Breaking Down the Beer Shits

Rob Fox12 years ago

I used to think holistic medicine was a bunch of hippie nonsense. Anyone who tells you that there are legitimate medical remedies involving herbs is either a crazed forest dweller who may or may not refer to themselves as a “druid,” or more likely someone who’d like to find an excuse to legalize their habits so that they don’t have to sweat it out every time their moped gets pulled over. If I get a rash on my taint forgive me if my first instinct isn’t to rub myself with parsley until my grundle smells like a Thanksgiving garnish. Besides, it’s much easier to explain away a red spot than a green one…I assume, ahem.

But really, focusing on getting mysterious “toxins” out of your body seems like an extraordinary waste of time without using actual medicine to do so. Honestly I’d rather just take a painkiller so I can ignore the horrible things in my body for a little while. That’s way better than trying to flush them out with some random weeds picked off the side of the highway by a woman who had to keep taking breaks to empty her moon cup. Warning: If you Google “moon cup” you may end up lighting your computer on fire out of disgust. That said you should totally Google it anyway.

This is all to say that I didn’t believe in “flushing toxins,” whether that meant using a strange plant or whatever, at least not until I took my first beer shit anyway.

It is undeniable that you feel better after expelling all the bubbling, Natural Light fueled evil out of your body. It’s got to be because of the toxins, whatever they are, are gone, right? And few things are more toxic than a beer that was already too rancid to be considered Bud Light.

“Goddammit! Another possum got into the Bud Light vat and drowned. Fish out the body and slap a Natty label on that batch.”

Beer shits assault one’s senses like a husband come home to his wife after a hard day’s work to find a FUCKING PIZZA!

If your husband has a quick temper at least have the good sense to buy a DiGiorno, because a Jack’s Pizza isn’t going to cut it. I bet it was a Mexican pizza too. Pizza with black olives = rage blackout. Just saying.

The beer shit sensory assault begins with pain. It’s a pain that starts in your stomach, an erratically fluctuating pressure that never allows you to get comfortable. It feels like a hurricane is having a seizure inside of you. You can hold in beer shits for a little while, but eventually they will find their way out whether you want them to or not. Holding in a beer shit for too long is like trying to cage a bucking bull in paper mache. It’s GOING to get out, and violently at that. The fact that you tried to cage it in the first place is only going to make it angrier. When it’s time to go, just go. I don’t care if you’re in a private bathroom at an expensive resort or one stall over from two truckers plowing each other in a highway rest stop. Don’t be a hero by trying to ride out the pain. Brave men fall too…brave men fall too.

Of course the internal pain is only part one of the punishment. Just because you’re getting the beer shit out doesn’t mean the bad times are over. No, they’ve only just begun.

The fact that it actually hurts to take a shit when said shit has the consistency of the devil’s toothpaste is mind boggling to me. Forget curing cancer or exploring the depths of space, if I were a scientific man I would devote my life to studying why beer shits are so painful, despite the fact that this question has probably already been answered.

Generally the first thing that goes through my head when taking a beer shit, after feeling pity for the inanimate object I’m sitting on, is “Hmm, I don’t remember swallowing a thousand microscopic shards of glass last night.”

After you’ve exhausted yourself from the pain and are ready to pass out right there on the toilet, the stench of your grueling efforts hits, ripping you out of your poo-daze and back into a gag inducing consciousness. To say that the beer shit stench has a smelling salt effect would be an understatement; unless your experience with smelling salts involves them being placed on your upper lip just before someone starts beating into your nasal cavity with a shovel.

Beer shits don’t simply smell like death. They smell like a hobo’s ghost died all over again. Sometimes I half expect that I’ll one day be found dead on the toilet on a Sunday morning, with a pile of vomit in my lap and a half written tweet about beer shits on my phone. Goddammit, that’s totally how they’re going to find me.

If you’ve made it past the first two phases of pain, and the smell, and by the way God help you with the smell if you piled your payload above the water’s edge and have no buffer between yourself and the exact opposite of that enticing scent smoke that floats off of cartoon windowsill pies, then it’s on to sight. I recommend closing your eyes, ever so tight, and getting out of the bathroom as quickly as you can. There are times to admire your work and times to run away as if you’ve just woken up covered in blood at a gruesome crime scene that you have no idea how you got to. This scenario would fall under the latter.

There are times when beer shits are worse than others, for example on a Friday morning at work when the only things in your stomach are last night’s beer and that morning’s coffee. It’s one of God’s cruel jokes that drinking coffee on a hangover is like throwing a log of un-bonded potassium into a lake.

Once I’m pretty sure I drank a cup of coffee and it came out seventeen minutes later, that very same cup.

As they say, it’s darkest before the dawn, and in my experience beer shits are by far the worst part of the hangover. At least you get it out of the way early, flushing those toxins and what not. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t a rough chore. Beer shits: yeah, I just wrote nearly 1,100 words about them. Deal with it.