Re: Potential extinction - please help

Ok! Ok! I have been slacking off. Blame it on the meds, Christmas shopping, and a touch of the blahs. Normal service will resume on a more semi-regular basis - dr. grogan


From Geoff Miller
18 Dec 1995

Speaking of worms, is there any information about whether eating lots of spicy food helps to prevent tapeworm infestation? I'm not terribly afraid of contracting a tapeworm, but since I'm a devotee of extremely spicy food, the thought *had* occurred to me.

ObT: When I was about nine or ten, I was checking out one of the piles of crap left in the backyard by our German shepherd, and I saw what I later learned were roundworms writhing around in the grogan-heaps. I mentioned this to my mom, who ordered some worm medication from the veterinarian. Looking back on it a few years later, I thought it was kind of odd that she never asked me what the fuck I was doing looking so closely at the dog's shit to begin with.

Then there was the time, during the same approximate period in my life, when I discovered that *I* had worms. I could feel the little bastards crawling around just inside my asshole, and it sometimes itched like crazy. So one time while I was taking a dump, I thought "fuck it" and jammed a finger up my ass. It came out with a small white nematode writhing on the tip. I found this fascinating in a detached, scientific sort of way, so I took it in to show my mother.

She was on the phone at the time, yakking to one of her friends, absorbed in conversation as women will often be when captives of Mr. Bell's invention. And I was still of an age where my mother hadn't yet acquired that sense of her child's privacy that mothers only seem to absorb via traumatic, emotional arguments when their kids hit adolescence. She was still at that stage where she was blabbing everything that I did and said to every other woman of child-bearing age in the goddam neighborhood, the word "discreet" not yet having entered her vocabulary as far as I was concerned.

I showed the worm to her as she stood talking on the kitchen telephone, and the resulting conversation, I have to admit, was pretty humorous from a tasteless point of view. "Geoff just showed me this little worm," she volunteered to her friend at the other end of the line (I had no idea who she was even talking to). "I asked him where it came from, and he pointed to his rear end!"

A couple of days later, my mother brought home a bottle of pills that were supposed to de-worm me. She passed along the doctor's warning that the medication would turn my shit bright red, and not to be alarmed if I noticed that. (My mother, Ghod rest her soul, was in stark contrast to my father when it came to matters scatological. I remember being emotionally berated by my dad when, as a budding ATer of five or so, he caught me looking at the paper after I'd wiped my ass. Then again, that bathroom farting incident I wrote about several years ago really did happen, so he isn't totally prudish.) Anyway, the medication's side effects were a let-down. I turned and looked eagerly into the bowl whenever I took a shit for the next week or so, but the most interesting thing I ever saw was a normal grogan surrounded by a faint, aqueous miasma of crimson. Big deal -- and that was just one time. If that happened today, I'd probably sue the doctor for false advertising.

Geoff

--
"Mother Teresa haiku:
Selflessness is a
Ploy that gets me
Laid almost enough." -- Jim Kister