Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
The Body Has Its Own Itinerary
I am a travel constipated person. This is a clinical designation I have assigned myself after decades of empirical research, all of it conducted against my will in airports, trains, stadiums, department stores, and at least one bookstore whose restroom I will not name but whose other patrons I would like to formally apologize to.
The mechanism is this: my digestive system, which operates perfectly well in the controlled environment of my Virginia farm, perceives travel as a threat. It bunkers down. It goes quiet. It does not answer knocks. And then, at a moment of its own choosing, a moment specifically selected for maximum inconvenience and minimum proximity to a private toilet, it announces that the time has come and it will not be negotiating.
I am heading to Marrakech tonight. I have not pooped today. This is not a good sign. This is, in fact, a declaration of war, and my colon is the aggressor, and it has already picked the terrain.
The Taxonomy of the Travel Poop
Over the years I have developed a working classification system for these events. It is not a system I wanted. It assembled itself through experience, the way scar tissue does.
The Anticipatory Poop is the one you see coming. The one you prepare for. You pick your airport restroom on the departures map. You scout the train car for the cleanest option. You build in time. And then nothing happens. The Anticipatory Poop is a feint. It wants you to stand down. It is waiting for you to stop paying attention.
Once, taking the train up to New York City to see my daughter, I accepted the Train Poop as inevitable. I made my peace with it. I was ready. It did not come. Fine, I thought. Hotel Poop. Reasonable. I checked in. Unpacked. Waited. Nothing. My body had something else in mind.
It happened on the subway. I made eye contact with my daughter across the car and mouthed three words: It is happening. She understood immediately. She has known me her whole 27 years. We hit West 72nd Street and surfaced into daylight like two people fleeing a burning building, except one of us was the building.
The nearest option was a Trader Joe’s. This is important. The bathroom was in the basement. Two escalators down. I rode both of them clenching with the focused serenity of a monk who has made very specific promises to God. I made it. I did not have an Escalator Poop. But I want to be honest with you: it was close. It was so close that to this day, my autonomic nervous system has been fully conditioned. Pavlov’s dog heard a bell. I see someone walking down the street with a Trader Joe’s reusable tote and my colon whispers oh, here we go again.
The Venue Poop is exactly what it sounds like. I have done this at a Whole Foods. At a diner. At Madison Square Garden, which I feel gives the poop a certain grandeur it does not entirely deserve. And at a bookstore near Pier 17 in lower Manhattan where, I regret to inform you, the acoustics were exceptional, and my opening statement echoed with a confidence that suggested I did not care who heard it. My daughter was not in the store. She has a gift for not being in the store at those moments.
The Airborne Poop on the Way to Dubai: A True Account
Then there is the highest classification. The rarest and most technically challenging event. The Airborne Poop.
My late mother used to read me Dr. Seuss. I think of her every time I fly.
I pooped on a plane.
I pooped in the sky.
I pooped over oceans
and here is the reason why:
My body said “No”
at the house and the farm,
but somewhere past Germany
it sounded the alarm.
I pooped in the air
with the clouds all around.
I pooped 33,000 feet
off the ground.
She would have been horrified and then laughed until she cried. In that order.
I had one over the Persian Gulf. Emirates Airlines. Somewhere between Mauritius and Dubai, my digestive system reviewed the situation and concluded that 37,000 feet was an appropriate altitude at which to finally do business. I excused myself and made my way to the lavatory, which was positioned, with the architectural cruelty that only aviation designers truly understand, directly adjacent to the galley where the first class flight attendants prepared their service carts. I was, in other words, pooping in the break room.
And then the turbulence began.
It was not gentle turbulence. It was the kind of turbulence that makes you grip things that should not be gripped. I was gripping things. The plane dropped. I held on. The plane shuddered. I was committed. There is no graceful exit strategy from a lavatory at 37,000 feet mid-event. You simply have to see it through and trust the airframe.
The knocking started about ninety seconds in.
“Sir, we need you to return to your seat.”
