Tag Archives: family

Jan 29 2014
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Like a Virgin

When I was 17 my girlfriend was finally ready to have sex. I, as one might expect of a 17 year old, was excited. Neither hell nor high water was going to stand between me and my final destination.

I get ready for the night, trim everything up, shower extra well. Unfortunately there was also an issue. I have a digestive disorder that sometimes causes my shit to become large and quite solid while still inside me. I wasn’t aware it was a treatable problem; I just thought everyone had to deal with the equivalent of anal kidney stones. I bring this up because I had a mighty one which had been loaded into the gun for several days.

Let me set the scene. Her parents are away. We have her house to ourselves. She is a little kinky so she demands we do it in her parents’ bed. I walk in to a candle holocaust. She’s been working on this all day, apparently, and it’s as bright as high noon in there with the lights off. Which is good, because she proceeds to do a sweet, sexy little dance for me.

I smile and tell her how good she looks. I’m sitting on the bed, watching her, but unfortunately, most of my attention is focused on the dull throbbing from my sphincter and the intestinal discomfort associated with not dropping deuce in days.

But somehow I still get hard and we go to town. We try a bunch of different positions. Due to my built-up distraction, I last for what seems like FOREVER. She can’t stop moaning and telling me how good it feels, and then she says what every man wants to hear “I want to make you cum in my mouth.” So she goes down on me.

She was always average at best in the head department but at least she tries. She pops my cock out of her mouth long enough to look up at me and say “tell me if you like this.”

Then I feel it. She sticks her finger up my ass. My brain hits the panic switch and every muscle in my body locks up. But it’s too late.

I let loose a massive, painful shit, all over her parents’ comforter. No, you aren’t understanding. I mean huge. IMMENSE. Take your largest shit and multiple it by forty-two and you’ll have an idea of what flew out of me. And when I say flew, I mean “hurricane force winds hitting an umbrella stand.” And due to my condition, it comes out as a large, dark brown, smelly harpoon.

I know it hit her. I didn’t see it. She ran screaming “OH MY GOD OHMYGODOHMYGOD EEEEEWWWWWWWW.”

I would like to say I got up to go after her. But I heard the bathroom door shut, and I just lay there. The smell hit me after a few seconds. It smelled like someone rolled a cat in shit and threw it into a tire fire. I looked down and saw this huge pile of shit — and I noticed the blood. Then I noticed the pain.

There was a small pool of blood where my ass had been, a final reminder of the exact place and moment I lost my virginity.

I grab my shit with my hands and go to the downstairs bathroom, feeling a trickle of blood flow down my leg, trying to ignore the sharp pain stabbing my rectum. I find myself wishing I had a photo of this.

Anyway, I finish flushing my baby, clean off my hands, jam toilet paper between my cheeks (I skipped the Band-Aid) and went upstairs. I could hear my girlfriend sobbing from behind the bathroom door. I decided not to say anything to her and just keep moving. The smell in her parents’ room was abysmal.

The scene is burned into my memory for all time. My life. My shame. My very first time smelled like a pile of dead babies. I quickly got dressed since the heat from ten thousand candles was making the room feel more like a port-a-potty. I was aware enough to grab the comforter on my way out and drag it downstairs to their washer, along with the top and bottom sheets, since blood had leaked through to the mattress. Still no sign of her, but at this point I considered it a blessing.

I jammed in the washer with 3 loads worth of detergent and set it on spin, knowing that not even the hand of God would save these linens, let alone Tide and Snuggles. Then I left.

I avoided her calls, so she came to my house. We had a long talk about what happened: talk being synonymous with “breaking up with you because you shit on me.”

She promised not to tell a soul; she was probably as ashamed as I was about the whole deed. Because this was the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me.

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May 21 2013
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Mind over matter

“The ruins at Panduwasnuwara are from this ancient city that ran on shit,” Josh told me.

“Then we have to go see it,” I said.

So we found ourselves exploring the crumbling brick walls of the utterly abandoned archaeological site with our two wives and two three-year olds. With very few signs telling us what we were looking at, Josh played tour guide, relaying to us what monks had told him on a previous visit: Panduwasnuwara is remarkable for its system of sewers that drained to a central holding tank. When this tank filled, the residents would dry the waste and make fuel out of it.

