Poop in a Box
Jenn had to poop in a box last week. The box came from a company called Cologuard that does cancer screenings. I’ve had cancer twice, but it’s still wild to me that there’s such a thing as an at-home cancer test, especially one involving pooping in a box.
Here’s how it works: The box comes in the mail. You poop in it. Once you have finished the pooping, you put the box on the front porch. Someone from UPS wearing a shit-brown uniform comes and picks up your poopbox. The UPS guy then takes it to a lab where a lab tech opens your poopbox and checks your poops for butt cancer.
Which is embarrassing, right? Also, it was 102 degrees the day the UPS guy picked up the poop. I don’t know why you need to know this but it feels like a salient detail because now you’re imagining odors, aren’t you?
So on a scale from one to butt cancer, pooping in a box is somewhere around taking a road trip with donald trump. It’s shitty and stinky and no one wants to have to deal with it any longer than they have to, and they definitely don’t want to do it every year.
But last year Jenn had to take the box to the UPS store. She had to walk in carrying a box of her own poop. Jenn can be embarrassed easily, and my heart hurt for her, thinking of her holding her little poopbox and handing it to the guy. She has given me permission to post this, but only because she is a good sport, and she loves me and also over the years she’s taught a lot of children that everybody poops (and that’s ok).
“Did you say anything to him?” I asked, later, after thinking about the whole situation, trying to decide if I’m more of a “leave the poopbox on the front porch” kind of a guy or a “take it to the UPS store” type person.
“Like what would I have said?” Jenn asked. “‘Here’s my poop box’?”
She makes a good point. What do you say to the person who handles your poopbox? Do they know there’s poop in the box? The Cologuard symbol is on the box, so they must know, which begs the next question: do they wash their hands after touching said box? Or do they remain professional and say “We’ll get this right out!” like they used to when I was dropping off my sad short stories at the post office in 2002.
And if you happen to see the UPS person when they are picking it up off your front porch—what do you say to them? Is “Thank you” sufficient? Do you leave a tip, taped to the poopbox?
It’s a baffling world we live in, friends.
Jenn chose the poop in a box route because it keeps her from having to get a colonoscopy. As someone who has had several colonoscopies, let me say that she made the right choice. I would poop in a box every day if it meant I never had to have a colonoscopy again.
It’s not the colonoscopy itself that’s the problem. I was out cold for the colonoscopy. They put a mask over your face and tell you to breathe deep. When you wake up later the. . .excavation is completed. The exploration is over.
It’s the preparation that’s the problem. They give you a jug of liquified chalk and make you drink it. This is at home, 24 hours before the procedure, when you have to start emptying yourself of everything. And I mean everything.
An hour or so after drinking the chalk you start the pooping. The pooping goes on for a while, long after there is anything left to poop out. Toward the end you are just basically peeing out of your butt, please forgive me for writing that sentence, I’m going to wash my hands now and maybe throw up a little in my mouth.
It’s not fun, is what I’m telling you. You start dobbing instead of wiping. You get rim rings around your butt from the toilet seat, elbow indentions in your pale and shaking thighs. This continues all through the night.
Luckily, all three of my colonoscopies showed no cancer. The first one showed diverticulitis, and during that whole hospitalization in 2016 I accidentally shit in my hospital bed and had to ask a nurse to help me, and there’s another sentence I really shouldn’t have written, another story I should have kept to myself.
But nurses deal with literal shit like that all the time, so she was kind while cleaning up my accident. Meanwhile, my attempt to die of embarrassment did not come to fruition, and I survived to write this essay, many years and many poops later.
Hallelujah.
In Barrow, Alaska, a guy will come around and pick up your bucket of poop. There’s no running water in most of the town, so they employ buckets. You sit on a bucket and do your business. Actually, everyone in the house—sometimes extended families—does their business in the bucket.
When the bucket is full, you call a guy to come get it. Or maybe he comes at a certain time each week, but that seems inefficient. What if it was a busy week? What if you had eaten a lot of Mexican food?
I also don’t know if you leave the bucket on the front porch or if the guy comes to the front door. Maybe you leave it out by the road like it’s trash? Maybe they empty the bucket and turn it upside-down so you know it’s safe to come out and get your shit bucket, which makes me wonder if that’s a chore the children have to do. I bet the kids get in fights over who has to go get the shit bucket. I bet Dad gets to use the shit bucket first in the morning, because that’s how men are.
