Potty-training for adults
ASS is surely one of the most bizarre trigrams in the American-English lexical, considering the seemingly unrelated and sometimes contradictory usages. If you are asked to move your ass or sit your ass down, that would mean the whole of you.
If you are called fat-ass, you are...well, fat. Smart-ass, that’s sassy and best avoided.
If you are told you have a "nice ass", that is a rude compliment, and if you are deemed “bad-ass” that’s a great thing.
Surprisingly enough, the expression "clean-ass" does not exist. Much less, "lux-ass". Let's invent it.
In the Château de Versailles of Louis IV, otherwise the epitome of luxury in that century, hygiene was ignored. Guests defecated in holes in the floor, distributed throughout the premises, and sometimes behind doors. It was disgusting, in contrast to the magnificent facade displayed by the king and his court. The same abominable hygiene was rampant in other places of filth and squalor, with less remarkable contrast.
By comparison, most consider our current Western habits to be superbly hygienic. After all, we wipe with paper and flush it all out through pipes that empty into outer space.
That is because we are lacking another comparison: a truly clean one.
You have only to attempt to clean anything visible with toilet paper to grasp how ineffectual it is. In Japan, the toilets tickle the anus with water spouts. Now, is that bad-ass or clean-ass? Regardless of your technological preferences, water remains the most effective agent for cleaning yourself, not paper. Worse, the multi-layered, soft paper that Americans relish (4% of the worlds's population consuming 20%), contributes to massive deforestation.
Our lack of attention to defecation is symptomatic and symbolic. It is a symptom of our voluntary blindness to things we wish didn’t exist. Can it even be written about? It is a denial of something that is naturally within us, and a denial of nature itself. It is also self-deprecating. We take great care of things that are of great value to us. Do our bodies not merit the same great care?
From this lack of attention to our own body, we can observe how little attention we give to waste production and disposal at every level. We see the majority of people scattering their litter wherever they go, from cigarette buds and boxes to obsolete machines. They have no sense of the impact of their isolated acts, and this is surely one of the great limiting factors in human evolution.
Waste-production is a vital function of all living organisms.
All of modern consumerist society is precariously out of balance in its production of waste.
Imagine if we were not potty-trained as infants. Probably we would figure things out because of the discomfort of macerating in our own excrement. This is an appropriate metaphor illustrating how we have yet to collectively figure out the problem of waste production and disposal.
We produce massive quantities of waste that is stinky, filthy, ugly, toxic, and non-biodegradable. Our land and our oceans are filled with it. If we can revile the excrement behind the doors in the Sun-King’s chateau, we should be able to look at our consumerist society with the same disgust. That would lead us to stop it.
No matter how bad-ass or kick-ass you may already be, make your own “clean-ass” experiment.
Replace toilet paper with water when you can (refer to Japanese culture), and become conscious of how you personally generate and dispose of waste. This is such as vast enterprise that you will need to start somewhere.
Start by eliminating from your purchase habits one product responsible for non-biodegradable waste. Choose a second product, and switch to a packaging with the least environmental impact.
Koan: Half-ass is not bad-ass, nor is fat-ass kick-ass.
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