My junior high school biology teacher instilled fear in our young hearts when he told us that if we got into a car accident with a full bladder, the bladder could rupture. He was right. In general, a full bladder ruptures more easily than an empty bladder.
This doesn’t mean that your bladder will explode if you hold in your urine because your dad, husband, or brother won’t make a pit stop.
Our bodies have a nonvoluntary reflex mechanism to prevent our bladder from getting too distended, called the micturition reflex. When our bladder gets distended, there are stretch receptors in the bladder wall that let us know that it is time to go. As we all know, this is not the most comfortable sensation (if you wait too long). These sensory neurons cause contractions that can become strong enough to overcome the muscle tone holding the urethra shut and release all that urine.
Borborygmi: borbo•ryg•mi; noun, pluraclass="underline" rumbling sounds caused by gas moving through the intestines.
Certainly not a word learned in medical school, or that can be easily used in a sentence.
These rumbling sounds are a normal part of digestion. They are generated from muscular activity in the stomach and small intestine as the food, gas, and fluids are mixed together and pushed through the intestine. This squeezing of the muscular walls is called peristalsis. Many people associate these sounds with hunger because they are louder and echo more when the intestine is empty. Yum!
9:07A.M.
Gberg: Good morning.
Leyner: All the best to you and yours… give me one moment, just finishing an e-mail…
Gberg: I’m just making a coffee.
9:10A.M.
Leyner: OK…
Gberg: Coffee and pizza for breakfast.
9:15A.M.
Leyner: I had a Slim Jim and a fermented mare’s milk.
Gberg: It’s hard to find good fermented mare’s milk these days.
Leyner: People should drink the milk of as varied a miscellany of mammals as possible.
Gberg: Did you ever sample human breast milk back in the day?
Leyner: All those diverse antibodies are good for getting an immune system ready for the coming apocalyptic flu pandemic.
Gberg: I live in fear of the avian flu.
Leyner: No… never sample that mamma milk… I’ve tried to keep the birthing process and my sex life as far apart as possible.
Leyner: The whole avian flu thing seems like some Hollywood pitch… like Hitchcock’sThe Birds and…
Gberg: So, my brother, we need to finish this bitch and move on to bigger and better things.
Leyner: What was that epidemic movie?
Gberg:Outbreakwith Dustin Hoffman.
Leyner: What are doing right now… are we IMing about something we need to be IMing about?
Gberg: Not yet, really just getting loose.
Leyner: Otay.
Leyner: Tomorrow seems not so good to work… is Thursday any good?
Gberg: I am doing stretches at the same time.
Leyner: Tell me about Thursday.
Gberg: Can’t do Thursday. Working.
9:30A.M.
Leyner: One of those six-pack ab cover mags… that men should do the recumbent bike in the gym and not the regular one that puts pressure on the cajones and the tender perineum.
Gberg: There is something about bike riding that can damage the pudendal nerve and affect your front end lifter.
Gberg: The tender perineum — who wrote that? Fitzgerald?
Leyner: I love when you conflate urology and heavy machinery.
Leyner:“The Tender Perineum”… yes, yes… the unfinished F. Scott masterpiece…
Gberg: I never knew I could conflate.
Leyner: Poor slob never had the chance to work out the denouement…
Leyner: I heard some woman talking about morning erections the other day…
Gberg: Did you just spontaneously spell denouement correctly?
Leyner: At a supermarket in L.A.
Gberg: I was wondering where you heard that?
Leyner: Yes, I spontaneously spelled it correctly… it’s the coffee.
Gberg: I didn’t know that people actually spoke in L.A.
Leyner: This woman… enormous plastic L.A. tits and the face of a wizened gargoyle… said she won’t touch a morning erection… because it’s not “for me” (she said)… it’s just a “reflex.”
9:35A.M.
Leyner: I guess people want to feel they’ve “earned” a change in some other human’s physiognomy.
Gberg: L.A. is such a bizarre place. New Yorkers would take advantage of any erection. Why waste a good thing?
Leyner: You know those commercials for that new Viagra… whatever it’s called?
Gberg: Cialis. Damn, those people seem relaxed and happy.
Gberg: We should start our own pharmaceutical company.
Leyner: Why do they say — at the end of that ad — that you should report erections that last over four hours to your doctor?
Leyner: Maybe you should report them to the police?
Leyner: What’s the danger of a four-hour erection anyway?
Gberg: Priapism, my friend, priapism.
Gberg: Very painful and can cause permanent damage to the penis.
Leyner: Can you get a permanent erection?
Gberg: Me, personally?
9:40A.M.
Leyner: That’s funny.
Leyner: Porn stars are said to be able to get their erections back quickly… it’s a vocational skill in high demand in the industry…
Leyner: What accounts for the difference in the refractory time for various men?
Leyner: Is that what that’s called?
Gberg: It sounds so scientific.
Leyner: That’s the right term! I just looked it up. I’m so smart… Don’t you think?
Gberg: You could write a scientific
article, “The Refractory Erectile Period in the Porn Industry.”
Gberg: Just as important as making it go up is making it go down. For those embarrassing public moments.
Leyner: Speaking of porn.
Leyner: Did we ask this in the book: Can women ejaculate?
Gberg: All we are doing is speaking of poop, porn, and penises.
Gberg: So sophomoric.
Gberg: Yes, and they can.
9:45A.M.
Leyner:… that we’re hard-wired to launch our genes into the future before we decay in a puddle of excrement and putrescence???