EXCERPT FROM "NOT EVERYONE POOPS"

CHAPTER 4

SCIENCE

I don’t know how to cook. I don’t know how to bake. Nor do I have the slightest idea how to fry anything. I burn soup. I evaporate water. I eat soup straight from the can. I cook my pizzas in the microwave. I can, however, make sandwiches and cereal.

It’s not that I don’t want to know it’s that it just never clicked inside this little brain of mine. They say baking is a science and I did poorly in science. Can I blame it on that? Or the fact that cooking wasn’t an event at home? Food and eating were just something that had to be done and however it happened was not questioned as long as something edible landed on the table.

Dad was the chef of the family so when Mom took on the task it consisted of Mac and Cheese with Spam or if we were lucky, Spaghetti. By then she was a single mother working 3 jobs. Mostly we were left to fend for ourselves. So I ate chocolate bars, sticks of butter with sugar on it, boxes of popsicles, and Banquet meals.

As I got older I tried to branch out but I found cooking to be tedious and time consuming. I couldn’t wait for the water to boil or the chicken to thaw or fry or whatever it does. I had a life to live. And I would live that life while the soup was burning on the stove because life doesn’t stop for baking or cooking--whatever. So why wait for the food?

Fast food was the cure. For the disease I call cooking. Even grocery stores sell ready to eat fried chicken and mashed potatoes with yummy gravy and coleslaw. Can you tell I’m getting hungry? Toss it all down with a Coke—eat a cream filled Long John for breakfast and that’s food for the day. Of course a candy bar here and there didn’t hurt. Once I could drive and had a job, the options for quick and tasty food were endless. And I hit every single one.

What is the big deal? At the time I didn’t know. I was a kid. Heck even now I don’t fully understand my situation. But I feel the weight of the situation. Every day I feel the ramifications of the choices I made as a child but I still don’t understand the why or, even more honestly, the how.

I don’t know how to change it. They’ve told me why I became what I became in the broadest of medical terms and thinking back on what happens next, I see that they could be right. But yet, I don’t understand how I am wrong.

To make the situation more confusing, I’m not overweight. So it was hard for anyone to pinpoint a problem. To see the war that was brewing on the inside. The only telltale clue was my deeply grooved dark circles. But this wasn’t a time of holistic healing. It was a time of immediate correlation. Dark circles belong to genetics or sleep deprivation; end of the road.

And that’s exactly what happened. The end of the road. And then I fell off into poop oblivion. I tumbled down the rabbit hole of puke buckets named George and eating baby food to survive, of talking to my stomach like it’s another entity and sobbing on the bathroom floor because I hate my life. I have blamed myself. Blamed my mother. Blamed doctors. Blamed a God I’m not sure I believe in.  

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. No one does. They all have their theories, their opinions and ideas of how to fix it, but nothing works.

Not everyone poops Taro Gomi. I don’t. I don’t poop. And I won’t let your book treat me like I don’t matter, like I don’t exist. I do matter. And my story matters. To someone. Out there. I hope. And if not, well, I matter to me. Rotting food and all.