The Morning After the Shite Before

'The Morning After the Shite Before'

by

Christopher Smith

Auckland, NZ

A hangover, that moment right before my mind had woken up, and all that existed were sensations. There was a sense of dread. A dull ache somewhere in my consciousness telling me that I’d been drinking far too heavily the night before, that I'd put some bad things into my body. This wasn’t an actual, concrete “I feel rough this morning!” thought. My soul just knew it. I didn’t need full consciousness to recognise it.

 

A beating headache started to gain focus and settled down behind my eyes. I detected a horrible pulsing sensation somewhere in the middle. Somewhere in the middle of what, I couldn’t put my finger on (with hindsight being a glorious thing, a finger probably would’ve been a spectacular solution to the forthcoming disaster). But the pulsing was there, and it was terrible. With each passing second it became heavier and thicker. Each successive wave steeper and sicker than the last. Everything became blood red. My eyes were waking up, despite being welded shut by my unconscious self begging me not to surface just yet. There was a slim but impossibly bright beam of sunlight scorching through a tiny gap in the curtains, landing right across my face. With a herculean effort, I managed to wrench a forearm from under the duvet through the thick air, landing it clumsily across my eyes. The red dimmed, but there was scant relief.  Every part of me was soaking. Wet. Slimy. The sudden movement has made the throbbing wave break, crashing down on top of me in a maelstrom of nausea. The spinning started. Oh my god.

What had I gotten up to the night before? Standard Saturday night out really, but dredging backwards through the fug I managed to pinpoint a number of factors contributing to this hell.

 

Bad Move #5 - I’d eaten a comical pile of cheese on toast when I got home, about 6 rounds. The entire dish swam in industrial-grade chilli sauce. I finished off the lager from the fridge. This recollection kicked off the gag reflex, as I became fully aware of the dry, rotten taste in my mouth.

 

Bad move #4 - I could see a packet of "Death Rain" Habanero Chilli Crisps. If you’ve not tried these before, I implore you to give them a bash. They’re mental. If you can make it more than half way through the pack without the urge to chop your own head off just to relieve the pain, you’re a stronger person than I. I had eaten an entire packet in one sitting. I peeled my tongue off the roof of my mouth in disgust, lolling it about, desperately searching for sweet moisture to irrigate the desert it now rested in.

 

Bad move #3 - Spilling endless, flat, piss-warm pints down my throat. Too many to count. Lago pints. Bottom-quality refreshment served up in streaky pint glasses in everybody’s favourite Seel St dive. You cannot argue at those prices though, even if my now grieving body was putting forward a strong counter-case.

 

Bad move #2. Pre-Lago. Lau's Chippy on Smithdown Rd. Chilli Beef with Salt and Pepper Chips. A glorious meal at the time. A death sentence now. Why, why, why had I eaten so much chilli in one evening? It hit me. I was ill yesterday! All bunged up with a severe case of the MAN FLU. I hoped all the chilli would blast open my constricted airways and allow me an uninterrupted night on the ale. It kind of worked, though just for good measure I necked two 500mg Codiene and Paracetamol Tablets before I went out, to take the edge off.

 

That was Bad move #1. It sent me slightly mental. I drank like a superhuman, danced like a prick and felt pretty fucking superb for the next few hours, but there was an undercurrent of menace resting in my bowels. Something just... not right. There was no doubt I'd created a monster last night, and it was beginning to stir in the midriff.

                                                                                                                                                         

I rolled over in bed hoping a shift in position might ease some of the ache. It's a bit of a lottery, but you know how it is. Sometimes pure chance will land you in a comfortable position and you can drift back off into blissful oblivion, hopefully resurfacing when your body is less angry with you. Unfortunately however, this was not the case. Something down there moved. It didn't seem overly urgent, but it certainly warranted concern. I just couldn't deal with it right then. I noticed that the other half of the bed was empty. Presumably my girlfriend had escaped and sought refuge in the shower from the noxious environment I had unwittingly been creating in the bedroom. It was about to get a whole lot more toxic.

 

I spent the next few eternal moments drifting in and out of semi-sleep, seeing all kinds of surreal images in my minds eye, hearing strange noises, shivering despite feeling like I was burning up. I distinctly remember hearing 'Life is a Rollercoaster' by Ronan Keating in orbit around my head. Things were going from bad to worse. Then the rumbling monster shifted, suddenly, and moved down from my stomach right to the very bottom of my torso behind the pubes where it swelled and sat, pushing out in all directions. It was intense. It had moved down far too quickly for it to be anything other than an innocuous fart, though, I convinced myself. "Solids won't travel through the guts that quick" I honestly beleived, "it must be a pocket of brown gas."

