Opinions Are Like Colonoscopy Stories: Everybody Has One
In retrospect, turning 45 was a mistake.
Ever since that fateful day in March, bad things have been happening to me—things even Cool Daniel or Even Steven Daniel can't seem to reconcile. There was the you have angry old man shoulder just deal with it diagnosis from my orthopedist, the now that I have you trapped in this little room have you ever had a prostate exam before from my new doctor, and most recently, the kind Indian doctor who is supposed to be helping me control my stomach acid suggesting now that you're 45 we should do a colonoscopy like it was some kind of prize for which I was now eligible.
Well, I can tell you this now with 100% certainty: it's not a prize.
In fact, I'm pretty sure colonoscopies were invented by a bored, sadistic intern who one day saw butts and tiny cameras and thought we could charge a lot of money if we put these two things together.
These days, most colonoscopies end the same way: with the patient writing about their experience on the Internet so that strangers are forced to think about butts.
So go ahead.
Think about butts.
Good. Now we can get on with my story, tentatively titled, okay but there's no cake in there if that's what you're after.
I wouldn’t claim we were poor growing up. My dad joining the military was probably the best financial decision our family ever made, and as he moved up the ranks in the United States Air Force, our meals improved dramatically. But in those early years, dinner was more about survival than culinary exploration.
Take, for example, my childhood favorite: carnitas with papitas. I didn’t realize until much later that this dish was just "meat and potatoes," and you probably know it as picadillo. It was just ground beef, potatoes, a little tomato sauce, and maybe a tortilla or two if we were lucky. To me, it was the apex of haute cuisine. Our menu was simple and unpretentious: spaghetti, tacos, and chalupas (which, according to my wife, are actually tostadas, but whatever). We ate what we had, and what we had was usually delicious.
Except Shake 'n Bake chicken. Fuck Shake 'n Bake.
When we moved to San Vito, Italy, in 1986, we spent our first few weeks living in a hotel called the Dei Normanni. That’s where I first encountered the sacred duality of food: some nights we enjoyed authentic Italian cuisine, and other nights we cracked open cans of Chef Boyardee. Honestly? At age six, I couldn’t tell you which was better, but I knew which was cheaper.
I haven't experienced the enticing aroma of Beefaroni warming on the stove in years, but I know it would take me right back to that cramped hotel room.
Living overseas has a way of shrinking your world. While my cousins were all growing up together in Corpus Christi and Austin, our family of five was tucked away in a little villa a few miles from the base. We were a self-contained unit, moving together, eating together, holding each other down through the transitions. And nowhere was that sense of comfort more apparent than at the dinner table. Food wasn’t just sustenance; it was stability, love, and a reminder that no matter where we were, we were home.
I don’t like anticipation. If something is happening on the weekend, I do my best not to think about it until Saturday morning. Unfortunately, that approach doesn’t work with a colonoscopy. You can’t just show up. You have to prep. Prep is most of it.
My first exposure to the butt-camera industrial complex came years ago while listening to Dale Dudley on The Dudley and Bob Show—now Mornings with Matt and Bob—describe his colonoscopy prep in excruciating detail. The kind of detail that makes you want to slam through the barriers on the 183 flyover and plummet to your fiery death just to make the mental images fade. He spoke at length about the prep drink GoLYTELY, which, despite sounding like a whimsical fairy’s incantation, is just a trademarked name for oh no juice.
Later, my friend Carl wrote a disturbingly informative blog post about his own experience, and even later still, my friend Cecilia started an awareness campaign for early screening, for which I had no follow-up questions at all.
When it was finally my turn, I read through the official prep instructions and laughed out loud at the line: "Plan to be near a bathroom." Buddy, I live near a bathroom. My home office is practically inside one. Must be all the water I drink.
I did appreciate the way the instructions tried—valiantly, I think—to tiptoe around the sheer indignity of the whole process. Euphemisms like “clean bowel” and “you may experience increased urgency” made it sound like these things were somehow optional. It should have said this is going to happen, and there is nothing you can do about it.
So yeah, I had a lot of thoughts going into the colonoscopy. But most of all, I dreaded what was to come. Not the camera. Not the IV. No, the real nightmare was the fasting.
Don’t tell anyone I love, but nothing in this world brings me as much pure, unfiltered happiness as food.
While it’s well established that I am a sugar-fiend of the highest order, I must also admit to being a savory fiend, a fried fiend, and, depending on the day, an I’ll-eat-something-I-dropped-on-the-floor fiend. Food isn’t just fuel. It’s the reward, the goal, the emotional support animal I keep in the form of a double Whataburger with cheese, jalapeños, and no onions.
Fast food is my happy place. I dream of Jack in the Box Ultimate Cheeseburgers. I would vote for a Domino’s thin crust beef and jollies if it ran for office. My taste buds know the topography of a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich better than they know the contours of my lover's neck. Give me Popeyes spicy tenders, Sonic’s foot-long coney, and the fish product from Long John Silver’s, and I am whole again.
There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t smile—truly smile—when thinking about what I’m going to have for lunch. I want to die in the middle of a General Tso’s chicken meal, with the last thing I taste being a crunchy bit of caramelized chicken slathered in syrupy joy.
All that said, I draw the line at buffets. These gross, germ-infested troughs represent the lowest form of human experience, where evolved apes jockey for position in front of crab legs and wilted lettuce, rather than having food served to them at a table like a person who is part of a civilized society.
