November 19, 2007
As we mentioned in our initial blog, certain stories that we collected for “The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death (and other true tales of drunken debauchery)” did not make the final cut due to length concerns, or, in the case of this particular story, because of an overall consensus between the writers and the publisher that it was just too disgusting.
However, in the interests of completeness — the star of this one deserves a spot among the world’s most notable drunks, even if his story is far more nauseating than the others — we have decided to post the unpublished parts of the book here on occasion.
We included many stories of drunks trying to beat the law, however few of our protagonists took matters as far as the gentleman in this following story, and hopefully very few have since.
Coprophagia, the consumption of faeces, from the Greek copro (faeces) and phagy (eat) is practiced by several animals due to limitations of their digestive systems or diets. The makers of Binaca breathspray however have yet to engineer a product potent enough to quell the mouth odour brought on by such a diet and as such eating one’s own merde is something of a societal taboo.
From an evolutionary standpoint, the re-ingestion of soft faeces captures vitamins that would otherwise be wasted in certain animals. Perhaps then the 57-year-old man who stuffed his mouth full of his own excrement was doing so not to beat a breathalyser test, as was the assumption of police at the time, but rather in hopes of replenishing vital nutrients after a night of heavy drinking.
Found driving erratically on a lonely stretch of Ontario road, the man was shoved into a patrol car and, in what would assume was a nightmare the next day for a car cleaner, he went on to vomit, urinate and defecate in the backseat. Once at the cop shop the man scooped up some of what he had recently expelled and put it in his mouth before he had to submit to a breathalyser test.
A police inspector speculating as to the motivations behind the man’s spur of the moment feast said he did not think that the man’s level of intoxication could have been solely responsible for making him do something as “disgusting as that”.
The man, alas, had nary a “shit-eating grin” to crack as sadly, he was unsuccessful in this innovative bid at cheating medical science. The breathalyser clocked him at twice the legal alcohol limit, and no doubt, he did not receive an offer that night to share the cellblock’s communal string of dental floss. (Source: The Toronto Sun, November 2005)
