge gets kicked up a notch. With every step you can feel your cheeks sliding, and with every slide comes the fear of rocking the gates open and unleashing the flood.
Whatever it was that you brought with you from the outside world – whether it be a sandwich, some documents from work, or your new born child from the hospital – it gets left in the car. Hopefully it’ll still be there later. That’s why you pay insurance; sometimes you really need to shit.
The Run is bad enough, but then a strange little phenomenon that has been lingering in the background this entire time really takes effect…
The TPSM
People that smoke marijuana know about the phenomenon known as time dilation, or, as I like to call it, weed time. Weed time is your perception of the flow of time as experienced when the pot is doing all the wacky stuff it does to your brain. Time slows. Everything you do seems to take much longer. You feel like you’re upping your thought-per-second ratio by a factor of infinity. Simply grabbing a glass of water that’s less than a foot in front of you will spark a chain reaction of thoughts that range from the profound and sublime, to the inconsequential and stupid. In the .9 seconds it takes for you to grab that glass, you’ve put more thought in to grabbing an object than you probably put in to most of your homework in your high school days.
When you’re in the midst of the mad rush to a toilet to relieve the mounting pressure in your rectum – the pressure of millions of gallons of damn water being held back by a beaver-constructed dam of sticks (there’s no such thing as exaggeration when it comes to an emergency poop)– you will probably experience a phenomenon similar to weed time — one that I like to call Temporal Panic Shit Manipulation, or TPSM. TPSM is the opposite of weed time, yet it’s the same thing. Time seems to slow, stretch. Everything takes longer. Things that should only take .9 seconds seem to take minuets. The amount of thoughts you can fill in those .9 seconds is roughly equal to the amount you have during weed time, just instead of your thoughts ranging from profound to stupid, every brain cell you have will be solely focused on informing you that there is no doubt that you’re going to shit all over your garden. And rather than experiencing the euphoria that comes along with weed time, with TPSM you are replacing that euphoria with hate, dread, fear, horror and loathing. It’s like having smoked a strain of marijuana that’s been crossbred with a nightmare.
The Release
We’re going to skip over the icky specifics about goes down once you hit the toilet, but let’s just say it’s the breathiest bowel movement you’ve ever had. Even if you’re an athletic-type, your heart will be racing at speeds you only thought humming birds could achieve. You aren’t taking one breath, it seems like you’re taking 4 or 5 at a time. Every time you close your eyes and open them again it feels like you’ve blacked out for entire epochs of human history. You fully expect yourself to be surrounded by highly evolved forms of human life that resemble the Guild Navigators from Dune – and within span of a single eye blink.
The Aftermath
When it’s all said and done, you will leave the bathroom by slowly, unconsciously shuffling your feet as your mouth hangs open ever so slightly. Your eyes lids will hang low, as if you had recently woken up from a 1,000 year slumber. To an outside observer, you will look like the lone survivor of a nuclear explosion who’s been wondering in the irradiated rubble while in shock as you attempt to come to grips with the horrors you’ve just experienced. Your heartbeat will only now begin the slow decent in to normalcy. Your face will be as pale and white as the toilet you just sat on.
You will want to sleep.
But more than anything else, you will feel relief. You will feel as though a crushing weight has been lifted off your shoulders, but mostly off your ass.
You will be at peace with the world.
And then you’ll realize something that’s even more horrifying than anything you’ve just gone through: this isn’t the last time you’ll go through this. All of this has happened before, AND IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.