Dave T’s Pros and Cons of Stuff Everyone Has: Poops

Eat some food. Any kind of food you like. Wash it down with some water. Wait. Feel that sensation in your butthole that says “There are occupants in here that wish to evacuate your premises?” Go to a bathroom. Close the door behind you. Drop your pants and underpants. Sit on the toilet. Push down with your stomach while concentrating on your butthole. Stuff will come out. Stand up and behold the brown snake in the bowl (or the black snake, or the yellow thin snake, or the broken up water bits of unsnakeliness).

This is POOPS

Don’t know what they are?

Poops are the waste products that your body doesn’t need from the food you ingest. Your body is kind enough to package these wastes into manageable “no-thanks sausages” that you can push out and dispose of.

Every living thing poops, it’s one of the eight life functions that all organic matter have in common: excretion, or waste-disposal. But not all organisms dispose of waste like we do, in turd form. For the purposes of this article, I’m limiting the discussion to turd-poops.

My question is: why do poops have to be smelly brown turd things that come out of our rumpholes at the most inopportune of times?

You may say they are brown because of bilirubin, a pigment caused by the breakdown of red blood cells in our bone marrow and liver.

You may say they smell because they are partly composed of bacteria that produce sulfur-rich organic compounds.

And I’d say don’t be so literal. Think outside the box. Why couldn’t poops be fun things that smell great and can be used as bookends and paper weights?

Pros:

• Pooping gives people time to think, time to relax. It gives my brother time to read.

• Without poops, what would we put in brown bags and place on the steps of people we hate and set on fire and run away from after ringing the doorbell?

• Horse poops are a cheap source of fertilizer. In fact, poops are apparently the best fertilizer around. And even human poops can be used as fertilizer. Not kidding. They call it “night soil.” They do this in India, and they do it in Disneyworld. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Also, start a death metal band called Night Soil and I will come to all of your concerts.

• Without poops, what would monkeys throw to express their anger? Rocks. That’s what they’d throw. And I’d rather have to wash off the stink of monkey poops than go to the hospital for a concussion caused by what EMT’s would start calling “monkey bullets.”

• Poops make for big business: toilets, bidets, toilet paper, matches, air fresheners, Preparation H, Immodium, prune juice, diapers, septic tank workers, the manure industry, pooper-scoopers, novelty fake poop, etc.

• Poops have given us the all-purpose adjective “shitty,” and I wouldn’t want to lose it. Not having it in my vocabulary would be pretty… shitty.

• Poops jokes can be really funny. Some thirty-year-old bloggers rely heavily on them to get a laugh.

• Without poops, our bodies would retain all of the food we eat, and we’d all be shaped like giant Weebles. We'd only get rid of what we sweat out, pee out, or burn off through exercise, which means we'd get to eat a lot less often than we do now.

• Potty training little kids is cute.

Total Pros: 9

Cons:

• Stepping in wet smushy poops that are nearly impossible to fully clean off your shoe is the pits.

• All the time we spend pooping could be better spent doing other things, like alphabetizing our books-on-tape or vlogging about last night’s episode of The Hills.

• Without poops, you could safely eat just about anything that looked like poop and know it was definitely chocolate or something else edible and reasonably delicious.

• No poops means no pooping your pants at an inopportune time. Not that there’s an opportune time to poop your pants. (The obvious exceptions being entering a Poop Your Pants Contest or trying to end a date that's not going well.)

• Dogs eat poop and then they lick your face. Whoever said “A dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human's” must not have heard about this.

• Sometimes just smelling poop can make you throw up. And now there’s poop and vomit in the same vicinity.

• Some poops burn when they come out. Some poops hurt because they’re big and dry. Diarrhea. Constipation. Hemorrhoids. Poop turning to poison in your body if you can’t poop it out for one reason or another. These all suck.

• Two girls, one cup. That video has all but ruined soft-serve for me. (To anyone who doesn’t know what the video is: don’t Google it, ever [especially if you’re at work]. It’s disgusting.)

• A bird pooping on you sucks. And I bet the person who first said it was good luck is the same person who said a dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human’s. It’s not good luck. It’s bad luck. Instead of saying, “Hey, it really blows that there was a torrential downpour on your wedding day,” we tell people it’s good luck for their marriage. People try to trick us with glaring lies and we buy into it because it makes us feel better. “Hey, when a crow pecks your eyes out, it means you’re gonna have a good summer.” “Oh, cool. Then I guess things are looking better for me. I can't really be sure, though, on account of my lack of eyes.”

Total Cons: 9

So, 9 pros, 9 cons. Even if there had been a few more pros than cons, I was more than ready to give up no-thanks sausages. So, all things being equal, it’s bye-bye poops. I’ll have to start making jokes about pukes or something.

Til next time, Ciao!

Dave T

Dave Terruso is half of the sketch comedy duo Animosity Pierre.