Unemployment Benefits: The AM BM

I work freelance in film and television as a production assistant. As such, I tend to spend vast swaths of the year (8 weeks or so) gainfully unemployed. Since I’m not drawing a paycheck during these times, it’s best to take what solace I can from the free time it affords me.

I am a morning shitter. My best dumps are routinely taken about an hour after I get out of bed, after my first cigarette and between my first and second cups of coffee. They are generally large deposits, made quickly and healthily.

Unemployment grants me the freedom to take my morning constitutional in the privacy and comfort of my own home. The importance and joy of this occasion cannot be spoken of highly enough. While on a set, such business is relegated to confines of porta-Johns, cramped stalls at the back of a trailer, or in the hustle and bustle of studio restrooms that see more traffic than the 101 at rush hour. Out of necessity I have overcome any public shit shame I may have had, but I believe that defecating, particularly at the start of one’s day, is akin to meditation or a morning prayer, and best done in solitude.

At home, in the quiet, friendly confines of our cozy lavatory, I can relax. The deuces dropped in public restrooms tend to be hurried affairs, messy and unkempt, unlike their much more solid and comely home-brewed brethren. They are hopelessly interrupted by squawks on the radio, noises from the next stall, or the knowledge that that one annoying grip saw me enter the stall, and if I don’t hold it in until he leaves, he will share with the crew that, yes as a matter of fact, something did crawl up my ass and die. There is no judgment in the privacy of one’s own water closet.

And what of reading material? At home, novels and subscriptions abound to pass the time till my legs go tingly. Out there, I have only my mobile phone’s occasionally tenuous connection to the internet to keep me entertained, and the erratic load times and data network availability do not jibe with the metronomic rhythms of my sphincter.

Ah, yes, the sphincter. During a good AM BM, the colon’s governor should be as lithe and powerful as a well-yogaed abdomen: firmly holding everything in place, yet flexible enough to allow one’s waste to pass unobstructed. When deprived of the tranquility required for a diurnal defecation, it is common to experience fits and starts in the anal region, as if somehow one’s ass has contracted anal-expressive Tourette syndrome.

Finally, at shit’s end, one is sadly forced to take potluck with the elements of post-excretal rites. I myself am a 2-ply man. I appreciate the dry familiar abrasion of well-constructed bathroom tissue against my soiled derriere (You can keep your moist wipes, thank you very much!). I simply cannot abide the shoddily crafted roughness or fragility of the single ply garbage so often found on the rolls of the public restroom. And, for the love of God, is warm water and a freshly stocked paper towel roll too much to ask for? The only thing worse than an unsatisfying crap is capping the trip to the crapper with cold hands that must be forced to drip-dry afterwards due to a lack of aforementioned drying material.

So it is with bated breath that I await these stretches of fiscal drought. For though I know my coffers may soon be empty, so will my bowels, and I will start my days feeling as clean and vacuous as the bowl I have just defiled.