the w.c.
Abandonment: the great fear: the secret shadow that moves, gone with the swiftness of a raindrop: total erasure by the stroke of a key: click. The endless quiver over total annihilation; no no instead I will let it freeze, then thaw, then…come back perhaps with new life, mold, spores—do some strange gastrointestinal transmogrification—release, oh sweet release! It refuses to move. I overcompensate by reading and rereading and returning to the places and people that make me forget, thumbing through a dusty shelf containing further metaphors and riddles ~ everything is a sign! Sodalite where art thou. Surrender of self: an empty wall. 242 hanging on the sidewalk upside down, walking itself dirty. White light is the secret paramour of dank cellars and I prefer the wet and slimy to the blinding. Did they even read my email. Ha, the amount of time I spend pretending to pretend—and down on my bloody knees! She’s a pretty good actress, I think, this person, though she doesn’t really act - a master of form, thespianage - which means she must be the real deal. So I will kill her! Yes yes. That’s it. Good. I cannot think straight: only in circles. Dyslexia has moved in and I’m not happy about it. Solution: join the bandwagon: commit social suicide: Sweet death! Bloodless and into the bowels: The wooden snake.
Mental bowel movements have become an essential part of my daily routine. Last time I was seriously constipated1, I conjured a psychosomatic quid pro quo: a dump onto the page begets a dump into the toilet, and vice versa. Mercurian sorcery at its most profane—silly and totally innocuous. An experiment began. Would it work? Was I insane? As someone who generally welcomes conversations and experiments around left-field topics, this one—the bowel/brain relationship—felt like a royal flush, a straight shot deep into the odious sewage of the subconscious!2
I wanted to dig. I wanted to understand. One question led to a thousand more. I started researching: surfing the web, thumbing through books, listening, releasing my thoughts onto the page, and yes, literally pooping. Along the way, I stumbled across Celine Nguyen of personal canon fame’s research as lesiure activity essay. A brilliant and highly referential piece (do read it if you haven’t yet) that essentially describes what researching is and what it can be (if, for example, you are not in academia, which I am not!) Well, in my leisurely research, I quickly became overwhelmed. The etymology of the term poop led me to researching the history of the toilet, which, many tabs later, led me to coprophilia, and many hours/days/months later, to other obscure vestiges of the online world—all of which led back to my original question: Where does shit go? And furthermore, what of the poetic excrements that bind us together?
Depending what pipe you go down, these can become questions of philosophical, scientific, historical, medical, and/or literary conjecture. Then there is the cultural side of shit: how it’s portrayed in art, film, trends, music, TV, so on and so forth. People love their shit TV3…Which leads me to metaphorical shit. Metaphorical shit is endless. So basically: shit is fucking everywhere! One could dedicate their life to researching shit. Ha, quite literally, as a scatologist. Or, as a leisurely researcher.
Maybe I’ll start a shit column and call it Bowling for Bowels.
I digress. My intention for now is to (finally) share some of my findings (really an excuse to get back into my public writing practice). Just a few. I first began this piece in February of 2024. Abandoned it thrice. Rewrote it twice. Today, April 7th, 2025, marks the second go. I probably won’t finish it til tomorrow. And won’t release it til Wednesday. Hail Mercury.
And for the sake of my “bowel/brain” experiment, (I don’t really have a name for it): I was unusually constipated the last two days.4 I had written a postcard to my friend Sara, and the previous day, to my friend Christian. That was the only “formal writing” I had done: I hadn’t written in my journal, nor had I written anything for this piece or another. And yet, despite having written something, my bowels were out of order—until today. Why? I haven’t a clue. My diet hadn’t changed—I’m an omnivore who feels the rainbow, drinks the rainbow, and tastes the rainbow5. I wasn’t feeling stressed. Wasn’t on my period. The body is mysterious indeed. So, in light of my morning BM, I am here: releasing.6

BOWEL MOVEMENTS: ORIGINS, SLANG, AND (A FEW) DERIVATIVES
The Merriam-Webster dictionary proffers three distinct definitions of the term bowel:
And two for bowel movement:
Bowel is such a great word. Poetic, multi-layered, rich in sacred and profane imagery. And then we have the term, “shit”. Almost as striking as its cousin, “fuck”.
Shit derives from the Proto-Indo-European root, skei, or the Proto-Germanic root, skit-, both of which mean “to cut, split”. Thus, to shit is to ‘split’ from the body through excretion—whose etymological origins, too, speaks to outing the discharge; see: ex- and krei-, both of which are P-I-E roots.
The Bowel Family Tree goes deep. It extends across numerous generations and languages, and its variety of usage, from nouns to adverbs, and from slang to song. The terms we’ve created to refer to the lumpy, loose, at times serpent-like excretions that discharge from our anuses! (And the foul smelling air that often accompanies it! The flatulence! The horror! The hilarity!) But beyond these terms—these inventive nouns—there is the shit-act, and the shit-character, and the shit-metaphor. Waste is circular, after all.