We wandered the site almost alone, joined by a few Sri Lankan couples more interested in canoodling in the tall grass than in archaeology. When it comes to ancient ruins, Panduwasnuwara isn’t at the top of Sri Lanka’s must-see list. My son and Josh’s daughter were playing together on the walls. Josh’s wife was taking pictures, and Josh was telling my wife and me the little he knew about Shit City as we wandered the ruins.

All this talk of poop alerted me that I needed to make a deposit in the National Bank of Panduwasnuwara. There were no bathrooms around, not even a Port-a-Potty. We were in the middle of the jungle, so clearly I was going to have to pinch one al fresco.

There’s no holding it; if I don’t do it now, I will surely pay the price in thirty seconds when things spiral out of control. My fuse shortens exponentially with each passing year; I am pretty sure I’ll be carrying a just-in-case Big Gulp cup and a pack of baby wipes with my AARP card. I was wise enough to have a sweat-soaked handkerchief in my back pocket. I was wearing light-colored khakis (CUE: foreshadowing music), and we all know that khakis have a narrow margin of error.

I spotted a nice big tree next to the ruins – plenty of privacy. I trotted toward it and began unzipping. My sphincter has ears, and the sound of an unzipped zipper is the equivalent of “Taps” – time to put a few soldiers in their grave.

The bad news: while my sphincter ears were hearing a sweet siren song, my real ears heard the sounds of a young couple making out on the other side of the tree. People within earshot and noseshot made it an automatic no-dumping zone.

The good news: it was a large, empty complex, and I could find another spot for privacy.

I zipped up, shouted at my sphincter to have a smoke and relax, and searched for another spot. An inviting cluster of trees was not too far off, so I headed toward them. The Oompa Loompas were screaming to make chocolate, and I told them to get ready.

That’s when I heard the high, shrill scream of a child’s agony.

I ran toward the wail, now punctuated with sobs. Josh and my wife ran in the same direction, the three of us shouting and running blindly, following the crying child sound to a spot at the far corner of the ruins.

I arrived shortly after Josh’s wife. My son stood on a crumbling brick wall, looking down. Four feet below him, Josh’s daughter lay on the dirt, shrieking and holding her visibly broken forearm which jutted at an awful angle. My son’s face was awash in panic.

“We were just playing on the wall and she fell,” he whispered.

Josh came barreling onto the scene, taking in the sight of his wife comforting his daughter, taking in her broken arm. This normally calm man completely lost his shit at the sight of his broken child. He reached down and scooped up his tiny, sobbing daughter.

“What did you do to her?” he roared at my son.

“Josh!” his wife shouted.

My son froze.

I took a deep breath to keep calm; getting in a fight with Josh about mistreating my son wasn’t going to do anything but make the situation worse. My wife came and wrapped her arms around our son, and Josh cradled his daughter in his arms.

Clearly, we needed to get her to a doctor. We got in our rented van, Josh driving and his daughter sitting on her mother’s lap in front, me and my wife sitting on either side of our silent son in back. We sped to a nearby small town not ten minutes away. Josh stopped the van outside of some sort of backwoods medical facility; I couldn’t read the signs in Sinhala script. He tapped the wheel a few moments and then shook his head. He announced that he couldn’t take her to a village doctor; who knows what kind of treatment she’d get? Josh had significantly more Sri Lanka experience than anyone else in the van, so we bowed to his knowledge.

“We have to go to Kurunegala,” he declared, throwing the van into gear and speeding off down the dirt road.

“But that’s an hour away!” his wife exclaimed.

“We can’t take her to a village doctor,” Josh muttered. He was in a crazed state, and there was no reasoning with him. He glared at my son in the rear view mirror, and I pressed my boy closer to me.

My son whispered to me and my wife, “We were playing. She ran past me and fell off.” I believed him, and he maintained his innocence in the years since.

Josh drove through the jungle like a madman, tearing around buses and cars and three-wheeled tuk-tuks, slamming the brakes for every goat and python in the road. Each time he jerked the van, his daughter cried out and his wife yelled at him to slow down.

That’s when I remembered how badly I had to shit. An hour to Kurunegala! What the fuck was I going to do?

I knew Josh wouldn’t stop, and I sensed that if I did ask him to stop, he was going to unleash a fountain of unpleasant that was going to end with my family abandoned roadside in the middle of the jungle, with no ride home and paternal khakis full of hot jungle shit.

I don’t trust my sphincter. For years, it has promised farts and delivered mudslides. It doesn’t wait for the actual toilet seat to go down; it starts releasing at the first song of unzip. So I couldn’t just clench, not with Benedict Anus on duty. I needed something else. It was time to get a little Zen on my ass. Or in my ass.

