I was never much for going on a fast. But with the scale bursting at two hundred and forty pounds, and me at only six feet tall, it was time for something drastic. I couldn't stand the thought of going on a diet, so I plunged in like a fat sumo wrestler in love with Nicole Richie and... stopped eating.
Well, I fudged a bit. There were some old cans of ramen noodles from the shelves on the second and third day. And then I really got desperate and started drinking some protein shake stuff that had been lying around for years. And by the fifth day some cookies that I bought at the dollar store. I really only got hungry about three times. One time, lying in bed at three in the morning, it was an alarming kind of hunger. I decided then and there that I was going to eat the next day.
There was no food in the house except for two packs of protein powder, so I dreamed of food while lying in bed. Anyone who's been on a fast knows what I mean. It is transcendently sublime to think of your cravings and imagine munching into each morsel of pasta salad, pork chops, or macadamia nut brittle ice cream.
I awoke groggy the next day, in a fog. One thing about a fast is that you're not being all that productive on the work scene or anywhere else. You're just not motivated. As I was getting moving, microwaving a mug of instant coffee and starting to think about eating, and trying to clear my mind of the fog of sleep (with Regis and Kellie on the TV in the next room... I like to have the TV on all the time because I'm single and it helps with the loneliness), I felt a burning sensation in my asshole. I had to shit. Now.
I had really only pooped one time since the fast. That surprised me, but I don't think about that all that much anyway -- when I need to shit, I shit. No big deal. No looking in the bowl. No problems. No telephone poles and no icebergs.
But this was totally ridiculous. The poop was churning out my asshole faster than Dick Cheney pulled the trigger on his gynecologist. I hopped around for a few seconds and when I got in the bathroom, there was no paper. I hadn't been pooping and it hadn't crossed my mind to have any available.
Aiming my tush to the toilet, I had my first mud slide. This was no pooping, but instead feeling sick and smelly and desperate as the joop came sliding from my hindquarters with a weird sloshing, squirty pungency very similar to someone raking cat turds out of an igloo.
Disembodied and groggy, I knew that my ass musculatures had no control. The poop was sliding out and there was no stopping it. Pushing made no difference. It was more or less comparable to stepping onto a dead cat and hearing the guts mush out of its belly button. The odor was like a rotting muskrat in the gas tank of a Volkswagen. When I rolled off the toilet, my muscles gave way and I fell into the bathtub.
A few hours later, I ate a meal at a slophouse full of rednecks and decided never to fast again.