I communicated that I was aware of the situation and engaged in a process that could not be expedited.
The knocking continued. The turbulence continued. The attendants outside that door were preparing salmon and chilled shrimp and whatever Emirates serves in first class, and I was about ten inches away from them, separated by a bifold door that does not, I want to be clear, provide meaningful separation.
When the smell began to assert itself, I made a decision that I stand behind entirely. There was a small basket of complimentary cologne on the shelf. I used all of it. I applied cologne to the walls. I applied cologne to the ceiling, to the degree that was structurally possible. I was not going to walk out of that lavatory and face those attendants without having made every effort available to me. I stepped out smelling like I had bathed in a department store sample counter. The attendant who had been knocking looked at me. I looked at her. She said nothing. I said nothing. I returned to my seat wearing enough fragrance to supply a mid-sized wedding.
I do not know if it helped. I chose not to know.
The Macy’s Incident: A Different Category Entirely
I want to be precise here: the Macy’s Incident was not a poop. It was a pee situation, which operates on its own separate schedule and has its own taxonomy, but which shares the essential architecture of all my travel body horror: the false sense of security, the sudden urgent reversal of fortune, and the involvement of my daughter as witness, shepherd, and judge.
We had been to watch a football game. I did not do the sensible thing, which is to go to the bathroom before leaving any venue, a lesson that is apparently not sticking, no matter how many times it is written directly onto my life. We were in a subway station. I was chatting with an old friend. I was fine. And then I was not fine.
I began crossing my legs. This is not a good sign in a man of sixty. I was doing the full childhood panic shuffle. I grabbed myself in a manner that I will not describe at length except to say that it was not subtle and my friend noticed. I yelled “It was good to see you!” the way someone yells from a departing train, and I ran.
My daughter pointed at the Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street. The Macy’s flagship is 2.2 million square feet. I did not know this at the time. A security guard directed me down an escalator. Men’s room to the right. I went right. There was no men’s room to the right. There was, instead, five departments. I went through all five of them. I am unclear on the departments. I believe luggage was involved. I believe there was a period where I passed through housewares. I was in a fugue state of focused locomotion, the kind usually associated with people crossing ice floes.
I found the bathroom. I did not entirely make it to the bathroom. I found it close enough to make a choice and I made the choice and I will describe it only as “a managed outcome.”
When I found my daughter she was standing at the foot of the escalator with the expression she reserves for me specifically.
“Where did you go?”
“Far, far away,” I said. “And on myself. I need to go to the hotel and change.”
She asked no follow-up questions. She is a wise woman. She gets that from her mother.
The Ongoing Situation
I am writing this prior to sitting in Premium class somewhere over the Atlantic, on the DC to Lisbon leg of what will eventually become Marrakech. I have not pooped. I did not poop before the flight. I did not poop at Dulles, which had ample facilities and every opportunity. My body is saving something. I do not know what. I do not know when.
Will it come over the ocean?
Will it come over Spain?
Will it come in Lisbon,
or the Marrakech-bound plane?
I do not know when
and I do not know where,
but I’ve packed an extra outfit,
just in case, as a spare.
Somewhere between Virginia and Morocco, at a moment not of my choosing, in conditions I cannot predict, my body will decide that the time has come.
I have packed accordingly. I know where the lavatory is on most commercial aircraft relative to the galley. I know that Marrakech has Western-style hotel bathrooms and that this is, statistically, where things should eventually resolve themselves.
I know that my daughter is not on this trip, which means there is no one to point me toward an escalator or wait impatiently at the foot of one.
It’s just me, my wife Karie, and whatever poop-adjacent adventure my digestive system has already planned and not told me about.
I will poop in the air!
I will poop with panache!
I will poop on a plane that is
bound for Marrakech!
Dr. Seuss would have been proud.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Marrakech v. America - May 5, 2026
- They Parachuted the Beaver - May 5, 2026
- Red Eye Has Nothing to Fear - May 2, 2026
