Constipation

I promise this will be worth your while or would at-least make you poop. This is meant to be read on your toilet-seat.

But first, a little premise.

I enjoy spending an insane amount of time in my bathroom. It is the closest I can get to a silos. Somedays I sneak in a book, and sit on the pot until I’ve read at least 40 pages. But who’s counting? I love feeling uninhibited, and losing track of time.

In my opinion, the best day to poop would be Saturdays. If the creator of the universe or god as people like to call him or her, or they or them, were to arrange for a system where you could only dump the gunk off of your intestines, once a week, I’d most definitely choose Saturdays to do the deed.

You’ll find out later in the article as to why, I chose the day of the Sabbath.

It is on the toilet-seat, I ponder over a gazillion different things, like the creator of the universe having only 2 genders. When god was first invented by the ancient Israelites, they called the Almighty, ‘Yahweh’. In the original texts, the name was written as YHWH. Sounds to me like WYD, IYKYK, YKWIM, and other modern yapa dapa doo made popular on the internet. Was the god, El Shaddai, him, or her or they or them? Did the jews ever bother to put a gender to address YHWH?

These days you cannot go wrong with pronouns. It is a crime, but it is super convenient, this system of ‘How to address someone without offending him/her/them’ from the woke manual. Because if I were to see a transvestite, god knows would you call him, her or her, him? I would just call them they and call it a day!

I both love and dread weekends.

I almost never had to work any Saturdays in my life. So if YHWH had to give us the free will to choose one day to poop, I’d most definitely choose Saturdays.

My school followed the Sabbath calendar and maintained observance on Saturdays, meaning we always had Saturdays off. This went on until I was about 18 years old.

Then I went to college and on account of being a government funded college, it operated for only 3 and a half days a week. My first job had a five day work week, nothing remarkable. My second job had a four day work week, with Fridays getting wasted under the charade of corporate wellness sessions. I didn’t hate them, but the idea of mingling with my colleagues was agonizing to me. My third job was a situationship that lasted only 4 months. My fourth was an arrangement.

The year following my fourth job, I took a year long sabbatical to prepare for grad school.

Alfredo Baruffi (1873-1948), 'Primo Specchio' (First Mirror) ''Novissima'', #5, 1905

It was not until I went to graduate school, that the lines between weekdays and weekends blurred. We counted trimesters and not days. Saturdays were grim, with back to back classes and Sundays not far from it. Add submissions, marching towards the 11:59:59 deadline, weekends flew by in a jiffy.

I later changed my predisposition of pooping on Saturdays to pooping on any free day.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays and sometimes even Thursdays would go without anything productive getting done. Somedays I would go on a bender, all by myself. Alone, because my boyfriend did not believe in doing anything inconsequential. The idea of fun never enticed him. And my best friend couldn’t take a sip of ye old whiskey without retching at least once. But he was my best companion when it came to making pot brownies. Cluster common areas had microwaves and kitchen shelves. I was becoming somewhat of a pro baker.

I found fun in misery, you know the kind of funny ideas you get obsessed with in the early years of your late twenties? When you hit that quarter, you fantasize about being a very sad and brooding, dark character living in a broken world?

It is only later that I found out, that your anus responds well to tobacco, and alcohol and does not at all yield to drugs.

Sarah Lynn was my inspiration. The Weeknd also made pain seem cool. I’d blast his wicked games, ‘Bring the drugs, baby, I could bring my pain’, now who wouldn’t get pumped up on that? And then there was of course chris issac’s wicked game. That shit would make you gulp down your cuba libre at 2x speed. And then immediately want to make you purge the insides of your intestines.

I met a cousin last week and she threw me a couple kind words here and there. She liked reading my writing or at least that is what she meant when she asked, ‘Why’d you stop writing?’. She said that I write really well. I told her that I do not have much going on in my life except from breakups one after another, it is like coming home to a pile of dirty clothes on your bed and a bathroom sink full of hair. You don’t know which one to tend to, so you leave cleaning the sink until tomorrow and push the clothes off of your bed. I think too much love is like over cooked noodles. They look appetizing but when you eat them, they are mushy and unpleasant. You need to cook the right amount, you need to love the right amount.

I pour ridiculous amounts of love into the person I adore, and in the end they turn out like overcooked noodles.

But breakups don’t make me sad anymore, if anything, they make me incredibly lonely. You know how people have both good sides and bad sides, people are a little happy and a little sad, but my scale seems to be calibrated slightly more towards the left, the bad side! It is a part of me now, it is innate. My lopsided scale accompanies me to parties and work. This is not something I can fix with meditation. Loneliness cannot be resolved with therapy.

In my opinion, Breakups are the number one cause of depression because your mind and your body are connected. Breakups cause constipation. Breakups are like cork screw stoppers for your anus.

Your whole body feels weird, like leftovers stuck in the farthest part of your kitchen sink, its putrid smell, the mish mash of disgust that your stomach cannot churn up. All you want to do is stay clean, I wash my hands a lot, I wash my face a lot, I delete photos and chats and remove tags from clothes I have not worn even once. I flip my book pages, I run my excel, I tune into Netflix and scroll onto Twitter. I keep my hands busy, I keep my mind distracted. But in all of this chaos, I cannot poop.

A disturbed stomach creates a disturbed mind. I don’t know about you, but I cannot get a good poop for days on end. I asked my friend, Sasha, who herself has had bad luck in terms of men, her last boyfriend died after eating overcooked noodles and she said, ‘Fiber is the key’, and ‘Get a load on!’

I took it as a green signal, and ordered a thick rope from Amazon.

Last week I ordered the same book that my ex boyfriend was reading. It was a long tempting bargain with myself that I’d carried out over the past 3 days. First, having nothing better to do, I put on some Erykah Badu and started desperately looking for the name of this particular book, one with a pink cover, written by this guy who made Bojack horseman whose name I had half forgotten. At first I scouted amazon, I tried Googling ‘Damaged love glory’, and second, I almost gave up. But then I remembered about the stuck up turd. What if carrying this book into the bathroom and reading it on my pot would make me poop. That is how I had finished reading ‘Anxious People’. By spending insane amounts of time sitting on the pot. Call me crazy but your bathroom is your safe house. Just turn on the exhaust fan and you can tune out.

Then I installed Hinge, and not Bumble this time because my experience on the latter wasn’t good. After all, this very app was the reason I couldn’t take a dump. Swiping right is hilarious because you get along with someone and all the while being with them, you wonder where exactly did you swipe right on this person? Were you smoking a cigarette sitting naked on your pot? Was it when you were waiting for your mother to come out of the hospice? At the passport center? Rolled over to the other side of the bed, when you’ve just copulated! Sitting on a salon chair waiting for your bleach to work its magic?

As if finding out would clear you from the anger and disappointment you feel when you break up and help you poop.

After some research on the internet, I finally found the name of the book he was reading. Ironically, the book is titled, ‘Someone who would love you in all your damaged glory’. The title really got to me. But it did not make me poop. Things didn’t move to the lower compartment of my rectum. By this time, I was getting really restless. I unlocked my phone to check for unread messages.

This little piece on poop was started in 2022, and I never got to finish this.

But good news, it’s 2024 and I am long past the agonies of my anus.