For the sake of brevity, and to spare you a diarrhetic deluge of fecal-speak, I will share my favorite shit/bowel derivative:
FECOPOETICS
The term, fecopoetics, was coined by author, literary critic, and academic of “Waste Studies”, Susan S. Morrison, whose book, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (The New Middle Ages), is now high on my list, as with Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. I discovered the term whilst reading Ed Simon’s “Fecal Fridays: Martin Luther on the Toilet”, an exemplary distillation of Lutherian scatology, and other fecal histories. In the ensuing passage, we get a taste of Martin Luther, of Ninety-Five Theses fame, whose legacy on the Protestant Reformation could be likened to the simple phrase he was said to have uttered, that he is “like a ripe stool and the world is like a gigantic anus.” (A totally absurd reduction, but play with me.) Or, in the words of Ed Simon, “Martin was often constipated”: his stools, wooden; his conviction, perhaps more solid than his stools ever were.
Luther produced thousands of pages of vibrant, visceral, vernacular German prose which explored faith, grace, and ritual, but he also developed a profound rhetoric of shit. In an era where metropolitan eras exploded in sheer human numbers, and where human waste became very much an aspect of everyday life (and a public health concern) Luther would, as others did, have a preoccupation with feces. And from that rich manure would come good trees, and as the reformer reminds us, good trees bare good fruit. And with no snark or irony I attest to the freshness of Luther’s shit theology. Please, do not read the second to last word in the previous sentence as an adjective, but as a noun. In that I mean to say that Luther took waste seriously, used it to great rhetorical effect, and took part in intellectual disputations which utilized sublime examples of what literary critic Susan S. Morrison calls “fecopoetics”...
“SNAKES”





SOCIAL SUICIDE
This one’s a bit more personal. Metaphorical shit I’m currently dealing with so to speak.
Deleting your Instagram (which I officially did last week, on April 3rd) feels like one of the biggest metaphorical dumps one can take in our current era. No longer being a slave to a machine designed to make us feel shitty? Pretty revolutionary stuff. I’m off social media, even left my ‘followers’ a little social suicide note before I pressed the official DELETE button. But the thing is: deleting (and I mean really deleting, not just deactivating) your social media is no panacea for metanoia, nor (and this is important) does it make you better than those still on social media. (Please, if you are going to jump ship, try to make zero to little splash. Get your stuff downloaded, tell people to catch you in the real world, and go.) I didn’t delete it to be cool or because I’m “above” Instagram.
Remember that moment in your twenties—or maybe you haven’t quite reached it yet depending on your age—when you realized, perhaps in some psychedelic moment of clarity, you didn’t need to succumb/submit to societal norms to be seen/accepted, god forbid I say successful? That you actually fucking hated certain styles of music you thought you liked—98% of jam bands, for me—and I don’t know, just stopped believing the sugarcoated lies that some of your friends, teachers, and parents were parroting? Rose-tinted glasses shattered on the floor, along with the drug rug and belief that college was “worth it”. New Years Eve 2013. 2014: The year I finally got my shit together—whatever that means for a 20-year-old. But frankly, that year was a big turning point for me. Anyways.
Something similar happened with Instagram. The thrill of clicking a button and everything I’d been clinging to (with such an online presence) falling to its death made me smile. Sweet ambiguity, at last. I had my various reasons for calling it quits, most of which have to do with reclaiming my mind and reorienting myself to the practices, people, and places I actually enjoy.
There will always be alternative bait-and-switches like Instagram (sigh). Though I’ve never had any other social media accounts (I deleted my Facebook years ago), Substack has started to feel more and more social media esque. (A trap!) The Notes function, for example, which I have used a handful of times as both a commentary device and promotional device, is great—on the one hand. But, like quicksand, can swiftly suck you in and commandeer your initial intentions of joining/being on this platform to begin with; scroll, scroll, scroll. Why am I on here? Some people I subscribe to and genuinely read, post several “Notes” a day; and my god, some people publish something longer form every single day! A concerning symptom of the Internet Age: the facility of engaging with something, writing something, etc., simply because you can, because it’s there.
It’s a controversial subject area.
I don’t mean to denigrate folks on here who are publishing something everyday. They have their reasons, and people can choose to subscribe or unsubscribe, to read or not to read. I appreciate the commitment and tenacity of writers who can show up everyday and write something they feel is worth sharing.
I’m realizing I subscribe to more newsletters than I can actually engage with on a human level, which makes me a bit sad because there are so many cool, talented people I’ve come across on this platform. I’m more of a lurker on here than active- member-of-the-Substack-community-type. Does anyone else feel this way? Overwhelmed by the content? I’m thinking about turning my email notifications off because 90-95% of the pieces I receive end up unread and/or redirected to my ‘newsletters’ subfolder where they await fresh eyes. It’s all just too much. There is no portion control when it comes to the Internet. We’ve been trained like dogs to click and comment and like, and it’s true: it feels good when people actually engage with our work. And it’s important if you want to earn real money from it.
Again, this is a complicated subject, and I’m not necessarily taking a firm stance on either side just yet, i.e. having a platform bereft of a social component vs. a platform with a more ‘progressive’ social component.
