Lately I’ve been fantasizing about Gwyneth Paltrow’s poops.  It’s not that I want to lie under a glass coffee table and have her squirt out a log from above.  No, this fantasy is abnormal.  Maybe “fantasy” isn’t the right word.  This is more of a movie that keeps playing in my head.  Gwyneth just sitting on the toilet like Joe Anybody.  Pooping her guts out.

And it’s not my fault.  Maybe this is a guy thing, but my irrepressible visions of Gwyneth Paltrow pooping remind me a lot of the time I fell in love with Tiffany Jones in the fifth grade.  She had hair like a poodle’s pubes, and she was too stupid to know octopi weren’t mythical beasts.  She wore a bottle of perfume around her neck that smelled and looked like pee.  But she passed me a note once saying she liked me.  And that hideous beast never left my mind.  Sometimes you don’t know you want something until it’s hammered into your brain by outside agents.  I didn’t want to touch Tiffany Jones’ boob nubs, but I probably could have if I wanted to.  So I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  This was poison.

Not to suggest I could ever watch Gwyneth Paltrow poop.  Not in person, anyway.  I don’t even want to.  Imagine if it didn’t stink?  What would that mean about the world?  I get a toe twitch just thinking about it.

But I blame Gwyneth for stamping this image on my brain.  She has a lifestyle newsletter called GOOP.  It’s all about her lifestyle, as you can tell from the way it includes her initials.  According to her, people were all the time begging to know just how she stays so thin and healthy and luminous and wonderful.  She’s spilling the beans in GOOP, because she’s a generous person.  How did she get that way?  Read GOOP.

I’ve never cared one way or the other about Gwyneth Paltrow.  She kind of bores me as an actress, and the sexist animal inside me that sees all women as sex objects can’t really muster a lot of juice for her.  She’s too sharp and spindly.  And she doesn’t even compensate with the swarthy big nosedness my libido appreciates in a Sophia Coppola, for instance.  Anyway, I have specific tastes.

Do I own previously viewed VHS copies of both SLIDING DOORS and SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE that I purchased from Blockbuster?  Sure, we all do.  Even though I don’t like Paltrow or these films, I can understand why I bought them.  Three-for-two sales, mostly.  But also because SLIDING DOORS is sort of science fictionish.  And as someone concerned with being a part of the national conversation, I felt obligated to own SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE.  Gwyneth wore a fake van dyke in that movie, and for that she won an Academy Award.  Also, you see her tits in it.  But whatever.  Like I said, she’s not my thing.

But I read GOOP because I have a Google Alert set for “wheatgrass juice”, and that’s why I can’t stop thinking of Gwyneth Paltrow’s poops.  Turns out the secret to her lustrousness has a lot to do with the liquid that she forces out her butthole.  From a recent issue: “If your bowel movements get sluggish, you can accelerate things by
drinking half a cup of castor oil or using a mild herbal laxative.
Bowel elimination is paramount for correct detoxification.”

See, Gwyneth and other people who don’t understand very much about human biology seem to think that eating anything made of food infects your body with mysterious toxins that can only be removed via forced pooping.  Almost every day, Gwyneth eats food.  Like a lot of us.  So you can imagine how much toxic buildup she’s got swimming in the space between her bony protrusions.

Over and over and over again in my mind, she’s sitting on a white porcelain toilet.  There’s a wicker tray on the tank full of decorative soaps and maybe one of those jars full of essential oils with sticks coming out the top.  She’s barefoot.  Her toes sink into the plush teal toilet mat.  Is she wearing green satin pajamas?  Yes.  But the bottoms are pulled down to make room for her poop.  She’s reading a Joyce Carol Oates book on her Kindle.  The sound is like a child at a wishing well alternating between dumping the rest of his melted Slurpee and tossing in a few coins.

Poisonous.

Why am I telling you this?  Well, I can only hope this vision is contagious.  If you find yourself infected, go ahead and pass it on to someone else.  Let’s flush this toxin from our collective consciousnesses.  Let’s all of us, right now, push.