When a boat is at dock, you are forbidden to use its toilet, as it dumps straight into the water. I was sleeping in my friend's boat, docked in a private slip in Florida, when I awoke in the middle of the night to the pains of an out-of-control sphincter. I ran from the boat to the dock's shared bathroom. When I reached the toilet, I realized that the pressure building up in my rear end was matched by the great urge to vomit. (Bad seafood.) I barely had my shorts down and my ass over the bowl when I exploded, simultaneously, from both ends. The sound and stench was not to be believed!

After the flurry of activity to which I humbly resigned myself, I was left with a mess of magnificent proportions, no knowledge as to where I might find cleaning supplies (I was a guest on the boat), and a feeling of shame far too intense to ask for help. I found two rolls of paper towels in a sink below cupboard and a pump bottle of liquid soap.

These were my only tools. It was time to act.

The small lake of vomit, urine, and liquidized fecal slurry that covered the linoleum was about a half-an-inch deep. In a five-foot by eight-foot room, that's a lot of slurry. I was, at this point, naked, for my t-shirt and boxer shorts were soaked and thus in the trash. The fetid mixture was squishing up between my toes like a thin, warm mud. I bent over and began picking up handfuls of the sludge and dumping them in the toilet. After fifteen minutes or so I began using paper towels, having to flush frequently so as not to clog the toilet and create yet another disaster. I used water, hand soap, and paper towels to clean, as best I could, the room and my self. Dizzy from sickness and the surreality of the event, I walked, naked, from the bathroom to the boat, climbed down the hatch, and went back to bed.

The following morning was merely an extension of the evening. When I awoke, I admitted to my host the mid-nightmare in which I was bound. He was shocked and amused, but amusement was cast away upon his visit to the toilet room. He came back, solemnly and rather green, and spoke in a low voice: "You need to go back in there and finish cleaning. There's a mop and stuff in the utility room."

As I walked, mop in hand, into the place of my torment, I was struck by the smell -- like being inside a well-used but temporarily empty stomach. Stale and acidic. Fecund. Humid. The floor was tacky and held to my shoes as I walked over it, like dried soda pop.

As I was mopping up the terrible mess, my friend poked his head in to see how I was doing, not without a certain voyeuristic air, like at a traffic accident. He said something and then paused mid-sentence and gasped: "Oh my God..."

His eyes were trained to the heavens as if he were indeed addressing God. I followed his gaze and was shocked at what I discovered. Hanging from the eight-foot ceilings, like small bats at rest, was my own shit. Little pieces of it, broken apart from the extreme velocity of their exit from my explosive bowel. Eight feet straight up, even with the pull of gravity working against them. My digression had been transformed into an event of spectacular proportions. The stuff of legend.

I was redeemed.