My Mom has been experiencing an intestinal block. In other words, she’s backed up. In other words, she’s constipated. In other works, she is having trouble shitting. In other words, she is having difficulties pushing the unnecessary waste from her body, so it is sort of stuck there, like a person in a dead-end, un-motivating job that can’t quit because they have a family to support, a mortgage to pay, and very few marketable skills outside of masturbation. I told her that I wish I could donate some of my shitting to her. If only charity worked that way. Maybe in the future.
My Mom called me up because our roles have switched. She is the needy and I am the needed. Also, she was experiencing the pain of not shitting, which most of us can’t relate to, just like we can’t relate to a person who has seen combat in Iraq, or someone who has fucked a sleeping tiger with dressed as Mary Poppins. I was once constipated when I was just a little boy. I remember it being painful, like feeling like there is a brick of shit sitting in my body wanting to explode, but for some reason giving the bird to its usual exit, AKA the asshole.
I had just finished eating diarrhea-provoking spicy chicken wings for lunch, being the fat fuck that doesn’t respect my own body that I am, and was driving home. I felt a vibration in my pocket, reached into it and answered my iPhone.
Me: [Looking in the rearview mirror, noticing the chicken wing sauce on my face and shaking my head in disbelief of what a sloppy fat ass I’ve become] Hi Mom.
Mom: Dan, I’m up in the hospital, the Huntsman Cancer one. I can’t shit.
Me: Fuck, I’m having the opposite problem.
Mom: Can you run home and get my Fentanyl patches? They’re in a box on the second shelf of my medicine cabinet. They’re on the right side I think. Sort of a colored pack, like a red or a green.
Me: I’ll be right up.
Fentanyl is a powerful drug. So powerful that the Huntsman Cancer Institute doesn’t carry it on a regular basis. They say that it’s 100 times more powerful than morphine and that they worry about people breaking into their pharmacy to steal it because it’s such an intense pain reliever. My Mom uses it because of the pain cancer has caused on her body, having had it for nearly two decades and all. Plus, it helps her num the pain of life and loss and the rest of the bullshit that comes with being born.
I hurried home and ran upstairs, stopping only twice: once to finish off a box of Snyder’s of Hanover Sourdough Hard Pretzels, and once to shit out some of the aforementioned chicken wings, an act that I’m sure my Mom would have been jealous of, even angry, sort of a showing off, a rubbing it in, a “Haha, you can’t shit, but I can, even while running errands on your behalf.” I opened her immense medicine cabinet, which would make any pharmacy owner feel like they aren’t carrying enough in stock. I scrambled around for a bit, my Mom’s vague directions bouncing around in my head. I spotted the second shelf up, grabbed the first two big, green boxes I could find and stuck them in a grocery sack.
I took one more shit and then drove up to the Huntsman Cancer Institute as fast as the Salt Lake City roads would allow me to without risking the proverbial slap on the wrist we all occasionally receive to remind us of the rules that help our society function with relative order.
I found my frantic Mom in one of the clinic rooms, room #8 for all you mathematicians. My Mom was wrapped in blankets and had a concerned look on her face, you know, the kind one has after not taking a shit for a very long time.
“Oh thank god you’re here,” my Mom said, snatching the sack from my hands in a way that would imply that there were patches inside containing a drug 100 times more powerful than morphine.
She looked inside and began to cry. “These aren’t it. Fuck. You fucked up. I know you didn’t mean to. But these aren’t it. What the fuck am I going to do? I said the red box, not the green. You fucked up.”
“You said to grab the two boxes on the second shelf, either red or green, right?” I asked, defending myself.
“You grabbed the wrong box. I wanted to Fentanyl patches,” she explained. “I called your phone, but you didn’t answer.”
I just got the new iPhone, in case you haven’t heard, and I’ve spent so much time jokingly bragging about it and carrying on about how much cooler I am than everyone else, even people who have owned an iPhone for years and been laid recently, that I haven’t learned some of the basic features, like getting it to ring instead of vibrate. I have watched porn on it though.
“Well, I have it on vibrate, so I didn’t feel it. It was just in my pocket,” I said.
My Mom angrily tossed the two non-Fentanyl patch boxes back at me and said, “Maybe if you tie your iPhone around your dick you’ll feel it next time.”
I ran home and got the right boxes, the red ones with the lethal pain killers inside, but still haven’t figured out a way to tie my new iPhone around my dick to I can tell when someone calls. Though once I do, I’m sure I’ll look even cooler.