Paradise Lost (OR: How My Hawaiian Vacation Ended In A Big Pile Of Shit)

[Currently Regretting: Writing this entry]

There is a universal sensation we've all experienced at some point in our lives - a unique blend of urgency, fear, and sometimes pain. We rarely talk about it, but it's happened to us all. It's an ill-acknowledged commonality amongst all of humanity. Christians, Jews, Muslims... It unites us, if perhaps only subconsciously. I'm talking, of course, about the sudden, overwhelming, uncompromising need to rush to a toilet and shoot hot molten stink liquid out of your ass. That's right, diarrhea.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me rewind a little bit.

Last week I went to Hawaii with Tam for a few days. Nothing huge, just a quick getaway after finishing a big project at work. I'd never been to Hawaii, and it's kind of one of those places you have to go - or so I'm told. We stayed on Kauai, which is the smallest, prettiest, and least developed of the islands. There you can snorkel amongst exotic fish, see dolphins and sea turtles in the open ocean, hike through the rain forest... Orrr, sit on your gargantuan ass and sip mai tais by the pool all day long while your back fat boils lobster red in the sun - which seemed to be the favorite activity amongst the many super-sized American tourists scattered along the sand like beached whales. I don't really understand traveling four thousand miles to sit on your ass at the beach as a vacation from sitting on your ass in your living room, but whatever - I've never been good at relaxing.

Kauai is refreshingly rural - you won't find any tall buildings or Wal-Marts (yet), and most of the shops and restaurants are Mom & Pop operations. Near the condo we stayed in, for example, a tiny general store became our regular stop for food and other day-to-day needs. The quaint little market had the type of basic necessities you'd expect - snacks and groceries, beverages, some Hawaiian gifts, and a tiny health care rack, stocked with Tylenol, Band-Aids, Chapstick, cough syrup, and enemas.

Wait... enemas? That was our reaction, too. There were two of them, sitting inconspicuously at the bottom of the rack, just like that. They looked like this:



Naturally we examined one, and giggled like fourth graders at the instructions and funny diagrams on the side. It was a very juvenile "hee hee you put it in your butt" moment, inspired largely by how utterly out-of-place such an item was on this tiny rack, in this tiny store. Why would a place that doesn't even carry condoms have an obscure item like a home enema kit? Maybe more people need to cleanse their bung chambers on a regular basis than I realize, but it still seemed weird. Tam decided that we needed to buy one - as if its unusual presence were some sort of sign that we were, in fact, destined to buy one. Besides, she added, there must be something funny we can do with it. I concurred, but suggested buying both of them, so we could use them as squirt guns and have an enema battle. It seemed the logical thing to do, right? Of course it did. I grabbed the two boxes, effectively clearing out the store's enema stock, and handed them to Tam. "Here, you buy them." She refused, saying that I should be the one to buy them. I told her that it made much more sense for her to buy them. "If a girl buys an enema," I told her, "the assumption is that she has some legitimate medical purpose for it, whatever that might be. If a guy buys an enema, they assume he's a pervert - which I am, but not in this particular case." Still, she refused, so I suggested rock paper scissors as a compromise. Loser buys the enemas.

I always lose at rock paper scissors.

Maybe things like this should be easier for me at this point in my life, but I really, really was not excited about purchasing two enemas from the little old Hawaiian lady we had bought groceries from every day at this tiny general store. I tried to go back on the whole thing, suggesting it was stupid of us to be buying enemas in the first place. "Let's just forget it, we don't need these." Tam wouldn't let me off that easy, and insisted I proceed with my mission - taking delight, of course, in my misery. Fuck. Okay. Suddenly I was a nervous teenager buying condoms all over again - I scoured the aisles for appropriate padding material, as if attempting to conceal the enema boxes amidst candy bars and soda would somehow de-emphasize them as the clerk rang them up. Of course, she didn't say anything - they might as well have been boxes of shortbread cookies, for all the difference it made. But inside, I knew what she was thinking. I could feel her judging me. Bitch. We left the market ten dollars poorer, two enemas richer, and blissfully unaware of the horrors that awaited us.

Later that night, we returned to the condo after eating too much at a luau (luaus, incidentally, are kind of boring, but the food is good), and found ourselves wondering what to do. Kauai is hardly a nightlife kind of place, so it can get a tad mundane during the later hours. Debating our options led to the enemas, which sat in their boxes on the coffee table, glowing with the promise of some sort of untapped entertainment. Should we have an enema squirt gun fight? Should we throw them at each other like water balloons and see if they explode? Should we... "I dare you to use one," Tam suddenly said. "Use... use one?" I asked. "Like, use one?" Oddly, the enema's intended purpose had been the last thing on our minds. "Yeah. I dare you."