This was time for serious visualization exercises. I closed my eyes and took control. What the mind can believe, the colon can achieve. Rather than squeeze my sphincter desperately, I pictured a fist closed firmly around my colon like the neck of an upside-down paper lunch bag. No matter how full that bag gets, ain’t nothing coming out. Road closed, and there is no detour: you’ll just have to wait.

We drove on. Josh’s insanity showed no sign of abating, and as we tore through the jungle at breakneck speed, I kept my mind on the prize. It was working. The pain was still there, but none of the urgency. My wife tried to whisper something to me, and I cut her off: I am trying not to shit my pants and I can’t talk right now. It is a testament to her that she understood and took on comforting our son solo.

Josh’s daughter was coming in and out of an exhausted, pain-drenched fugue state, half-sleeping, half crying. It was easier to concentrate on the Zen fist when she wasn’t crying, and each time the van jerked, I had to redouble my efforts to close the fist. I considered praying for Josh to drive better, but that used precious mental energy.

An excruciating hour later, we were tearing through the streets of Kurunegala, Josh stopping at each intersection to get directions to the hospital. When we arrived on the hospital grounds, we left the van in front of the main entrance, and Josh and I both ran in. He went to the front desk to find out about getting his daughter admitted; I started looking for the toilet. A woman in a habit – either a nurse or a nun or both – directed me to another building.

No toilet in the hospital? You’re shitting me!

This was getting dangerous. Running and nun-critiquing and thinking meant less mental effort expended on my magical clutching fist. Things were churning, and it wasn’t good. I ran to the next building; it was nearly deserted. There were no signs for a toilet. Running was not good, either, so I slowed to a waddle.

Nothing. No toilet. As I exited the building, I was nearly run over by Josh in the van.

“Hop in! This place is a nightmare! It’s filthy. We’re going to Kandy,” he said. Kandy was home, another hour away.

I looked at the maniacal glint in his eye, the child wailing in her mother’s arms. I had no choice: I got in the van.

My wife smiled at me. “Feel better?”

“There was no toilet,” I whispered.

The sympathy and horror on her face were enough to void my bowels right then and there. As we’d traveled together over the years, I’d abandoned enough underwear in fast-food restaurants and train station bathrooms that she knew I was beyond my abilities here.

I sat back and regained my concentration on the fist. It wasn’t working, though. It was a struggle now. I had lost ground while running about the hospital. I pictured the Zen fist, but my colon was having none of it. Vesuvius was about to blow.

But what of the poor people of Pompeii and Herculaneum? What of them?

I had to keep trying, so I added a second fist. Two fists are better than one, right? My mind’s eye stacked them end to end the way you’d hold a baseball bat. I made and remade the fists, one finger at a time, like playing a scale on the piano. Reverse peristalsis. Exorcism. In my mind’s eye, both fists squeezed, working the toothpaste back up into the tube.

And suddenly, I was back in control. I was in the moment. I ignored everything around me, focused within, and found inner peace in the form of two fists clenched around a bag of turbulent shit. Transcendence in the back of a van lurching through the hill country of Sri Lanka: I don’t remember that ride. Everything was blacked out.

We got to Kandy, pulled up to the front door of the hospital, and Josh and family rushed inside. Here’s the thing: Lakeside Adventist Hospital was a five-minute walk from my house. My house was right there. So close. Toilet and shower right there in the same spot. A perfect denouement for the Greek tragedy brewing below.

But I had to face facts, and I had the presence of mind to know that I couldn’t walk that far without my house of cards tumbling in disaster. As soon as I stepped out of the van, the fists disappeared. The siren song began its call, and I started clenching as though my life depended on it. Are you there, God? It’s me, John. Please let there be a fucking toilet in the lobby.

I looked around the main entrance and saw a sign for toilets. I walked very slowly and deliberately toward the men’s room. I have to be gentle with my sphincter in this hair-trigger state: I have been known to crap myself right outside the bathroom door. My sphincter is an excitable, piddling puppy.

I got to the bathroom. The good news is that it was unoccupied. The bad news is that it was a squat toilet, a tiny closet of a room with a sopping wet tile floor and two footrests astride a hole. I don’t mind squat toilets, but I had enough experience with them to know one thing: the minute I bent to squat, I would shit all over my khakis.

