The Beginning
My bowels have shut down. Jennifer is lovely. She has a bright smile, is enthusiastic, empathetic, and pregnant. With only four weeks to go for this, her fourth child, she seems happy despite the polite refrain, "I don’t know what I’m going to do." I like Jenny. I’ve already taken to calling her Jenny in my head, as that is how she refers to herself in her stories of life with her parents living close by, her brother who just got the house, and the other one abroad. All this I know about Jenny in our first five minutes of meeting, and it is necessary to like Jenny right now because Jenny is in my ass.
I had only ever seen colonic irrigation performed in comedy shows. Jackass was the first time. Thirty-something-year-old coked-up skater dudes carrying out pranks like stapling scrotums to pool tables for MTV. The day they did the colonic, a toy car came out of one of them. Jenny was gentle. There was no stink, no mess, just a specific tension and Jenny talking. As the pipe would wash its warm water inside me, my anxiety would creep up, and the bloating would increase with the feeling of needing to go. Jenny would just watch the contents move through the machine, saying, "Are you going somewhere nice for your holidays?"
This episode began in a Chinese restaurant in Dublin’s north inner city. I had just opened two Vicar Street shows, playing to thousands of screaming women, opening up for the Netflix-famous Hannah Berner. Deirdre O’Kane and I made a quick exit from the busy green room party for food. Road pals from touring, I’d order, she’d rant, we’d laugh and rant some more. It was in the early hours when we left, past the neon, the fishtanks, and the plastic waving cat. A man with his belly hanging out under his t-shirt looked at Deirdre, then at me, and said, "You lucky bastard!" and she swanned into the back of her taxi like Mick Jagger.
The next morning, the pain started. No breakfast, no appetite. The nausea kicked in with a fever. "You feeling OK?" I texted Deirdre. All was good on her end; the prawns must have been fine. I wanted to vomit, I wanted to shit, I wanted to eat, and my body allowed none of these things. Days later, I spent the Kilkenny Cat Laughs festival running between stage and my hotel bathroom as the laxatives began to work, and my attempt at a romantic weekend ended in another short relationship turned to shit (pun intended). From there, I drove to West Cork for my mother’s 70th, arrived in shivers, all I could do was sleep, fake smile, and not tell anyone I was terrified to eat anything. Back to Dublin, canceled shows, fevers, chest infections, dosing in and out of sleep, waking up to my daughter grabbing my face whispering, "I miss you"; and still, there was no sign of me returning to myself.
Weeks had passed by the time I had Jenny in my ass. "You’re doing great," she kept saying. It wasn’t nice, and I really wasn’t sure if all this was working. "I’m just re-educating your bowel," she would say, and I lay there picturing my bowels signing up for a further education course. Then she said it. The contents passing through were going from dark brown to black: "Would you say you’ve been stressed?" More water whooshing inside me, deep breaths, close the eyes—stressed? I get up every night in front of strangers hoping they turn up, hoping they laugh. I drove to Galway and back for five people; it nearly broke me. My liver is shot from processing adrenaline 24/7, and I think so much about making them laugh I barely laugh myself.
I had a tear in my eye, and I sucked in the air, I just wanted all this to be over. "There we go," Jenny said, and as I wiped my eyes to look at the latest display in the illuminated transparent pipe behind the screen of the Herrmann Hydromat, I saw it, slowly making its way through the pipe. It was not a toy car. It was jagged, strong; it was what I can only describe as a small rock. "That’s been there about 8 months," Jenny said. I was impressed as to how she knew this; there was no receipt attached. "That looks pretty sore to be carrying around," I suggested. No reply, and I tried to remember eating a rock for lunch and concluded I never had.
I remembered the latest bedtime story my daughter and I would read: ‘Your Fantastic Elastic Brain’. We learned all about how the brain has the capacity to learn and grow the more you use it. "The brain is an organ, not a muscle, Daddy," she’d say, and the organs all have their own intelligence. "You’ve been holding on to a lot of emotions," Jenny said. "You’re exhausted," and all I could do was smile. Jenny turned to look me in the eye: "You’ve done brilliantly today." I knew I had and knew that life was about to change. Right now, it was time to rest, take stock, breathe and meditate on rejigging the priorities in my life. It was time to get real, recover, and reset—soon the time will come to start a new course. But right now, it was time for Jenny to get out of my ass.