For this modest and completely victimless idiosyncrasy, I have been ostracized by fraternity brothers, girlfriends and, most recently, a houseguest who saw me marching to the can with the Boston Globe and not much else. I turn to this forum for solace. My partners in poo, this is my confession.

I think I started shitting naked as soon as my older brother left for the Marines and I had the upstairs bathroom to myself. I had endured years and years of Adam's sick and violent harassment every time I tried to enjoy a weighty and protracted deployment. Adam was a total prick -- still is, in fact, which is probably why he *chose* to join the Marines -- and he used to laugh hysterically as he'd rattle the doorknob and bang on the door and yell at me to hurry up, sometimes whipping the door open when I was in mid-dingle -- restricting me to gravelly little bunny turds.

I lived in constant agony, gatekeeper to a gnarled and surly ten-year-old terrapin waiting to bust its turtle head out of my chute. Frankly, the only times I felt safe to unpack my ass were the afternoons in the fall when Adam was at football practice, terrorizing somebody his own size. So you can imagine that, as a budding PoopReporter, the summer of 1986 was, for me, like the summer of love: Adam's dump-busting regime had ended -- and the bathroom became my private and wonderful shrine.

There's another part of the naked shitting picture you need to know: the New England factor. I grew up in Maine, where the weather turns cold by the third week of school and by October, folks bundle up in three or four layers of clothing. I never liked the feeling of being imprisoned by my clothing -- an armor of concentric sweaters and shirts, encased in a waterproof parka the same way a stuff sack encases a sleeping bag -- and I liked my clothing least of all when I had to rush off to the bathroom to grunt one out.

It wasn't just the time-consuming logistics of stepping out of snow pants or digging myself out of long underwear that bothered me. The bigger problem was that, with three layers of fabric clustered around my ankles, I couldn't open my legs wide enough to give full clearance to the chunker inside me. On days when Adam was otherwise engaged, I'd find the time to wiggle one foot out of its boot and worm my leg out from the maze of leggings, but even then the narrowness of the turn-of-the-century bathroom (whose designers put the commode right up against a massive claw-foot tub) prevented me from really spreading my wings. To make matters worse, I lived in perpetual fear that my shirt-tails would fall into the muddy waters below me, so I had to hoist up all three shirts and sweaters and tuck them under my chin while I was fighting against the vice-like restraints of my trousers.

The final piece of the puzzle was the tremendous temperature disparity between the upstairs bathroom and the rest of the house. My parents had what one might euphemistically call a "hardily Scottish disposition" towards utility bills -- they didn't see the point in heating their large and drafty home much above freezing. ("The sun heats it fine, and it don't cost a dime," my father was fond of saying.) And yet, the only steam radiator in the house that ever seemed to do its job properly was the one in the bathroom. It popped and clanked and hissed eight months a year, keeping the little, 9x9 poop space so toasty that beads of sweat formed on my brow whenever I walked in just to take a leak. Sometimes when I was trying to fight out a feisty one, I thought I'd get heat stoke, and I'd leave the scene of the crime with my shirt-collar soaked through and a thin film of sweat all over my body ... which would promptly freeze as soon as I walked into the rest of the house.

And thus began my ritual. When the troll inside me groaned and strained, I would walk up to the hall outside the bathroom and remove my outer layers of clothes, carefully folding them and placing them on the linen shelf. Inside the sauna-like-shitter, I would take off all of my undergarments except my socks (perplexingly, the floor of the bathroom, which was porcelain tile, always stayed as cold as the rest of the house). And then, with a Sports Illustrated draped across my lap I would answer nature's call with the patience and thoroughness of a Swiss watchmaker. My legs were free to swing wide open to liberate my log, and I could slouch comfortably forward without fear of tainting my shirttails.

The act of stripping down to my birthday suit felt emotionally and spiritually liberating. I wasn't just pooping -- I was cleansing myself, luxuriating in a temperate oasis high above the ice-crusted brambles and the snow-caked sidewalks. It's true that part of my pleasure was that the bloodthirsty, low-foreheaded, mouth-breathing mutant I called a sibling was far away, paying for his myriad cruelties one pushup at a time. But mostly it was just that total feeling that I was in my own space, moving my bowels as natural as God intended.

I have never broken the habit. Sure, I keep my trou close to the crotch when I'm in an office building (or a public john) and it's true that I can still get the job done with shoes on and pants at half mast. But you cannot imagine the joy I experience when I walk into a dark and dusty academic building (I am a graduate student now) and I find a solitary throne in a room by itself, behind a door with a working lock -- a place where I can cast off the trappings of polite society with a Proustian thrill and drop a load in the unadulterated sanctuary of my own skin.

-- Mastercrapper

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