messages in water

Dreaming about collaboration, the feeling it generates and the sense of belonging. I also dreamt about an enormous house my mother had, almost as big as a small medieval town in Tuscany.

a catalogue of elimination: a surreal fishbowl


We are turning our life into a really distorted surreal, science fiction horror movie.

(I wrote this when it happened a week or more ago now)

Yesterday we were hit up by the media with reports of contamination that confirm our drinking water has unfiltered amounts of medications, and if that news wasn't bad enough, a Governor has been soliciting the services of an expensive working girl. Coincidentally, during the same day, the Pope pronounced his additions to the list of seven deadly sins, including prejudiced and biased crimes against one another, pollution, and use of drugs. Honestly, when this all happened, I was searching for weather reports to learn when the next snow would be.


Reports came in that  our water is contaminated, drugged, contains has residues of sex hormones, anti-pain medication, psychoparmaceuticals, and other legal drugs. Our local media avoided the subject of how these enter the water system, and did not even mention a cause. The national media only showed a flushing toilet, hint hint, can you guess how we get these drugs into our water table.  The use of this image without verbal explanation exhibits and confirms our Puritantical refusal to address our waste and excess openly and honestly, and shows our squeamishness and self-loathing leads us to the use lethal avoidance tactics. A little Twinky and then some Pepto outa cure all the anxiety those talking heads cause with their sensational reports and lack of constructive solutions. We take another pill, and then go eliminate it without a thought about what we are sending down the drainpipes. We are complicit in our own demise and harm others too… again. 

The Pope proclaimed that using drugs, polluting the earth, and committing acts of prejudice against one another are also sins, and has added them to the famous list with Gluttony, Sloth, and Avarice (cupidity).  Will this help us treat our neighbor as ourself, and will it invite us to take another look at how we are abusing one another through our drugged water tables.  Hmmm. Interesting how these news items overlap. Our over mediacted and medicine-dependent society might look again at prevention and the costs of certain choices.

The history of the chamber pot and the way in which we empty it is a long one, and speaks to economy, boundaries, taboo,language, and all the juicy discourses that make me rub my hands. These are the ones we avoid. So now, we have a new chapter in this history that glimpses our habits, our additions, our failures, and our avoidance of the consequences of our actions. Maybe the message is in water.

The flushing toilet has been a blessing and a curse. Our economy is based on circulation and elimination, and if you think carefully, the company that take away trash and handle waste are some of the richest in the world. In History of Shit by Dominique LaPorte, we begin to understand how a French king’s taxation on poop and demands for its disposal in the provinces generated a whole new economy, language, perception, and set of rituals. Think about who today lives near industrial waste or toxic dumpsites. Think about how we view people who live on the fringes of town versus those in town, and how we build our cities around these premises.

Prior to the disposal of waste outside of our cities, people would dump their chamber pots and throw their bones and scraps on the streets outside of their own houses. This is also documented in Susan Strasser's Waste and Want, A History of Trash.  This method of casual dumping in the proximity of home and hearth, contributed to health and sanitary concerns. People were awash in the stuff, and it flooded streets where animals and people traveled, and scented entire cities with smoke-filled air and soot. In Terence McLaughlin's Dirt, A Social History as seen Through the Uses and Abuses of Dirt, the English equated water with evil and would not wash. Consequently, they developed many illnesses and plague. Imagine wearing layer upon layer of wool and living with the things living in that wool and on your skin. So then we dumped it out the window, then carted it to the edge of town, and now we dump it everywhere, basically. We have created all new types of contamination and pollution, sin and crime, and we are good at it. We create products to conceal our waste, and those become waste and contaminants, too.

Seems like we have been contaminating and contaminated for centuries, though we love our perfumes, aromatic soaps, deodorants, powders, and Glade air fresheners. Who can forget the constant reminders women get about how smelly we are. There are never matching products for men. Hmmm. Where does this rant lead to. I am always looking for ways to examine the way we shape our identity and polish our image.

The best way to look at ourselves is not through others, but by sifting through our own rubbish and dung heap, real and personal, physical and figurative.

The shifts in the history of elimination, trash, and dirt, we learn that what we avoid, ignore, and overlook becomes that which we are forced to contend with and confront. We cannot avoid the plethora of liquids, gases and solids we dump into our oceans, skies, and earth.. We can learn from these histories, and see that in one hundred years we have tidied and cleaned not with elbow grease, but toxic remedies that eat away at everything healthy in the process of cleaning up grime and germs we fear and want to be rid of. Our consumer addictions have us frantically buying into al of the snake oil ads and products, so our cabinets are living death traps for ourselves, families, and animals. We have thrived on gasoline and plastic for a short, but long enough time to forget that we could ever live without these things, or realize how devastating they can be. We only think about our immediate comfort. This has been going on for a s long as I can remember. We already had an oil crisis and recession in the seventies, and people recycled, used less, rode bicycles to work and made healthier food choices. And we wore bellbottoms then, too. What happened since then.


I recently had to pare my diet down to water and rice. I decide to use the occasion to learn something about myself, to become more aware of what and when I eat, how what I eat affects my ability to function, think, etc., as well as, my ability to let go of a difficult and uncertain health situation, and to become more aware of what I ingest and when. I learned I can live without sugar, butter, cheese, and other extras. I could feel quite energized with a bowl of miso and some shavings of carrot and daikon radish for breakfast, a light bowl of rice for lunch, and maybe some broccoli for dinner. No snacks in between. Eight or more glasses of water keep me awake and fluid. I realized I did not need or want that evening glass of wine anymore, or carve that two dollar coffee with sugar and milk, that rots my teet, churns my stomach, and adds to my middle-aged tire. 

In the few weeks I had to pare down my diet, I have become more appreciate of everything I eat, of the value of those foods. I have been growing chives and grass for my cats, and have learned how long it takes something to grow. It is a crime how we manipulate plants and animals to make them grow faster, so we can feed the insatiable appetites of the world. I have also learned that fat does not develop being sedentary alone, but really, it is constructed upon the endless source of indigestibles we casually take in, such as potato chips at a party, a pack of Twizzlers on the go. I learned in a grammar book with its clever sample essay on the dangers of over-produced foods that it is the hydrogeneated oils that are dangerous. I think these foods are addictive, and once you stop taking them in, you lose the craving. I feel safer and more at peace in my body. In the end, we are what we eat, and our world is what we dump into it. I believe that we could make a difference with small shifts, better daily choices, and more compassion towards our neighbors, including the fish.