An Open Letter To The Person Who Vomited In My Sink On New Year's Eve

[Currently Listening To: The indescribably irritating sound of my idiot friends laughing obnoxiously loud at the television from downstairs]


Dear Person Who Vomited In My Sink on New Year's Eve,

On the eve of the new year, I invited you into my residence to partake in festivities relating to our passage into 2007. It is my sincerest hope that you enjoyed yourself and that I for my own part was a gracious host. However, I am disquieted to confess that I have not prepared this correspondence in good temper. Quite on the contrary, my message is one of disappointment and admonishment. You see, in the morning following my new year's gathering, I was alarmed to discover a scene of no small horror laid out in my downstairs washroom. The sink, part of the counter, and indeed even part of the mirror were painted quite generously with an extremely foul green-colored sludge of a substance which I came to recognize as vomit. Certainly you can understand my reaction of considerable disgust, for I am no savage, and prefer not to encounter the stomach contents of myself nor anyone else, if indeed it is possible. As such, I found your actions in my washroom to be quite disagreeable.

Please, Person Who Vomited In My Sink On New Year's Eve, do not think me brutish for my words: I fully comprehend the rather fragile predicament you must certainly have found yourself ensnared in that fateful night, and hold great sympathy for it. The intake of spirits by all parties was understandably more gratuitous than might be considered appropriate on an evening of any lesser festivity. I will confess that on certain gay occasions even I have been known to act in poor judgement and indulge too heavily in the consumption of adult beverages, and I have on those occasions found myself feeling quite ill as a result. Undoubtedly this was the case for you on the eve of the new year, and for that you have my sympathies. However, I must take issue with your choice of location when emptying your stomach contents. Customarily, one who is overcome with the need to be ill does so in the toilet, as it is by its nature a repository for things unclean. Had you merely repositioned yourself thirty six inches due east when emptying your stomach, and flushed the results, I doubt with great sincerity that I would presently be inclined to exchange words with you.

I don't know who you are, Person Who Vomited In My Sink On New Year's Eve, for you did not own up to your wrongdoing. All I can be certain of is that you ate a salad for dinner on Sunday. From the looks of it, a spinach salad, possibly with tomatoes. Full-sized tomatoes, not the miniature ones they put in salads sometimes. It appears also that you made at least a passing attempt to clean your mess from the surface of the mirror, as it was streaked with foul-smelling, spinach-laiden bile in a pattern suggesting it had been partially wiped off. While I appreciate this, I would have preferred a great deal more effort be invested in the attempt, as the unenviable burden of undoing your grotesque wrongs subsequently fell squarely upon myself. I should also note that the unpleasant results of your salad, marinating overnight as they did, saturated the washroom with an impressively pungent aroma. I have never sliced open a goat's belly and let its filthy innards spill out, then left them sitting in the summer's heat for several days time, rotting and collecting maggots under the unforgiving sun - nor have I any desire to engage in such a practice. However, if I had, I am certain the fragrance produced from said rotting innards, although awe-inspiring, would fail to equal the uniquely unbearable odor which hailed from inside your body and took unwelcome residence in my washroom.

In closing, Person Who Vomited In My Sink On New Year's Eve, I hope that this letter finds you, and causes you to rethink your choice of vomit receptacle if ever again you find yourself needing to be ill in my or any other washroom. The sink is a poor location for stomach contents, and any persons who think otherwise are quite unwelcome in my home. I very much doubt I will ever know your true identity, Person Who Vomited In My Sink On New Year's Eve, but should I discover it, I would be strongly inclined to shake my finger at you and say "for shame!"

With regards,

Robert

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.

Stinky Old Lady Poop and Airport Holy Wars.

So today I traveled from the sweaty, rain-drenched filthpit of New Orleans to the welcome sunshine of California. Overall it was an irritating trip, to say the least.

When I got on the first plane, and everyone was settled in, that is when they decided to tell us that there was going to be a 45 minute delay getting off the ground. Bad weather, or something like that. So, I figured I'd go pee while I had the chance. I went back to the "lavatory," as they call it on airplanes, and opened the door, which read "vacant" on the little indicator by the handle. To my surprise, there was a little old woman in there, standing at the sink, thankfully already done with her business. She was five foot nothing with large spectacles and a mop of curly white hair - the archetypal Grandmother. I apologized and reached to shut the door again, but she said it was alright, that she was just coming out. "That's why I had the door unlocked," she told me, in that "Grandma knows best" tone of voice. She then told me, looking back into the bathroom somewhat hesitantly, "I don't think there's a way to flush in there, but if there is I'll leave it up to you." At least I think that's what she said. It was an awkward moment, and I was anxious for it to end, so I paid no mind to her comment and simply said "okay," and made my way into the bathroom, locking the door behind me. Not really looking, I reached to lift up the toilet seat while fumbling with my zipper. And then I smelled something that hit my nose like a fist. I looked down and saw it, staring back up at me: In the dry toilet basin sat a single, large, oily greenish-brown old lady turd. It was long - serpentine, if you will - and it was nestled comfortably under a blanket of cheap single-ply airplane toilet paper, which itself was decorated in Grandma's colorful skid marks. Oh, and it stunk like the fucking unholy bowels of Satan.