The only way to make this work was to step completely out of my pants without releasing the Kraken. My concentration was shot, and I relied on SuperSphincter to do me right. I unzipped. I couldn’t let the khakis fall to the floor, or they’d be soaked in the rinse water of everyone who’d pissed and shat in there before me. I clenchedclenchedclenched and, balancing on one leg, worked one foot free of the pants leg – thank God for yoga – stepping expertly out of and back into my flip-flop. I performed the same feat with the other foot, then clutched my khakis in a ball to my chest as I squatted, now naked from the waist down, above that black hole. A Kodak moment.

While shit poured from me, I sobbed. Really, I did. My head on my forearms on my knees, crumpled in despair and victory and relief: never have I been so victorious over my irrational, disobedient sphincter. I shat and I cried and I held my khakis high as I released the Black Plague all over the floor and my feet and my flip-flops.

It took me a good half hour to empty my oil tank and then clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But that’s okay: that’s how squat toilets are designed. There was a spigot near the door which flooded the tile, and it all ran into the squatter, Black Death and drowned cormorants and all. It all washed away.

By the way: if you find yourself in the Kandy Lakeside Adventist Hospital men’s room, here’s a word of warning — there’s no soap.

I walked back out to the lobby a good twelve pounds lighter and learned that Josh’s daughter was with a doctor. (Her arm was set in a fetching, hot pink cast; six months later, she re-broke it in the U.S. because they set it badly.) We were free to go home, so we did. I’m pretty sure my wife had some new-found respect for me that day.

I’ll end this tale of victory, of mind over matter, of man vs. sphincter, with a word of warning: if you picture two fists wrapped around your colon, it has the same physical effect as having two real fists wrapped around your colon. I might have been victorious in the van, but it took two weeks before my off-ramp was working properly. Be careful how you use your powers.

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Apr 30 2013
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All in the Family

The reason we ate grilled lamb all week was that we were traveling, we were young, and we were poor. My brothers and I were still in sticker shock from London when we arrived in Paris for four days, so we were looking for the cheapest food imaginable. I had been in Paris the year before, so I was in charge of accommodations; my two brothers were there for the first time. I found us an inexpensive but terrific hotel room in the Latin Quarter, tucked away on meandering street with little shops and lots of windows with food you could carry away.

And carry it away we did: greasily delicious, grilled lamb packed into a baguette with French fries. We two oldest, just out of college at the time, were so taken with this cheap food that we ate it for lunch and dinner. We’re big boys; sometimes we’d even order a second baguette, even though one was plenty. Our younger brother, Albert, a skinny high school student, quickly tired of the lamb, but skinny people don’t eat that much, and he was spending our mother’s money. My older brother, Simon, and I were spending our own, but more significantly, we were cheap. We stuck to the lamb.

The inexpensive but terrific hotel room had three single beds and a large bathroom with toilet, bidet, and shower. My brothers eyed the shower suspiciously – a showerhead sticking from a wall, and a drain beneath it in the tiled floor, the shower area marked by a ridge of tile. The best feature of the room was a big French window; we were on the third floor, and by spreading the windows wide, we had a view of the neighborhood and even of the Panthéon’s dome, if you stuck your head out and craned your neck a little.

It took perhaps two days for the Lamb of God diet to work its magic. We were on a crowded Métro train, and I expertly released what I thought would be an undetected fart. I was wrong. This wasn’t silent but deadly; this was silent but pestilential. Simon looked at me, his eyes wide. He glared.

“You are nasty,” he hissed. He didn’t have to ask whether it was me or Jean-Jacques next to me. We’re brothers; he knew. Then as the potency of my vicious fart revealed itself, he started laughing. A fart like that — sour, eggy, sweet — calls for appreciation. It was just fucking incredible.

Albert made a face and moved away from me, rolling his eyes in embarrassment at his older brothers. He knew perfectly well that the fart was just as likely to have been Simon’s and that Simon was redirecting blame.

I remember that particular fart well, not because it was the worst, but because it was the first. Almost immediately, Simon began to replicate my swamp gas, and the two of us were poisoning the air in a twenty-foot radius. Whatever genetic makeup we share includes the ability to manufacture the same grotesque stench. Our manufacturing plant began running 24/7.

We spent that day traipsing around Paris, incapable of stopping the fumes enveloping us like a cloud, Albert fifty feet ahead of us at all times. A lot of farting is not out of the ordinary; this was out of the ordinary. Never have I farted like this, and never in stereo. We came back to our hotel room after a day at Versailles, and the room still reeked of brimstone.

