Will I Die On This Toilet?
A stream of consciousness to match the stream of poo after a night in Bangkok’s party district.
Round 1 takes me completely by surprise. After a night in Bangkok’s backpacker party district of Khaosan Road, and copious amounts of Chang, I awake in our studio apartment at 8am, a post-beer poo already brewing after four hours sleep.
When you first start going out and taking this drinking thing serious, the mornings after begin to show signs of the same horror story playing out again and again. The first time is always the scariest, but by Halloween H20, you’ve seen it all.
I’ve never really understood suffering through a hangover because for as long as I can remember I’ve always been two-steps ahead of my future self. If I’m picking up a few cans from the shop, I’ll always slip in an Irn-Bru, a drink so loaded with weapons-grade sugar it was deemed necessary to change the recipe back in 2018, helpfully coinciding with the introduction of a sugar tax.
Neck an Irn-Bru. Lie back down till 12. Eat some food. All good. It’s a carefully curated recovery mode to get me from ‘half dead’ to ‘yeah I’m free for a pint tonight’.
None of this counts now. Because it’s 8am and something’s happening. There’s been a disturbance in the force, and it’s about to force it’s way out my kecks if I’m not on the toilet in 10 seconds.
I assume the position. My mind is running a mile a minute, every push feels like a fever dream. A conscious stream of thought to match the action between my legs.
If you’re in a condo, you are essentially shitting in the sky, and if the outer walls collapsed right now I’d be revealed as The Dirty Shitter. Think Lenny’s living situation being exposed in The Simpsons, but I’m not shamefully gorging on a cartoon can of beans, I’m pants-round-my-ankles sweating out last night’s mistake that should’ve stopped at somewhere closer to 11pm than 4am.
Round 2 has quick turnaround time. I imagine it’s what actual boxers go through, still high on the adrenaline coursing through the bloodstream. “Is that all yer got?” my trainer would say, rubbing my shoulders, kissing my forehead (I’m assuming that’s what happens). Little fella squirting me in the face with cold water, jolting me back to the mortal realm. “Focus”, he’d say. “Focus on this, you’re winning this fight”. But I’m not, the foul dribble is. I’ve got no more left to give. But here I am, barely managing to get from throne to sink before my pants are down and I’m back it.
How at times it feels like my butt hole will be open forever. I can’t go back to normal poops. How long it must take to formulate a solid piece of shit, and how my body decided (without consent) to bypass the usual procedure of forming a turd, and instead reduced me to dribbling out my hole in a steady stream for the past ten minutes, to be repeated Forever.
It’s Round 3 now.
Men pee standing up, women pee sitting down, and my theory of why women don’t have constant rancid farts like the boys is because they poo a lot more frequently than men. My theory is supported by my decision a number of years ago to embrace the sit-down pee. Started at a job I didn’t like. Just sit down, have a wee, big fart, maybe a little poop, and 15 minutes later emerge from the cubicle. I was getting a lot more of it out my system, frequently. One particular jaunt was accompanied by the sound of an I.T guy snoring while on the shitter. His record of 74 minutes in the bog was never beaten, but always admired.
When do I chance putting clean boxers on? At this point I’ve decided not to bum-gun/bidet my arse after every trip, adopting the ‘out of sight (shite) out of mind’ stance on my downstairs. When is it safe to make the call, enough is enough, it’s time to shower and not go the loo again this month?
A good hour passes, and after the discovery of having absolutely no food in the fridge, I decide the best option is to head out and try to regain some normality. After a wash and a much needed change from what has become a glorified adult diaper to clean underwear, after a short walk on what feels like the Warmest Day Ever, after using the public train system alone for the first time in this new city, Round 5 begins in the public toilet of a sprawling mall.
Gone is the comfort of letting rip and not giving a fuck, now it’s all the anxiety that shitting in public brings. This includes:
- timing shits to other people’s flushes
- shuffling my squeaky shoes on the tiles to mask the wet sound of my arse coughing out liquid poo
- but not enough that it sounds like I’m dancing with diarrhoea?
- waiting in silence for others to leave, like I’m a Michael Myers waiting to stab some teenager to death. Not even a breath as they do up their belt and leave. Only then can I wipe and reveal myself to whoever may be waiting outside in this hole of shits, the literal shit-hole.
Is it odd to have a favourite public toilet? When friends visited from back home, I made sure they stopped in at Terminal 21’s 6th floor toilets to experience the Japanese-designed automatic loos. There is nothing better than sitting down for a crap and letting a robot jet water up your backside and then dry it with a built in blower-thing. Every toilet since has been a sad experience, obviously none sadder than what’s happening downstairs for me right now.
Round 6 takes place back at the condo. After the Russian roulette of lunch choices aimed at turning whatever’s inside from liquid into a solid, and settling on a chicken sandwich with potato wedges, I’m back on the home throne shitting my guts out. The franchise that refuses to die.
Can you bruise your bum hole? I decide not to Google. I pray it’s my last trip to the toilet today. In fact I never want to sit on this loo seat again, fearing what may happen the next time I open my butt, the initial flow of liquid remnants of today’s Hell, followed hopefully by an actual poop.
I wish I’d just bought an Irn-Bru instead, but they cost £1.15 over here. Rather shit myself.
