Friends! Hello! This week’s edition of Smooth Brain Gazette, in which we endeavor to de-wrinkle our brains in a bid to survive these times, is not only late but necessarily different than those that have come before, because in a truly abusive twist of fate I have been debilitatingly ill in the bowels all week. All week! Positively buffeted on all sides by the slings and arrows of gastroinstestinal distress! I have tried and tried to give you the sort of high-quality, erudite ~*art*~ to which you have become accustomed but I simply haven’t the strength of body or spirit!! I simply haven’t!!!
I mean that literally! The facts are these. Beginning Monday at approximately 2:45 pm, my body has not permitted me to do anything but:
A. Lay prone upon my bed writhing in agony while loudly reciting Scripture in the direction of my lower intestine
2—Drink the finest of reduced-sugar Gatorades
iii. Shit as if my asshole has in fact been retrofitted into an industrial-grade hydraulic water drill.
I’m not like a petrogeologist or anything, a thing I’m not even sure is a thing but Substack isn’t marking it as misspelled so I’ma just go with it, but I don’t need to be one to know that my asshole in its present highly pressurized configuration could be used to frack the highest quality light sweet crude from even the most stubborn of Alberta tar sands, and that’s all the way real.
Someone get NATO on the line and let’s sanction Russia into the goddamn ground because you back this rosebud up to some oil-rich bedrock and Europe’s fossil fuel woes will be sorted by close of business, and that’s a promise. The EU can’t figure out where else to get its natural gas? GOOD NEWS BRUSSELS: My asshole is in tatters and I dream only of the grave but I am willing to continue sacrificing for the greater good! Hook me up to the pipeline and run me my check, Exxon! Slava Ukraini!
Anyway I am sorry for the toilet humor but like not as sorry as I am that this is my reality? Like this is my truth! And if that makes you uncomfortable maybe you should just be grateful you HAVEN’T had to spend the entirety of your week atop the toilet primal screaming in agony CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE. I am traumatized! My lower intestine is a portal to the underworld! Dark forces reside therein! It’s like that closet in Poltergeist that somehow turns into like a wormhole to another dimension? Like if you threw tennis balls at my abdomen I am pretty sure they would go through me and come out the other side covered in ectoplasm just like in the movie. Nothing is right. Absolutely nothing is as it should be! But on the other hand I’m skinny now so who the fuck cares.
Now for those of you asking questions other than “Holy fuck why did you write this and then actually click ‘send’ and email it to literally a lot of people Jesus Christ”—questions like, “Oh my God are you okay?” and “What is this illness from which you suffer?!” the answer is I have no idea!
So naturally today I took this case of interminable bowel revolt where it belongs—no, not to a doctor, this is America! You fool! I took it to the internet, for answers. Because obviously I’m dying, right? What kind of a stomach bug lasts four fucking days except for, like, cholera?! And I haven’t been to like 19th-century Colombia lately (what up Gabriel García-Márquez hive, we eatin) on account of it being a pandemic and also time travel not existing, soooooooooo not sure that’s really on the table as an explanation! And as for food poisoning I did have a breakfast sandwich from Tim Horton’s right before this started but Canadians aren’t even capable of this level of gastrointestinal distress, it’s in their Constitution along with the new national holiday honoring Justin Trudeau’s dumptruck yoga ass.
So I poked around the internet and my good bitch MayoClinic.com was like “also stress can make you do di-di on account of the mind-gut connection so” and I was like skrrrt! Huh? “Mind-gut connection?” Now as a bitch who regularly buys gluten-free bread for no reason and treats all illnesses with ~*green smoothies*~ and ~*supplements*~ I am congenitally disposed to believe in things like “the mind-gut connection” but isn’t that the kind of thing actual doctors roll their eyes at because it can’t be duplicated in a fucking test tube at Johns Hopkins?! Like! “Mind-gut connection” seems a little too QAnon kombucha influencer esoteric for a profession still out here preaching low-fat diets and telling women their aches and pains are in their silly little heads like it’s that episode of Golden Girls where Dorothy has chronic fatigue syndrome!
