Bringing Back the Bean Counters / Home Birth / Ego Death
A triple-feature today. Merry Christmas, you filthy animals.
Bringing Back the Bean Counters
Team,
This is Tom Yates, CEO, with a quick announcement about a course-correction in our organization’s structure. Pembroke Consulting Group has been one of the world’s largest and most profitable professional services firms for over six decades, and it was a mistake on my part to disband our entire Accounting, Finance, and Audit teams — over 17,000 experienced leaders across nine countries — with one curt email that said, “Fuck the Bean Counters.” As many of you know, the majority of our profits derive from our world-class Accounting Services team, and the four months we’ve tried to operate without them have been an unmitigated disaster. My decision to sever ties with the soulless, money-grubbing squares was an impulsive one fueled by an attempt to bond with my teenage son. He suggested we watch a documentary called Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, which profiles the notoriously offensive punk rock musician known for his violent and obscene live performances. Desperate to connect with my son, I convinced myself I believed in GG’s anti-establishment ethos, detesting the world’s craven number-crunchers in their phony little suits who march into offices every morning causing more chaos and destruction via their spreadsheets and casually-committed white collar crimes than GG ever did with his shocking but ultimately harmless onstage defecation stunts. At the time, I believed I was going to positively impact the world by firing 17,000 heartless drones who do not understand art, passion, or love. That was all a mistake. Our clients across the board have been confused and litigious. Our internal bookkeeping system immediately fell apart, and I’m bracing myself for a nightmarish tax season. But more importantly, I have been lonely, walking the empty office remembering all the accountants I fired whom I used to consider friends. I spray painted an anarchy symbol on a wall and cut my bare chest with a piece of a broken bottle one afternoon, but it felt phony and forced. When I sopped the blood off my stomach with a hard brown paper towel in the restroom, I got a look at myself and realized this version of me — the punk rocker — was the craven one, putting on a mask and pretending to be someone he’s not. Like all of you, I derive sincere satisfaction from my work. I find helping corporate clients with their accounting needs intellectually stimulating and fulfilling. My suit is no costume. It’s as authentic to me, and to all of you, as full-frontal public nudity was to GG Allin. To be punk is to be yourself, and that’s what we have been doing here all along. I am proud to announce we’re re-hiring all 17,000 bean counters. I am thrilled to have you back.
To show my gratitude, I’ve scheduled an all-hands company retreat to Oslo, where we’ll enjoy some exciting team building activities, all of which involve burning down churches. My son recently showed me a documentary about Norwegian black metal music and it’s given me a lot of fantastic ideas about the future of Pembroke Consulting Group.
Home Birth
“I’ve been holding it in for six days,” Monica said, flipping her highlighted hair.
Meryl smirked, raising her gorgeous eyebrows. “I haven’t gone in seven days.”
“Well,” said Meghan, biting her plump, glossy lower lip. “I haven’t used the toilet in fourteen days.”
The girls shrieked and hugged Meghan, congratulating her.
“Hey, guys?” Janet slurred, sitting on the sofa on the other side of the basement. She removed her retainer and sucked in her spit. “I’m a little worried that, like, maybe it’s not good for you to avoid bowel movements for so long.”
Monica rolled her eyes. She’d protested inviting Janet to the sleepover all week. She’d told Meryl and Meghan that Janet was a drip, and she tried starting a rumor that the bones on Janet’s left and right sides were swapped due to a genetic disorder. But Meghan’s mother was friends with Janet’s mother, and Meghan insisted they had to invite Janet, and it would be fine because while the Three Ms discussed bras and boys, Janet would sit in the corner reading a book, and they could ignore her as if she were a cat.
“You know my mom is a gastroenterologist,” Janet said. “She’s taught me a lot about bowel health, and ideally we should all be going at least once per day.”
Meryl scoffed. “That’s old fashioned,” she said. “All the models in Paris are holding it in. It keeps you pure and clean. Pushing it out is nasty.”
“The poop goes away,” Monica said. “It’s a myth that you have to get it out. Your body re-absorbs it all, and the nutrients are great for your skin. All the actresses in LA hold it in.”
“You glow like a star,” Meryl said. “Boys notice, and they like you more. Maybe you ought to try it sometime, Janet.”
