The Ring Around Your Anus

Thanks to the movie Beverly Hills Cop, most of us know that if you put a banana in your tailpipe, your car won't go.

Thanks to The People's Pharmacy, I know that putting a banana in your personal tailpipe makes it easier for you to go. Allegedly, it's just the ticket for hemorrhoids. Insertion is easy, because of the natural taper of the fruit, but that's not what they recommend. You are supposed to apply just a portion of the banana peel to the Affected Area. According to the website, "getting the banana peel to stay in position may be challenging, but no more so than a cabbage leaf." I do not have sufficient experience to refute this. I do know that rigging up a whole banana peel on one of those sanitary napkin belts we used to wear in the olden days is not likely to be useful, let alone socially acceptable. The belts worked fine if you didn't move, but take two steps and everything has migrated north.

Hemorrhoids are very common. By middle age, some 50% of the population is bothered by them. The other half doesn't much mind. They tend to flare up and die down, but occasionally can become quite debilitating. It is said that life-threatening bleeding from hemorrhoids is rare, but it could be that that sort of thing just never makes it into the obituaries. If things do get especially dire, surgery is recommended. Outcomes are usually good. When it comes to the anus, we all like a good outcome.

If you find piles starting to get the upper hand, you might need to be examined with a proctoscope. A proctoscope is a long tube with an asshole at each end, I've heard, but that might be unfair. After all, the proctologist is just trying to help. They're like anyone else--they take pride in their work. If they didn't, they wouldn't have proctoscopes named after them, like Kelly's Rectal Speculum. Or they wouldn't attach their name to the position a patient assumes during a rectal exam ("Sim's Position"). For the record, if anyone wants to name something after me, I'd prefer a star.

Everybody specializes these days. We don't have many general practitioners anymore like we did when I was a kid, and Mom would call Dr. Martin to come over when I came down with the punies. Dr. Martin always called my mom "Mother," and one time when I was sick in bed he just poked his head in the door long enough to sniff, and then wrote out a prescription for penicillin. He was either very good or not so good. He was also, years later, the first person who performed a gynecological exam on me, which was mortifying, because we had never had that kind of relationship before. I felt humiliated enough before he went over to the clothes hook to sniff my underpants. The man was a sniffer.

Anyway, nowadays doctors have specialties. I'm guessing the good sniffers dont' get into proctology. In fact, there's a built-in dilemma about consulting proctologists because there's something suspect about a doctor who wants to be in that field. On the other hand, in any class of med students, someone's got to be near the bottom, and there's always an opening in proctology.

There are benefits. If you tickle someone's ass with a feather, you are likely to generate a reflex called the Anal Wink. I'm not sure what the presence or lack of an anal wink can tell you, medically speaking, but I can imagine that you might be moved to perform the test anyway, when you're in an under-appreciated specialty. It's like a little thumbs-up. So to speak.

If you want to avoid the proctologist, you might want to keep some bananas on hand. Especially later in the year. According to experts, winter is the peak of multiple hemorrhoids. I'm going to try to remember that, because I'm always missing the Perseids.

What's That In Your Pants?

I hate bananas. There, I said it.

I didn't used to hate bananas. They weren't anything special, but they were easy to peel and dispatch, and easy goes a long way in my book. They're high in potassium. You jam one in the top end, and you ward off foot cramps at the bottom. As long as they stayed out of Jell-O, they were okay. But after a few decades of bananas, I began to realize I didn't like them very much. It took another decade to realize I could just stop eating them. Same thing happened with pot; I'm a slow study.

Then I heard a couple things on NPR that really sealed the deal for me. They said the bananas of my youth had given way to an inferior variety, mealier, drier, and less tasty, because the original kind got buggy or blighty or hard to box up or something. So I wasn't making it up: bananas are worse than they used to be. The second thing was a statement made to the effect that enlightened American consumers don't buy bananas. This is because bananas have to be shipped from somewhere else in the world, and thus incur a cost to the planet of fossil-fuel use. Thoughtful consumers try to buy closer to home.

That meant I could now embrace my bananaban with a light heart and a sweet whiff of righteousness. Here was a policy that felt right to my core, in a way that taking short showers with a puny water flow just doesn't.

This is the sort of thing liberals are required to think about. We can't stop thinking about it. Even carnivorous liberals have to think about their hamburgers at the picnic: was the cow contented? Was she fed antibiotics that get into the ecosystem and lower their effectiveness against emerging bacteria that will now rampage through our population with newer and deadlier infections we will be helpless to thwart? Was the bun made from wheat from a farm using unnatural fertilizers that seep into the Mississippi and create a massive dead zone at the delta that will not recover in a zillion years? This is why liberals are no fun at parties. This, and the tofu dip. And this is why liberals wear loud shirts and sandals and assemble their remaining hairs in ponytails the size of noodles, because they want to feel like children, since they can't stop thinking like adults. And conservatives show up at the picnic dressed like adults, with their minds as delightfully uncluttered as a child's, survey the situation and think: cool. More hamburgers for me.

I got to thinking about bananas the other day because I read somewhere that they are an effective remedy for  hemorrhoids, and glad to hear it. That's pretty close to my best-case scenario for banana placement anyway. I guess you're supposed to apply just the peeled skin to the afflicted tissues, however. It wasn't what I was visualizing, but at least this way it doesn't ruin the trouser line.