Cedar Burnett comes clean:
“Inflammatory bowel disease” has got to be the least sexy malady out there, trumped only by elephantiasis of the nuts or scabies. Most people have never heard of it, which necessitates at least a brief explanation involving the words “anus and rectum.” “But what does it do?” concerned friends ask, to which I usually reply, “It makes me poop my pants.” Talk about a conversation killer. No one has ever followed that one with “Please tell me more.”
How about maggots in your scrotum? Or an inguinal hernia? Or then there’s the more conventional, highly painful, entirely unmentionable blights: the angry hemorrhoid, the boil on the butt, a pilonidal cyst, ass herpes. It goes on. I met someone a while back who was utterly liberated from these constraints. He spent the entire evening going on and on about his hemorrhoid, trying one seat after another, writhing in pain, occasionally sitting so far back in a chair that his butt rested free and clear in the air. I never had the chance to say “Please tell me more” before he did.
The visuals were a little much but, nonetheless, I came away with real respect. Why should he be more inhibited in speaking about obvious acute butt pain when he wouldn’t be about a back molar? Montaigne loved few things more:
No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
The Dish 