Monica laughed. “I bet Janet goes number two all the time.”
“It feels good to be regular,” Janet said. “I have a warm bowl of oatmeal every morning, and a small box of raisins after school. All that fiber keeps me healthy.”
Meryl rolled her eyes. “Oh, it’s definitely having an effect on you…”
Monica laughed. “Everyone knows that keeping your stool inside means no smell, no mess. It’s proper and lady-like to squeeze your cheeks and hold it in. Day three was tough, but after that it’s easy. I sit down to pee and don’t even remember there’s another type of going to the bathroom.”
“I think this is bad for you,” Janet said. “Maybe just try a little push, and I bet a whole lot would come out. And you’d feel really good. I promise.”
Meryl said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. My grades have improved because all these extra nutrients are going to my brain. And Greg Gimble has been writing me notes about how beautiful I look in my purple jacket.”
“Isn’t life better when you pinch it in?” Monica said to Meghan. “Right, Meghan? Meghan?”
The girls turned to Meghan, who’d been quiet for a few minutes. She lay on the carpet beside the bowl of popcorn, staring up into the ceiling. Her face looked pale and wet, her neck and arms tinted yellow.
“She looks angelic,” Monica said.
“Divine,” added Meryl.
Janet put her hand on Meghan’s chest. “Her heart is racing and this rash is growing.”
“The nutrients are being re-absorbed,” Monica said.
“She’s in sepsis,” Janet said. “Harmful fecal bacteria is attacking her.” Meghan’s teeth clacked together violently. “This is an emergency. We have to get her impacted stool out.”
“Don’t you dare,” Meryl said. “Meghan has worked hard to get to this point and she deserves to have all that inside her. You can’t steal it from her just because you’re jealous.”
“I don’t want this,” Janet said.
Fat beads of sweat rained down Meghan’s forehead and neck. Her eyes turned gray and they rolled back into her head as her breathing slowed.
“She’s going to die,” Janet said.
Monica rolled her eyes, but then she leaned over Meghan, held her hand over her plump lips, and felt the shallow breaths. She swallowed hard and looked at Meryl.
“My dad is an OBGYN,” Janet said. “He’s shown me the basics of childbirth and I can apply the techniques to Meghan’s impacted fecal lump. Help me carry her to the bathtub. Now!”
Monica and Meryl startled to action, lifting Meghan and hauling her into the bathroom while Janet filled the tub with warm water. They pulled Meghan’s pink pajama pants off and sat her down. Janet knelt between Meghan’s legs and leaned her head in, peering with one eye into Meghan’s anus. “She’s dilated,” Janet said. She pressed on Meghan’s bloated stomach. “It’s hard and dry like a baseball. Bring me your makeup kits.”
Monica and Meryl fetched their bedazzled zip-up purple bags, dumping out the lotions, creams, and lip glosses; all of it reeking of strawberries; all of it slimy and slippery. Janet squeezed gobs of goo onto Meghan’s anus, trying to coax the brown clump out. But even after applying the eleventh lip gloss, the mass would not budge. “I can see it through the hole,” Janet said. “It’s got to be fourteen pounds. There is no way this can come out without tearing Meghan in half.” Janet took a breath. “We have to do a cesarean.”
Monica and Meryl’s eyes widened. They did not know what to say or do. They looked to Janet, desperate for guidance.
“Get me earrings and those thongs you all are obsessed with,” Janet said.
The girls returned with the items, and followed Janet’s lead in stretching the thongs across Meghan’s bulging belly to indicate straight lines. They watched through squinted eyes as Janet used the sharp back of an earring to slice open Meghan’s skin and immediately the hard brown orb emerged, crawling into the air like a sunrise.
Monica wrapped the dense turd in a blanket while Meryl held Meghan’s stomach flaps together as Janet stitched them with birthday cake-flavored dental floss.
By the time Janet finished the stitches, Meghan opened her eyes. The color returned to her face, and her breathing calmed. “I feel so much better. What happened?”
Monica, Meryl, and Janet smiled at each other, then Monica leaned over to hand Meghan the swaddled mound of excrement.
Meghan gasped, holding her creation. She smiled down at it. She sniffed it. “No smell.”
