My Fellow Inebriates,

When WordPress let the following comment through, I thought its spam filters must be drunk.

…stop using your harsh bathroom tissue. Buy premoistened wipes or pads instead. Do you use garlic at home?…

But Holly Hayden’s message actually  made sense in response to 5 Ways to Help Your Anus Thrive. Goodness, she was actually proposing help for the ragged anuses at LBHQ.

“Stop using your harsh bathroom tissue.”

Given that throughout history people have used everything from leaves/twigs to corn husks to wipe away their nightsoil, TP doesn’t seem so harsh. But point taken. Miss V in particular dislikes the harshness of Kirkland Signature toilet tissue, a product we’ve taken to buying in bulk at Costco because she enjoys unspooling entire rolls into the toilet while nobody’s looking.

“Buy premoistened wipes or pads instead.”

Done and done. Almost no one with young kids can avoid prepackaged wipes. In just the way disposable diapers sneak into the diaper bag, especially with a second kid, premoistened wipes assert their must-have status in short order. You get to the point where, if somebody else’s kid sticks a hand down a diaper and emerges with a handful of excrement, and the parent doesn’t have a premoistened wipe, you think they’re a total asshole.

But according to an itchy-bottom expert, wet wipes can cause rashes. Especially in body areas that transition from external to internal, “such as the lips or the anus,” or indeed the lips of the anus, sensitivity to methylchloroisothiazolinone/ methylisothiazolinone (MCI/MI) or kathon CG, the chemicals most often found in wipes, may induce mind-bendingly awful ass rashes, which then devolve into further hell as you “treat” them by wiping instead of using TP.

I did an informal poll of LBHQ to see who exactly is using these wet wipes.

Miss P: No. Miss P likes to squat and dash, using nothing, and leaving everything behind for later discovery. Hemorrhoids? No.

Miss V: Yes. Miss V feeds wet wipes to the toilet despite their obvious indigestibility, making for later surprises of the plumbing kind. Hemorrhoids? No.

My dad: Refused to be interviewed. Hemorrhoids? Not that I know of, which is to say, inconclusive.

My mum: Yes. Takes wet wipes to the park so other parents won’t think she’s an asshole. Hemorrhoids? “None of your bloody business,” but no.

Scarybear: Shits in the woods, he says, which means outside by the cedar trees. No one has ever seen him leave the house. Hemorrhoids? How could someone as ornery as Scary not have hemorrhoids?

“Do you use garlic at home?”

For what? OMG, my fellow inebriates, what is my spammer suggesting? What would one do with garlic vis-à-vis hemorrhoids? Insert them up one’s ass??

I had to know, so I clicked on Holly’s link.

My WordPress spam filter might have tied one on, but gmail’s was sober. It put my “H Miracle Alternative Remedy Handbook” straight into the spam pile. And when I retrieved it, it was just a tease.

Luckily I don’t have a functional anus, but I know most of you do. Should you insert garlic into it?

My new friend Holly may have been reticent to share her hemorrhoid wisdom without a credit card number, but Lainey Penninger was not. Her instructions were as follows:

Insert the garlic clove into your rectum like a suppository. Adding lubricant will make it easier to insert. Simply use your index finger and insert the clove inside the rectum approximately two inches. Leave the garlic suppository overnight… Repeat three times per week to decrease hemorrhoid symptoms. The garlic clove will naturally be expelled when you have your next bowel movement.

Holy crap, people, I’d never thought about doing this. Have any of you ever done this? Would you like to?

We have garlic in the fridge, but none of the humans wanted to be a guinea pig. So I thought I’d find Scarybear and insert some garlic up his cavity while he was busy watching The Matrix for the hundredth time. But I got distracted by a bottle of PHILLIPS ANALOGUE 78 KÖLSCH. Unbeknownst to me it had arrived in a Phillips sampler pack that included DR. FUNK DUNKEL, a beer my dad found so awesome that he asked my mum to buy it again, little knowing that she would instead abide by the LBHQ beer-tasting agenda and buy a four-variety pack so we won’t run out of brews to review and have to post two weeks of cat pictures again.

At first my dad was disgruntled at receiving only three DR. FUNK DUNKELS and nine randoms. I suspected hemorrhoids, but you can’t blame those for everything. No, my dad thought he’d tried the Phillips sampler before and hadn’t liked it. Which was a total hallucination, as the box has never been in our house before. Again, I suspected hemorrhoids—this time the hallucination-inducing kind. This he denied, so I guess I got my interview.

Fact is, when we got those Phillips beers chilled, they were damned fine. ANALOGUE 78 pours silky straw-colored with a film of white head and quick bubbles that waft bakery crust, faint citrus notes, and earthy hops. The aroma falls within typical parameters: nothing outlandish, just crisp and uncomplicated.

On the palate ANALOGUE 78 is clean and refreshing with peppy carbonation, easy bitterness and restrained malt. A quintessential summer beer, the stuff is more quaffable than its marketing materials (“our version of the long-play album”) purport. It was gone in a blink.

Needless to say, any thoughts of garlic were also gone. Not that stuffing garlic up Scary’s ass was one of my better ideas…