 

Now, I always paid attention in science class at school. I got A's in my GCSE's and I consider myself a pretty smart chap. Why, then, in my assessment of the situation I decided to omit knowledge of that all important 2nd state of matter, the phase between a solid and a gas, I shall never know. This was a crucial piece of information which, had it occurred to me at that point, would have avoid the choas which followed.

 

I pushed the duvet back and tried to get some fresh air onto my sweat-glazed body, to cool the furnace. The pressure continued to build, starting to tug and stab at the lower intestine. It began to feel as though somebody was pulling out a sizeable handful of my pubic hair. From the inside. I ragged off my t-shirt and boxer shorts, lying naked and helpless, and readying myself for what would surely count as one of the most corrosive farts mankind would ever know. It might be a hot one, it might 'grease the cheeks', but it's going to be fine. I can just breathe really shallow through the pillow for 5 minutes whilst the air clears. I can get through this.

 

So, executing an exquisite and precise piece of ring-control, I allowed the first waft of evil to escape. I literally could not have opened my nipsy wider than a millimetre. It was silent. I felt the heat spread out across my lower cheek. "Fuck! That is a hot one!" i thought. I was pleased with myself, and the relief brought on by the easing pressure spurred me on. Wave number 2, ready to go. I unclenched my cheeks again. And there was a squelch.

 

No.

No no.  

No no no.

It's just a fart.

It's got to be a fart.

In my panic, I'd lost all control.

The heat was spreading further across my cheeks.

"Good god, that's got to be a fart. It's just a warm one, that's all. A big, warm one. I'm fine. Everything is fine."

 

It wasn't.

It kept coming.

 

Seconds passed. Second which felt like hours. I couldn't stop it. The warmth was spreading down my arse, up my lower back, down the insides of my thighs. One particularly adventurous trickle had almost made it down to the knee-pit. My instincts drew my legs to a close, spreading the unholy custard further about my lower half and creating a pretty 'shit-angel' shape across the bedsheet. My hand raced down my back to check, one last hope beyond hope that it was my mind playing tricks and I really had just done a nuclear air biscuit. I brought my hand up and held it an inch from my bloodshot eye. There it was. Naughty Nutella spread across three digits.

 

I shot out of bed at light speed and surveyed ground-zero. It was devastating. I had full-on shat the bed. I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length wardrobe mirror which a mere 12 hours earlier had been used by my superhuman self to preen and strut in front of, getting ready for a night out. I was unrecognisable. Post-apocalyptic. Guant and covered in shite, I made a strange whimpering noise. I think I might have laughed.

 

I managed to find a used towel in the laundry basket and held it loosely around myself, taking care not to let it graze my filthy arse or legs. I traipsed across the landing and rested my forehead on the locked bathroom door, moaning softly to my showering girlfriend, pleading for help. It was a low point. She opened the door and peered out.

 

"I'm not well" I whimpered. "I've had an accident". She smiled and ushered me into the bathroom.

"What happened?" She asked. 

"I... uh.... I thought it was a fart..." was the only explanation I could manage, and to be fair was the only explanation that was needed.

 

She smiled pitifully but sympathetically at me and left the bathroom, kindly allowing the last fibre of dignity from which I hung to remain intact. I showered, scrubbed and sorted myself as best I could, feeling marginally better but steeling myself for the mammoth clean-up task ahead of me. I'd just managed to get rid of the god-awful stench and now I had to go and face it again.

 

I walked back to the bedroom formulating a plan of action. Just quickly grab each corner of the sheets. Bundle the whole thing up into a ball. Contain the rusty cream in the middle of it. Bung it in the washing machine. Done. I barged purposefully through the bedroom door to find the girlfriend smoothing the creases out of a crisp, clean white bedsheet she had snugly fitted over the mattress. Astonishing.

 

"Where's all the shit??" I gasped.

"In the washing machine, my love. Don't worry. I've sorted it."

 

We were married within 18 months.

