If Elvis Had a Bidet He Would Still Be Alive

I knew there was something magical about buttholes the day I had to use a suppository as an 11-year old.

I kept throwing up this medicine I was supposed to be taking, and so the doctors had a back-up plan: ingest this capsule anally. My mom asked if I needed her help... I did not. You would have thought I'd only been taking medicine that way all my life with how much of a pro I was.

My under-developed brain could not comprehend what wonders my personal abyss could hold. I had seen Episode VI; I had seen the sarlacc pit. 24 years later I got a bidet and it all made sense.

Before we begin, I need to dispel the notion that my bussy does not bite back. It certifiably does. It's actually one of the reasons my sweet wife refuses to massage my prostate. It's dangerously powerful. There's an EOB from BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina for a dislocated knuckle as evidence.

I'm going to talk about rectal health, and I'm going to disclose some things that would go viral off a QT screenshot with caption "you couldn't waterboard this information out of me." What I am about to do is brave. Quite frankly, I think I will eventually be heralded as a trailblazer. My grandchildren will stand with a stiff back and bass in their voice when they do a history class family tree presentation in 2049. They will herald me as a hero. Yours, too, will know my name.

2023 is not 2004. We need to agree on that baseline. Yes, Queer Eye For the Straight Guy (2003) catapulted "Metrosexual" into the vernacular, but that doesn't mean the tenets permeated culture. Normal, innocent men are just now really establishing a skincare routine, or even caring about their skin. And, that's just the part of their body that is visible to the world!

I know for a lot of men my age we can think back on all the times we had some streaks in our boxers, or smelled our nuts at the end of the day and blacked out for a few seconds. I threw out some Nike Tech Fleece sweatpants whose waistband smelled permanently of boiled peanuts.

My freshmen year of college I had a 10AM Political Science class. It was the only class I ever got less than a B in, and one of the reasons I had to take summer classes to keep my scholarship. A canon event occurred that Fall semester at Winthrop University. I was walking towards the building talking with a person that was a roommate of a person I actually was friends with. While they were blabbering about the cafeteria menu I thought "Oh, I'll just sneak a little fart out while we're outside." I did. I also got more than I bargained for.

I was wearing some white Polo Sport Shorts, and I felt a warmth fill my boxers. Remember, briefs were seen as tighty-whities during this epoch. We were all letting are long balls hang loose and free in boxer shorts. I could have sworn I felt something hit my calf. I cut off the conversation 10 yards short of the door and said "Alright, man. Talk to you later," and hustled to the first floor private bathroom.

I had sharted. Normally, you would just kind of clean yourself up as best as possible and get to a shower as quick as you could. However, I had a unit test in the aforementioned POLISCI 101 class. I could not dip out back to the dorms and become a person again. Instead, I had to use wet paper towels to rub my nether regions as clean as possible. I could have... should have... thrown my boxers in the trash can but I only had one minute to get upstairs and take this test that made up 25% of my grade. Without thinking, I took my boxers off, went commando, and sort of balled them up and put them in a section of my backpack that was designed to hold a portable CD player; it had a channel to run wired headphones out of so that you could wear your backpack while you listened to music.

I finished up, and ran up the stairs, entering the classroom just as the teacher was closing the door. To say I was a little distracted would be an understatement. I ended up getting a 73 on that test—a combination of having fecal fragments in my backpack and not really liking Political Science at all. An unintended consequence of shitting yourself before the first class of the day is that you have more classes. I couldn't go back to my dorm, because I had two more back-to-back classes. I finally skipped lunch and got back to my room.

I was 17 when I entered college, and had recently turned 18 due to a September birthday and starting preschool early. This means I was an idiot. I took the boxers out and put them in my laundry hamper. Then I went to take a shower.

How often do college students do laundry? How often do college students who live in a dormitory do laundry? Honestly, I cannot even remember where the laundry machines were located. It's a blackhole of my college experience. I know that I did laundry at some point, but cannot remember how. Anyways, I forgot about those boxers being in the hamper, and continued to put other dirty clothes into the hamper.

