I momentarily thought I might be incontinent. I had relieved myself and, per human nature, I briefly basked in the afterglow of having taken a reasonably credible dump. While remaining seated I heard trickling of liquid. I thought hmm, I stopped peeing some moments ago. Am I possibly expelling additional fluids involuntarily? The concern was not serious. The sinks in this particular bathroom often have leaky faucets, and I further concluded that no additional fecal or urinary or other bodily fluids were involuntarily dripping from my openings. My only lin=gering concern was upon leaving the stall and finding no sinks were possessed of leaking faucets. I returned to the stall, thinking this a strange place to revisit, as if returning to the glory days of my last bowel movement. It was on that return visit that I heard some sort of trickling noise in the pipes of the toilet into which I just shat. Not my problem, but neither, fortunately, is incontinence. 

I knew someone who is incontinent, and will be for life, according to his reckoning. It seems to be a little-known fact that one of  permanent side-effects of long-term cocaine use is incontinence. I think this person did coke for 7 years and, presently 50-something years old, will wear adult diapers for the rest of his life. He has no control over when it will happen, which must bring a new set of challenges to having sex. I would think there is some capacity to infer when it might occur but what do I know… My innards are firm and righteous. 

I say that this side-effect is little-known because I’ve told many people about it and none had ever heard of incontinence as a side-effect of long-term coke usage. I am the informer of this bit of additional trivia. 

To his credit, the dude takes the fact that he will shit unexpectedly in stride. He brags to friends about shitting mid-sentence and not faltering one blip in his speech. I don’t talk to him anymore but one time, coked up to the rafters, this dude offered me a job paying $100,000 doing what, I never could wrangle out of him.

I don’t know why but I always think taking a dump is going to take a very long time, too much time for a working stiff to be away from his desk. I imagine it being a lavish, extravagent affair in which I set up incense and some music and settling in for a long haul. But really, I’m in and out of the shitter in less than 3 minutes, typically. Sometimes I BASK in the afterglow a little longer than other times but mostly I am an efficient, on-target, time-tempered shitting machine.

Perhaps my ideas that being at shit is an hours-long commitment comes from memories of a professor I used to know at the University of Tampa. He would sit on the shitter for hours, it seemed. He was always in there, reading while, I assumed, a pool of his excrement lay idly beneath his bare buttocks. I was in high school at the time and genuinely thought sitting over a pool of your own piss and shit for hours on end was pretty nasty. If he flushed while still seated that might lessen the nasty but I’ve only recently learned that most toilets in offices and similar places blast out plumes of feces several feet into the air. Some entity issued a warning that sitting while flushing will send your feces right back up your asshole and possibly cause infections leading to small forms of plant life growing around your anus. Did this esteemed professor I knew have little crops of broccoli growing around his asshole? I will never know.