Oooooooh I’ve got a good one for you todayyyyyyy….
“Normal” Wednesdays. Prepare to be weirded/grossed out but remember that’s only because you’ve never thought about it before maybe or maybe it is really weird and gross but please read the whole thing because it speaks to a bigger idea.
Family Cloth
Dude, this is a crunchy mom thing I haven’t tried. You know how cloth diapers exist though, right? Some people scrape the poo into the toilet and then wash the cloth diapers. Saves the planet, etc.
Well OK. Family cloth is using cloth to wipe adult bums and beans. Wiping your shit and pee with a washcloth, or a torn up shirt, or whatever, and then washing the cloth that you probably put into some type of bin or something specially for them.
This is bringing up a memory of visiting my friend Christina when she studied abroad in Costa Rica in college. She’s so cool. I was informed that the tradition was to throw all toilet paper in a trash can beside the toilet instead of flushing it bc of the plumbing and septic systems. Those people survived and the places didn’t stink.
Europeans and Japanese readers are going Jesus Christ these people will do anything to avoid a bidet. Well I carried around one of those Tushy things for years and across several apartments and houses and never did successfully attach it to a toilet I’ll have you know. So yeah, I don’t know what I’m missing. You’re right.
The Bigger Idea Here
But think about this — remember the stupid toilet paper craze at the beginning of Cov*d? We were all freaking out because we didn’t think for two seconds that there were options. Like wiping your butt with cloth and washing the cloth. We had an utter failure in ingenuity and problem-solving as a nation.
This relates to tomorrow’s Substack around kids and toys I’m almost through writing. It’s easy to forget you have problem-solving skills and imagination when you’re told what everything does all the time and everything is stupid single-use. I have definitely used non-hammer-things to hammer things. I once opened my car door with a string passed through a straw. We need a McGuyver resurgence stat.
The next time you’re perplexed or panicky, have some fun with it. Look around you at what else you could use to serve that purpose. Get creative. Think it through or don’t. Hell, have a day of not using anything for its intended use. That sounds like a lot of fun that would blow open your creativity for life. Pay me $10,000 and fly me to your corporate retreat and I’ll run it for your team. We’ll cover emotional intelligence either before or after the panicking wink wink.
One more comment on toiletries - there’s this guy Rob J Greenfield who does all sorts of beautiful foraging, trash, and eco-activism in a very peaceful and demonstrative way. One of his things he’s on is the “toilet paper plant.” You know, when he’s not planting vegetable gardens for single mothers and teaching them to tend them, or over 100 community fruit trees and counting around Orlando, FL. YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD, AS I DO.
But really I’ve felt that the disconnection from our food sources is kinda the place everything went wrong, so maybe I should be listening to and acting on the ideas from Mr. Rob a little bit more.
Or just peeing in the yard. At the Hawaiian clothing-optional eco-farm I stayed at once they told me the papaya trees really liked it when we did.
Happy Wednesday!