I live to eat and eat to live, and I have receipts in the form of this epic Dad Bod.
Honesty corner, I missed the part in the instructions about avoiding fruits, vegetables, and nuts the day before the day before, but in my defense, I rarely eat those kinds of empty calories anyway. So I was probably fine.
To prepare for my liquid diet day, I went to H-E-B and returned with a frozen pizza. Not exactly on the approved list. I ate it alone in my office, crouched over my keyboard like Gollum with his ring, whispering "my precious" between bites.
Later, I realized the word "liquid" in "liquid diet" had a very specific modifier: "clear." Apparently, protein shakes and orange Jell-O don’t count if they look like someone wrung them out of a traffic cone. So back to H-E-B I went, this time reading labels like a detective on CSI: Pflugerville.
On the actual liquid diet day, I subsisted on clear protein drinks, pineapple Jell-O, and lemon-lime Gatorade. It was soul-crushing.
To top things off, Dom made chili for dinner that night. Her famous, aromatic, soul-nourishing chili. The entire house smelled like warmth and joy and Fritos, while I sipped a bottle of vaguely apple-flavored sadness.
To be clear, keeping my stomach full of liquids did help stave off actual hunger pangs. But my hunger has never lived in my stomach. It's always lived in my heart. And my heart was empty.
I wasn’t hungry. I was miserable. This was terrible, I told myself. And the worst part? I hadn’t even gotten to the Dale Dudley “grip the seat with both hands” portion of the festivities yet.
I didn’t care about what was coming next. The procedure, the IV, the butt-camera—whatever. All I cared about was that I couldn’t eat. That someone, somewhere, had the authority to tell me I couldn’t eat.
That’s not the America I know and love.
Fasting is a champagne problem, I know. The fact that I can normally afford to eat whatever I want, whenever I want, is a privilege—and a curse. Because I don’t eat to "fuel my body," as my more disciplined, kale-crunching friends do. I eat to beat back the darkness. I eat to silence the internal monologue that keeps reminding me of all the things I’ve failed to do by age 45. I eat to feel, if only for a moment, like I’ve won something.
Food is happiness. Not metaphorically. Literally. There are chemicals. Endorphins. Signals to the brain that say, “You’re doing great, sweetie.” And for whatever reason, those signals seem amplified in me. I can’t explain it, but a chorizo, egg, and cheese taco brings me more joy than a month of Wellbutrin ever could.
You know that old saying, “Feed a cold, starve a fever”? In my world, it’s "Feed a cold, feed a fever, feed a sprained ankle, feed a paper cut, feed a generational trauma that is threatening to upend the very foundations of your existence."
I assume people think I talk about Long John Silver’s all the time because I’m trying to be funny. But I’m not. I’m crying out for help. I’m asking you to love me, so I don’t have to keep eating diamond-stamped fish to feel okay. I’m asking you to care about me before I order another combo with extra crunchies and tartar sauce.
Fasting didn’t just deny me food. It denied me access to the one thing I know makes me feel better. The one thing I trust. And what kind of monster asks you to give that up, even for a day?
I never minded being grounded as a kid. I could survive losing my Game Boy or being told I couldn’t ride my bike for a week. But being sent to bed without dinner? That was true punishment. That was emotional warfare. If given the choice between a spanking with an old leather belt or skipping a meal, I would have dropped my pants and bent over the coffee table without hesitation.
One of my favorite dinners from that time was Penne with Butter Bread. Penne, in our house, meant pasta with tomato sauce—just sauce from a jar, nothing fancy. The butter bread was exactly what it sounded like: a loaf of white sandwich bread, each slice painted with a mix of melted butter and garlic powder, then toasted to perfection in the oven. I could eat four or five pieces without blinking. It was warm, and cheap, and perfect.
There was one night we were having penne, and I accidentally poured my iced tea into the bowl. I don’t remember how it happened—maybe I got distracted, maybe I thought I was topping off my drink—but the result was a bowl of sugary tomato soup. My parents were furious. They thought I was goofing off, ruining a perfectly good dinner on purpose. I tried to explain, but nothing came out right. I just sat there, staring at my drowned noodles, wishing I could take it all back.
That’s probably when it first clicked: food is love. And ruining a meal—even by accident—felt like breaking something sacred.
Dom and I try to keep that sacredness alive. We believe in family dinners at the table, even when we’re tired or annoyed or when one of the kids is pretending to die because we served green beans. And I wonder sometimes—do they feel it yet? Do they understand what the meal means, what it’s doing beneath the surface? Or are we laying the foundation for that feeling now, bite by bite?
The night before my colonoscopy, I didn’t have dinner with my family. I didn’t eat at all. At 5 p.m., I uncapped a bottle of Clenpiq and drank it alone, like a man who had been excommunicated from the church of dinner.
And it felt like a betrayal—not of my body, but of something deeper.
Anyway, the whole thing was fine. I drank the drink, I got through the night, and then I had the sleep of angels. Never mind about strangers seeing my bare ass because I don't remember that happening, so it didn't.
Ultimately, we like to believe we’re rational beings, evolved and enlightened. But all it takes is one day of skipped meals to turn us back into desperate little humans, clawing our way toward a shiny packet of Pop-Tarts. In that way, food reminds us that we're alive.
And we'll keep living, so long as we keep eating. Ping me sometime, and let's go share a meal together.
Your brother in Krispy Kreme,
Daniel
