It has been known for even me to take things for granted. Even me, even right now at this point in time. You would have thought I would know better. I do know better, but that’s not the point. I know better, but I believe worse. If that makes any sense.

People often take other people for granted. That’s a bad thing to do, because you stop appreciating people. I am guilty of that too. I’m a little ashamed of it too.
                    
I used to take my body for granted. I showed little – if any – respect to my legs. Then one day when I was 14 I found a lump above my left knee. It was a chunk of bone that was growing outwards. I used to intentionally break the bone so I could get out of sports at school. I thought I was so smart. I was, really. But it kept on fixing itself. Then one time it must have fixed itself in a funny way because it started to pinch a nerve and my leg would occasionally buckle. At 15 I went in to hospital to have it removed. But as I was only 15 I went to a children’s hospital. The bed was too short for me – I was pretty much the same height then as I am now, 13 years later – and the other patients were young children. I went under general anaesthetic which was cool but odd. I couldn’t masturbate for a week afterwards.
                     
But enough about that. What I really took for granted was a special part of my body. My arse. Or, to be more specific, my bowels. I don’t think I was really all that conscious about shitting when I was a child. But then two things which were very important milestones in my life changed that. First of all, at 13, I became vegetarian, thus upping my intake of fibre by a gazillion percent. Secondly, at 17, I managed to become very, very ill.
                     
As I said earlier I don’t think I was even aware of my lavatorial visits before I stopped eating animals. I did excrete – that is for certain – but I can’t recall how often. I have a friend who usually “drops the kids off at the pool” twice a week. Twice a week? Twice a week! It is thus conceivable that I too went twice a week. But then, upon turning vegetarian, that all changed. Anything less frequent than once a day was strange. When, in early 1995, I dabbled with veganism everything changed again. And I mean everything. What was once once-a-day became twice-a-day, and even thrice-a-day. Yes, there were times when it was more than that. And I’m not talking about diarrhoea or anything like that either. I mean I used to shit three times a day. And where non-veggies tend to strain out their poo I would strain to keep it in, for fear of dropping my stomach into the murky waters below.
                     
If this wasn’t enough I went to Thailand later that year and became very ill. I don’t know exactly what happened but I woke up one morning – about 3 days after our travel insurance had expired – with a headache so intense that I couldn’t open my eyes. The aspirin bottle was opened and I took the maximum dosage for a few days. During that time I had little if any appetite. By the end of that week I was vomiting blood and a strange and foul-smelling black liquid was coming out of my arse. I know now that it consisted mainly of digested blood. We still had some time left before we were due to fly home and we had no insurance. I had to hang out in Thailand with an anus that dripped digested blood six times a day. I tell you, one loses one’s sense of humour mighty quickly in those situations. When we finally got back home I was thin and my face had taken on a hollow appearance and my skin was more yellow than tanned. The doctor found nothing wrong with me, but then again, he didn’t try very hard.
                     
Since then my anus and I have been rather close. We communicate daily. I find myself thinking about my anus very frequently and I like to take care of it. None of that cheap toilet paper for me. I don’t care if the good stuff costs three times as much. I need to pamper my anus and show it that I love it. You see, I once did something very, very bad to it and I have to make it up to it.
                     
In 1996 I took a trip around Western Europe with a pal. We had no money and hitchhiked from Spain up to Amsterdam. We ate bread and brie and drank red wine. I should have known and taken more care, but I didn’t. We consumed pretty much nothing else. We also stopped off in the south of France to go grape picking for a week to try and bolster our thin wallets.
                     
At first I dismissed the pain as simple aching from the work, or from the alcohol poisoning I had given myself on our last night at the chateau. Little by little, as the alcohol left my system, it dawned upon me that I hadn’t shat in over a week. I had stopped being vegan a while before all this but I was still vegetarian and I was still shitting an average of twice a day. So, lying back in the forest around Brussels I started to think about the sheer amount of faeces in me.
                     
“I need a shit,” said I to my friend.
                     
“That’s nice.”
                     
“Do we have any bog paper?” I asked with slight panic.
                     
“No. Use the map. But don’t use Holland or Belgium. Or anywhere around Calais – we’ll need that.”
                     
I took most of the North Sea (thank God for the geographical layout of Europe) and scuttled off to a quiet area out. I found a nice tree, dropped my jeans and leaned up against it. Nothing.
                     
Nothing?
                     
Nothing. I pushed a bit. Nothing but extreme pain. I strained a bit harder, felt sharp, blinding pain and then a sense of relief as I defecated out the stomach cramps. Then it stopped. I wasn’t done, but due to the intensifying pain in my anus I decided that I should stop and have a reshit later. I shifted about to move away from the mess and to clean my anus with the North Sea. It was then that I caught a glimpse of what I had done.
                     
It took me a few seconds to work out what had happened. It took me a few more seconds to digest what it all meant.
                     
But the truth was clear.
I had torn open my anus and it was bleeding.
In Amsterdam I passed two lumps about as big as my fist and about as malleable. You see, the Dutch have a little shelf in their toilets so you can inspect your doings. My friend said that he laughed so much he peed a little when he heard me cry out from reopening the wounds in my anus. Since then I have never taken my anus for granted. I show my anus respect.
                     
I made a doctor laugh. They never find anything funny. He was Indian and very serious. He wanted a stool sample.
                     
“A stool sample?” I asked. “Are you joking? I’ve only passed solids once in the last ten years and that made my anus tear open and bleed!”
                     
“Well then you will be needing to scoop up some of your faeces…sorry…you tore open your anus? Hahahahahaha!”
                     
As I said, now I show my anus respect. Other people don’t though.