You like to think that years of experience should count for something. But the more years you’ve racked up since you were out of diapers, the more likely it is you’re going to be right back in them soon. That’s just an actuarial fact. That’s just math. You can’t fight math. So it shouldn’t be front-page news that I pooped my pants the other day. And not just a little.

[It wouldn’t be, Murr, if you didn’t tell everybody about it.]

Regardless, I maintain it wasn’t my fault. The blame strictly resides with the jar of salted cashews. Cashews, once opened, release a nut pheromone I did not evolve to resist. Satan himself has cashews on retainer, for odd jobs.

What happened was that I, in spite of my decades of experience being me, thought maybe I could open the can and have a small handful of nuts. And I could. I could, in fact, have quite a few handfuls. Fifteen minutes later my gut hollered up from the depths: What the hell you sending down here, woman? I put the lid back on the jar. Not too tight. Twenty minutes later, my gut again: Really? Really?

It was an unconscionable number of cashews. I know that now. I knew it at the time.

The first thing my gastro-intestinal tract did was shut down operations altogether in disbelief. A full day went by with no repercussions. No anything. Picture the serenity of prehistoric glacial Lake Missoula, filling up behind an ice dam to the tune of half the volume of Lake Michigan, just before the dam fails and sends two-thousand-foot walls of water down the Columbia river basin.

It was peaceful, that first day. I mean, yes, all sorts of movement is going on in the interior to help things along, peristalsis, waves of muscle contractions coaxing the eventual product through proper channels, but there’s a gate at the end of the line that we’re supposed to have some control over. We count on it. And so first thing the second morning, I duly terrified the toilet, and then an hour later I swamped it again. Honestly, it was impressive. Then I decided it was safe to go for a nice walk. I was a mile away from home when that gate began creaking ominously.

It all brings to mind the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. Surely some of the good citizens of Boston were alert to rivets popping on the giant molasses storage tank and yelled “Run! She’s gonna blow!” And then it was every man for himself.

I held on as long as I could. Maybe a workman’s porta-potty would show up in front of someone’s house. Maybe the restroom in the park that’s always locked won’t be locked. Maybe the Mexican restaurant has opened for the day. It’s only a half mile away. Maybe…maybe I can make it back to my house? I turned around. My options were being sealed off. Nothing else was.

No. All systems were Go. All sphincters surrendered, waving a briefly-white flag. All I am left with is grim resignation accompanied by a mild curiosity about the consistency of the product: are we talking a bean paste situation here, or salsa? I have abandoned my sprightly 4mph pace for the sorry gait you acquire when you’re only moving from the knees down, and added a slight pelvic tilt to avoid spillage. Visualize Carol Burnett doing Mrs. Huh-Wiggins. For a mile.

But I’ve learned my lesson. I am here to tell you that the next time I am presented with an open jar of fresh salted cashews, I will totally do it all over again. But I might stay a lot closer to home for a few days.