There are some things people just don’t like to talk about.
No matter how close a friend or significant other, poop perpetually exists as taboo, reserved for only medical emergencies (or kinky sex? Let’s not go there). If it exists at all.
When a group travels beyond the realm of bacterial familiarity, into a land where gastrointestinal integrity is no longer taken for granted, a special bond is formed.
Anyone who has traveled to a distant land can attest to the magic that is travelers talking about their GI lives. At home, people talk about work lives, sex lives; but in Mongolia, we had whole soap-operas worth of material and drama pertaining to nothing more than diarrhea and its many relatives.
A: Hey Kevin, how was your day?
K: Good, but I haven’t shat in 3 days! I’m gonna go try now…
A: Damn! Well, good luck! Give ’em hell!
[10 minutes later]
A: Well?
K: Great success!!
A: Hallelujah!
Such a situation was quite plausible, if not normal. This extreme take on a traditionally sensitive subject (flexibility borne of necessity and increasing familiarity with said subject’s less desirable territories) exposes the opposite extreme in which we are perpetually trapped back in the 1st world. Sure, once a healthy rhythm is established, and things stop being interesting, it fades from view…
Ha! I like how you’re going where other people won’t in your writing. This is hilarious and very true.
😀