shitstorm

I left work at 8:30 p.m. this evening, fully intending to visit the nearby SSG Food Market and buy ingredients for vegan gyros (I have the "meat," tomatoes, and lettuce, but I need a cucumber plus yogurt for the tzatziki sauce, some black olives, and a small block of feta). But as I stood at the subway platform, my intestines suddenly had other ideas. They began writhing and roaring in my abdomen, and I was struck with the powerful urge to take a dump. On the spot, I made the command decision not to go to SSG, but to return to my place instead. That decision was a bit of a gamble, but I determined that I could last through a four-minute subway ride (2 stops) without spraying everyone in the car with my anal essence.

This is not my first rodeo; I've been suddenly struck by such urges before. I can usually stave off the need to shit until I get to a nearby toilet. This is a matter of doing breathing exercises, focusing on my breath, and/or analyzing the painful urge to jettison my load. Sometimes, the analysis alone—which deconstructs the pain—is enough to make the urge temporarily disappear, but such wasn't the case this evening. The pressure kept building, yet I managed to hold the intestine-dragon back. I got off at Daecheong Station, my stop, and hobbled up the stairs toward the B1 turnstile. Once through the turnstile, I felt the urge ramp up like an Arrakis sandworm sliding toward the desert's surface and getting ready to breach. My brain flashed the image of a logarithmic graph—the sudden upswing, the terrifying acceleration that it implied. Things were rapidly getting out of hand.

The brain goes into overdrive when there's an emergency. I saw something I'd never noticed before despite having spent years in this complex: a public bathroom only a few meters away. Alas, it was inside the turnstile leading to the platform for the subway running in the opposite direction, meaning I'd have to pay for a subway ride I wasn't planning to take just to use the frustratingly close facility. My options: head up to my apartment, or pay the fare to reach this restroom? As the urge continued to mount, my brain screamed FUCK IT. I headed to the turnstile, paid the fare with my traffic card, and rushed into the men's room.

Just in time, as it turned out. Only once or twice in my life have I ever lost control of my ability to hold my shit in, but this sandworm was beyond debating. There would be no more breathing exercises, no more pain-analysis (I'm trying very hard to avoid the "anal in analysis" joke). I found a cubicle, threw my winter coat on the floor because I couldn't be bothered with hanging it on a hook, and began undoing my belt.

That's when the sandworm, now totally beyond my control, decided to leap out.

I knew this could be horrific. If even a drop of shit were to touch my underwear before I had the chance to yank it down and sit on the pot, I'd be carrying the stench of my defeat with me for the rest of the walk to my apartment. Somehow, I managed to get the pants and underwear down my legs as the shit was sliding out of my ass and I was making to sit on the pot.

And a miracle occurred: the shit leaped out of my ass as I was sitting down, and the trajectory of my descending ass and my descending shit were exactly parallel, like Maverick flying in formation with Rooster. The shit flew straight into the toilet water; my ass slammed down onto the toilet seat: docking achieved. Relieved and feeling as if I were giving impromptu birth, I let the rest of the shit run out of me as I gasped for breath. There was one further burst of shit—more of an exclamation point than a full sentence. I cautiously wadded up a bit of toilet paper and ran it across the back of my ass and the back of the toilet seat to see whether any stray ass-goblins had escaped and flown awry. No. Nothing. This had to be the cleanest possible docking maneuver in all possible universes. I was able to wipe like a normal person and dress myself. The toilet looked like a nuclear holocaust, but the sandworm had safely ejected itself. I flushed, and it was as if I'd washed my sins away.

As I pulled up my pants and tightened my belt, though, I could feel angry, subterranean rumblings happening again, and I knew that this disaster was only Dune. Dune Messiah would be coming next. But I was confident, now, that I could make it to my apartment without acting like an incontinent 90-year-old. Incontinence is a problem for all of us as we get older, and I've sometimes wondered whether my stroke did something to my gut's nervous system. So far, since 2021, there's been no problem: I haven't sharted accidentally in bed or at the office or while taking public transportation. But days like today are always a lurking possibility, and my fear is that, one day, the sandworm will breach when I'm far, far away from any toilet. And that's going to be a very bad day.

So—crisis averted, but only barely. I threw all my meditative tricks at the problem, which may have saved me, but it was still close, and in the end, it was only a random quirk of physics that kept me from baptizing my underwear.

I had planned to hit SSG, then take my bookshelves back to the office later in the evening, but I'm still feeling a bit wobbly right now, so my bookshelves will have to wait. Sometimes, you just have to follow that gut feeling.