 

Lati-pood

'Lati-pood'

by

Phil Turner, Wolverhampton

This story takes place at Latitude. In case you are unfamiliar, Latitude is an arts festival in Suffolk organised by Festival Republic, who also look after the Reading & Leeds festival. It is of smaller profile to those other events though, basically being the ideal festival for people who can’t be bothered with humongous crowds of people (many of which are in a lower social strata and can’t help but get loutishly drunk, steal blackberrys from tents and publically urinate up fencing), watching superstar performers, or having big corporate logos burned into their retinas every five minutes – but still enjoy the experience of standing in the rain being overcharged for rudimentary necessities such as food and liquid.

One of the less typical but gratefully received plus points of Latitude is that, for a small extra charge, we were able to take a fully equipped caravan; meaning that although some of the accustomed comforts of civilised society were still compromised, the festival could largely be lived with human dignity intact. I say largely, because there is still the thorny issue of defecation. Don’t get me wrong, our caravan had a functioning toilet, but as any seasoned caravanner will tell you, the caravan toilet is NOT to be used for solids. Not terrible news if you are in the “guest area” where you sit on a golden seat and a young virgin plays a harp and squeezes grapes into your mouth whilst you defecate, before cleaning off your arse with a towel of silk and bidet fountain of champagne-spray (for those of you who have never been in the guest area I can assure this to be absolutely what happens because I was once in said area myself. I remember those heady days well. My virgin was called Ian). But this was not the guest area. These were the disgusting festival ‘long drop’ toilets; those roofless, stable-door stalls positioned above a huge pit; that the disgusting general public used. In fact the nicest thing I can find to say about these particular loos, is that they’ve an aroma a bit like Saint Agur (a nice little reference there for connoisseurs of the supermarket cheese). But generally speaking, it doesn’t matter which festival you’re at, the sense of dread is exactly the same when one feels the inner-anvil ready to drop.

I headed to the toilet roll dispenser located in front of the cubicle blocks (these festival animals can’t be trusted to have their own roll inside each of the cubicles), plucked myself a dozen sheets, trudged up the platform steps, slid the bendy lock on the door of one of the metal cupboards and sat down to attend to my business. Well, not ‘sit down’ exactly - it may only have been rainwater that had drizzled the seat I peered at, but I wasn’t really willing to take any chances. So instead, I kind of hovered over the bowl with my knees half-bent holding my hand against the wall to assist with balance. And waited for emancipation.

The first tip anyone will give you about these types of shared ‘pit’ toilets is to never look down. It is unsavoury to think that so many people’s omissions collected in one shared ditch, but at least you can retain ignorance if you are sparing with your sense of sight. Unfortunately, you cannot retain such ignorance to the sensation of touch, specifically the touching of a warm liquid spraying across your buttock. Especially when it seems to be coming from the direction of a very audible urinating sound from the cubicle behind. In any other circumstance, I would consider this quite a feat. Surely it is a scientific impossibility for someone to urinate in a near horizontal direction? The only other explanation is that the person behind was weeing with such vigour, it was causing a splash-back effect from the swamp below. And perhaps understandably I’d rather believe it was the former. Philosophically-speaking, it is surely better to be pissed on by one man than be pissed on by a whole festival audience. And more pressingly, since I had refused to look down beforehand, if that level of splash-back could be achieved by single stream of liquid, what sort of monsoon could erupt as a consequence to the thud of my own solids? It was a treat gruesome enough to close my bowel for good. And at that moment, coincidentally my bowel did freeze up; leaving nothing but a kind of small cigar butt of faecal matter wedged between my buttocks.

I waited and waited, trying to muster the sufficient additional weight to cause a droppage but nothing came. At one point I attempted a little Chubby Checker Twisting dance to free the small trapped slug in my buttocks, but it just wouldn’t budge. I think I even tried a more abrupt pelvic thrusting action, but still I couldn’t manage shake it out. And after a while, my hand, which had been supporting the weight of my weird half-crouching position, was getting tired and beginning to buckle and give way.

The only remaining option was to abort the mission and commence with my wipe, trying to mop up the sandwiched messy carnage as best I could. But it wasn’t really ‘mopping’ as much as ‘smearing’. In hindsight, twelve sheets of paper weren’t quite enough because I found myself laying the last two sheets in my pants, doing up my trousers and waddling off back to the toilet roll dispenser to equip myself with more provisions. As I swung the metal door of the toilet open, I caught the glance of a young lady who had been waiting outside for her turn to use the cubicle. And as she entered, I felt paranoid that she would automatically assume I had been the typically selfish and clumsy male who had been responsible for the drizzle on the seat. All in all it was a most vile experience, on so many levels. Next time I will remember to pack some Immodium.

