sh*t temple

I don't know when I started flushing public toilets with my feet and worrying about my toothbrush getting blasted with shitspecks in the bathroom but I do both of these things now. I plunge the toilet when necessary but don't enjoy it and I sort of want to shower afterwards (shitspecks). I don't think I'm a germaphobe because I ride the subway and fly in planes without surgical masks and gloves though I feel a little bio-hazardous until I wash my hands.

Don't get me started on people who let their cats climb on the kitchen counter and hop in bed with cat shit hanging off their bottomholes. Just, no. So it's pretty unlikely that someone was able to talk me into getting a colonic AKA colon hydrotherapy AKA colonic irrigation. I GOT MY ASS IRRIGATED. I don't even like passing gas around friends; how was I to make that transition to hopping up half naked on a table to stick a tube up my butt and let a stranger fill me up with water so that she could massage my belly and push my shit out? An make little comments how how it looked? Hm?

Yeah. Here's the thing. I imagined that someone would tell me, or at worst show me, how to place the tube in my booty and then leave me alone. I would be in a room by myself, privately emptying my bowels to some sort of soothing and ambient background noise, something aquatic involving waves or burbling rivers or dolphins. I really didn't expect that I would be simultaneously trying to hold up my end of chit chat while also concentrating very hard on not taking a big dump all over this person I just met. I know that's not supposed to happen but they put a square of paper padding under your rear end so, whatever, you know there's potential there.

I played along but at some point I was like, "ALRIGHT, enough of this get to know you routine, you've seen my butthole like three times now."This may have been when my hydrotherapist noticed I was staring very intently and silently at the digestive system poster on the wall.

"Does the machine bother you?" she asked, pointing to the clear tube where a turd of mine was floating past.

"No," I lied.

"Most people can't take their eyes off it," she shared.

Which I thought was just another example of how Seattle can be so lovely, yet get on my last nerve so easily. But something happened by the end of my session. I'd experienced a bunch of stages: nervous sleeplessness the night before, apprehension that I wasn't hydrated enough and I shouldn't have drank 6 pints of Manny's Pale Ale and sullen pouting over waking up at 7am to go do THIS. Right before my appointment, in the Tummy Temple lobby, amongst the Buddha statues and Tibetan prayer flags and "quiet zone" signs, I shared a crazed, uncontrollable, snorting fit of laughter with the person I'd gone there with, another first timer. He actually laughed so hard, he cried, and forbade me from looking at him.

In perhaps the last ten minutes of my colonic, however, I started feeling less horrified by the situation. Maybe it helped that there was less pressure in my shitless belly. I felt nice and empty, if a little overexposed, and I was getting used to the idea that the girl sitting next to me, the one who seemed so happy for me, was just doing her job and is really used to this shit.

Here's what another person thought.