By the third day, Albert was in despair. He’d spent the entire night awake with his two older brothers tear-gassing the hotel room. “You guys have to stop it!” he cried, in actual tears. What could we do but fart some more and roll in hysterics while Albert hung his head out of the French windows, gasping for air? We discovered that when you lay on the bed, it smelled worse. Yes: this was the heaviest gas known to man, and it sunk to the floor. Albert eventually abandoned us, leaving us to giggle in our own stench while he explored Paris unmolested.

After a full day of Parisian fart tourism, we settled in to sleep. The French windows were wide open, and Albert had scooted his bed closer to the fresh air. Simon got up for the bathroom. He was in there for a while; I heard water running, splashing, possibly the shower. I don’t fall asleep easily, and I was beginning to be curious. Eventually, the door opened; light from the bathroom poured into our room. Simon was backlit in the doorway, but I could see that he was tracking wet footprints into the room.

“I couldn’t get the toilet to flush,” he said, loudly.

“We’re trying to sleep,” I told him.

He said, “I took a dump. It wouldn’t go down. Then I turned on the faucet and water sprayed up in my face. But the shit still wouldn’t flush. I had to smash it into the little holes with my heel.”

“What little holes?” I asked.

“The other toilet,” he said.

“What do you mean, other toilet?” I asked.

Simon was silent a moment, and I realized that he meant the bidet.

“I couldn’t get the shit to flush,” he said.

“That’s a fucking bidet!” I shouted. “It’s for washing your ass!”

He said, “Well don’t use it, because there are little pieces of shit caked around the drain.”

I started laughing.

“You are both so gross,” Albert moaned as he pulled the sheets over his head.

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Apr 15 2013
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Mexico City Blues

by Ben Tanzer

We were in Mexico because of my mother. It was her idea to take Adam and me south of the border. Her vision was that we would see the great artists of Mexico City—Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, and Kahlo—and then hit the beach in Cancún. But things started going wrong and, on our third night in Mexico, a country where everyone actively discourages you from drinking the water, we all decided to order shrimp scampi.

I can’t remember what the meal tasted like; I can tell you however what happened the next day at the airport as we prepared to catch our flight from Mexico City to Cancún. It started with Adam saying he had to go to the bathroom. We waited, and waited, but as the minutes passed it began to seem less and less likely that he would return, and at some point I went to look for him. The bathroom was dark and quiet, and Adam was nowhere in sight.

I walked up to the row of stalls and called out his name.

“Adam, you still in here?”

“I’m over here,” Adam said, sounding like a junkie looking for his next hit.

“Hey man, what’s going on?” I said as I worked my way to his stall.

“I have diarrhea,” he said, “I didn’t make it all the way to the toilet.”

“Shit,” I said, my expletive matching the mood, “are you okay?”

“I need another pair of shorts,” he said, “and I need them now. Some guy has been pounding on the door and screaming at me in Spanish.”

I ran out of the bathroom and sprinted to the nearest newsstand. They had no shorts. Nor were there any at the duty-free shop. I wandered the terminal; no shorts were to be found. This was not the airport of today, mini-malls full of Starbucks and Benetton stores, massage tables and Polo golf shops. This was pre-globalization, and it was an entirely different time and place. The first George Bush was in office, MTV actually showed music videos, and Barry Bonds was still a string bean hitting no more than 30 homeruns a year for the Pirates. This airport had the basics—the International Herald Tribune, cheap rum and imported cigars—and that was it.

I walked up to a young traveler type, one of those guys you see at every airport. They have one backpack on their back where it belongs and another on their chest, where it does not. They’re wearing dirty, faded Columbia shorts and scuffed leather sandals of indiscriminate origin. They have a scruffy, not-quite adult beard and disheveled near Jew-fro hair. Their t-shirt has some obscure reference to Machu Picchu or some island, somewhere, where people drink hallucinogenic tea before dancing all night beneath a full moon.

The guy can be from anywhere, but he tends to be from Australia, doing that walkabout thing they do.

“Hey dude, excuse me,” I say.

“Yeah mate, he says.

Bam, called that.

“My brother had some bad shrimp,” I say, a little panicked, “and he didn’t quite make it to the bathroom, and now he needs some shorts, and I’m hoping you might be willing to sell me a pair.”