You can read other non-poo related stories at www.daysofenlightenment.wordpress.com

Stag Poo

'Stag Poo'

by

Anthony, Liverpool

The following account is factually correct, to the best of my knowledge. I may have got a few details incorrect here and there, but on the whole, this actually happened. Part of me wishes it hadn’t, part of me feels oddly proud that it did.

In June 2007, I went on a mates stag do to Magaluf. Before I continue, it’s probably worth mentioning that in 2007 I was a 28 year old adult male and a Civil Servant.

Anyway, there was a load of us in a bar, in the daytime, getting bladdered. Standard stag do protocol really. This is where things start getting a little bit hazy.

I have an uncanny knack for falling asleep when drinking alcohol. I wouldn’t call it a skill, more a harrowing consequence of my own inability know my limits. The problem is - and always has been - that sleep creeps up on me, really quickly. One minute I’m feeling a-ok, then next, I’m slumped in a chair, dead to the world.

Now, add to the mix the fact that I have absolutely no sense of direction - whenever I exit a shop, I always walk in the opposite direction to the one I intend to be going. I’m not entirely sure why it is but I just can’t take in my surroundings. If I go to a place I’ve never been before there’s no chance AT ALL of me being able to navigate the streets by myself, at any point. Especially if I’m only on a 3 day visit. Especially if I’m also drunk.

So anyway, I wake up in this bar in the blazing heat. It’s only around 3pm. I’ve no idea where my (so called) mates have gone and I’ve no idea how to get back to our hotel. It's probably worth mentioning that the hotel we were staying in was bright pink and probably 2 mins walk away.

I mentioned earlier that when I’m bevvied, sleep creeps up on me and takes hold in an instant. The same can be said of my poos. I can go from definitely not having a brown dog barking at the back door to urgently needing to sign on with the brown pen in a matter of seconds. I’ve never understood the concept of ‘holding it in’. I essentially have the bowels of an infant.

So anyway, as I said, I wake up in this bar in the blazing heat. It’s only around 3pm. I’ve no idea where my (so called) mates have gone and I’ve no idea how to get back to our hotel…..I’m completely shit-faced and NOW I need to shift an almighty bum cigar, post haste. We’re talking DEFCON 1 here.

I’m surrounded by hotels and bars, all of which I assume contained toilets galore, but for some reason, at the time, I was hell bent on getting back to my own personal toilet in our hotel room. This was a huge error, with hindsight. I think, in my head, I thought that the toilet in the room in the hotel I was staying in was the only toilet in Magaluf.

I recall going in to a souvenir shop to ask for directions to our hotel “the pink flamingo”, not realising that we’d just referred to the hotel as “the pink flamingo” cos it was pink. The actual name of the hotel still escapes me to this day. I know for certain it wasn’t called “the pink flamingo”. Predictably, the guy in the souvenir shop couldn’t help a brother out.

At this point I stumbled upon a previously undiscovered stage between a turtles head and a full on turd. It was a total minefield. My head was all over the place. Everything was going in slow motion. I felt like Neo from the Matrix curling one off! I knew that this was it. I had no option but to relax my bum muscles and commence the million pound drop, live!

In an astounding error of judgement, I decided to pull my shorts down in the middle of the street and drop my feces into the top of a bin. It was one of those bins that had a metal top where you’re meant to put your ciggy butts in. It closely resembled a toilet, in my eyes. I was a desperate man.

When I say I pulled my shorts down, it wasn’t like they were round my ankles or anything. I’m not an animal! Nah, I just kinda pulled them down so it looked like I was mooning someone. As a result, a fare amount of my rancid transaction ended up both on my shorts AND spread over my cheeks. Don’t get me wrong, there was a good portion of human waste in the bin, but as a result of the shitty shrapnel all over my backside, I knew I had to wipe myself with something.

At this point, with my dignity well and truly gone forever, I decided to rag my disgusting rear end down the side of a nearby silver BMW. Well, if I’m going down then the innocent driver of this rather nice car is going down with me, I thought.

Eventually, I located our hotel and finished off what remained of my sorry episode. I then had a very long shower but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t scrub away the memories. Needless to say, my shorts were a write off.

