This did not happen the very first time I met my girlfriend's grandparents, but it did occur during that funny little period when you are still not entirely comfortable around her family, when you're trying to make a good impression, when you're still afraid to show your true self. You're not IN -- you're on the verge of IN, but you're not quite there yet.

My girlfriend spent a lot of time at her grandparents, and so, consequently, did I. I spent many a pleasant evening shootin' the shit with her Pap. He'd tell me about his Depression-era childhood, working for twelve cents a day cleaning out coal ash, or about working as a foreman in the steel mill. Her grandma and I would play marathon games of five-line Yahtzee. She was a spunky old gal. I know it's cliché, but she had a real twinkle in her eye, an orneriness about her -- and she could add those Yahtzee scores like a jack rabbit, leaving me in the dust every time. I liked the grandparents. They seemed to like me just fine. That was important to me.

Now, right here I could tell you all a very sad tale about how I didn't have any grandparents of my own anymore-- they'd all passed on, as had my own mother just a couple years before; and about how these two old people became MY grandparents, too, and how they took me in and made me one of theirs, and spoiled me at Christmas time and always had a place for me at the dinner table and all that. But this is PoopReport, ya'll -- not the time nor place for all that sappy happy shit.

One day after work, I stopped over at Grandma and Pap's. My girlfriend wasn't even there -- I was there to play a little Yahtzee with Grandma. I'm a highly competitive person (to a fault, my wife says). The old broad had beaten me the week before, and I had a score to settle.

We were well into our second game of Five-Line. I had beaten her the first game, so we we're in the tiebreaker. My guts start the ol' churning -- audible groaning, shifting, weird little high-pitched wheezing sounds. Aww, shit. I looked over at Grandma, hoping she didn't have her hearing aids turned on. Grandma was stone deaf, (again, a cliché, and again, completely true) and she had hearing aids; but they bugged her, so she let them just sorta dangle out of her ears at times. No such luck on this day -- Grandma had all her equipment installed and fully engaged. She's wired for sound! I glanced over at her little button nose and begin to ponder, with no small urgency, just how well her seventy-eight year old smeller is working.

I started getting the nervous sweats. After the whole meet the parents debacle, I wasn't exactly eager to dump a load at the grandparents' house. My intestines continued their ominous wheezing and churning, and I become slightly agitated with the MADDENINGLY SLOW PACE of the Five-Line Yahtzee GAMEAAARRRGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!! GRANDMA! Are you gonna just take the twosies or WHAT, just mark something down! Gimme them dice! Let's GO! Roll it! Mark it! Let's MOVE, lady! MOOOOOVE!!!!

Ahem.

This is the part where I make up a bunch of sphincter metaphors and turd similes and all that gooshy stuff. You know you want it.

So my guts're all churned up and threatening-like, and I try to let a little pressure off the stop-gap, you know, sneak a few silencers out, Grandma is deep in her game, and I'm hoping I'm downwind from the air conditioner current. Oh, they're silent all right, but not benign; the gasses leave the building, but they carry with them a juicy, acrid little cargo. That's okay, I reason, I've had the burning skid marks before, I can deal with it again. Happens to everyone. Right? RIGHT?!

My sphincter is now hot AND lubed. Not a good combination. A hot lubed asshole, Grandma, and five of the slowest moving dice IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND.

I suffered -- and I do mean suffer -- through the rest of the game, threw down the dice, yelled over my shoulder to Grandma, " I'm sorry I gotta run, you add up the scores, lemme know how we did, I forgot I gotta get home and um, um, shave my dog's ASS or something, I'll call ya GrandmaaaaAAAAEEEEEKKKKK" and I ran from the house screaming like a little girl. I jumped in my Metro and cut mud fer home. At this point I'm managing to hold the lugnuts on the load, but she weren't pretty. You know why you don't take the distributor cap off a hot engine? Then you know what I was a'strugglin' with.

At the time I lived ten minutes from Grandma's house. Not a gas station, not a fast food joint, not a Dear Jon construction worker's porta-potty to be had in between. I made it halfway down Route 60 -- a winding, hilly, four-lane divided highway in Western Pennsylvania, nothing to my right side but a wall of rock and a few scraggly, half-hearted pine trees hanging on for dear life -- when it hit. And hit hard.