It is possible I spend too much time thinking about shit.
One of my subscribers—shoutout to Elizabeth F.—sent me this video link last week:
This is the “Paul Poop” song, and it’s two minutes and twelve seconds of a guy singing the words “Paul” and “Poop” over and over in slightly different ways.
You cannot imagine how hard I laughed listening to it. It struck the perfect chord of irreverence and potty humor that I so love. Jenn calls me “8th grade Paul” when I find such things funny, because she knew me in 8th grade and, like most 8th grade boys, I found a lot of things funny. I think I knew even then the world was full of shit—I just didn’t have the words yet to articulate it.
Elizabeth sent me the link because I eventually did find the words to articulate my thoughts about shit. I have posted several of these poop stories on Substack. It’s even in my bio:
There’s this one about a father who shit his pants the day I chaperoned my daughter’s 3rd grade field trip—he was a chaperone as well, and his white shorts were a poor choice for what happened later in the day. https://paulcrenshaw.substack.com/p/field-trip
There’s this one about my brother and me chasing each other with dog poop when we were kids: https://paulcrenshaw.substack.com/p/a-little-levity
There’s this one about an unfortunate encounter walking home from the bar one night: https://paulcrenshaw.substack.com/p/some-funny-shit
And there’s this one about a shitty Christmas (literally): https://paulcrenshaw.substack.com/p/a-christmas-movement-an-essay
(I removed the paywall from all of these.)
Now that I see the evidence of my obsessions stacked before me, let me defend myself by saying that I write about poop because as a society we’re embarrassed to talk about our insides. I find pooping in a box funny because we’re so ashamed of our bodies that we try to hide what they do. We install sprays and scent dispensers. We invent things like Poo-Pouri. Some public restrooms play music so people can’t hear the flush, as if it’s the sound that’s the problem, not the smell.
I don’t know why we do all this shit, but we do. We do everything we can to mask our unpleasantnesses, our aromas and odors, our ejaculations and excrements. We try so hard to pretend we’re cool and then we turn 50 and have to shit in a box.
It all comes crashing down after that, friends. Your carefully constructed image of yourself, the way you walk around in this world. Let’s say the fabric of reality comes a bit undone, once you’ve pooped in a box and mailed it to a medical professional, or had your ass mined for cancer.
Life seems a little more absurd after something like that. Which is the way I like it, because the world is too fucked up to be taken seriously. We shit all over the planet and yet we’re embarrassed of a little poop? I mean, it’s in a box—how bad can it be?
And the pooper? Think of the power the person who poops in a box has now. That person can handle anything after such an ordeal. That person can walk through a field of poop and come out unsmeared. They can fall into an outhouse on burrito night and still smell like roses.
So I believe everyone should have to carry around a box of their own shit for a few days. On the bus or beside you in the car on your commute. In the drive-thru getting cheese-tots. Your little poopbox on the bedside table late at night.
Think of the humility we would all learn. The kindness we would give each other, knowing we’re all carrying around a bunch of shit that could, at any time, become cancerous. That could turn ugly inside us or turn us ugly inside.
We won’t allow it, however, those of us who’ve pooped in a box. We’ll hold our heads high. We’ll stand unashamed.
And when the mailman comes to pick up our poopbox we’ll look him in the eye and say, “Here. I made this just for you.”
**Welcome to all the new subscribers I got this week. I will understand if you now turn around and leave. <3
Ok, Paul. I am dying. As a nurse, poop is something you sort of end up with a specialty in. A phD in poop sort of thing. Always go sit by a nurse if you want to talk about poop. My mom was a nurse too. She said when patients couldn’t poop in the hospital, and they’d need an endless source of help in that area, when they’d finally go, they’d check out their work and say, “How’d I do?” And my dear sweet mom would say, “Oh, it’s a real Kodak moment! Too bad I forgot my camera.” This was so goddamn fucking funny! Thank you for writing it!!
So, so funny. As always, you make me laugh and cry. I was on a study abroad program 40 years ago, traveling with 30+ students and a professor and her family as chaperones. We spent a month in each of Egypt, India, Taiwan, and Japan, with 1-week stops in Rome, Israel, and Nepal, as well as Thailand. Poop became the focus of our lives for so many reasons. When someone had a "problem," we all knew it. Because, how could you not? If someone was all clear, they would raise a fist, as in solid. If not, well, enough said. I have never thought so much about poop until I read your piece.