The Myth of American Constipation
the commune's Stu Umbrage gets too personal for us to back him up this week 

Monday, October 28, 2002
Jesus. It's as cold as Hillary Clinton's snatch out there. I know this happens every year, but Good God. Does it really? Like this?

Knock on wood and hopefully I'm not screwing myself here, but is constipation really the big national problem these TV commercials make it out to be? Who are these poor suckers who are getting so desperately plugged up on a regular basis? Granted, you go to the average steak house and the amount of fried batter on the appetizer platter alone is enough to mortar over the San Andreas Fault, but does anyone actually eat all of that crap? You'd think that a couple of heart attacks at the table while eating would be enough to convince the average person to ask for a doggie bag and maybe finish the meal tomorrow at the hospital, but I guess not.

Maybe I'm more of a rarity than I like to think, but I have to admit that just like that Drew Barrymore movie, I've Never Been Constipated. Sure, I've had a few slow days at the lumber mill, as they say, but nothing a Burrito Supreme couldn't fix. And I'm not kidding, that Taco Bell "meat" will clean you out like a fire sale. If you need any kind of medication beyond that, I swear, you must have a prairie dog gummed up in the works down there or something.

Now okay, I have to admit, this isn't all entirely true. I did get constipated once. One time, back in the fifth grade. It was some kind of craft project day at school like we used to have back then. I guess that meant the teacher had a hangover or just that the new issue of Guns & Ammo had come in. Whatever it was, we were spending the day gluing these Styrofoam cups together, and glue-sticking glitter flakes and candies and whatever junk we found on the floor to them to make these bullshit pretend Faberge eggs. You know, the kind of thing a hung over gun freak would think was educational.

Anyway, I had just finished gluing one of these lame things together when Mikey Davidson turns to me, I remember it like it was yesterday, and he says "Hey, did you guys know that if you eat Styrofoam you'll get constipated?" Now, in retrospect, I really have to wonder where in the hell he got that information from or why he brought it up in the first place, but in my eleven-year-old mind all I heard was some paunchy little blowhard talking out of his ass to try to impress everybody, and I wasn't going to stand for it. I called his bluff, and just to prove he was an asshole I ate a whole Styrofoam cup right there, on the spot.

The guys all thought this was great, either that or I scared them and they bluffed it until I was gone, whatever. The important part was that I'd shown up Mikey, and he'd think twice the next time he got the urge to try and bullshit his way into momentary popularity.

As a small sidenote to this story, I was horribly constipated for about a week after that. So a word to the wise: don't eat any Styrofoam unless you want to burst a blood vessel in your eye trying to get your conga line moving. Christ.

The Dating Game: Ages 10 and Up
When you think about it, once we started demanding that everybody should look like ten year-old girls with abnormally accelerated breast development, it was only a matter of time before people would start hacking out their ribs and having botulism injected into their faces and eating seaweed.

Spare Me the Summer Love
Give me a break, you hit a kangaroo with your jeep and a couple of bullion cubes rubbed on its ass qualify the whole damn thing as “beef flavored” as far as the law is concerned. It’s a shady business to the core.

Chug a Lung
They say that writing angry letters to people and them burning them is good therapy. Now, if I understand that line of reasoning, then blowing up a scale-model of someone’s house has got to be even better. Hypothetically, anyway.

Lube the Tuber
Few things are more unsettling than waking up in the middle of the night and finding yourself floating naked in the middle of outer space, like the baby at the end of 2001. The movie, not the year.

Herman’s Hermits: Your Dad’s Got Crabs, Eddie
You ever notice how, in a noisy environment, the number 406 sounds just like “oral sex”? In other news, I think the drive-up ATM is going to have to satisfy all of my banking needs for a while.