The Tao of Poo

When I worked at Pathways the first year I worked the 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. shift, after which I went to school.

One fine morning, after copious drinking which led to the inevitable shakiness and headache, I was assigned to Charlie and Brian’s room. I went in to wake up Charlie, because he took longer to get dressed and ready than Brian. I went in to their bedroom and noticed immediately that Charlie was not in bed, however, his covers were pulled up all the way up. For some reason (think horror movie wherein the female victim does something stupid like walking alone outside in the dark after she has heard a scary noise) I felt compelled to pull back the covers on Charlie’s bed. Centered in the perfect indentation of Charlie’s sleepy outline was a gigantic pile of steaming human shit.

This did not bode well.

After choking back some dry heaves, I looked up to see a trail of poo finger paintings leading in a trail across Charlie’s bedroom wall. I followed them to the hallway, where they continued, and on to the shared bathrooms. I knocked, but Charlie couldn’t talk, so I took his “Uh-uh-uh-uh-ah” as an “okay to enter.”

I entered the bathroom to find Charlie eating a log of his own poo. Yes, this is true. He had a bit of his own poo squishing between his teeth and was swallowing it. Needless to say, the dry heave/gag reflex was working in overdrive and I had to run into the bathroom across the hall and follow through with completely vomiting all over the place.

Here is an aside:
I have noticed that some individuals with developmental disabilities, Alzheimer’s and other mental disorders have a neural switch turned off which tells them that poo is not for eating. Apparently, this condition is called “coprophagia.”

Part of me wants to believe that Charlie was blissfully unaware that he was eating poo and that poo is generally considered off limits. However, I swear to god, Charlie was laughing his full head off when I entered the bathroom, gagged and ran out.

Regardless, I spent the next 3.5 hours cleaning up not only the finger painted poo on the walls and the poo filled sheets, but also the poo in Charlie’s teeth – all the while taking incremental breaks to run into the bathroom across the hall to vomit, dry heave, gag and cry.

I finished work at 10:00 and went to my 10:30 Philosophy 101: Ethics class where we were discussing the metaphysics of Immanuel Kant. I looked around at the half-interested students and thought “I just cleaned shit out of a dude’s teeth for three hours – like I really care about the categorical imperative.”

Needless to say, I passed the class with a C.