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social skills and crap
Wednesday, September 16 2009
Gretchen and I drove to Bearsville early this afternoon to pick up a swivel chair from our friends Susan and Dennis, who live with a bunch of yapping pugs and purebred Labradors (which they claim are rescues). At the entrance to their road, someone was shooting a movie, and later off in the distance I would hear the meatball spinning of tires - part of the scene being shot. Depending on the number of explosions in the movie, that scene might well end up in the trailer. Dennis was home but not Susan, and Sally did what she's been doing a lot lately at other peoples' houses: she went around pissing trivial amounts of urine on the dog beds, as if to ruin them for the canine residents. Usually this happens unnoticed if at all, but Dennis caught her in the act and made a fuss that lasted (in various stages of intensity) the rest of our time there. It ranged between mild disgust to bemused detachment, though someone with better social skills would have known enough to not belabor the point. (Mind you, this is the guy who took some of the most famous photographs of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.) Dennis was having difficulty moving data from an old laptop to his main computer, so I'd brought a thumb drive that was about sixteen times the size of the Magnum-branded drive he'd been trying to use. As I was doing these things, Dennis showed me his latest photography project: animated details of vintage cars set to unfashionable instrumental music. I was going to comment that it looked like "vehicular porno," but my social skills stepped in and threw that brilliant insight into my "save for your blog" pile.
Eventually Susan showed up and the ladies got to chat. Meanwhile Dennis and I talked about technology. But it's never much fun to talk about tech with someone whose purchasing power, technical knowledge, or generational perspective is vastly different from your own, and Dennis and I were mismatched in all three respects. (Indeed, it turns out that I have nobody to talk tech with in my day to day life, so it ends up being yet another part of my Asperger Singularity.)
We got the chair and headed home.
Back at the house, I found myself thinking about the best site for an outhouse. I've already know essentially what I'm going to built. It will be a small building that basically puts a 32 gallon trashcan under my ass. Every six months or so, I'll swap the can with a new one, letting the old one compost. At the end of the composting, the crap ends up as greenhouse or garden fertilizer. The goal is to stop mixing my shit with potable water.
But how do I know how large my crap container should be and how often I'll need to change it? I did an experiment. Every day that I've been home since early August (with one emergency-based exception), I've been crapping exclusively in one of two five gallon buckets I keep down at the greenhouse. I crap in the bucket, wipe my ass with two wads of grass, and throw the wads of grass in with the shit. Then I return the bucket to its place, hanging from a hook on a low branch on a hickory tree (this is to keep dogs out of it). I keep a couple pieces of scrap iron on top of the bucket to keep out rain. Interestingly, it has hardly any odor.
Doing this, I've found that the combination of crap and grass comes to about a gallon and a half each week (that's over a pint per day!). Mind you, that's shit, not piss. I piss at least a quart per day, and in this weather most of it ends up outdoors in random places.
As for my new summer toilet habits, the grass wads don't provide a sufficient cleanse, so I supplement them with a dunk into a large tray of accumulated rainwater. I use the same tray over and over, but it bakes in the sun and is full of organisms (including many mosquito larvæ), so I act as if it self-cleansing. This new routine seems to have solved a number of problems that have plagued my asshole for years, and that alone is enough for me to want to extend the routine into the winter.
But I still haven't settled on a place for my outhouse.
Today I took delivery of something called a Galileoscope, a cheap telescope being distributed as an astronomical answer to one-laptop-per-child. Galileoscopes have been hard to come by, and I've waited over two months (I'd learned about it on Astronomycast, one of several science-related podcasts I listen to). I put it together and, despite the cheap plastic body, I was surprised by the evident quality of the optics, at least when looking out the east windows at the trees 100 feet away. Unfortunately, the sky was cloudy and I wouldn't be able to look at the heavens.
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