13. Gonna Be Trouble

Everybody wants to talk shit, but who can? Not the Macho Man Randy Savage, that’s for sure. In his long and storied career, his most undefeatable opponent was the Parental Advisory sticker. As hard as Macho might look on the cover of Be a Man, “Gonna Be Trouble” proves he can only talk “shhh.”

And he’s not alone. I’ve been trying to talk shit for over 15 years. I have Crohn’s Disease, an autoimmune disorder that causes inflammation in the large intestine. I’ve never published, or even finished, any writing about it.

I was diagnosed at 19, the summer between freshman and sophomore years of college. Though I had been experiencing symptoms for close to two years at that time—fatigue, bouts of diarrhea that would never really clear up, and eventually, blood, fever, and that distinct feeling that I’m sure a lot of you have experienced of realizing in a dreadful rush that you’ve let an inconvenience fester into full blown trouble. I flipped the freshman 15 by losing the modest muscle mass I’d built playing high school football. The tipping point came on a drive back downstate from a late-summer trip to northern Michigan, where I was one I-75 pothole away from shitting myself in a car full of friends. I made it to a gas station bathroom, and so began a 15-year journey of being less and less afraid of shitting my brains out in gas station bathrooms. Like anything, the more you do it, the more mundane it becomes. When you have my problem, you start to associate the gas station bathroom with feelings of relief. If you’re shitting in the gas station bathroom, that means you’ve made it to the gas station bathroom.

I’m lucky. I’ve only shit my pants a handful of times. Once, while walking in the dark back from working the merch table at a StarKid concert. Once, stupidly, standing in my bedroom while my roommate occupied the only bathroom in the house (Why didn’t I just drop trow and blast the wastebasket, or run out the backyard, or try literally anything else?). One time, I was walking on campus with my girlfriend at night, and it started coming. I was able to get inside a familiar campus building, all the way down the hall, only to lose it opening the door to the bathroom. My body does this cruel thing where it increases the pressure the closer it gets to a non-mortifying means of releasing the pressure. If you have an irritable bowel condition and this happens to you, please reach out so I can have someone to laugh about this with.

The author in 2007. Unwell.

There are so many stories. I’m an old pro at colonoscopies. During my most recent one, the doctor was late to the procedure room, and the over-caffeinated support staff were joking around. One of them looked at my chart and said to me, “You’re 35? What the heck are you doing here?” Then he looked again and said, “Oh, Crohn’s. Sorry, man.” If I was feeling mean, I could have said, “Lucky for you it’s not cancer.” But instead, I said, “The day’s coming when I won’t be the youngest patient in the endoscopy center.”

I was in a writing workshop class years ago, and there was a detail in a classmate’s story about blood being drawn and the smell of pennies being detectable by another person in the room. I decided to plausibility police that, and all the women in the room rolled their eyes at me. It was a double-down on the world’s worst roller coaster realizing what they were talking about, and then realizing I had to eat the embarrassment. The choice in that moment to be the typical man who forgot that women experience the world differently was far better than being the freak who starts an argument in workshop about how menstrual blood might smell differently than fresh blood—at least, his fresh blood— which doesn’t smell like fucking anything. I had held a dripping, red-wet slick of toilet paper a foot from my face enough times to know that for sure.

Why do I have such a hard time writing about this? Well, it is embarrassing. It’s not a heroic disease. It’s chronic, and my life is made a little to a lot worse by it every day, but it doesn’t stop me from doing almost anything I want to do. I don’t want it to define me, and I don’t want you to think about my asshole when you’re talking with me. I also would rather not think about it. Some days, if I’m not actively thinking about it, I can trick myself into forgetting I have it.

One of the People I Look Up To, Hank Green, has ulcerative colitis, which is what I was initially diagnosed with until my most recent doc revised the diagnosis to Crohn’s. Like most things he experiences, he’s been an incredible communicator about it. Green was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 2023, a cancer that the medication I’m taking increases my risk for. It hit me harder than any celebrity illness had ever hit me. Green’s in remission, but his experience was a reminder that at some point, this is gonna be trouble. I’m convinced that, eventually, something like lymphoma will be what puts me in the ground. My uncle died of colon cancer in 2022. Writing about it makes me think about it. I’m controlling the condition with medication, and I have regular checkups on the books—so thinking about it doesn’t do me much good.

Hank’s brother, John Green, the famous YA novelist, published a video this summer discussing why he rarely talks about his marriage in public. John says, “I know that the more you share of yourself, especially your pain and your secrets and whatnot, the easier it is to get people interested in the work you’re trying to share.” Friends, it’s not so much of a secret that that’s exactly what’s going on here. And it’s very, very possible that I haven’t written about this because I haven’t had work that was important enough to share. Or, to get really cynical about it, I haven’t really had work that was available for sale.

Then, of course, there is my son. Still unborn as I write but hopefully among us now as you read. Genetically, with me, my mom, and my wife’s mom with major autoimmune conditions—he has some bad DNA to dodge. Out of all the impending fatherhood fears, one of biggest is bringing a child into the world to endure an affliction that he’s not yet old enough to understand. I was never very good at football, but there was a period in my physical peak from 16 to 17 where it felt as if my legs were industrial springs, as if I could run forever. I got a short but wonderful window to feel strong and good. What if my worst days are my son’s best days? What if that starts before we can explain what’s wrong? Writing about it makes me think about it. One of the worst leftovers from my religious life is how superstitious I am. I don’t believe in speaking things into existence, but I also don’t want to chance it. A rapper named Smokke is featured on “Gonna Be Trouble.” He warns us, “Watch what ya say before the shhh go bam.” And maybe he’s right. If you don’t talk shit, maybe you can avoid getting shit.

It's possible I haven’t written about this because it’s an ongoing story that has yet to reveal its purpose, and so any attempt to bring things to a point must reckon with the fact that I don’t know what’s going to happen. And, like Randy says in this surprisingly okay song, “I’m sick and tired of all the speculation.” I don’t believe in it, but I wouldn’t mind it if you kept your fingers crossed for us.

3.25 out of 5 dreamless, Propofol sleeps.