There is one image that I can’t shake from that fateful day. Every time I recall this story, I have this sudden flash back of a family eating a meal in a restaurant directly across the road from where the bin incident took place. I have this memory of them staring in disbelief. There were children there. CHILDREN! I’m not sure if I’ve just made this image up in my head to embellish the story OR if it  actually happened and I’m trying to suppress the memory. I guess we’ll never know.

If you and your family were tucking in to a hearty meal in Magaluf in 2007, or if you were the proud owner of a silver BMW parked by a bin in Magaluf in 2007, all I can say is sorry…and I mean it from the bottom of my disgusting, smelly bowels.

A Poo In A Field

'A Poo In A Field' 

by 

Christopher McIntosh, Liverpool, U.K.

It was a scorching hot Saturday afternoon towards the end of the school summer holidays and I was with two of my best friends, Paul and Joe. We were 11 years old and like most kids our age, we spent nearly all of the time we weren't in school playing football. Joe's house backed on to a massive field so most days you could find us there.  On this particular afternoon though, we decided to take the 15 minute stroll down to Jackson's Park to play footy. I can't remember why we'd decided to break the mould, I can only assume that we were bored of our usual playing field and craved exotic new pastures to play '3 and in' on.  I remember the stroll well, we stopped off and bought an ice-pop and we kicked the ball along as we slowly walked, occasionally dashing to stop it from rolling into the busy road.  We got to Jackson's park and lay down our jumpers to use as goal posts and began our game of 3 and in. The premise of 3 and in is fairly simple. One person goes in goal whilst the others battle it out, one on one and the first to score three goals gets to swap with the current goalie and the game starts again.  I never understood why whoever scores three goals first doesn't get the choice to either be the goalie themselves or nominate the other player - it seemed like you were being punished for being the superior footballer. Going in goal is rubbish and I try to avoid it at all costs, even now, as a 30 year old man I'm always first to shout a rapid-fire 'BAGSY LAST IN!!'.

Anyway, we played for about an hour on Jackson's Park before I felt poo's first gentle taps upon the door. We packed up our stuff and set off for home, this time with slightly more urgency than on the way there. In hindsight, I think the ice-pop I had earlier on might have played a part in why what happened happened. Joe's house was the closest so that's where we were headed. However, as we neared our destination, I noticed that I no longer needed to use the toilet.It had gone back in, so to speak, so we headed straight to the field, our normal spot, and we continued our game of 3 and in. It was around 5pm by now and the field was a hive of activity. The referees of the amateur football matches taking place were now blowing their whistles for full time, there were multiple dog walkers, other kids playing footy, people flying kites and couples holding hands whilst cutting across the field as a short cut to get from Childwall Valley Road to Barnham Drive. It was at this exact moment when my poo came back with a vengeance. It came from nowhere...there were no warning signs, no chance to prepare, to head to Joe's house where I could sit down, privately on the comfort of a toilet and evacuate my bowels 

I was in goal at the time and I just remember shouting, 'IT'S COMING OUT, IT'S COMING OUT!!', like a maniac whilst simultaneously unbuckling my belt as fast as my hands would let me and yanking down my kecks in the middle of this bustling public space and doing a massive, bright, golden poo on the grass. I remember crying whilst it was happening. I was crying and shouting, 'SHUT UP!! STOP IT NOW!!', to my two best friends who were also crying, but their tears were tears caused by laughing hysterically and uncontrollably as they creased over and pointed and laughed and laughed and laughed. At one point, my friend Joe was literally rolling around on the floor laughing. Once my body had finished leaking, I quickly pulled my pants up and began waddling back to the house. I couldn't bare to look up as I walked, I couldn't bare the shame, so I just stared at the ground the whole way and sobbed. My pants were dead wet too because I'd wee'd on them whilst I was pooing myself. I got back to the house and Joe's mum cleaned me up and sorted me out with some clean scruds.  I made her promise not to tell my own mum for fear she'd batter me (not literally) but I did tell her in the end, about 2 years later when I was in hospital just after I'd woken up from an operation I had to remove my appendix.

That's not art - that's just shit!

I love stories. I love telling them and I love listening to other people telling them. But let's not beat about the bush, the best kind of stories are the ones that involve somebody shitting themselves. This blog exists purely to exhibit your tales of the inappropriate expulsion of feces.

Send your shit stories to me at

theshittingforecast@hotmail.com