There is a function of toilet water that most people rarely, if ever, consider: The water considerably masks the ripe odor of a stinky poo. However much your shit might stink, consider that, if it were not safely submerged in its porcelain swimming pool, it would be at least three times more potent. And this, as frequent travelers are aware, is exactly what happens with the water-free toilets in airport lavatories.

So the old lady turd was just sitting there, in the open air, its stench free to permeate the claustrophobic interior of the bathroom. I literally almost gagged, it was so strong. Also, it looked as though Grandma had eaten something with spinach in it for her most recent meal. For a brief moment I became concerned for the elderly woman's digestive health, and wondered if I should suggest to her that perhaps she talk with her doctor about incorporating more fiber or other digestive aids into her diet, since her system was clearly not effectively processing leafy greens, which we all know are a very important part of a healthy lifestyle. And then I remembered my far more immediate concern, which was the increasingly unbearable stench of bodily waste, presently causing me to feel a bit light-headed. I quickly reached down for the button labeled "PUSH TO FLUSH," which somehow the old woman hadn't managed to spot, despite it being in plain sight. The toilet made that magnificently loud "FWOOOOSH!" sound that airplane toilets make, as the bottom of the basin opened up and sucked the turd away into darkness. However, Grandma's hotsnake had marked its territory. It had left a piece of itself behind as a reminder, a long streak of brown on the curved interior of the toilet. Grimacing, I peed, quickly washed my hands, and made for the exit. And as soon as I opened the door and started to step out, I stopped dead in my tracks. Who was standing there, waiting for the next vacancy, staring me right in the eyes as I froze up awkwardly in the doorway? It was the prettiest girl on the plane, of course: a young blonde-hair-blue-eyed girl-next-door type who I'd noticed in line boarding the plane. And she was about to step into a nauseating sauna of filth, of which she would surely assume - not unreasonably - that I was the culprit of. I had to say something. I had to assure her that I had not produced such an ungodly odor, nor decorated the toilet so magnificently with spinach-colored turd remnants. The moment was only getting more awkward as I stood there, like a deer in headlights. As her nose was no doubt already detecting the first signs of wretchedness. SAY. SOMETHING.

"Uh, I didn't do that."

Great. Excellent. How incredibly eloquent. Of ALL the ways I could have possibly phrased that, I picked by far the most idiotic. She looked back at me, her eyebrows cocked as if to say, "sure you didn't, buddy," and I moved on, leaving her to her cruel fate.

Fucking old ladies.

After that portion of the trip, I had a stop-over in Dallas for roughly an hour. The airport there was an absolute disaster. Flight delays, cancellations, gate changes and over-bookings had thrown the terminal into chaos. Massive crowds of frustrated, confused, middle America normal people were clustering around every gate in various states of travel panic. I made it to my gate just in time to be informed that it had been suddenly changed, and myself and the couple hundred other people waiting to board flight 2633 now needed to walk roughly eight hundred miles to a different terminal. This announcement was met with a cacophony of groaning and complaining, as everyone grudgingly stood up and gathered their belongings for the trek to terminal C. And during the walk over there, something amazing happened.

While making my way through the long pathway, alongside a couple dozen huffing and puffing overweight tourists, one of those airport tram vehicles rode up alongside me. Those little passenger cars that zip around from gate to gate, transporting anyone too fat or old or handicapped to get from point A to point B by way of their own two feet. It was filled with about six or seven old ladies, all of whom had silly, vacant grins across their wrinkled faces, as if this fun little tram ride was the greatest adventure they'd experienced in a very long time. The tram made its way past me, slowed a bit by the heavy foot traffic, and as it reached a narrow bend in the passageway, it came to an abrupt stop, jolting the elderly women a bit. Replacing their glee with confusion. As I rounded the corner I saw the problem: Another tram, this one heavily stocked with fat women, was coming around the corner from the opposite direction, and the two had nearly collided head-on. Now they were both stopped, about six feet away from each other, It was a good old fashioned show-down: The old ladies versus the fat ladies. And neither of them were going to budge.

This is where it got really good. I was already late for my connecting flight, but I had to stop and see how this was going to pan out. The drivers of each tram were both some variety of middle-eastern ethnicity, and they started shouting and gesturing at each other to back away. Neither car budged. Then they began full-on yelling at each other in some indiscernible, furiously-paced foreign language. It was almost as if the two airport employees were bitter rivals, and neither was willing to compromise in this intense situation. It was like a microcosm of mid-east tensions, right here in Dallas, in the walkway between terminal A and terminal C. The old ladies and the fat ladies were exchanging nervous glances at each other, unsure of what to do. The shouting grew louder. People were stopping and staring. Then, the drivers' argument suddenly gave way to a very uncomfortable silence, as they both just stared at each other, bitterly. I thought Jihad was about to be declared. I thought they were about to leap at each other and stab at each others' throats with pencils. But both trams began inching slowly forward, as both drivers turned their steering wheels hard to the right. The vehicles turned as they moved forward, avoiding impact by mere inches. The two drivers never took their eyes off each other as they went by. The old ladies looked apologetically at the fat ladies, and vice versa. And when the trams were a safe distance apart, each sped away from each other at a determined pace. It seemed that Jihad had been avoided, and the fragile peace at Dallas-Ft. Worth had held together... at least for now.