SHIT!

It did not occur to me until recently that pooping into a porcelain bowl of water was a little bizarre. But about a week ago, we met with a man who showed us the beauty of pooping into a little dry box instead of a bowl of water, and BAM, the clouds parted and I saw the light.

This revelation is about on par to the joy I felt when I learned how to properly wipe with my left hand, but I feel like it would be easier to implement the dry toilet than to retire our beloved Charmin Ultra. The dry toilet is a genius invention. The beautifully designed bowl separates your poop from your pee (I choose not to use the painfully sterile words "feces" and "urine") and allows your unencumbered shit to plop down into a box of its own kind, followed by a scoop of ash, to dry and compost into a rich yet texturless soil. The pee glides down its own pipe into a separate holding tank to be diluted and spritzed onto plants and trees, which gleefully accept your golden gift. Does it seem too simple to be true? Well this is no joke. In fact, the reality of the situation is not funny at all.

Today, in the average city, there are tons and tons of shit flowing beneath the feet of the cosmopolitan . Once the poop is flushed out of sight and out of mind, it is multiplied to 600 times its original volume by mixing with water alone. Thats how much water it takes to move your poop elsewhere. In other words, the amount of water used to flush one persons waste in one year could be enough for that same person to drink for 60 years. With statistics like that, we cannot be too surprised about the shortage of clean drinking water in the world: we are shitting in it.

Unfortunately for most, dry toilets go against various zoning laws in most towns. Its actually illegal to not poop in water. It is really too bad, because the soil produced from our poops could be incredibly beneficial to put back into our gardens. Imagine the joy you would get from knowing that you had completed the cycle from your seeds, to your vegetables, to your poops, to your garden! Maybe if we began to see the beauty of our own "waste," we would find a new found connection to our nether regions and bowel movements. If we knew that our poops would be feeding our garden, maybe we would put down the Twinkie and lay off the antidepressants. After all, what could be better for a bad mood than a nice, big shit.