You know that song, She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain When She Comes? Ever wonder who "she" is? Well, "she" is a fourteen-pound load of hot, slappy brown ASS CHILI, and "SHE" will be comin' round the mountain whenever the hell "SHE" decides "SHE" wants to COME. And won't be a damn thing you can do about 'er.

I don't know why I'm writing in West Virginia Speak. Must be my inner hillbilly coming out. Huh. Go figger.

I'm not going to make it home, I'm not going to make it to a nice roomy pull-off area in the road. The bitch is comin'. 'Round. The. Mountain. I lurch to the side of the road, my trusty little red Metro hugging the guardrail for dear life, cars and semis whizzing past us three inches from the door. I'm trapped in the car until a tiny break in the traffic; and then I make my move.

I've already come to terms with the fact that total strangers are going to witness my shit attack. There's nowhere to hide. Just a guardrail, a shallow embankment, and then a wall of rock. No trees, no bushes, no tall weeds, nothing. At this point, I'm okay with the fact that total strangers are going to witness my shit attack. That's fine. I'll never see them again, right? Right?!

Here's where I make my first little mistake. Actually, on reflection, it was more like a big, gooberus, colossal, ridiculous SERIES of mistakes, without which the forty-two complete strangers who witnessed my shit attack that day would not have been treated to the added bonus of this sight: as I shot out of the car to avoid being hit by a Mack truck, AS I WAS HURLING MY BODY FROM THE VEHICLE, I got the brilliant idea to save myself some time by unbuckling, unzipping and just in general preparing myself to take a very urgent, very public dump on the road.

You may be surprised to learn this, but I am not the most graceful, coordinated, pulled-together individual, even in Western Pennsylvania. I ain't all that smart, neither. In one fluid movement, I managed to extricate myself from the vehicle, drop my drawers to my ankles (effectively hobbling myself in the process), frantically hop to the guard rail, and pinwheel my body, end over end, rolling down the embankment like a human reenactment of the proverbial shit that hit the fan.

That's right, as I was rolling, the shit went a'flyin', tearing outta my crack pipe and flinging to the four winds.

I lay prostrate in that shallow ditch for what seemed like... seconds. I was cold, wet, and mortified. Hardest thing I ever did was pull myself up and out of that ditch to face traffic. I knew what I looked like. I was a study in brown and fluid movement with a profound element of humanism, for all you art fans. Art fans what reads the PoopReport.

I stood up and looked for the toilet paper dispenser. (I am currently getting up a petition to have toilet paper dispensers installed along the highway, one every two miles. Who needs those stupid EMERGENCY CALL BOXES, what we need here in Pennsylvania is toilet paper by the side of the highway!)

I took immediate inventory of my clothing, frantically searching for anything I could comfortably part with. No socks, dammit, I was wearing stupid sandals. I did, however, happen to be sporting a kinda graying, busted-up pair of BVDs around my ankles. (I have since given up on underwear, but that's another story for another day.)

I wrenched my pants off -- of course not stopping to pull my sandals off first, so the pants were all stuck around my feet. I'm sitting in a ditch covered in my own monkey-dung, arguing with my pants, trying desperately to get my shitty underwear off so I can wipe my entire body with them, pretty much giving up on ever getting that Rhode's Scholarship by now.

I got the underwear, swabbed the pitiful decks as best I could given the tools at my disposal, flung the filthy brown things over my shoulder, threw my pants back up over the mess and hobbled back to my car, carefully avoiding eye contact with any passing motorists, willing myself invisible. In complete denial. I tried to line my car seat with the entertainment section of the newspaper (gee, I had missed an opportunity to wipe my ass with George Clooney's cheesy maw).

I limped home, took a shower, threw away what remained of my clothes, and cracked a beer. The best beer on the planet. Ever.

A couple weeks later, I was driving south down Route 60 on my way to Grandma's house for some Yahtzee and fried fish take-out from the Serbian Club, and as I approach the "spot," I look to the left, and what do I see? There, hanging from one of those scraggly, half-hearted little pine trees that struggle to grow out of the rock wall, THERE are my stupid, shit-encrusted underguchies, flying like the gol-durned FLAG. The flag of the lonely and the downtrodden, the incompetent and the incontinent, the proud nation of differently-abled shitters, with a message for all the world to see: WE SHIT OURSELVES ON OCCASION! WE'RE BROWN AND WE'RE PROUD!

-- SnapKing