More information about my bowels than is absolutely necessary!

Riddle me this: How is it possible to have a shitty day and a non-shitty day at the same time?

Easy... Just get really, really constipated and head to K-Mart!

It all started Monday evening when I began to feel crampy about my mid-section. After listening to my gut with her stethoscope, my physician wife diagnosed me as being full of shit. I've received this diagnosis often enough, but not in the literal sense for quite a while now. Nothing was moving inside and my guts were bound up tighter than two S&M Christmas turkeys awaiting a jolly good beating by their dominatrix. I tried to think about what I'd eaten that might have caused my condition, but other than that block of extra sharp cheddar, I couldn't come up with a single thing. So, after a fitful, gas-pain-filled night, and an empty toilet sort of morning, I decided to head out to K-Mart for mass-quantities of toilet paper and enemas.

Let me just say, I really hate the local K-Mart. It's one of the most irritating places a person can go around here. It's a big store, but only has about 1/4 of the employees of a normal K-Mart of the same size to help stave off bankruptsy, I suppose. With so few employees, some sections of the store, particularly the office supply area, have been allowed to become a wild-west no mans' land where chaos rules and you can't find a damn thing. You can also never find anyone to help you if, say, you want to try on clothing and need the dressing rooms unlocked or if you need to put something on layaway. In those instances, there are buttons you can press that summon employees to help you by sending automated messages out over the loudspeaker calling them to you. But, K-Mart does tend to have cheap toilet paper and since my fondest wish was to use some, that's where I went to buy it.

So, there I was, rolling through the aisles of K-Mart, cart packed high with Scott 16-packs, soothing Christmas music over the speaker system interrupted twice a minute by a very loud monotone recording saying "SERVICE IS NEEDED IN LAYAWAY! SERVICE IS NEEDED IN LAYAWAY!" Soon, other shoppers began to encroach upon my personal space and get in my way. And then the loudspeakers began to play Bruce Springsteen's Santa Claus is Coming to Town, which I hate, and hate even more when it's continually interrupted by "SERVICE IS NEEDED IN LAYAWAY! SERVICE IS NEEDED IN LAYAWAY!" and I came to the decision that I'm fed up with the place and it's time to go. I took my cart full of butt-paper and enemas to check out, only to find that the only two open checkout lanes were clogged even worse than my colon.

Each checkout line contained three people and from the brimming contents of their carts, they were apparently doing all of their Christmas shopping for this year, plus shopping retroactively backward in time for seven generations. The cashiers were, naturally, not the speediest of transactionists either and this was compounded by the fact that both lines seemed to have some sort of pricing issue, which brought the whole shebang to a halt. I was irritated enough by this, but then I saw that one of the tabloids this week was picking on poor Suzanne Plechette. What did Bob Newhart's TV wife ever do to them? Jackals!

"SERVICE IS NEEDED AT THE FITTING ROOMS! SERVICE IS NEEDED AT THE FITTING ROOMS!"

Meanwhile, my stomach blazed with gas pains and cramping and at that moment I wanted nothing more than to buy my TP, escape this hellish place and, oh, maybe go home and bust a poo.

Then I sensed a presence lurking up beside me, to the right. It siddled up closer and closer, then stoped a few feet away and paused in what felt like an expectant manner. I turned expecting to see someone I knew coming over to say hi. I was right, but not in a good way, for standing there was Chester the (Potential) Molester. What's worse, Chester was smiling at me as though I were somehow his friend.

In the years I've known Chester, I've done everything short of punching him full in the face to alert him to the fact that I hate his guts. When he visits us at the library, I stare daggers at him and give him the most rage-filled spiteful face I possibly can, hoping the message will communicate that he is an unwelcome presence. (I actually told him this to his face on one occasion, but it didn't take.) Yet, every time I see him anywhere, his first reaction is to smile and wave as though I am a dear friend. This drives me nucking futs! If only I had been capable of defecating at that moment, perhaps I could have delivered unto him a violently-applied turd across the face to help him remember not to attempt friendliness at me in the future. Instead, though, I just stood there cramping and firing as much ire at him as my face could muster.

"Uh, hey," Chester said, ignoring my expression yet again. "Is the library open today?"

I continued tearing him into little shreds with my gaze for a long moment.

"I'm afraid it is," I said very slowly and with what I hoped was threat in my tone. Then I turned away from him entirely and refused to look back. Chester stood there for a moment, then wandered off, oblivious to how despised he is.

When I arrived at work, a poopless hour later, I warned my coworkers of Chester's potential to appear. Fortunately, he never showed up.

Meanwhile, I'm downing mineral oil (which tastes exactly like drinking a Crayon) and anything with fiber I can find in the hopes of busting the clog before it busts me. So far, no go.