Within the fields of scatology and coprology, the so called “twin sciences of shit” , there are many deep dark mysteries…so to speak. I noticed one of these strange occurrences this morning. However, please dont go off the deep end thinking this signifies a supernatural phenomena or anything weird like that. Dont go calling one of those creepy Ghostbuster reality TV shows to tell them you think theres a Casper like spirit inhabiting Cliff’s bathroom or intestinal tract.. Ok, here is the long and short of it, no pun intended. Do you know how women talk about menstrual rhythms and how sisters in a family and/or female coworkers somehow end up with co-occuring menstruation, something that men who live with them simply call a “living nightmare”? Well, many of you devoted listeners know that I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS).  Dont all applaud at once…it’s not exactly my proudest achievement or greatest contribution to modern society. Flushable Wet Wipes and their inventor deserve that distinction. Now that’s real technological progress…but I digress. By the way, while I am digressing and probably regressing on the subject of poop, dont you just LOVE the feeling of being “empty” after a good dump? I think that may be on the physical level pretty close to the Zen experience of “No Ego”, or the Zen state of complete “emptiness” that millions of Buddhists aspire to. Makes you wonder what the Dalai Lama does when he is irregular or constipated on this physical plane of existence. Anyway……my girlfriend and I , who are both followers of the Dalai Lama as well as the guy who wrote the bathroom books, “What’s Your Poo Telling You” and the wildly popular companion volume,”The Poo Log” were talking shit, literally, the other day. Some of you may or may not  know there is an actual numerical chart of fecal typologies. I’m talking about the PQI or Poo Quality Index. Let me repeat..some genius with a PH.D. in Crapology and an MD in Gastroenterology has published a guide that folks with bowel trouble use to gauge the health of their Bowel Movements (BMs). As a Clinical Psychologist I am quite used to and comfortable asking my clients, “How would you describe your feelings and what number would you give them on a 1 to 10 scale?” However, I’m not sure my emotional openness extends so far as to say, “How would you describe your poop and what number on this chart would you consider its size, shape,consistency and delivery?”  Delivery? Are we on the Obstetrics ward? Naah, were not too anal a culture are we?  Only Nazi Germany was more anal and meticulous about charting anything and everything for so called posterity. Anyway, my courageous partner was saying last nite she had notice her latest BM’s to be…and here we have to delve into the lexicon of feces…”sludge-like” or “the kind that always leave a tell-tale mark after you flush”. Right, I knew just what she meant. We were talking the same language but were having vastly different toilet experiences because I was, until today, literally on another page of the chart. To be perfectly honest, due to my IBS which is the gastrointestinal version of being Bipolar, I typically swing wildly between the extremes of diarrhea and deprivation, meaning absolutely nothing to show for myself. When my gf described her latest creative accomplishment in the bathroom,  I envied her productivity and her sludge-like PQI score. Here finally comes the weird part. After I spent a fairly sleepless nite of weird dreams about submarines, subways (both the sandwiches and the underground transportation systems) and a random one about my mother in a scary clown costume, I awoke today with the urge to go, even without my early morning French press coffee ritual, which is the poo obsessed person’s version of a Japanese Tea ceremony. Very exact and almost never varying to produce the desired physical and spiritual results. Well, in this case I completely skipped the Zen ritual and went right to my ceramic friend John and “voila”, what do you know but I got sludge! I realize most people would not make such a big deal, write a whole essay about it or , god forbid, grab their digital camera and send a picture to Ratemypoo.com. I’m not kidding, people do that. However my point here is less pictorial and more metaphysical. Sort of the scatological version of the quantum physics movie, “What the Bleep”, the documentary positing that idea that individual and group consciousness can influence the material world. Holy Shit! I thought sludge and I got it! Now I have to just keep believing in myself and my vastly underrated  “Powers of Poo” and literally move myself up the PQI chart toward increasing health and total enlightenment. Maybe its all psychological but I feel better already.