Oh, the power of those three simple words. How many obscene, dangerous, humiliating, extreme situations have occurred throughout history as a result of the unique provocation implied by those three words?

"You dare me?"
"Yes, I dare you."
"I dare you!"
"You can't dare me after I dared you!"
"Sure I can! I just did!"
"I'm not going to do it!"
"Fine, be a pussy."
"I'm not a pussy! You were the pussy first!"
"Fine. I'll do it if you do it."
"Fine. You go first."
"You go first!"
"Rock. Paper. Scissors."
"Fine."
"FINE."


I never win at rock paper scissors.

And so it was that I would be the pioneering explorer into the uncharted world of rectal cleansing.

First, though, let us pause for a moment to consider the nature of the enema. For the wholly uninitiated, a home enema is kind of like a DIY colonic. Its primary use is to clean out all the excess shit that builds up inside you. It looks like this:



The little skinny end goes in your bunghole, and then you squirt it like a turkey baster and fill your stink cavern with liquid. Once you're filled up, you then poop the liquid out like you would anything else, and it theoretically flushes out a lot of other crap along with it. The power of the dare had left me determined to experience all of this for myself.

I went to the bathroom, and followed the instructions on the box. The process, so you know, is fairly simple and painless, although it's indescribably weird feeling your bowels fill up with liquid. As soon as you've squirted it all in you feel a very strong need to send it back out, and so you poop, and that's the end of it. No big deal, really.

Or, so I thought.

I left the bathroom and proudly shrugged off the whole ordeal to Tam. "Dude, that was nothing," I told her. "It's like a walk in the park." She wanted to find our for herself, and so disappeared into the bathroom with the other enema.

And at this point, I learned something very interesting.

As it turns out, the liquid I had just squirted up my ass was not simply some kind of purified water, as I had naively believed. In fact, it's a powerful saline laxative - it even says so on the box. I'm not sure how I missed that detail, but as I sat there on the couch, relaxing as if the event was long behind me, my stomach suddenly cramped up in a very alarming way. I shifted uncomfortably, and went to get a glass of water in the kitchen. It hit me again like a punch in the gut - a hard, crippling blow that made me lean forward in pain, clenching my abdomen. The agony rumbled down lower into my intestines, and settled into that ominous spot just above your groin which tells you one thing very specifically: Things are about to get messy.

Still clutching my stomach, I hobbled down the hallway and banged on the bathroom door. "Are you almost done in there?" I shouted, "I have a problem!" From the other side of the locked door came a loud "Go away!!" Fuck. Okay, okay, it's alright, I can wait. Maybe it'll pass. A deeper, harder tightening of my intestines pointed urgently to the contrary. Something wanted out of me, and it wanted out immediately. Fuck, fuck, okay, what now? The condo had only one bathroom. I ran back into the living room and paced back and forth furiously, my eyes darting around as if they might discover another hidden bathroom I hadn't noticed before. Inside me, my guts twisted as if some menacing, unseen birthday clown was crafting a little balloon poodle out of my intestines. I was sweating profusely. My ass clenched up in instinctual defense. This must be what labor feels like. Except I don't think my baby is going to be very cute.

Back to the bathroom, and I banged on the door again. "Tam, seriously, I really need to get in there!!" I pleaded, which was met with an aggressive "GO. AWAY!!" I figured she must be in a similar Hell. But where did that leave me? My body was not going to hold out much longer. I was getting dizzy and insane. The feeling in my bowels was angry and urgent. In my delirium I imagined a mob scene of slimy brown turd people shouting and waving torches as they stormed the gates of my sphincter. They had built a battering ram and were slamming repeatedly at my ever-weakening last defense. They were desperate to escape their fleshy prison, and with each charge they came closer to freedom. But if I didn't figure something out in the next thirty seconds, they were going to be escaping all over my pants.

Back to the living room. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Okay. At this point there was going to be no happy ending. At this point it was pure damage control. I looked towards the back door. Maybe I could just run outside. Settle this the way nature intended. No, no, there might be people outside. Fuck. Owww. Okay, garbage can? Is there a garbage can?? No, fuck, it's just a tiny little wastebasket oowwwwww fuck fuck fuck, okay, okay, uhhh fuuucccckkkk. I was out of time. This was it: Make a decision, or shit your pants. And then, I saw it...

The sink. The kitchen fucking sink.

