Last Sunday, I wrote an entry based around what I'd had for dinner and whilst doing so, made a throwaway comment about how thrilling the blog had become at such an early stage. I followed this with an intentionally self-deprecating joke supposing how long it would be before I was using the blog to document my own stools. I even humoured my own humour by bothering to hazard a guess of September. Unbeknownst, I had somewhat overestimated the time it would take to resort to such lows. At the time of writing yesterday's entry, I honestly hadn't given a second thought to its contents or their implications. But upon realizing, I'm left feeling thoroughly disappointed it took less than ten days before I succumbed to writing about excrement (although in a medical sense, I am not sure that dihorrea is actually medically classed as a 'stool', so it's still arguable that I'm worrying myself over nothing.)
The subject is puerile enough to have left a smudge in my memoirs, which I'll now anticipate shrinking in embarrassment from in years to come. What will my one-year old nephew learn about his Uncle should he ever find this blog when he's older? There must be more to me than simply being a man who fears being forced to use splashed-back dihorrea as unrequested Cologne. It's concerning to be writing such things after just 9 days because it implies I am shallow. What could be a worse revelation to learn about myself?
Then it struck me; I am also currently writing something else - completely independently - about the perils of irritable bowel syndrome. Maybe I have some sort of worryingly weird and obsession with the subject of excrement (a terrible thing, but on the bright side, at least I'd hastily managed to find an even worse revelation to learn about myself!).
Today I made my gym debut for this year. My health regime has suffered over Christmas and this was the first time I've been to the gym in over a month. Prior to that, I was a disciplined regular and the longest I had been without visiting the gym had been about 5 days. Don't ask me where such motivation came from. It could just be an accute self-discipline. Or it could merely be a desire to claw value for money from the fixed monthly membership fee.
As I pulled up on the car park, I felt a strange sort of daunting nervousness. What if I couldn't exercise anymore? What if I exercised too much too soon, and gave myself a fatal heart-attack? I know it sounds a bit silly, but these extremely morose worries were probably just something to do with having such a prolonged period of abstinence.
When I got to the changing rooms there was one other man in there drying himself. We acknowledged each another while I got changed, but were both preoccupied by trying not to look at each other's cocks to have any sort of real conversation (please note I include this line for the benefit of any twelve-year-old boys who may have joined my readership after stumbling over yesterday's puerile entry. Not that I have any unhealthy interests in ensnaring a following of 12 year old boys or anything - I am not a pervert. Neither do I have an interest in men's cocks for that matter).
One of the gym attendants entered the room. It was clear that the man and the attendant were familiar with each other, and soon struck up a conversation.
"Did you get that bog fixed?" the man asked casually.
"Yeah fixed now." The gym attendant replied.
"Ah good."
I didn't say it was the most riveting of conversations, did I? But at least I'd been informed of my gym's plumbing situation during my absence. The man continued getting dressed while the attendant clothed down a mirror.
"Wouldn't flush you know." he suddenly piped.
"Yeah I know" the attendant agreed, "all fixed now"
A brief silence followed, but soon it became apparent that the man considered the topic as far from exhausted.
"You could see what had happened," he said before going on to explain, "Some bloke had gone in and dropped his load. Tried to flush it. Wouldn't flush, so he just left it."
"Really?" said the attendant with an unsuccessfully discouraging feigned interest.
"Then another bloke came in, dropped his load and couldn't flush it neither"
The man then seemed to disconcertingly tap his nose, before saying in a kind of hushed conspiring manner,
"I could tell that you see. There was two different colours in the bowl".
I couldn't believe it! At that moment, I literally had to hold myself back from kissing this stranger. What a relief! He'd really managed to put my fears of obsession into a new perspective. For I am merely a man who had written a couple of things about my own problematic excretions. Yet this fellow had become so consumed with the subject, he'd even started studied the excretions of others; apparently with such pedantry, he'd now become some kind of weird fecal detective.
But the important thing is that no matter how much you might try to convince me otherwise, there is relatively little evidence to suggest that the amount of time I spend thinking about poo is unhealthy. In fact, having just used a spell-checker which I didn't have at my disposal yesterday, I've also just discovered 'dihorrea' isn't even a real word. Wouldn't any self-respecting obsessive at least learn the spellings of his subject's terminology? For all anyone can tell, yesterday's entry might not have been about diarrhea at all.
You - on the other hand - might want to start asking yourselves a few questions before you next think about pointing the finger at me. Exactly what made you end up typing the words 'anus' and 'horribilus' into a URL in the first place? You twisted people make me sick. And before you get excited, I don't mean that in a literal sense. I'm definitely not going back over that story again any time soon.