Janet nodded. “It’s so old and dehydrated, it’s like wood or a brick. Odorless and solid. Won’t smear your fingers.” She pet the turd, then showed the other girls her clean hand.
A tear dripped from Meghan’s eye onto her feces. “I know what I’m naming her,” she said. “Janet. For the girl who saved my life.”
“I’m so jealous,” Monica said. “I want my own.” She sat on the toilet and pushed out a seven-pound briquette of dry stool, gasping in ecstatic air after it passed.
Meryl curled into the fetal position on the floor and birthed her own fat, hard potato.
Janet helped stitch the girls’ torn anuses, and cared for the Three Ms as they recovered beside each other on the basement floor in front of the television.
Monica looked over from her big piece of scat to Janet. “You are hereby an official member of our group,” she said. “We want you at every sleepover.”
Janet smiled, but she didn’t say what she was thinking. These girls were disgusting, and she’d seen too much of their bleeding anuses to ever view them as equals. She enjoyed watching Mean Girls with them that evening, but she knew she didn’t fit in with them, and for the first time, she enjoyed the feeling. Janet smiled at the girls and their bundled dung while looking forward to the future, when she’d politely decline any invitations to their nasty sleepovers.
Ego Death
By age 29 I’d accomplished my every goal: an Academy Award, prizes at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, a leading role in a top-grossing three-film franchise. But still I craved more success, more accolades. There were always new peaks to scale — star in a prestige streaming series, get into directing — but during one afternoon lunch meeting to plot out the next decade with my agents and managers, it hit me: I’m no closer to happiness. Each win made me need the next. I was addicted to fame, to seeing my face on billboards and posters. I set my truffle panko scallops down and leaned back from the table, overcome with the realization that would reset my life. “I’m done with all this,” I said to my perplexed team. “I’m moving to a monastery in Nepal to study with monks, to abandon these endless desires and find real happiness within.”
Upon my arrival, the monks chuckled. Another westerner here for a photo. But I insisted my motives were sincere. I showed the monks my Academy Award, and then I threw it into their deep, sacred lake.
After the first year of study I learned how little I knew.
Two years in, I began to see through cloudy eyes.
Finally, after seven years of daily meditation, my ego crumpled like a meaningless scrap of paper, rolled into the flames of my modest fire, and turned to smoke before my eyes.
For the first time in my life, I was alive. Two years of bliss and serenity. Air, pebbles, grass, water.
And one afternoon at lunch with the monks, observing how we and the carrots we eat are the same, it hits me that I have at least forty years left in my life, and this daily routine is so unbelievably boring I may have to jump off the side of this fucking mountain. It was relaxing for a little while, but, holy shit, forty more years of squeezing carrots with my eyes closed? Of smelling the dirt on a potato? It was interesting the first few times, and then just okay the next three hundred. I’m supposed to do this for decades to come? I lean back from the table, overcome with the realization that will reset my life. “I’m done with all this,” I say to the perplexed monks. “I’m moving my ass back to Los Angeles to cake my face in makeup and see my shit-eating grin plastered across the side of a bus where it belongs. This life is nice, but I killed my ego way too soon. If I’d come here at age eighty-one, it’d be perfect. I could coast on this zonked-out zen until my body runs out of gas. But I’m only thirty-eight. So I’m going to press pause on the radish-worship. Muchas gracias for the produce, gentlemen, and I wish you the best of luck zoning out while I resuscitate my ego and pledge allegiance to that gorgeous son of a bitch, getting calf implants and hair plugs, screaming at my agents to make my face bigger on the poster for the piece of shit comic book movie I star in, notching vain victories, accomplishing conceited goals, and feeling alive again. I’ll be back in a few decades, all spent and worn and ready to snooze with you hombres. Adios.”
I hire a crew to drain their sacred lake and fish out my Oscar. I hug it, standing alone on that mountain, squeezing my name on its faceplate, and the boring hellscape around me disappears. The wind, the trees, the screaming monks, withdrawing their vegetable knives and threatening to kill me for what I did to their lake. For a moment it’s just me and my award with my name on it — my name, my name, my name; me and only me; all me — and I finally know peace.