Why an orange would want to make a toilet explode
“You know,” Dave says thoughtfully as we park in front of the library, “sometimes eating fruit really creeps me out.”
“Why’s that?” I ask.
My friends, I regret my innocent query. You see, plants, animals, minerals, and various other elements have lived together in harmony for all of time. Dave explains how most plants reproduce by creating a fruit of some kind, and they sneakily put a seed or twenty inside the sweet, tasty flesh.
“So we’re eating their babies,” says Dave earnestly.
“Well yes,” says I, impatient to pick up my book. ”But it’s actually a way of spreading the seed. Animals eat the fruit and carry the seed to other locations so that it can grow.”
“If they swallow the seeds and if crap on the ground so the seed can take root. We throw the seeds in the garbage. No one craps on the ground anymore. We use toilets. We’re flushing away their babies. They’ll never grow in the sewers!”
“Unless you are a hippie and you have a compost pile,” I say, thinking of Chupacabra, my worm bin. ”Or an even bigger hippie and you have a composting toilet.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he insists. ”We’re not fulfilling our part of the bargain. They give us fruit, and we flush it down the toilet to die.”
I am silent. One cannot argue with such logic. I imagine living as primitivists and backpackers do. My butt feels cold just thinking about it.
“This needs to be a Splarks story,” he declares. ”The vegetable kingdom will rise up against the human race and demand vengeance for not crapping on the ground!”
And I think about it. Oranges using psychic powers to explode toilets and such. But in the end I decide to let the idea speak for itself and go into the library to get my “Expanding your Serenity with Qigong” book, which is blissfully unconcerned with my personal hygiene habits.
I eat dried jackfruit slices later that evening. Poor jackfruit babies. I feel bad for denying you a grown-up jackfruit life, but it’s cold out there and the neighbors already think I’m weird enough.
***
Check out Urban Scout for one of my favorite re-wilding modern primitivists. He does his best to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in Oregon, encountering all sorts of weird obstacles that could only exist in modern life. He also looks cute in a loincloth … OMG did I type that out loud?
My friends Kat and Alan also have an awesome farm, Sunflower River, in New Mexico with not only a compost heap, but a composting toilet or two. They also have handmade yurts, a huge vegetable garden, fruit trees, a fancy DIY rabbit hutch and goat pen, and a solar-powered water pump. I have fabulous friends. Perhaps they will be spared during the Vegetable Revolution.
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Yeah, but so much of what we eat are babies, like grains (oats, wheat, rice, corn) and nuts. With those it wouldn’t matter if we crapped it on the ground because we’ve destroyed it.
So many of the fruits we eat wouldn’t grow here anyway.
(Although I do know of pear tree growing in the wild.)
“”The vegetable kingdom will rise up against the human race and demand vengeance for not crapping on the ground!”
This is one of the best sentences of all time.
Great little piece…for what it’s worth, most seeds can last a very long time if you just wrap them up and store them for later scattering or compost-distribution.
Randy, see, we do have a defense! When the Vegetable Uprising happens, we can be like, “We were born to eat babies and destroy them.”
Will, maybe the “future scattering” technique can be your defense when the uprising happens.