“So, as I was stumbling home from the neighborhood ‘bar(-dello)’, I came across my longtime neighbor, Steve, and his two small daughters. One of them, the somewhat more than toddler-year old was stumbling around like she was also drunk.

He looked haggard as he turned to me and said ‘You’re It’, holding out his fist for a parental authority transfer gambit which I adeptly declined like a grandmaster of gene-line replication chess.

“She has a poopy diaper,” he declared. “So she wants to stop every few feet to further pre-empt a change. It’s taken us an hour just to get this far from her school.”

( !!! )

This seemed like the key to enlightenment to me.

Never had I previously imagined that children and others might actively inhibit the possibility of getting the crap out of their pants!

Suddenly, in a flash, I understood the entire history of my species. Civilization in general. My own history. My mind. It was like the sunrise of a shit-star in consciousness…

I turned back to Steve, who I had passed, and said: “That reminds me of my own brain. I am fairly certain I have successfully avoided changing that diaper since around the time they assassinated JFK!”

A laugh-riot ensued, and I could have sworn that I saw the load in his kid’s pants expand a bit during the dumpster-fire of hilarity that quickly coupled itself to further sacrifices of possible intestinal integrity in all of us.

— Bobby Yingo on The Way Home