Fuck. I had no choice. The sink had a deep basin, so there would be no splashbacks. Stainless steel for minimal mess. It had a large drain for quick disposal. Most importantly, it wasn't my sink. It would work. It would have to work. I ran to the sink, pulled down my pants, and leaped up on the counter backwards, hanging my ass into the basin just in time for a Roman candle of turd blasts to explode from my strained rear end. The simultaneous feeling of relief, agony, disgust, and shame was almost too much to handle. The room seemed to be spinning as I sat there hunched over, fingers digging into the edge of the counter, stomach churning like an alien was about to burst out of it, and molten mud lumps from the farthest reaches of my innards splatting against the bottom of the sink with one wet thump after another.

After a couple minutes of intensity, the misery tapered off and I could breathe again. I didn't move for another minute - I just sat there, breathing, dripping sweat, wondering what the hell had just happened to me. It seemed to have subsided, at least for the moment. But now what? Thankfully there were paper towels to substitute as toilet paper, but another major issue remained: A big pile of poop sitting in the sink drain, too thick to go down on its own. Fuck. It didn't smell very good. In fact, it smelled uniquely terrible. Clearly the enema had worked - this poo didn't smell like poo, but rather like stale insides. Like guts. Like it had been rotting inside of me for a very long time. And it was getting worse. My relief turned to panic once again as I looked around for some sort of solution. I turned the faucet on, but the water didn't help. Fuck, fuck, now what? The garbage disposal. The fucking garbage disposal. I flicked the switch on the wall, expecting it to whisk the poop away in that magical way that only garbage disposals can. It shouted a loud angry "VHWHRRRRRRRRRR" as the blades inside the drain began to spin. And what happened? Well, more or less what common logic - distinctly vacant from this whole situation - would suggest would happen: It started splattering little bits of poop everywhere. FUCK! FUCK FUCK FUCK, I turned the switch off as quickly as I could - thankfully with little damage done.

Now what? The problem, I deduced, was that the shit pile was too high up in the drain - instead of being sucked down in, it was being pushed upwards by the garbage disposal. Okay, so, how to get it farther down? Tam would almost certainly be walking in any minute, and happening upon a uniquely grotesque situation. I yanked open one kitchen drawer after another, digging through the kitchenware for... A fork! A big fork! It was a long, oversized skewer of some kind, with two prongs. Like something you'd poke a steak with. I guess. Whatever, it would work. It would have to work. Holding my breath, I poked my slimy mud pie with the sharp prongs, stabbing it frantically as the faucet ran, working it down into the drain. Okay, good, good, it's working! I reached over to the garbage disposal switch, and...

OWW FUCK! I keeled over again, struck with another sudden intestinal cramp. It was back. God help me, it was back. Round two had commenced - and like a Jerry Bruckheimer sequel, it was bigger, badder, and more explosive than the first. Helpless, crippled, I struggled to pull my pants down and leap back up on the counter for a second agonizing barrage of filth. This one was quicker, but no less painful. Groaning, sweating, catching my breath. Paper towels. The faucet. The long fork thing. Okay, let's try this again. I flicked the garbage disposal switch and flinched a little, defensively backing away in the event of another poop shower. The angry drain roared with life, and...

It worked. It worked! The slimy goo pile slid down the drain and was gone as quickly as it had appeared. All that remained was the dramatic odor, which I imagined was more or less what the underside of Satan's nutsack must smell like. Sighing, groaning, clutching my wounded stomach, I left the water running and stumbled into the living room and collapsed on a chair. I sat there for a moment, sweat dripping down my forehead, heart racing, breathing deeply. It was over... It was over. Tam appeared then from the hallway, looking pale and distraught, as if she'd just seen a ghost. She collapsed on the couch next to me, and sat in silence for a moment before saying "What just happened...?"

"I don't know," I told her. "I really don't know." All I knew was that, with the agony and embarrassment fading behind me, I felt refreshingly light and cleansed. I felt like demons had been exorcised from my colon. I felt like I'd had a religious experience. Tamar then asked me, "why did I hear the garbage disposal?" and so I told her my story, and we laughed for a long time. Dolphins, boat rides, lush tropical landscapes... None would emerge as highlights of our trip quite like the time I shit in the kitchen sink.

So if you're ever in the mood for a unique, possibly traumatic, ultimately cleansing experience, you can buy enemas from the comfort of your own home right on amazon.com, for only $1.69! And if you ever happen to find yourself staying in unit 167 at the Outrigger Plantation condos on Kauai... don't use the steak skewer.


P.S. - While searching for images to use in this post, I happened upon a very strange Japanese website called The Enema Museum. It is, as the title implies, a gallery of various enemas. Why? I don't know. Some things aren't meant to be questioned. I love Japan.