How to Take a Shit at a Festival

Earlier this week we ran an article about how to avoid taking a shit at a festival. Personally, I believe there is nothing wrong with laying cable in a festival setting. The thing you ought to ask yourself if you’re at a music festival and need to take a shit is “why am I at a music festival and needing to do this? How important is voiding my bowels to me? How much value do I place on removing the remains of a burrito from my insides in an effective, pleasurable manner?” 

You see, we all take shits but what’s not talked about very often is that we all take pleasure in taking shits. We all evaluate them, have internal thoughts about the texture, consistency, colour and weight of our bowel movements. We’re all bringing reading material into the bathroom, fragrancing the air. We’re all on an eternal hunt for paper that’ll generate the perfect wipe. (I’ve got a lead on some quad-ply Japanese stuff made from a combination of carbon fibre and sheep’s wool that’ll get your butthole so clean you’ll shit yourself.) So, ask yourself, how important is getting that foul nugget out of you in an environment that you’re comfortable with? Because – guaranteed – that environment is not a music festival.

Which is the paradox. We want to imagine ourselves as beings of pure expression. Wearing jeans that somehow say something ineffable and true about ourselves. Nobody is dumb enough to think that the clothes they wear or the environments they place themselves within don’t have semiotic meaning – even if they don’t think of it that way. So the paradox is that, for all of the propagandising music festivals do, all the talk of them as places removed from the regular world, they are still places where people need to take a shit. Festivals can feed you rhetoric about rules not applying in their multi-stage celebrations of not plagiarising Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Music’ list so much that they could get sued but the reality is that, if you feed yourself, one immutable rule remains: people are going to need to slide out some of the Devil’s rope while they are there. The talk doesn’t align with the reality of what they’re promising.

There’s one obvious option that looks you right in the face and says “hey, I’m an obvious option and I’m staring you right in the face”. To wit: taking enough drugs that your digestive system is jammed up enough (or plain confused enough) to not generate a loaf while you’re listening to a 19-year-old child with a pirated copy of Ableton, a wispy moustache and an interesting approach to capitalising their pseudonym. This is the cowards choice. This is not being true to your body and the poetry of peristalsis. Do not dishonour the system that’s given you a perfect brown gift every day you’ve been alive. It’s equivalent to punching Santa Claus in the face because you’re more into Hanukkah right now. He’s been so good to you and – what? – you insult him out of convenience and caprice? For shame.

So a person’s mind, naturally, starts to wonder. About what the most perfect set of circumstances for detaching yourself from a particularly delicious coq au vin you ate a day ago while taking in the smooth, smooth tones DJ Johnny Fuckhead or whomever. Dangling a glass box from a helicopter above the crowd watching the headlining act, sitting on a diamond throne, squeezing out what remains of some unethically farmed meat while you exult in a feeling of absolute power. “I’m literally shitting on people right now” you think “many people will publish theses about my faeces. They will wonder which was the greater spectacle. Hambone Sally sexing it up to her hit song ‘I’m a Sleeve so Put Your Arm in Me’ or the person defecating 20 metres above the crowd’s head.” Which is a thing that cannot be achieved. Except maybe by funnyman Steve Martin. 

So we’ve established that a music festival is never going to generate the optimum (or even sufficient) conditions for peeling off a parcel of putrefaction. We’ve also discovered, you and I, that if music festivals were true to their ideals we wouldn’t need to shit at them.

So until the technology exists to arrest thousands of people’s digestive systems for the duration, the solution is to get political. To stage our own small, off-putting revolutions. Occupy Dump Street. Music festivals are bullshit charades generated by people with more money than either you or I. Sleepy corporate leviathans who have swaddled themselves in enough borrowed blankets of cool nobody notices their grey, corporate skin. There’s exceptions, sure, but if you really want to take a shit at a music festival and have that log represent some justice in the world you’re going to have to do it on the main stage. Hustle your way through security and drop a deuce right in the middle of the harmonium solo during ‘Magickal Scarecrowz’ by the Sorcerous Logp1le (feat. Beaver Dam). It’s going to be difficult but it’s also going to be worth it. Because isn’t that what the festival deserves? They’ve asked you to pay hundreds of dollars to simply attend and then don’t let you shit wherever and whenever you want. If they really hewed to their their ideals they’d massage each ex-sausage sausage out of you personally. Music can change the world and it’s being held to ransom by promoters who don’t care about your bowels.

Fuck that shit.

Kane Daniel never defecates. Instead he puts all his waste into a toilet named Twitter.

Previously: How To Avoid Taking A Shit At A Festival