Soon as I awoke this morning, I needed to poop. But it’s a shared house with only one toilet, and someone was already sitting on it.
not a paid product placement
There’s a Plan B for this very situation — my portable poop bucket. The mess of my room, however, has greatly heightened itself since I stopped taking out anything but wet trash, and my poop bucket is lost under the clutter of cardboard, empty food packages, dirty clothes, unopened mail, and everything else that’s piled taller than I. The piles are precarious, too — if I start poking around, the clutter will collapse, and it’d take two hours to clear a path to the bedroom’s only door.
In a practical sense, then, I no longer have an emergency poop bucket, but I needed to poop pronto, and the toilet was still occupied. I had about 30 seconds to concoct a Plan C or explode, and near the top of the rubble was an empty plastic bowl of Reser’s potato salad.
Relief came quickly. Lifting one leg onto a table and stabilizing myself with one hand, my other hand held the empty Reser’s until it wasn’t empty, behind my behind. Three wipes with paper towels left my rear reasonably tidy, and the evidence was entirely inside the Reser’s.
Here’s an odd bit of old-man human physiology, though — a firm wipe puts pressure on my anus, which is like pushing a button for more poop, so suddenly I needed to poop again.
If the Reser’s had been a 16-ouncer it would’ve been full, and I’d have needed a Plan D, but I buy Reser’s in three-pound containers, so it wasn’t even half full. I repeated the pirouette, poop, and wipe, and this time the wipe didn’t trigger another output, so that’s my morning bowel movement in its entirety.
The Reser’s jug has an airtight and odor-proof lid, so no worries, I left it on my table and watched an old movie from my recliner. Several hours later, emerging to check the mail, I simply tossed the Reser’s into the kitchen trash.
My flatmate Dean was in the kitchen, as he often is, cooking, because he fancies himself a chef. He was stirring a french oniony something on the stovetop, and began telling me what recipe he was working on, though I hadn’t asked.
As I dropped my Reser’s poop into the trash, Dean being Dean, scolded me. “That should go into the recycling,” he said, “not the trash.”
“Yeah,” I replied, “but it’s not clean.”
“Well, the world’s in trouble, Doug. I don’t think it’s asking too much to clean and recycle our empties.”
“I recycle. Just, not this once.” I paused intentionally, because Dean is a nosy man. When I cook, he watches and offers unwanted commentary. When I come home from the store, he watches me put away my groceries and does play-by-play. When I come home without groceries, he asks where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to. He’s a very nosy fucker, one among myriad reasons I dislike him, but this time I wanted to pique his curiosity, so I added, “It’s not potato salad.”
Then I leaned on the refrigerator, and watched as Dean wondered. He glanced at me, then turned the heat down on whatever he’d been stirring, and stepped over to look into the trash. “It says it’s potato salad,” he said. It’s opaque plastic, so he couldn’t see through it, had no way of knowing what was in that Reser’s 3-pounder without picking it up and prying the lid back. I desperately wanted Dean to pick it up and pry the lid back.
“It was potato salad when I bought it,” I said, and paused again, “but now it’s something else.”
Dean looked at me, and I looked at Dean. He looked at the Reser’s, looked at me again, and then, sadly — no, tragically — he went back to stirring his pot of french oniony whatever.
8/25/2025
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