The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. I had to pick up 5-year-old from Scouts. For this I needed his car seat.

So I went into the lightwell. I dragged out the car seat.

The lightwell, by the way, is an enclosed space in our apartment building that lets light into the building. It has a glass roof. It's very cool to stand inside it and look up because the walls stretch up and up and up until finally at the top there's the sky.

"That's not 5-year-old's car seat," said Girlfriend. "That's 1-year-old's car seat"

So I returned 1-year-old's car seat to the lightwell. Then I dragged in 5-year-old's car seat.

"It's all a big mess out there," I said.

Because we live on the ground floor, we're allowed to use the skywell as our personal dumping ground. There are black bin bags filled with our junk, two fans we only use in summer, some paint-encrusted steps, doors I took off the cupboards in the living room and haven't thrown away.

"This shoe rack, this entire shoe rack is full of your shoes," I said to Girlfriend.

Girlfriend opened the shoe rack. There were three pairs of my shoes and one of hers.

"What's in that bag?" said Girlfriend.

"Oh that," I said. "It's full of cardboard to be recycled. The bin was overflowing so I stuck the card in a bag and left it here. And I've forgotten about it."

Also, I should mention that all our neighbours can see into the lightwell. They can see our bin bags and junk. They brought it up at the last landlords' association meeting. I didn't go because I'm not the landlord.

I set out in the car to pick up 5-year-old. I put It's Almost Christmas by A Great Big World on the car stereo. When the song was over, a children's song about hippopotamuses and tigers came on. Then a song about a scared worm. Then a song about a starfish that likes to sing pop music. When I was playing these songs for 1-year-old every day, I was also unwittingly training the Spotify algorithm to think all I wanted to listen to were children's songs. Children's songs were now playing one after the other on the car stereo and I was powerless to stop them because I was driving. I was driving 100 kpm down the motorway and was forced to listen to a song about a monkey who likes to dance day and night. But I couldn't change the song, because if I took my eyes off the road to look at my phone, I could have crashed into a ditch, and then I'd be hanging upside down by my seatbelt, with both arms broken, and the music would still have been playing - songs about squirrels, chickens, and snails - and I would have had to listen to them while bleeding out into death.

I took the motorway exit (while being forced to listen to a song about a lion who's too shy to use his claws anymore) and drove to the Scout building. I found a place to park. I got out of the car. There were other parents waiting for their children.

"You don't need to worry, 5-year-old's still alive," said one of the parents.

5-year-old came out. We drove home. When we got home, I discovered 5-year-old had left his jumper and coat behind. Luckily another parent had 5-year-old's jumper and coat so I picked it up from his apartment later.

In the evening I needed a poo. But the poo wouldn't come out. It was stuck. So I took out my phone and looked at pictures of Lego Loco, a 1990s computer game where you build a town for Lego minifigures to live. I looked at the screenshots while sitting on the toilet and imagined I lived in one of those little houses, a house with flowers outside and without too many neighbours. I imagined spending my days exploring the town and riding around on the little train. My sphincter muscles relaxed and the poo flew out my bum at Mach 7 speed into the toilet.

And it was a big one. About five centimetres in diameter. I wiped my bum. I looked at the toilet paper. There was blood on the toilet paper. Blood mixed with shit: red and brown. In a middle-class household, I would have immediately seen a doctor to rule out the possibility of colorectal cancer. But there was no need because I already knew what the problem was: anal fissures and/or haemorrhoids. I've had bleeding like this since I was a teenager and it happens when I'm constipated.

I just looked up "normal poo size in diameter" and found this:

When the diameter is 3 to 4 cm, this type is the most destructive by far because its size is near or exceeds the maximum opening of the anal canal‘s aperture (3.5 cm). It‘s bound to cause extreme straining during elimination, and most likely to cause anal canal laceration, hemorrhoidal prolapse, or diverticulosis.

And mine was 5 cm. Fun times.