A Regular Guy

I’ve recently started taking Metamucil, at the ripe old age of 31. I’m hoping to take it for the rest of my life.


Jerry Seinfeld once said that, “Since men can’t have babies, they’re automatically proud of everything else that comes out of their body.” Truer words have never been spoken; indeed, I’ve recently become aware that a circle of my friends have taken advantage of the unholy potentialities afforded by male scatology and camera phone ubiquity and started texting one another—how can I put this delicately?—pictures of their poo.

Now, the gentlemanly thing to do when one hears about such activities would probably be to politely nod, while tactfully declining to take part, and speaking no more of them.

I, of course, decided to participate.

It can be hard to resist such temptations; when one hasn’t done much in a day, one must seek the pride of accomplishment wherever one can find it, and it can indeed feel like an artistic triumph when one can produce, say, something shaped like a perfectly formed treble clef from the depths of one’s colon.

My “pieces” soon won accolades from friends, and I felt they compared favorably with the “artwork” I saw posted on ratemypoo.com—work that, frankly speaking, looked rather amateurish and derivative. But for a while, I felt like—how shall I say it?—a tortured artist. Sculpture’s not just about shape and form, but texture, and in these situations, part of the problem was that my productions often came out as—how should I describe it?—sticky baby poo. Also, my creations often simply took an inconveniently long time; once I had to take a cab to a first date because I spent a full twenty minute to bring my efforts to full fruition. When constipation starts to feel like writer’s block, something, literally, has to give.

For a while, I thought about colon cleanses, or enemas. The latter seemed a little invasive; still, I once heard a story where someone underwent one that brought forth a penny they’d swallowed as a child that had somehow gotten stuck in one of the folds of their large intestine. Though I never mustered up the moxie to undergo the procedure myself, this made it seem incredibly intriguing and strangely healthy. As for the first option, I eventually followed the suggestion of one of my friends and walked down the dark road of googling “colon cleanse” and clicking the “Images” link. I was intrigued by the volume and consistency of the productions I saw showcased there. Some seemed like reverse sculptures of the entire inside of a colon; they were incredibly long, and surprisingly stringy, and my friend suggested that these cleanses could remove, literally, pounds of impacted material that had spent decades inside one’s body. But most of these cleanses involved doing strange things like consuming nothing but maple syrup mixed with lemonade for weeks on end, and, frankly, people, I like to eat.

Then one day, another friend came and described how he’d embarked on a course of action that, he said, “changed his life forever.” He’d started taking Metamucil. In tones of hushed reverence, he related to me the incredible volume of material he’d been producing—a literal torrent of brown creativity. And he offered visual proof—a camera-phone photo of an early work he’d entitled “Alabama Black Snake.”

Needless to say, I couldn’t resist.

Within days, I was at Walgreens, making my initial purchase. (Orange-flavored Metamucil being, in case you didn’t know, the brainchild of Donald Rumsfeld, a legacy of his time heading G.D. Searle. This might seem strange, unless you think about the fact that he basically spent a large portion of his career helping people produce shitty messes. I digress.) Anyway, since I’ve tended towards overconsumption of various substances at different parts of my life, I, of course, indulged in these habits here as well. So I started consuming Metamucil the way I once consumed, say, Miller High Life or, once in a blue moon, Nyquil—with a liberal attitude towards normal amounts and recommended dosages and things of that sort.

And my artwork has flourished. (You’ll have to take my word for it, because I’m not posting pictures; blogging about it is fun, but even I have my limits.) I’ve produced creations such as “Dead Alien Baby” and “The Revolting Blob” and “Mother with Child” that, frankly, rank among my best work.

There are drawbacks; Metamucil gets thick and goey if you don’t drink it quickly enough, and it leaves chunks of residue in your drinking glasses. And you end up with enough mass moving through your digestive tract that you often can’t take in more without having to get rid of some shortly thereafter.

Still, I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Even though I’m basically using Metamucil for recreational purposes—for shits and giggles, as it were—it feels like a healthy indulgence. In recovery programs for other substances, one has to admit powerlessness and unmanageability. But with this, I feel powerful, and this area of my life has become very manageable indeed—more regular, and more pleasant, than it has been in quite some time.