But it turns out nope, the ~*medical establishment*~ has in fact decided the “mind-gut connection” is real! Have I just anxietied my way into a case of dysentery?! But then I was like, “bUt I hAvEnT eVeN bEeN tHaT sTrEsSeD lAtElY!” forgetting entirely that not only has this been one of the most stressful months of my life but mere hours before this debacle began I had ~*an actual anxiety attack*~ during which I cried from behind my Warby Parker prescription sunglasses while riding a city bus! Ha ha! Life comes at you fast!
So anyway I did one my dumb little meditations and did some of my dumb little affirmations and went for a dumb little walk in the dumb little sun and now I have successfully eaten one (1) bowl of chicken broth and one (1) slice of toast and one (1) cup of applesauce and it’s been a whole-ass 90 minutes and I have yet to Old Faithful any of it into the farthest reaches of a toilet bowl so lololololololololololololololol turns out the mind-gut connection is real just like Daddy Mayo Clinic said and I belong in an actual institution! Cool!
Imagine being the type of embarrassing-ass bitch who actually believes astrology is real and does yoga ~*for spiritual reasons*~ and is less than a year removed from a fucking mountaintop spiritual epiphany instigated by a fucking Glennon Doyle book and not even once considering that maybe all this chupacabra in your guts needs is a little turmeric and deep breathing! Truly the dumbest bitch in every room since 1978, which is why I always say I’m The Dumbest Bitch in Every Room Since 1978™ Dumb Bitch Disease is a debilitating condition and there is no cure. Please donate today.
So all that to long-windedly and circuitously say, this week has been mostly a lost cause. And while I did get a stretch of time on Tuesday when my suppurating asshole did not force me to the toilet long enough to watch an episode of Ryan Murphy’s 9-1-1, we will have to put a pin in that because I just went to Hulu to rewatch it and get you your little screenshots, and Hulu is DOWN. Like DOWN down! Like article in Variety about it down! And since this Substack is already nearly two whole-ass days late I am taking this as a sign to just call it and continue ~*resting*~ and ~*healing*~ and practicing ~*self-care*~ or whatever (jerk-off motion). Maybe this is divine providence! Maybe trying to spin gold this week would have just stressed me out more and the di-di would have returned to claim me! God works in mysterious ways amen.
So we will pick up on Ryan Murphy’s 9-1-1 next week so I can tell you about the dude who died in a bouncy house that blew into a canyon on the Santa Ana winds (lololololololol).
But until then… IDK, I guess, here you go! This week’s Substack is about my harrowing battle with diarrhea! IDK man, this is absolutely not my beat. (Don’t you love how I say that as if I haven’t made some kind of vile semen joke in every newsletter I’ve written so far? One of the things I love about me is my audacious lack of self-awareness🥰) But everything’s all about radical self-acceptance and transparency nowadays, isn’t it! So here I am, warts (by which I mean diarrhea) and all! Consider this me singing that awful “This Is Me” song from that fucking terrible Greatest Showman movie every dork who ever saw Les Misérables in high school is still fucking obsessed with. Here lemme look up the lyrics real quick and see if I can get off some of my dumb little jokes, hold please…
Okay, I got it
When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
I'm gonna send a flood (of diarrhea), gonna drown 'em out (with my diarrhea)
I am brave dehydrated, I am my butthole’s bruised,
I am who I'm meant to be, this is me (with diarrhea)
Look out 'cause here I come (to the toilet because my ass is exploding amirite)
And I'm marching on to the beat I drum (toilet because my ass is exploding amirite)
I'm not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me (with diarrhea)
See how good I am at this? Wow. See, I write shit like this and it just seems impossible to me that I’m not the head writer on like Conan O’Brien or whatever. Just totally unsung, you know?
Anyway, I guess I’ll leave you with that, because if I can’t make it good, I can at least make it weird! See you next week when me and my anus are hopefully back in top form. And if you all unsubscribe before then I will truly not blame you because I just re-read this and wowowow, it is not that many steps removed from the type of shit eight-year-old boys write while they’re going through their toilet phase. God I hate myself. I hope the diarrhea comes back.
Okay well on that note bye bye!!!