Around two weeks later, I was running out of clothes to wear and needed to do laundry. I decided to sort through my laundry—separating the Lacoste polos I purchased on eBay from a seller in Brazil that were, under retrospection, absolutely fake—from the undershirts, socks, and underwear.

I pulled out those boxers and went Dr. Strange scanning through every universe, and realized that these were the ones I sharted in weeks earlier. They were crusted shut from being shoved in a backpack compartment for a CD Player and then buried under 10 lbs of dirty clothes. I peeled them open, and what I saw has haunted me to this day.

A lone peanut.

I have been sitting down to pee for years. My legs are so tired. My balls are long, and I appreciate the sweet respite.

Moreover, I think the years of my jacking off technique (something I've been doing for 25+ years at this point) may have had long-term effects on my urethra. Instead of just like a normal, up-and-down normal situation, I have this reverse-jelq technique (pretty sure I invented this... should have filed for a patent) where it's mostly tip stroking. My shit leans to the left (my parents fault for allowing me to have a computer in my room and dial-up in 1996) and sometimes when I pee.... it just goes askew? I have peed on my foot more times than I would like to admit, and I have had to clean the floor or wipe off the toilet more times than I can count. I spray in a Golden Ratio. It's safer for everyone if I sit.

What this insane information that has certainly changed your opinion of me means is that I have been in a more close proximity to my general "groin quality" than dudes who may just poke the weiner out the zipper and pee pee. I was sweaty. Even if I showered that morning, it just always felt like I was not clean. No matter how many times I wiped against the grain, it felt like the topography of my sphincter just did not work within the current system we have created. (Anyone who hates on me for this is ableist!!!)

I tried moist wipes. I remember an anecdote where Will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas fame said he used them because "have you ever tried to wipe up peanut butter off a counter with a paper towel?" But those are not great for your pipes.

But then I got a bidet. My beautiful little baby... It changed my life.

This might be new information to you, but activity and diet will affect your health. My (±) 30lbs weight fluctuations over the years is directly attributed to whether I've been able to easily play pick-up basketball three times-a-week and my consumption of water. Unfortunately, the sodie pop calls me like a siren. While I am usually pretty regular—pooping twice a day—I might find myself perpetually dehydrated during the periods of Cheerwine Slugging.

This has only been exacerbated after I was prescribed Lexapro, which made me so horny the erections hurt. I remember having to delay a Zoom call because my shit was throbbing to the point of being alarming. I couldn't even form a coherent thought.

But, I couldn't nut... a problem I had to relay to my nurse practitioner who replied, "Well, you and your wife need to discuss whether this a positive or negative." LOL. I still laugh at this fresh out of medical school quasi-doctor, who was assigned to me because my previous provider left the practice and has no rapport or insight to who I am as a man, telling me, "Maybe being able to fuck berserk isn't necessarily a bad thing?"

But then they gave me Crestor because of my cholesterol. This combination made me not perma-bricked, but it did fuck my gut health up. I was farting some of the most heinous gas in existence. I've been around myself all my life, and I know what I'm capable of. But this medicinal-propelled gas was something I had never been capable of. It was methane on steroids. The UN would consider it a war crime.

At my follow-up, my precious little practitioner recommended I get some probiotic vitamins. That didn't help. A million tiny microbes were actually exacerbating the issue. I was blocked up.

While I would have previously suffered on the toilet for a half-hour only to eke out a river pebble, I can now simply sit for five minutes and let the bidet fill up my cavity like a water balloon, and force the issue.

The problem with the bidet, is that it's too effective. Years of blasting my ass with powerful jets has eroded my asshole. I have a history of prostate cancer in my family so I get early screenings, and the doctor told me, "Justin... your anus is too eroded. Your sphincter is too powerful. Your rectum is too clean. You have to stop. They'll kill you." But I won't. That's simply playing into their hands. Not using the bidet is what will kill me. Just ask Elvis. Oh, wait. We can't. They killed him.