You'll never see it coming

The thing about shitting yourself for the first time is that you never see it coming. Especially if happens to you when you're young. There you are, striding through life thinking you're invincible and nothing can stop you and the world is playing into your hand, and suddenly your bowels come in to remind that you're only human. It's humbling, really -- you'll see the first time it happens to you.

My first time would have made an excellent comedic scene in a romantic comedy, were it acceptable for a romantic comedy to contain graphic shots of flying shit. Allow me to explain -- I had just gotten off work when I identified that I needed to go. I was actually feeding a friend's cat at the time, and she lived about 15 minutes from where I was working, so I figured the easiest thing to do was go when I got there. After being in my car for a few minutes on the interstate, I realized that the situation was a little more dire than I had originally realized. I pulled off and tried to find a gas station, a McDonald's, anything that had a public bathroom, but for some reason I was not having any luck.

Getting back on the interstate, I was actually deep breathing and talking out loud to myself, because at this point I was in some physical pain as well as trying to deal with the inevitable. "Okay", I said to myself, " it is going to be fine. You are going to make it there. You will make it." A few more minutes passed and I realized that I was most definitely not going to make it. Something bad was going to happen. Taking a deep breath, I said "Okay, this is going to happen. You just have to let it happen, everything is going to be ok." And as I said it, I wondered: would it be like a log, lying in the crack of my butt uncomfortably? Or would it be, even worse, a steaming hot mess? Was this really happening to me?

Well, it did happen. About 5 minutes away from my friend's house, I totally shit my pants.

Arriving at my destination, my first concern was running up to the door with a giant brown stain on my shorts, which just so happened to be khaki (wrong day to choose not to wear black). I finally decided there was no one around and bolted for it, desperate to get the horrible warm, sticky feeling wiped away and cleaned up. I opened the door and immediately was confronted by two hungry cats who were very happy to see me -- after all, my arrival meant they would get to eat. The thing is, though, they had to wait. Just a second.

So I get to the bathroom, and I yank down the shorts and it is bad -- much, much worse than I possibly could have imagined. I start pulling the shorts off, and as I do, the cats come into the bathroom, meowing at me to come feed them. Distracted, I try to wave them away, and as I do, the shorts fly off the one leg, fly up in the air, and shit spatters all over the bathroom, splashing on the two cats, the bathroom rug and god knows where else.

Believe it or not, I cleaned all this. I cleaned the shit off the cats, off the bathroom walls, off the rug, and somehow eventually off myself. Running around the house bottomless, I packed up my destroyed shorts and underwear and put them in a garbage bag. At this point, I realized I had yet another problem. My friend was a size 4 or so, and while she had plenty of clothing, I was more like a size 8. I wouldn't be able to fit in any of her underwear, pants, shorts or anything like that. I was stranded in her house with no pants, a bag of shit-soaked garments and no options.

Desperate, I dug through her closet until I found a drawstring skirt that I was able to loosen enough to get over my hips. I ran into the kitchen and fed the cats, who looked slightly terror-stricken and not at all hungry anymore (not that I can blame them). And I took a deep breath and realized that the crisis had actually been averted --despite the shame of the entire experience, somehow I had emerged still sane and escaped being discovered in the act by anyone.

To celebrate, I called one of my best friends and announced " You'll never believe what just happened. See, I was driving to feed my friend's cats after work...."