Inside Darren

For the past few days, I’ve been home sick from work. It hasn’t been the most terrible form of sickness - just a lot of achy muscles, a lack of energy, and a lot of rushing to the bathroom every hour or so to excrete some more diarrhea. My butt is so sore from passing mass quantities of acid feces that I can hardly sit down. On the plus side, I’ve caught up on my Maclean’s reading.

All this extra time at home has allowed me to watch more TV than I usually do, and all this time in the bathroom has caused me to think about why people on television shows are rarely, if ever, depicted using the bathroom at all.

For the average television show, say, Gilmore Girls, or one of the many CSI spin-offs, you can get around the bathroom issue fairly easily. Rory had a quick pee after she arrived at Logan’s place, but before the scene itself started, which may have opened with them watching a movie. Or the crime scene investigator made a quick detour into the nearby coffee shop to pinch a quick loaf on the way to the killer’s apartment to comb through the rug looking for dandruff for a DNA sample.

But take a show like 24, where the concept of the show lends itself to showing everything happening to each main character for a full 24 hours. Granted, I haven’t watched every episode of 24, but I’ve watched enough to know that Jack Bauer must have bladder/bowels of steel, or a very well hidden colostomy bag/catheter system in place if he’s going to chase down terrorists for a full 24 hours without dropping some weight in the loo occasionally. I drain the weasel every 4 hours on average, which means that Jack should have 6 potty breaks per season. What’s the deal?

Kudos, therefore, to the excellent example if television pioneering that is Babylon 5, which showed its characters going to the bathroom on at least 2 occasions. And as a show that’s set in the future, it showcased some interesting future bathroom technology in having the characters clean their hands by passing them through some sort of light field. After all, water use must be carefully controlled in a self-contained space station.

And washing your hands with light looks really cool.

What do you like to start your day out with? A cup of coffee? Some freshly squeezed orange juice perhaps? Or maybe you’d like to down a hearty cup of your own piss.

This morning, as I was eating my breakfast (which, incidentally, did not include a cup of pee), I came across this article in The Hamilton Spectator discussing the possible health benefits of drinking your own urine. By the end of the article, I found myself experiencing an odd combination of enlightenment and revulsion.

Contrary to popular belief, urine is not bodily waste. It’s a byproduct of your body’s blood-filtration system. It’s made up of 95% water, and 5% various nutrients which your body has no immediate use for at the time of processing. Because of this, it’s sterile, and theoretically, can be consumed without harm.

The article mentions a leading advocate for urine consumption by the name of Martha Christy, who “recommends a regime beginning with five drops of ‘fresh morning urine’ under the tongue before gradually increasing the dosage to as much as a cupful, morning and night”. This woman believes that urine drinking is responsible for curing her of various medical problems, and that everyone should follow her example.

All day I could not get this article out of my head. I found myself trying to imagine what the world would look like if this practice started becoming mainstream.

“You wouldn’t believe how much money we’ve saved on juice-boxes for Danny’s lunch, now that he’s taken up drinking his own pee. We just send him to school with a sandwich and an empty sippy-cup.”

“Actually mom, I usually trade my pee with Bobby’s. His tastes less like sulphur and more like salty-grapefruit juice”.

I imagine the transition to piss-drinking would be easier in the States than in Canada. After all, those who drink Budweiser are already halfway there.

Warning: If reading about people’s crapping-habits disturbs you, then please do not continue to read this post. Also, if reading about people’s crapping-habits arouses you, go to another website. Because that’s just gross.

I am proud to consider myself to be very “regular”, generally speaking. And when I say “regular”, I don’t mean that I’m average in most areas of my life. I mean that I find myself crapping on a fairly predictable schedule.

I also pride myself on being able to set and adjust my crapping schedule with a minimum of frustration or discomfort. When I went to Japan for five weeks last year (a country that is a full 13 hours out of sync with my own time zone), I was back on proper crapping schedule within three days. What has me perplexed is how my defecating routine decided to change things up on me a few months ago, for no apparent reason.

I now poo twice every morning.

It didn’t used to be this way. I used to get up, eat, dump, take a shower (essential to do immediately post-excretion, in order to rinse off any poo particles which the toilet paper did not see fit to apprehend), shave, brush my teeth, get dressed, and head out the door. Now, I find that I must empty my colon immediately after getting out of bed, proceed through the rest of my morning routine (holding off on the shower until we reach poo-round-two), crap again, and then shower and get dressed before leaving.

The question that I’d like to ask my body is: Why don’t you take care of the entire “firing rear thrusters” procedure during session 1, instead of taking a break and sending me back to the throne an hour later? It seems like it would be much more efficient that way.

Now, I know you may want to suggest to me that perhaps I have simply been mistaken, and have decided to cut session 1 short prematurely, before the entire operation is complete. However, I can assure you, with every faculty in my body that allows me to sense the completion of a poo, that I am unable to push anything else out of my body when I take up the toilet paper roll and bring session 1 to a close. And still I know that, before I leave for work, there will be another session yet to come. A final purging of residual fudge nuggets, so to speak.

I admit that there is a difference in the consistency of the “pipe I’m laying” in session 1 compared to session 2. Session 1 usually deals in solid, well defined rectal-deposits, whereas session 2 is a big pile of flaky-residue. Like having a sausage dinner followed by a small salad. Perhaps if there is a proctologist among my readers, you can shed some light on this dichotomy.

In the meantime, I’m just going to keep on “releasing the chocolate hostage” on my twice-per-morning schedule, and hope that my body doesn’t decide to experiment in triple-session-deposits.

Euphemisms for “poo” and “pooing” were taking from The Poop Thesaurus. It made me laugh so hard that I was clenching.