“This too, shall pass.”
Oh shit, did I just come up with the perfect motivational poster for bathrooms?!?
Previously on NSSMOTDF, Act 2: What’s Up Doc?…
“S’pose I better double-check and make sure that there isn’t anything more serious at play here, like, say, a tumor…”
*snaps glove a bit too enthusiastically*
Doctor about to perform a ThoroughDigitalAnalog exam
Act III: Following In His Footsteps
To put it succinctly, the week around Labor Day 2019 was a rather emotionally intense time for me. Everybody’s Favorite Blog had just gone live, and I was grappling with my impending internet fame (or lack thereof) which is quite a trip when you lean heavy to the introvert side of the social spectrum.
Trying to get my mother on a plane to California for her granddaughter’s once-in-a-lifetime event was such an utter and complete clusterfuck that that fiasco warrants a 3-part series on its own. For today’s purposes, you just need to get the drift that it was pretty ----- stressful.
And then the icing on the cake was that just about everyone in our household caught a fun-times virus that would make you vomit exactly every 30 minutes for exactly 8 non-stop hours. Did I mention we have 2 young children in our household?
But something much deeper than all these “This too, shall pass” type of worries was a’brewing…
Deeper in my bowels, that is!
To spare all y’all the glorious details, suffice it to say that my body must have decided to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the original No-Shit Sherlock saga that you recently read about,1Just in case you hadn’t click here for Act 1 and here for Act 2. and I found myself with some seemingly inexplicable digestive “irregularities.”
Typically such [fecal] matters wouldn’t be such a drain on one’s spirit, but I had some reasons to strongly suspect that some non-pooping related organs might be physically interfering with me taking care of normal human business, per se.
To understand the danger this thought posed to my emotional well-being, it is critical to remember that that Labor Day portended the 12th anniversary of my father’s passing.2As I recently alluded to in the Racist Ventriloquist and Dying Rancher posts. While he ultimately succumbed to a combination of pneumonia and lung cancer, the first step towards his relatively early demise had all begun years earlier when he he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
If you’ve lost a close loved one, it is not uncommon to find yourself in an existential funk every year when the season of their passing rolls around on the calendar. Not one to ever be an exception, I was already in that frame of mind before all this shit started happening–or not happening, as the case was.
So, with the inevitable fate faced by every member of humanity already simmering somewhere in the back of my mind, you can only imagine where my train of logic raced off to once the idea popped into my head that I might literally be following in my father’s footsteps towards Death’s door.
Making this all even more intense was that I found myself wrestling with my own mortality all alone, on account of the Boss Lady never really having liked my regular3Yes, that was indeed a bowel movement-themed pun. attempts to discuss my, um…”solid waste management” throughout the course of our marriage. You know, that makes it kinda hard to have a heartfelt conversation when “I can’t poop” is a critical plot point leading up to the denouncement of “I think I might be ----- dying” and all.
You don’t know how many September evenings I just laid next to my dozing-off-to-sleep daughters, hugging them tight with a tear in my eye, wondering if I was destined to haunt them with the smell of my farts.
Oh, you may think I’m joking, but I swear that I’ve smelled the Ghost of Bob J. in the bathroom with me on multiple occasions. I know it’s not the point of the story, but I can’t help but wonder if phantom flatulence runs in the family…
“Well…so did you die or not?” you may be muttering to your computer screen right now. “DON’T LEAVE ME HANGING LIKE A CHAD!” you are indubitably screaming right now, out loud and/or in your head.
Welp, you’re just going to have to tune in next week (or, if you’re from the future, click here) to find out whether or not I’ve actually figured out how to blog from the Great Beyond…
Content created on: 23 September 2020 (Wednesday)
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