I couldn’t get a job because I couldn’t go to school, and I couldn’t go to school because I didn’t know how to piss into a toilet. I reeked of my own piss. Mother would make me bubble baths, but it wasn’t too comfortable because the bath couldn’t have been more than four feet long. While I sat there hunched in it I would piss, and the water would turn green as the baby blue bubbles mixed with the urine. I was not purging myself. I was indulging. I took a shit in the bath once because it seemed okay.

Toilet training took several years. Every day I would sit on the toilet for hours on end, waiting to piss or shit. My older sister would sit reading me Nancy Drew. The bathroom wasn’t big enough for both of us. Although she has always been very modestly sized, I was six feet tall.

I would think about death as I waited to excrete. After I had sunk deep into a daydream I would finally feel my bowels move and begin to piss. It was around that time that I learned the phrase “worth the wait.” Sometimes I would shit and sometimes I was unable to shit. I loved diarrhea, though. I still love it to this day. It is one of my main outlets for meditation.