Poop.
Human waste.
Brown-25.
Shit.
Everybody poops. Pooping is proof of life.
Poop is disgusting. It’s alive with bacteria. It stinks, powerfully. Poop is terrible. I do hope that you wash your hands after you poop, for your sake as well as mine.
I can count on the fingers of my left hand the number of serious conversations that I remember having about it. I am aware that this is because I have never had kids.
There are people who find poop funny. I’m not that person, and haven’t been since I was 6 or so. I’m not here to make poop jokes. I’m here to talk about this defining subject that hardly anyone ever talks about. There are people who find poop sexy. I am definitely not that girl. Human excreta is so not my thing. More power to you if it’s yours. I don’t judge.
Punk scourge GG Allin was into poop. He once got himself banned from a well-known rock venue in Cambridge, MA for pooping on stage. I have a friend who tells me GG used to eat a whole bar of Ex-Lax™ before a show. He also told me that GG went to the emergency room with blood poisoning more than once, because he would also cut himself as part of a show, and then roll around in his own excrement. I kind of liked GG’s first single, but… like I said: not my thing.
Is poop important? It would be difficult to answer that question in the affirmative. But it is, arguably, the single thing humans produce in greatest abundance. It’s been observed that (healthy) humans produce about an ounce of poop per day for each 10 pounds one weighs: a person weighing 160 pounds will produce almost a pound of the stuff every day. It should be fairly easy, then, to do the math for the estimated 7.4 billion people on the planet, if we consider 160 pounds to be the average weight of a human being.
The disposal of human waste is of great import, because of the very real dangers of not getting rid of it. 2.8 billion of us live in impoverished places where there is inadequate human waste disposal. This is of major concern for both humanitarian and world health reasons. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is working to develop technologies for processing human waste as close to the source as possible, which should considerably reduce the cost and difficulty of dealing with the amount of human excreta produced in cities in poor countries where getting rid of feces and urine is most challenging and therefore most threatening to general human well-being.
75% of poop is water. What’s left is half bacteria and half undigested fat, fiber, and carbs. It’s what’s left after virtually everything of value has been extracted from what we take in.
But poop is not entirely bereft of meaning. In a laboratory, scatologists can study feces and determine many things about the being who produced a particular sample, such as what it eats, where it’s been, whether it has certain health issues.
Poop can be a metaphor. In this blog post, though, it’s not being used as one: here, poop is just poop.
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