Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Has anyone else ever thought that pumpkin pie mix would be more at home in a toilet bowl than on a kitchen table? It’s warm, moist, grainy, with a nasty brownish-orange color and a weird smell. Plop a scoop of it into a public potty (or somewhere else you’d expect to find feces) and no one would know the difference.
I’d never realized how much poop and pumpkin pie mix have in common until I got a chance to compare the two nearly side-by-side in an unfortunate Thanksgiving mishap last week, an incident so shockingly disgusting that I might never eat a traditional turkey dinner again, pies (of any kind) included.
How did this happen? I’ll try to choke back my nausea and tell the story. My maternal grandma is 78 going on 50, thanks to several facelifts, two breast augmentations, a few hundred boxes of hair dye, and a wardrobe straight from the pages of Vogue. She looks fifty times better than any geriatric should, but I guess the smooth skin and perky boobs hide a few health problems that everyone, now, is painfully aware of. For the past few years, she’s had a few noticeable issues with incontinence, the most recent of which happened just a few weeks ago, evident from a wet spot on my aunt’s car seat. She also has problems with gas, and not the kind that costs $2.39 down at the Maverick. This stuff is free, and she spreads it around with carefree abundance. A few years ago, my older brother was sitting on our couch when my grandma walked by and blasted him right in the face with a flatulent burst. The smell lingered the rest of the night, and he blames his baldness on the toxicity of her farts, plus the shock of being hit at such close proximity.
Okay, so she’s getting older and these things are expected to happen. But she refuses to see a doctor, and it all finally caught up with her at the worst possible time.
We had our Thanksgiving dinner at a local church this year, since a single house is no longer capable of holding my entire extended family. This was fine with me, since there was an indoor basketball court and plenty of empty rooms to hide in, not to mention urinals in the bathrooms. You women will never know how satisfying it is to pee standing up.
After eating, the men went into the gym to play basketball while the women started cleaning (gender equality is very important in my family). Halfway through our game, I caught a whiff of an objectionable odor coming from the women’s bathroom. One of the females in attendance had obviously just made a deposit, which is okay, since that’s what the bathroom is for. But the smell lingered for a long time. My mom and my aunt decided to finally check it out, since none of the other women dared. It was that bad.
Although I’d never smelled something so nasty, my natural curiousity found me following my mom into the bathroom to find out what could possibly cause such a beastly odor. Outside the bathroom, the smell was bad, but inside it was unbearable. The air was so heavy with stench that I feared asphyxiation. I also knew I’d have to burn my clothes when I got home, since they were now contaminated. At first glance, everything looked normal. Then my aunt peeked into one of the stalls and made a choking noise that I’ve been hearing in my nightmares since. I took a quick look myself, and then ran away in disgust moments after I’d laid eyes on the scene. The toilet wasn’t too bad. There was a mountain of paper towels and toilet paper in it, but nothing worth vomiting over. What was worth vomiting over were the scraps of poopy toilet paper stuck to the walls of the stall and littered all over the floor. I immediately ran outside into the parking lot, praying a speeding car would put me out of my misery.
The worst thing about the whole incident was what the poop looked like. If it wouldn’t have been Thanksgiving I might not have made the connection, but it looked like a slightly yellower version of pumpkin pie mix. It even had the same consistency and texture. The taste might have been the same too, but I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure. The pumpkin pies waiting patiently in the kitchen never looked so inedible.
The weird thing about the whole incident is that no one knows exactly what happened, or when it happened. Whether she had the blowout in her pants or in the bathroom is up for speculation, but shortly after we finished eating, she briefly left the church and came back wearing a different pair of pants. Thankfully, she didn’t prepare any of the food, so if her accident did happen before we ate, I’m sure nothing on the table was tainted. Still, the thought of what might have been (under slightly different circumstances) was enough to bring the contents of my stomach into my throat.
My grandma spent the rest of the day acting like nothing had happened, helping out where she could and even serving dessert. When I saw her dishing up slices of pie, I tried to run in horror, but she caught me and asked me what I wanted.
“How about a slice of that cherry one,” I whimpered, trying not to look at the pumpkin pie with several wedges missing. Someone, somewhere, was eating it. They might as well have been munching warm feces.
“Ok, and do you want ice cream with it?”
“No, just the pie,” I said, because I knew it wouldn’t be going near my mouth.
She balanced a slice of pie on a fork and, using her free hand to help it out of the pan, laid it daintily on my plate.
Vomit threatened.
“Thanks,” I coughed, and retreated with my plate, immediately thinking of somewhere I could properly dispose of it, preferably in a bio-hazard bag.
I left soon after, never to return to that doomed building, leaving the women to clean up the bathroom. They actually volunteered for the job, hoping to get rid of the evidence as soon as possible. I think cleaning it up was almost therapeutic for them.
