My new girlfriend and I had been living together only a few months before our domestic bliss was rocked to the foundation by the tremendous disparity in our bathroom habits: she was a zippy little shitter and, when I lumbered off to the throne, I usually took three sections of newspaper, a cup of coffee and sometimes a slice of toast for sustenance.

It amazed and intimidated me that my girlfriend did her business with such brisk dispatch; her world-record times up-ended centuries of gender-based stereotypes about comparative bathroom behaviors and, eventually, when neither of us could avoid the topic any longer, we met over coffee one morning for a discussion that would revolutionize my thinking about my favorite seated pastime.

"Why do you take so long in there?" she asked me.

"Because I want to get it all out," I told her, "and it sometimes moves very slowly."

"That's funny," she said. "Are you getting enough fiber?"

I chuckled at the notion that my diet was in any way deficient: at a voracious 200-plus pounds, I consumed daily an entire side of beef, a bushel of vegetables, and a bakery truck full of gourmet breads, adding up somewhere in the mix to about a #2 washtub full of fiber.

"Well, maybe you're missing something else," she said, "because my turds just blast right out."

My [facial] cheeks reddened with envy. Truth was, I had started to notice a decline in the propulsive forces that powered my poo over the years, and I worried that this might be one of the many physical declines destined to begin now that I had turned 30 years old. Crapophiles the world over will probably agree with me that propellant is the critical x-factor in a successful shit.

Think about it.

When you've got propellant, you can gun out a chunker that breaks from you clean (with occasional splashback when you're squatting at a full basin). A clean poopie gets you on your way with a minimum of wiping, which translates to a minimum of chafing, particularly in humid climates or during sweaty seasons. But when you grunt and sweat to squeeze off an oily one, it leaves behind a viscous mess that leads to scraping and grinding from the buttlips to the perineum (a.k.a "the taint") and you end up shimmying and waddling around for the rest of the day to avoid getting an itchy bung. Worse, you never feel clean until you shower and you never feel that heady buzz of satsifaction that you get when the poop comes quick.

The next day, my girlfriend brought home a one-pound bag of roasted soy nuts.

"What the hell happened to those peanuts?" I asked her, ignorant of the magical properties contained within the small, celluloid satchel. The roasted, hulled soy nut looks like an anemic peanut on the worst day of its life: pale, desiccated and smaller than a peanut should be.

"These are the reason Japanese people don't get cancer," my girlfriend told me. And she was right, at least, circumstantially. Although most of the early studies remain tentative in their general consensus, many in the medical community believe that soy products play a significant role in overall health, particularly in combating heart disease and cancers.

But that wasn't why my girlfriend brought them home. The real reason was that soy nuts are little tiny dookie-fuel depots, miniaturized pods of jet-fuel for the GI tract. In addition to a hefty dose of fiber, soy nuts contain an indigestible carbohydrate that accumulates in the lower intestine, fermenting and bubbling like barley malt in a hillbilly's still.

For many health food aficionados, soy gas is an uncomfortable problem -- particularly for the whirly-girl hippie chicks who live exclusively on tofu -- but for me, the little bubble of tenuous uncertainty that formed just above my beltline when I ate a handful of soy was like money in the bank.

True, it took me a little while to get used to the taste of the soy nuts. They simply do not have the depth of flavor or the density of peanuts, but if you eat them for long enough without eating a peanut, you can start to convince yourself that you're eating peanuts. Trust me: I've watched my girlfriend trick herself into believing that frozen yogurt tastes like ice cream and that turkey bacon tastes like ham. The self-deception potential of the human brain is truly amazing.

With soy inside, I was able to cruise through a power-dump without even finishing the first paragraph of the "From the Editor" page at the front of Playboy. Even so, I was missing a piece of the puzzle. The considerable quantity of soy nuts needed to strap some legs on my shit also degraded the quality of the product; the extra fiber in soy left me with too many squeegee and droopy poos and I was starting to miss the nicely-articulated tootsie rolls I used to spawn during my glacial bouts of pre-soy stoolery.

Some of the greatest advances in medicine and the arts have come from those who merely took the time to observe the behaviors of the creatures who shared their environments, and I discovered the perfect solution to my soy-shit conundrum simply by watching my dog. That's right. My 30-pound beagle and I follow a ballet-like sequence two or three times every day: first, she signals to me that she wishes to go out by pacing nervously at my feet and farting greasily. Next, I ask her in the same annoying voice that you all use when you're talking to animals if she wants to go out. But here's where things get interesting: as soon as I ask her if she wants to go out, she wags her tail and she makes a run for the food bowl. And, in the few minutes I need to locate her leash and put on my coat, she eats as much food as she can possibly stuff into her doggy gullet. Then, once we go out, she fires off an impressive (some might even say "disproportionate") sized loaf with no dangle or wiggle: just a nice clean, crisp report as it smacks onto the soil.

For lack of an existing term of art, I call my dog's behavior "cramming", and I have discovered in recent weeks that it is a foolproof way to build propulsive force irrespective of one's dietary choices. Cramming is so easy it should be patented and sold in an infomercial. All I do is this: I wait until I can feel the crap backing up in my gut like a drugstore checkout line at midday -- and then I rush to I stuff as much food in as I can possibly fit before the cramps and convulsions absolutely force me to pop a squat.

And I do mean as much as possible -- sometimes I bend over at the waist in the final moments before I rush off to deploy, jamming in a last-minute muffin, a piece of meat, a chunk of banana -- whatever is within reach. And then, presto! My poo comes coursing out with military precision and -- this is the best part -- the new food goes quickly to work at forming the next stool for delivery.

Friends, I no longer even take reading material to the can. The eastern mystique of soy has put wind in my sails and cramming has put me on course, full speed ahead.

-- Mastercrapper

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