One night, I went to the movies with a friend. During the film I binged on snack food; and then, after the film, I made the fatal mistake of going to Denny's for a late-night nosh. For this, I would pay dearly.

We ate and ate and sat for hours just talking -- my friend would soon be moving out of the area. Finally we said goodbye, and I headed home. Along the way, that familiar, painful wrenching of the bowels began to present itself. I knew that real soon there would be a major international incident.

"Relax," I told myself. "You can make it home." But I wasn't so sure. I had taken a route through the more deserted areas of town, where businesses were sparse, and *nothing* was open at this time of night (well, morning, actually). I seriously considered finding a strip mall and desecrating the open ground behind a dumpster, but I decided against it. I firmly commanded my colon to shape up; and, with great effort, I made it home.

As I exited my vehicle, I almost unloaded. It took some minutes for me to contain the situation, and it took minutes more to walk the thirty yards or so to my front door. I moved like Frankenstein, lurching forward while struggling to keep a lid on the pressure cooker. It was soon to blow! By this point I was at Defcon Zero and the missiles were armed in the silos. I crawled step-by-step up the stairs to our apartment's only bathroom.

I opened the door and was preparing to do my business when an insane thought struck me. "Hey," I thought. "This could take a while. I'd better get some reading material."

I don't know what my priorities were. I don't know what madness possessed me. But I stood back up very slowly and inched out into the hall to grab a magazine. As I sat down again, I was only two feet above the bowl when disaster struck.

It was as if I had turned on a fire hose. One would have thought that an eighteen-pound cannon loaded with feces had been fired point-blank into my bathroom. My mess covered the toilet bowl, tank, the floor, the vanity, the bathtub and shower curtain, the wall, and the throw rug on the floor. I managed to wrap up business, consuming about two rolls of toilet paper just cleaning myself up.

I needed to shower, but that would awaken my sleeping wife in the next room. So I stripped off my soiled clothes and threw them, along with the shower curtain and the rug, into the laundry basket. I took that downstairs and immediately started the wash, adding lots of detergent and Clorox 2 to the load (no pun intended). Then I retrieved the cleaning supplies, including a mop and bucket. "Should I bring the shovel?" I wondered.

Well, needless to say, it took over an hour to repair the damage. I scrubbed and rescrubbed all the surfaces numerous times, even using Q-tips to clean in all the nooks and crannies of the toilet. All this time I worked silently, fearing that my wife might wake up, come into the bathroom, and wonder why her husband was mopping the floor, nude, at four in the morning. There would be no possible explanation.

Well, I cleaned up, showered, sprayed plenty of air freshener, and crept into bed. No one was the wiser. The next day, my wife said, "Honey, did you clean the bathroom after you got home? It looks great!"

-- Smirky Choadesworth