another megaturd

I promise I won't talk about every single huge turd I have, but it is noteworthy—for me anyway—to squeeze out megaturds at all. My output tends to be rabbit raisins or goop, the latter from an apparent lack of fiber despite the five psyllium-husk tablets I take every single day to supplement whatever fiber intake I get from my diet. But Friday night's post-walk turd was, once again, a throat-clogger for my suddenly overworked toilet.

Like last time, I'd eaten salad, then gone a couple days without doing what Korean kids call "the Big One" (큰 것/keun geot, lit. "the big thing," from the Chinese term for defecation—daebyeon/大便, i.e., large excrement a.k.a. feces, something of an analogue—or is it anal log?—for the English term "Number 2"). I finished my walk Friday night and immediately bought myself a snack, thus starting the usual chain of events that eventually led to my need to hit the pot once I got back to my apartment. For whatever reason, the ingestion of subsequent meals always makes me want to push out previous meals, almost as if my innards were simply one long intestine—a subway tunnel with enough room for only one subway train.

So with the pressing urge upon me, I stopped my dinner prep, went to the terlit, and launched out another fat torpedo—so fat that, once again, the toilet was unable to swallow the thing in a single gulp. I could hear the normally robust flushing sound becoming stifled, like the plumbing version of rags being stuffed down the throat of a screaming kidnappee. But I wasn't stressed. Now that I'm armed with my toilet snake, no problem can ever defeat me again. That said, I wanted to see whether the plunger would work this time around.

The turd itself was huge, soft, and an evil dark-chocolate color (although it smelled nothing like dark chocolate, I'm sad to say), looking like nearly a gallon of Satan's ice cream. Most of the mass sat piled atop the toilet's "throat" (i.e., what's technically the inlet that leads to the trap pipe), effectively blocking the flush. Unlike last time, though, I didn't flush repeatedly, so there was no shit-water overflow this time. I noticed that the water level did sink ever so slowly, so with plunger in hand, I cautiously tried a single flush, then began working away with the plunger, flinching and grimacing in disgust every time a drop of filthy, brown water flew out and landed on either me or the porcelain.

And the plunger turned out to be all I needed. With the shit being of a softer consistency this time, unclogging the mess proved a lot easier, but I still had to clean off the plunger, the toilet bowl, the bathroom floor, and the bathroom sink afterward. Cleaning is always a bit hazardous: I normally use Windex, which is ammonia-based, for the sink; and I use bleach for the toilet itself. You should never mix Windex and bleach unless you like the idea of breathing in toxic chloramine gas. I always try to be extra-careful about how I clean things in the bathroom, never allowing these two incompatible chemicals to mix. (In fact, I remember mentally solving the case very early in an episode of House where it turned out the patient had poisoned himself by using both ammonia and bleach to clean his bathroom.)

So—crisis averted. I went back to dinner prep, and all was well. I shudder to think what manner of turd I'll be birthing next. Prodigious pile or puny pittance?