I don’t Mean to Piss on Your Parade, But …

We’ve come a long way, baby, since the days of kerosene lamps, milking our own cows and outhouses. We have home water delivery, personal shoppers, and credit cards are so '80s when we can pay for things with our cell phones. It’s a constant array of ever-evolving items and services to make our lives easier.

We have biodegradable potato chip bags*, the increasing lineup of hybrid cars, we’ve thankfully long moved away from the ubiquity of Aqua Net-needing hairstyles that destroy the ozone layer with their CFCs.

Our green-ness struck me around the holidays as I’m walking around this enormous outlet mall called Woodbury Commons in upstate New York. Here I am, carrying my Banana Republic shopping bag and fending off personal-space-invading Asian shoppers (also ubiquitous) when I had to pee.

So I go to the restroom and am pleasantly surprised that they have installed flushless, waterless toilets throughout the shopping center. This is a good thing, right? Saving 1.5L of water per flush, conserving the environment, going green, yay us.

But then I got to thinking: What the hell IS a flushless, waterless toilet anyway? Seriously, isn’t it just a hole in the ground? How’s it different? Where the hell is all that piss going? And what’s more, why the heck did they have to build an enormous porcelain basin for me to piss in in the first place? I assume the creation of said porcelain basis must have produced a waste product in and of itself? What makes this such an advance? I just don’t get it.

To me, it’s the reinvention of the outhouse. We’ve come full circle. We piss in a hole and shit in a compost pile. It’s the friggin’ frontier all over again. I like Mustangs, not a mustang. I’m not going back. From now on I will piss in a Sun Chip bag and hope for the best.

* This is how fucking retarded people are in America. Our fat asses, who consume God-knows-how-many bags of chips a year, finally had a capitalistic corporation do something good! The Frito-Lay Co. developed a biodegradable bag for their Sun Chips in 2007. That way, when your lazy ass leaves it on the ground in the park it will just break down over time and not affect the grass or the soil. So what happened? The stupid, fat, ridiculous American consumer complained so much about the bag being—get this—too loud, that it was pulled from the market in October 2010. People would rather not be bothered while reading their video game magazine in a Subway than put up with a little extra noise in the hope of protecting the Earth. I’m disappointed, but what’s worse, I’m not surprised.