Scatologically Speaking (a brief essay)

Here's a fun thing to do.

Go into your grandmother's bathroom sometime while she's snoring on the sofa, in a mild coma brought on by alternating doses of Celebrex, Lotensin, Paxil, Prilosec and cheap bourbon. If you look under the sink in there, odds are good that you'll find a product called Epsom Salts.

Now, the most commonly-discussed use of Epsom Salts, or magnesium sulfate (named for Epsom, England, if anybody really cares) is to soak tired or aching muscles. Of course, the "alternative medicine" folks will further try to sell you on its benefits to clean out your liver, stop your epileptic fits, regrow lost limbs and cure acne. But we'll ignore all that, and suggest that you take two tablespoons in a glass of lukewarm water, stir well, and drink all at once.

Now the trick here is the phrase "all at once." The stuff tastes roughly like watered-down bile, and it has a sharp chemical edge to the flavor that will make you strongly consider weeping about halfway through the glass-full. And if you stop drinking, you probably aren't going to be able to make yourself start again. So chug it down.

Now that you've finished, it would probably be the wrong time to tell you that you needed to stock up on Gatorade and baby wipes; if you haven't done it already, you're screwed. Because you have just very literally kicked your own ass. About twenty minutes, maybe half an hour from now, you're going to experience a gurgling in your lower intestine, the first sign of what we sometimes euphemistically call "gastric distress." Don't try to ignore it and finish up whatever you're doing. You need to rush to the toilet right now. Because if you don't, you will crap yourself.

If you're cooking, don't leave anything on the heat. If you're stupid enough to be operating heavy machinery, leave it idling and let somebody else power it down - you don't have that kind of time.

It's too late now if you haven't installed seatbelts on your toilet, but you might want to consider that in the future. Remember those little plastic rockets you used to fill with water and pump up until it would shoot up into the sky trailing a stream of pressurized water behind it? And you'd stand there at the age of seven, giggling like Rush Limbaugh with a fresh supply of Oxycontin and Dominican male prostitutes.

Yeah, your ass is that rocket. And it's going to keep firing off every hour or so for the rest of the day.

It's not like the bowel-clearing ability of this product is a closely-guarded secret - in fact, most brands of Epsom Salts have the word "laxative" somewhere on the package. But the rectum-reaming effectiveness of this product is astounding to the average American, raised for generations on "gentle laxatives" and "soothing, overnight relief." There's nothing "soothing" about Epsom Salts - at some point during the next twelve-to-sixteen hours, as your sphincter begins to be digested by the steady stream of stomach-acid and e. Coli racing through it, you'll curse me for not having mentioned the baby wipes earlier.

In the larger sense, I find this to be a metaphor for both Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.