I want to be cool, but I’m not—I’m desperate. If this guy won’t help me, we’re fucked, it’s that simple.

“Sure man, no problem,” he says, smiling, “you can have them for free.”

I want to hug him, but that seems too personal—plus how am I going to get around his front pack? Still, I want to do or say something.

“You rock brother,” I say, “and that Pat Cash, cool dude, handsome too.”

“Right,” he says turning away, “good luck with everything.”

I dash back to the bathroom and pass Adam the shorts under the door. He’s gaunt and ragged when he finally comes out but feels fine by the time we get on the plane. My mom though can’t say the same.

“I’m feeling very sick,” she tells me as we take off.

“Let’s see if they have some Alka-Seltzer,” I say.

“No,” she says, “that won’t help.”

This response is expected. My parents don’t believe that medicine is ever helpful, they won’t take anything, and for years all we have had kicking around the medicine chest is an ancient, unused bottle of aspirin and a home colonic that no one has ever opened. I think this has something to do with showing weakness and an aversion to products and brands and anything corporate, though mostly they don’t like being told what to do, and the act of taking medicine somehow acknowledges that someone, somewhere, off behind a curtain is doing just that.

I stop the flight attendant, who then brings my mother the Alka-Selzer.

My mother drinks the Alka-Seltzer.

“Wow, that’s incredible, it really works,” she says.

The Alka-Seltzer incident becomes our touchstone for every discussion on over-the-counter medicine from that point forward.

After we land I become so sick that, after making myself vomit for an entire afternoon, I am forced to lie in bed for two days. I watch Mexican soap operas, drink bottled water, and while I should be dreaming of bland foods like white rice and toast, comfort foods, we didn’t do that when I was growing up; we didn’t follow rules, we dreamed what we dreamed, and so I dream of chicken fajitas.

I do get healthy though, and outside of the moment days later when we actually have to question whether or not Adam was dead, the trip was really quite lovely.

I should pause here to say that we thought Adam had drowned while jogging on the beach when the tide had come in but he hadn’t returned.

My mother, at this point healthy herself, sunburned and lovely, her hair still all black and long, was convinced that Adam was dead.

“What am I going to tell dad,” she said over and over again.

I didn’t want to believe Adam had drowned, but when the hotel finally said they would look into sending out a helicopter to search for him I started to wonder.

Moments later when he walked in barefoot and tired after getting lost and being forced to walk back to the hotel along the highway, I realized just how terrified I had been.

I also realized that it might be time to go home. Which we did, at this point smiling and full of love, the good memories far outweighing the stomach problems and near drownings.

At least that’s how I remember it. Memory is a funny thing, and I wonder if Adam remembers the trip the same way I do. I e-mail him the draft and ask him for his thoughts.

He replies immediately.

Dear Ben,

Your memory of the story is actually a bit more sanitary, pardon the pun, than what I remember. My memory of this story is that you, Mom, and I went to the airport and we divided up the jobs. You had to do one job, mom had to do a second job and the third job was that I was going to wait in line for all of us to check in.

Quite a long line in a hot and crowded airport, I might add. As I was waiting in line recognizing that I was doing a job that would not only affect my travels but yours and Mom’s as well, I felt quite nauseous and had a strong sense that I had to use the bathroom. I said to myself that for me to get out of line and then for you and Mom to come back from your jobs and for us to have to start at the back of the line again was just not acceptable. We might lose our flight. So I waited for what seemed like an eternity, probably only about five minutes, until I felt a variety of explosions racing through my body.

Not knowing what to do or where I was in the airport, I raced outside, where I vomited…and had diarrhea simultaneously, painting the Mexican sidewalk a variety of colors, but everybody around me seemed to not be phased at all. I raced to the bathroom. And from that point your story is the same as my memory.

Perhaps it is my recognition that I will not become famous in any other way, or perhaps it’s my hours of watching the Jerry Springer show, but either way reading this story does not embarrass me. I need to run, nature’s calling.

Adam

There is much I can say here, about memory, and diarrhea of course, but I think it’s most important to note that this is something we shared, and it is now an ingrained piece of family folklore, like your first words or the night you were caught with a half-naked girl in your room. We didn’t do over-the-counter medicines or bland foods, we didn’t have rules, we were rarely careful as children, or necessarily even cared for all of the time, but we had love, lots of it, and adventure, and we now have stories, many, and a shared history we all revel in.

And who wouldn’t kill for all that, despite the trade-offs? No one I know.

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