On the drive home, my brother and I had a debate on how much money it would take for us to eat a spoonful of grandma’s homemade pumpkin poo. We finally settled on $517,000 dollars for him to take a bite and $486,000 dollars for me. I would have normally held out for more money, but time is always ticking away and poo tastes much better when it's warm.
I’d never realized how much poop and pumpkin pie mix have in common until I got a chance to compare the two nearly side-by-side in an unfortunate Thanksgiving mishap last week, an incident so shockingly disgusting that I might never eat a traditional turkey dinner again, pies (of any kind) included.
How did this happen? I’ll try to choke back my nausea and tell the story. My maternal grandma is 78 going on 50, thanks to several facelifts, two breast augmentations, a few hundred boxes of hair dye, and a wardrobe straight from the pages of Vogue. She looks fifty times better than any geriatric should, but I guess the smooth skin and perky boobs hide a few health problems that everyone, now, is painfully aware of. For the past few years, she’s had a few noticeable issues with incontinence, the most recent of which happened just a few weeks ago, evident from a wet spot on my aunt’s car seat. She also has problems with gas, and not the kind that costs $2.39 down at the Maverick. This stuff is free, and she spreads it around with carefree abundance. A few years ago, my older brother was sitting on our couch when my grandma walked by and blasted him right in the face with a flatulent burst. The smell lingered the rest of the night, and he blames his baldness on the toxicity of her farts, plus the shock of being hit at such close proximity.
Okay, so she’s getting older and these things are expected to happen. But she refuses to see a doctor, and it all finally caught up with her at the worst possible time.
We had our Thanksgiving dinner at a local church this year, since a single house is no longer capable of holding my entire extended family. This was fine with me, since there was an indoor basketball court and plenty of empty rooms to hide in, not to mention urinals in the bathrooms. You women will never know how satisfying it is to pee standing up.
After eating, the men went into the gym to play basketball while the women started cleaning (gender equality is very important in my family). Halfway through our game, I caught a whiff of an objectionable odor coming from the women’s bathroom. One of the females in attendance had obviously just made a deposit, which is okay, since that’s what the bathroom is for. But the smell lingered for a long time. My mom and my aunt decided to finally check it out, since none of the other women dared. It was that bad.
Although I’d never smelled something so nasty, my natural curiousity found me following my mom into the bathroom to find out what could possibly cause such a beastly odor. Outside the bathroom, the smell was bad, but inside it was unbearable. The air was so heavy with stench that I feared asphyxiation. I also knew I’d have to burn my clothes when I got home, since they were now contaminated. At first glance, everything looked normal. Then my aunt peeked into one of the stalls and made a choking noise that I’ve been hearing in my nightmares since. I took a quick look myself, and then ran away in disgust moments after I’d laid eyes on the scene. The toilet wasn’t too bad. There was a mountain of paper towels and toilet paper in it, but nothing worth vomiting over. What was worth vomiting over were the scraps of poopy toilet paper stuck to the walls of the stall and littered all over the floor. I immediately ran outside into the parking lot, praying a speeding car would put me out of my misery.
The worst thing about the whole incident was what the poop looked like. If it wouldn’t have been Thanksgiving I might not have made the connection, but it looked like a slightly yellower version of pumpkin pie mix. It even had the same consistency and texture. The taste might have been the same too, but I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure. The pumpkin pies waiting patiently in the kitchen never looked so inedible.
The weird thing about the whole incident is that no one knows exactly what happened, or when it happened. Whether she had the blowout in her pants or in the bathroom is up for speculation, but shortly after we finished eating, she briefly left the church and came back wearing a different pair of pants. Thankfully, she didn’t prepare any of the food, so if her accident did happen before we ate, I’m sure nothing on the table was tainted. Still, the thought of what might have been (under slightly different circumstances) was enough to bring the contents of my stomach into my throat.
My grandma spent the rest of the day acting like nothing had happened, helping out where she could and even serving dessert. When I saw her dishing up slices of pie, I tried to run in horror, but she caught me and asked me what I wanted.
“How about a slice of that cherry one,” I whimpered, trying not to look at the pumpkin pie with several wedges missing. Someone, somewhere, was eating it. They might as well have been munching warm feces.
“Ok, and do you want ice cream with it?”
“No, just the pie,” I said, because I knew it wouldn’t be going near my mouth.
She balanced a slice of pie on a fork and, using her free hand to help it out of the pan, laid it daintily on my plate.
Vomit threatened.
“Thanks,” I coughed, and retreated with my plate, immediately thinking of somewhere I could properly dispose of it, preferably in a bio-hazard bag.
I left soon after, never to return to that doomed building, leaving the women to clean up the bathroom. They actually volunteered for the job, hoping to get rid of the evidence as soon as possible. I think cleaning it up was almost therapeutic for them.
On the drive home, my brother and I had a debate on how much money it would take for us to eat a spoonful of grandma’s homemade pumpkin poo. We finally settled on $517,000 dollars for him to take a bite and $486,000 dollars for me. I would have normally held out for more money, but time is always ticking away and poo tastes much better when it's warm.
