Poop

I swaggered down the street, wine-drunk, belly full of the flesh of my enemies which, these being civilized times, was first pan seared and seasoned with shitake mushroom sauce and served along with the pounded flesh of potato and followed by coffee and cheesecake. As a result I have the distinct feeling that in my lower torso—somewhere in the ventral cavity—one might find an elastic sac of fluffy fluid pancakes stretched to capacity. Soon, it would become poop.

If one were to empty out the contents of my stomach before they were dissolved—before the many chemical bonds were broken and the released energy stored for later use or converted into adenosine triphosphate—one would no doubt find it to be quite colorful. However while inside my stomach they are not colorful at all. The reason, of course, is that there is no light inside my stomach, and color is not so much an innate quality that is revealed by light as it is a modification of visible light itself. So you see, if you were wondering, the food in your stomach is colorless until it comes out of you. Then it is brown (because it is poop).

I have never met a man who didn’t poop, and I don’t expect I ever will. It is conceivable that someone who was sustained on a strictly fluid diet would have almost no poop, relegating the vast majority of their digestive waste processes to the urogenital system, but even then I find it difficult to believe that there would be no poop at all. It would probably just be watery poop.

It is intriguing to wonder how long one could continue to discuss poop. The well-known Zen master Shunryu Suzuki is said to have commented that if you can understand a frog, you can understand everything. The idea of course is not limited to a frog, it could be anything, the point being that if you truly and fully understand any one thing, then you get it all. I suppose this is because it is impossible to understand any one thing without understanding it all, as nothing exists independently of everything else. To extend this statement, then, one might presume that if you truly understand poop, you understand the nature of the universe. This, like most things, raises some interesting questions about God.

A haiku:

Don't forget to poop,

Because when you poop it means

You are still alive!