talking toilets

Did I dare title this article - “let’s talk shit?”…no! Because we cannot talk about his sensitive topic in polite company…in fact, we cannot pretend that we even have such stuff in our lives, so we flush it away using gallons of ever-more-precious clean water…drinking quality water we have spent much time, energy and money getting to our front door, and yet more energy cleaning up over and over.

This has never made sense to me, esp. since the revelation I had one evening in 1969 - under the influence of an incredible brownie, I bored my friends for hours with my treatise on toilets and the curse of the flush toilet and how it has ruined civilization, blah, blah, blah…

Well, I was actually on to something - but it was 40 years too soon, as usual. Now, things have caught up with us and here in California as we watch the reservoirs dry up and counties begin to squabble over who owns the right to suck out which river…we are beginning to talk water conservation…not toilets – yet - but i predict it is only a matter of time…

I especially am bothered by the sound in women’s public bathrooms – of a toilet being flushed before and after use! Why not let it “mellow”? Of course, we are afraid of contamination and probably rightly so. I had a crazy idea last year of offering a “Flexi-flush” stall in some multi-stall public facility to see if women could be encouraged to flush only occasionally ( every third use?) rather than every time.

They could choose to use that stall, and would get a “GOLD STAR” for not flushing…also a pen/poster on the door could be used to note every time a flush was saved…we could monitor our progress in saving water. Crazy? Maybe not! Maybe we could slowly change some habits.

There are great options to flushing. The best one so far is the composting toilet. I have used a number of these inventions, and can tell you that almost every experience was a majorly smell-free and enjoyable moment, as these things go…of course. So, check out composting toilets as you build new houses or change out old bathrooms, I think we could change the shitty direction things are going! There - I said it.