Going Down with the Brown

As you read these words, millions of people are purging fecal matter into or onto toilets, holes, ditches, bogs, quicksand, oceans, Honda Civics, sinks, urinals, troughs, wooded areas, grass, dumpsters, trash cans, statues of the Virgin Mary, nostrils, mouths, armpits, feet, vaginas, penises, someone else’s butthole, pets, cheese, and whatever else you could think of. Add animal dung into the mix, and it’s obvious that we are in the throes of a serious excrement epidemic that you may not be aware of. So allow me to inform you: One day—and it could very well be someday soon—we will experience a global sewage backup so severe that a turd tsunami will devastate the world over, literally laying waste to every village and metropolis in its path. Rivers of poop will submerge islands and rise up hundreds of feet, eventually cracking the windows of the penthouse apartments of the last survivors until they slowly drown in a foyer full of diarrhea. Don’t believe it? Well, brothers and sisters, have I got news for you. Crap has already declared war, and it’s winning. Behold just a few of the innumerable examples of how shit can kill.

WORMS FROM RACCOON TURDS

Raccoon poo typically contains millions of roundworm eggs per pellet. If the parasites happen to enter the guts of a human, they will make a beeline to the brain, lay more eggs, and cause nerve damage and death as they squirm through synapses. Raccoons instinctively construct “latrines” where the digger and his or her friends do their business, and these stool depositories tend to be located underneath decks, on roofs, and in garages. These concentrated packages of fecal poison are scattered all over suburban North America, left by furry, ring-tailed terrorists. Those with young children who will stick anything in their mouths should take heed: Be very careful and wear gloves and protective masks when cleaning up raccoon droppings. One small oversight and Junior could end up with a skull full of worms. This is shit’s plan to destroy our babies from the inside out. I encourage you to take up arms and wipe away doo-doo wherever it may cross your path.

TORRENTS OF HORSESHIT

A horse produces 15 to 35 pounds of road apples a day. Before automobiles, cities like New York had more than 100,000 horses hauling people and cargo from place to place, which equates to at least 750 tons of feces dropped every 24 hours. According to the 1997 book

The Making of Urban America

, “The manure was everywhere, along the roadway, heaped in piles or next to stables, or ground up by the traffic and blown about by the wind.” New York dealt with these unseemly piles by licensing “dirt carters” to haul the shit to designated dumps, which would attract flies and odors for months and sometimes years. After it rained, the filth would pool in rivulets and puddles throughout the streets. Even worse, the city had to deal with a surplus of horse corpses in addition to their shit and often dumped the bodies in nearby rivers. What’s more, thousands of people died from feces-related diseases every year. So the next time someone bitches about the “evil of oil,” remind him or her of yesteryear and that the internal combustion engine was one of humanity’s greatest victories in the Great Excreta War.

RECTOVAGINAL FISTULAS

Perhaps the most devastating feces-related ailment, a rectovaginal fistula is what happens when the tissue between a woman’s vagina and rectum dies and results in a giant flesh crater that is extremely prone to deadly infection. Thankfully, fistulas are practically unheard of in the West. The condition is far more common in developing countries in Africa and South America where medical care is scant to nonexistent. Fistulas are usually caused by gang rapes or particularly grueling childbirths and can lead to kidney disease, nerve damage to the legs that leaves the victim unable to walk, and, in some cases, death. Women are often too ashamed or ostracized to seek help, and there are reports of females enduring fistulas for 40 years in painful silence.

DEATH FROM CONSTIPATION

Everyone knows Elvis died on the crapper, but less publicized is the fact that he suffered from one of the worst recorded cases of chronic constipation in medical history. This was probably due to his twilight-years diet of deep-fried bacon cheeseburgers, cheese grits smothered in gravy, and taffy. By the time of his death, Elvis’s colon was so full of hunks of burning love that it was more than twice its normal size. In a book published in 2010, Dr. George Nichopoulos, Elvis’s personal caretaker, went so far as to say it was constipation—not barbiturates—that killed the King.

SEPTIC SHOCK

Prison inmates sometimes go a little bit nuts from boredom and isolation and start playing with their own excrement like an infant who finger-paints with his dookie on his parents’ solid-oak coffee table. Case in point: In 2009, a prisoner in Arkansas smeared shit all over his body in what we can only imagine was a cry for attention. The guards ignored the shit-smearer for an entire weekend, allowing him to lose consciousness, lapse into a coma, and almost die from septic shock. John Glasscock, the guard blamed for the incident, was also known for getting lap dances while on duty and accepting stolen Hot Pockets as bribes, which just goes to prove the old adage, “People who eat Hot Pockets have no problem leaving others to die in a pile of their own caca.”

PIGEON POOP PULVERIZER

On December 7, 2007, Craig Taylor of Balgowlah, Australia—like you, someone unafraid and even unaware of fecal death—took shelter from a rainstorm under a store’s awning. Unfortunately, pigeons had been nesting there for a long time; in fact, the overhang was so laden with bird droppings that the rain caused it to collapse right on top of poor Craig and crush him. His death, however, was not in vain: Three years later, a coroner’s inquest ruled “the issue of awning safety is pressing and requires that immediate notice be given to local councils across the state.”