Day 4: Coffee or Beer?

This is an extension of a quality Gmail chat SammyC and I had during work on Friday. We work really hard.

If you had to have one of the following, which would you choose?

1. Monday Morning Coffee Shits

2. Sunday Morning Beer Shits

I tried to find a good explanation of the actual physical differences between the two, but couldn't (Bry, Mark, little help?) So, I'll just leave it by saying that both coffee and beer are diuretics; let's evaluate based on contextual differences.

Coffee: I don't drink that much coffee, maybe 3 cups a week. But almost every time I do - whether it's iced or hot, latte or a man's coffee (I drink them all) - I end up with the runs. Probably once every hour or two, I need to run to the bathroom and piss-shit.

The upside is that I get frequent breaks from doing work, and I guess I'm a little bit more alert when I am at my desk. Plus, I really think coffee is delicious. The downside is that my shits tend to stink a little bit and I'm always wary of leaving a foul order in the office john. Not to mention, I eat a lot of lettuce and corn and those tricky little particles have a nasty tendency of bubbling back up into the bowl about 10 minutes after the flush. (There's one other person in my office who also eats a good amount of lettuce, apparently). Plus, battling diarrhea makes me sweat a little bit and then I'm faced with whether or not pull a Costanza at work and risk wandering out into the office shirtless, or just to man-up and risk a pit-stain or boob-sweat stain on one of my few nice shirts.

Beer: The post-binge, mid-morning beer shit is a dangerous beast. Sitting on the toilet, perched precariously with a slight lilt to the right, the bathroom mat spinning in front of me - seemingly whipping up tumbleweeds of months-old pubic hairs - is at once joyous, exciting, painful, relieving, neverending, leg-numbing and frightening. On the upside, it gives me the chance to reflect on the night before, but most thought vanishes as the room slowly fills with the unfailingly disgusting smell. Sure, it's always fun to expose others to the odor; but alone, in a tiny 613 bathroom, it can be fatal.

You also know that every minute spent pouring watery feces into the quaking bowl between your legs is another minute not spent chilling in the living room watching Flight of the Phoenix (or other such trash) and doing a much different, much more enjoyable, version of shooting the shit. And then there's the burn. Oh, the burn. Finally, the continuously naive decision to order a stinger or a PPP. "All of the grease will calm down the acids from the beer." Yeah, right. After pounding one of those you'll need a gallon of coffee on Monday just to finally cleanse your colon.

With all that said, though, my vote is for the Beer Shits, because of college and because of the kick-ass night we would have had before my own ass ripped itself a new one on Sunday morning.