I was enjoying the garden last weekend, marveling at my wonderful leeks and corn and beans and flowers, and most especially my squash plants, which are looking particularly lush. So lush, in fact, that I couldn’t help but wonder how the plant tasted. I’ve seen pumpkin flowers as accents in salads before, at fancy restaurants and weddings and the like, so I figured it’d be edible. I found a female flower growing in an inopportune spot, and so I thought, hey, I might as well eat that if I’m going to prune it anyway. Then I took a bite of the first male flower I found, and thought it was good, if not a little bitter. I started munching away, pruning every excess flower away in that special way one does when a gardener is proud of his work.

It was so satisfying, in fact, that I thought back to a recent hike I had with some friends, where we saw a majestic doe nibbling on the grasses here and there, posing gently for us as we marveled at her venison beauty from a few dozen meters away. We gawked, we took pictures, and a friend of mine made a crack about how deer shits are the weirdest fucking shits, how they just seem to blast out little piles of kibble and leave them in the forest.

Return to me, chewing on my squash, trying to work around the little spines, and making sure to get at all the juicy spots so all the delicious squash nutrients would find their way into my body, me, the gardener. The lord and master of this lovely, green place, at one with nature, much like that lovely doe.

Needless to say, I shit myself multiple times that night. I blew through multiple pairs of underwear, my entire bedspread, and every blanket in the house. I’d also eaten an unreasonable amount of stool-blackening blueberries that day. And my mattress still smells like rotten fruit.

TL;DR – Toxic Squash Syndrome.