A few weeks ago, the poorly-installed plumbing in this modest little home sprung another leak. Not the first but the third dripping section of pipe so far this year, the holes appeared inches from a major and intricate intersection of copper tubing a few feet past the hot water heater. Having already performed two other repair jobs and feeling more than up to the task, I took it upon myself to cut out the entire intersection and replace it with plastic tubing and push-on compression fittings. Naturally, my local home-improvement stores did not have in stock the parts I required, and I am still waiting for the correct parts to be shipped to me from the Internet retailer that sent me the wrong parts two weeks ago and has since been dragging its feet correcting his error. (Seriously, how hard is it to tell a 3/8” compression fitting from a 1/2” one?)
Living without faucet-borne water has forced me to make a number of changes in my life: I now import drinking water in from the outside at a cost considerably greater than that of pumping it up from the well; I now wash my dishes using rain-water collected in a 25-gallon cistern with the same water I use for clothes-washing (which I have been doing by hand in a collection of specially-designed buckets since the beginning of summer, anyway); and, most drastically, I have begun to defecate outside and to compost my feces rather than filling my toilet's reservoir with water from the stream twice or thrice a day (I have begun also to collect my urine instead of just pissing off of the balcony, spreading it over the growing mounds of leaves so as to speed their transformation back into dirt). I have not shit outside regularly for some years now, but beyond my feet getting wet walking through the frigid dew and having to assemble a nest of leaves upon which to catch my soft-serve excrement and with which to carry it over to the nearest composting sites, I find it nearly as enjoyable and not much less convenient than dropping deuces on the porcelain throne.
What, you may be wondering, are some of the benefits of shitting outside and composting one's turds? For one, as I am squatting and hugging my knees I can watch all the little critters as they move about in the grass, which trumps staring at a tile floor or re-reading old copies of Popular Science magazine, any day. A second benefit is the return of all of the unprocessed nutrients and trace elements contained in my shit to Nature's own growth cycle (I will be applying the compost to my gardens, come springtime). A third benefit is that I do not have to haul thirty-pound buckets of muddy water up from the stream multiple times a day, drag those buckets across the living-room carpet, or clean up the spills I make at the toilet's base when trying to pour their contents into a gap a few inches wide that sits four feet up off of the floor. Will I continue this practice once the proper fittings arrive and I can turn my jet-pump back on? I might. Will I choose to believe John Seymour's Guide to Self-Sufficiency, which urges the reader to compost his solid wastes rather than pumping them into subterranean holding tanks filled with bacteria, or will I revert to the old and tired ways and deprive the land of that which it needs, coaxing from it a lessened harvest? Handling feces is not the most pleasant of tasks, but when using a proper nest of fallen leaves or freshly-cut grasses and basking in the knowledge of just how good it is for making things grow, I may, someday, think it OK.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
Showing posts with label feces. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feces. Show all posts
22 October 2012
13 July 2012
on false compassion
On Tuesday night, the dog came back from the veterinarian's office, with droopy eyes and a ridiculously large cone around her neck. For the fourth time in less than two weeks, the poor beast – a two-hundred pound English mastiff – had undergone surgery to have her tail shortened, or, better said, to have the open mess of flesh and bone sewn back shut after she had chewed out the sutures. Why, you must be asking yourself, was she allowed to even get her mouth anywhere close to the freshly-closed wound? The answer, dear friends, is because of false compassion.
Her primary owner – a housewife in her forties with children of high-school age – had left the large, hurting bitch unsupervised on a number of occasions without properly restricting her ability to access the source of her pain. The woman had said repeatedly that she felt sorry because the dog had trouble getting around the house, bumping into things constantly with her plastic cone of shameful ridicule. Given her puffy eyes and despondent mood, oh, wouldn't it be nice to lift her suffering a bit by removing said shameful device and letting her lounge around, outside, by herself, next to her favorite tree. This woman's actions, of course, only added to the dog's suffering; her compassion proved false, harmful to her pet's well-being, dangerous, even, to its very life. The mastiff came within inches of death; had her owner not decided to spend another one-and-a-half thousand dollars to get the tail sewn back shut for the fourth time, the big bitch would have either been put down and cremated or taken into a nearby field, shot, and buried.