Like ‘big social’ (a term that feels fitting now that I’m off of it), Substack allows you to Follow people. However, Following someone does not mean you necessarily Subscribe to them. And if Substack was still a platform [free of ads] built “for writers [and now] creators to publish their work and make money from paid subscriptions” I find the Follow function troubling. The feature was added in August of 2023. So, shortly before I joined, though when I joined I didn’t fully register it.
I’d like to believe the designers of Substack created this platform with good intentions—their nonchalance and laissez-faire stance around certain ‘freedoms of speech’ controversies notwithstanding. I mean, what did people expect? A lot of people have jumped this metaphorical wasteland (I kid), for Ghost, for Beehiiv, for back-to-the-basics newsletters via Gmail or their own website host—but the exodus seems far from any sort of mass level of extinction. The system is farting, but the people are still here, eating from the buffet.
So back to this SOCIAL SUICIDE metaphorical shit: I am worried I have substituted one social media existence for another, on here. Notes, chat, followers, and all. As someone who fancies the idea of patronage, of building a guild of writers and experimenters and paying them for their work, I question the role of the parent company—of the Internet—on our integrity, on our morality, on our ability to sieve the good shit from the bad shit, and separate truth from fallacy.
We all want to be seen and heard, in different ways, some more than others; everyone yearns to be understood. And yet, the basic idea of Self is changing. The bodypolitik is polluted. And here we are growing increasingly constipated—some of us, anyway. Where to go from here?
*
If you’d like to divorce yourself from ‘big social’, here are a some ideas, guides, and outlets to support you through (or into) the process, maybe even palliate some withdrawal symptoms.
Ideas:
Start learning a tactile hobby!
Cheap: Origami, collage, zines, creating mobiles and sculpture using recycled materials.
Communal: Start a club! Join a community!
Dancing - There are so many different kinds of dance communities out in the world, and depending on where you live, there’s going to be at least one in your vicinity. Make an effort to go it. Or start your own!
Cooking - Practice your technique! Start a cookbook club.
Bird-watching - Learn how to keenly observe nature.
Recreation leagues - Release stress through sport.
Craft night - Channel your creativity.
Immersive Workshops - Cultivate your senses.
I teach a wine and poetry workshop every month (in person in NYC) called Wine Poetic. If you dig poetry, if you dig wine, if you like discovering other ancestral beverages, please check out the wine poetic are.na channel! It serves as an archive and pool of insight into various poetic voices across the world. You can check out my are.na here.
Technological: Get a synthesizer, start a band; learn how to sew, or how to repair things in general; get a camcorder and make a movie.
Niche: Make chainmaille; learn how to fly a kite; carve your own spoon.
Find a friend (the more the merrier) who’s also interested in waving big social goodbye. Having the support of someone you love and trust makes any big change easier. You’ll be okay.
Alternative outlets:
Imagine if Pinterest and Tumblr had a monastic baby. Enter: Are.na.
So Textual: “A space for thoughtful readers to cultivate a richer, more intentional relationship with books, art, and ideas. Through curated resources and a dynamic community, we help you discover new depths in your reading life and connect it meaningfully to the world around you.”
Guides:
On the topic of Are.na, here is a compendium of articles compiled by EL KSC, entitled, “Reasons to DISMANTLE Instagram, FB, Meta, whatever trifurcated identity crisis this company is having,” which I have only skimmed the surface of, but recommend as a reference point in your own division process.
post instagram society by Mariana Ungaretti is also quite the trove, though again, I’ve really only skimmed its surface.
Some of my favorite accounts belong to: Ilona Altman, Rachel Meade Smith (of the wonderful Words of Mouth newsletter), and grief revelation.
I don’t remember when exactly or from what (probably a combination of shitty catering food and stress), but my god multi-day constipation can be torturous. It will make you question everything, inspire insidious thoughts, unnerve you. You aren’t fun to be around. The real culprit: cortisol. Stress is a malicious butt plug, your fancy probiotics and herbal remedies be damned.
A rollicking good time let me tell you. The puns are coming.
What is your favorite ‘shit TV’ show? Write it in the comments or DM me! I will shamelessly admit that I occasionally watch Survivor—a show I sometimes watched with my parents and sisters growing up. Was always a big Lord of the Flies fan.
As of April 9th, when I am publishing this piece, I have not shat, again, for two days. Weird coincidence?? Alas, this timely bowel/brain experiment has borne no consistent results. I’ll be okay, it’ll come.
I eat a lot of vegetables, some meat, some fish; I love cheese; I love cultured foods; I brew and drink kombucha for Christ’s sake; I like butter and hearty loaves of bread and having my daily dose of dark chocolate. I’m a healthy 30-something year old who drinks alcohol occasionally - socially - and lately, prefers bittersweet liqueurs and agave spirits to wine or beer (save the occasional Guinness, I mean c’mon). Coming from someone who’s worked in/around wine the last 6 years…
For the record, as much as my writing practice and poop schedule are somewhat intrinsically linked, I don’t think I can say writing totally begets my plumbing to kick into gear. Nor will I say writing cures constipation or pooping inspires one to write. But the act of both/either can surely ease the mind and spirit.