False compassion is similar to such false economy as is very often practiced by today's emotion-driven Americans, we who have been told to go with whatever our hearts tell us and that we can always buy whatever we want to buy in order to placate our slightest impulsive craving at our local convenience store, which is sure to open even at this time of night. Rather than practicing a bit of self-denial and self-control, we bash around and do what we think our gut is telling us to do rather than having a nice quiet sit and thinking about things for a while before acting. It was no better at the emergency room for pets, where I witnessed dozens of people fork over thousands of dollars for teeth cleaning, to buy a chemotherapy session for a fucking cat, and to try and save the life of a fourteen-year-old blind dog that was in its death throes, its body rigid and locked in seizure.
This is a touchy subject, one regarding which, I find while writing this article, I am in a sort of inner turmoil. At which point does one allow a giant dog into one's house, a dog recently rescued, a dog that shits and pisses on the floor every night for weeks, a dog that whacks her tail against the walls so badly when her new mistress returns from even the most brief trip outside that she develops a festering open wound that sprays droplets of blood with every wag? At which point does the damage caused to inter-human relationships by all the urine and blood and feces covering the inside of one's home compel one to give the dog away, to install a fenced-in kennel in the back yard, or to put the dog down quickly and quietly? The answers to these questions are hard to come by, but one question – whether to leave on the cone of shame or to let the dog waltz around a bit without it – has an easy answer: to reduce the bitch's overall suffering, one must leave the damn thing on, no matter her crocodile tears or pitiable whimpering.
場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit
Her primary owner – a housewife in her forties with children of high-school age – had left the large, hurting bitch unsupervised on a number of occasions without properly restricting her ability to access the source of her pain. The woman had said repeatedly that she felt sorry because the dog had trouble getting around the house, bumping into things constantly with her plastic cone of shameful ridicule. Given her puffy eyes and despondent mood, oh, wouldn't it be nice to lift her suffering a bit by removing said shameful device and letting her lounge around, outside, by herself, next to her favorite tree. This woman's actions, of course, only added to the dog's suffering; her compassion proved false, harmful to her pet's well-being, dangerous, even, to its very life. The mastiff came within inches of death; had her owner not decided to spend another one-and-a-half thousand dollars to get the tail sewn back shut for the fourth time, the big bitch would have either been put down and cremated or taken into a nearby field, shot, and buried.
False compassion is similar to such false economy as is very often practiced by today's emotion-driven Americans, we who have been told to go with whatever our hearts tell us and that we can always buy whatever we want to buy in order to placate our slightest impulsive craving at our local convenience store, which is sure to open even at this time of night. Rather than practicing a bit of self-denial and self-control, we bash around and do what we think our gut is telling us to do rather than having a nice quiet sit and thinking about things for a while before acting. It was no better at the emergency room for pets, where I witnessed dozens of people fork over thousands of dollars for teeth cleaning, to buy a chemotherapy session for a fucking cat, and to try and save the life of a fourteen-year-old blind dog that was in its death throes, its body rigid and locked in seizure.
This is a touchy subject, one regarding which, I find while writing this article, I am in a sort of inner turmoil. At which point does one allow a giant dog into one's house, a dog recently rescued, a dog that shits and pisses on the floor every night for weeks, a dog that whacks her tail against the walls so badly when her new mistress returns from even the most brief trip outside that she develops a festering open wound that sprays droplets of blood with every wag? At which point does the damage caused to inter-human relationships by all the urine and blood and feces covering the inside of one's home compel one to give the dog away, to install a fenced-in kennel in the back yard, or to put the dog down quickly and quietly? The answers to these questions are hard to come by, but one question – whether to leave on the cone of shame or to let the dog waltz around a bit without it – has an easy answer: to reduce the bitch's overall suffering, one must leave the damn thing on, no matter her crocodile tears or pitiable whimpering.
場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit
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