05_potty.md 5.2 KB
Potty
Toilet is the first pro homeless skill to master, as it consumes a service with no exchange. Typically a park or mall or department store will have a bathroom available, and random trips to it suffice. After a week of regular trips, somebody will notice and start watching and expulsion could be a matter of time—and people are liberal with their slander of vagrants and homeless. Pooping into a bio bag is the best course of action. I am aware of the possibility of using composting toilet matter and have not found a source of the material after a cursory search. SF Bay Area, imagining a 1lb block of hamster cage wood dust/chips. Maybe that’s the solution. Currently I then put that in a semi-sealed container like a coffee cup or a chip bag, which holds the smell. Peeing into a bottle is fine. I recommend 1 gallon bottles that are used for water, with secure screwon lids that can be discretely dumped and then recycled for example in a backpack at a pack. I’ve seen other VanLifers use glass water bottles… I question the full cycle of maintenance. Pooping in the tent can make or break a work day, but one must manage the smell. A reusable container to seal in the smell can be tempting, but then it will absorb the smell of poop and become very unpleasant to work with. Better is to wrap the poop bag into a bag saved from chips or a coffee cup. These options will be limited by the temperature and airflow of the environment, and make a good option for early morning poop schedules. Eg. The poop comes at 5-11am and then fast is broken at 1-3pm and toilet containers placed in waste and dumped in a can on the way to pick up food. Roll up your sleeve before you shit. In a pinch a chip bag will work. Keep a spare with you, just in case. Roll up the end up tight, pushing the air out. Then keep the bag pinched if possible. This is overall better than wrapping the entire bag around itself, as far as air escaping. Food is one of the first things that people think of offering a homeless person. Free food is never free. The hidden costs are travel and bathroom. It’s wise to do without animal products.Once the bathroom technique is mastered, it leads to a more pleasant end result than even using the home toilet in some cases—wet tush wipes make all the difference, and certainly public bathrooms do not accommodate them well or often. The defensibility of shitting in a bag is a hotly debated contemporary topic, and the reason that I’d preferred to delay publication of the book until I was housed, perhaps second only to the concern about sleeping in locations known by potential aggressors. No doubt I’m vulnerable to scape goating and example making. Never the less, the argument goes like this:
- If there are no toilets available then one must poop in a bag on in their pants.
- People throw dog poop in the waste bin
- People throw diapers in the bin
- Landfill disposal is sealed in the ground and does not decompose
- Given investment I can dispose of human waste for drivers and homeless people who are forced to shit in bags, and be profitable. It’s a reality. There’s a supply. I can turn it into an opportunity, and turn a profit. Or you can put me in jail. Mother fuckers are blessed to handle my shit. Mother uckers who handle my shit are blessed. Or you can take the idea and feel like you need to kill me for it (and fail if you try).
[ IMAGE time spent doing potty ]
In a space like a tent or carriage even a well sealed poop container starts to smell as it gets warm and creates internal pressure within the container. This is incentive to deal it well and keep it in a space away from occupation, and to empty it frequently. The smell can be very uncomfortable. It’s hard to imagine that this is sanitary over the long term. Demons may thrive upon eating one’s own poop in trace amounts that are left on the fingers before eating. Imagine pooping and wiping, touching other things, and then eating with fingers—gross. Running water is required for proper sanitation, as even use of chemical sanitizers can create resistant strains that survive (eg. 0.01% survive and then multiply). If one is able to spend time in a coffee shop or coworking space and blend in, it can be a great alternative to pooping in bags behind dumpsters. The better a neighborhood one can blend in in, the better. Prices may be more expensive and bus service may be more rare, and that is a feature to the residents of the neighborhood (beyond some aberrations like the bay area). The norm at cafes and coworking spaces can be high trust. Go along with whatever the norm is, which often times means leaving a laptop on a table unattended. This may be against corporate IT policy, but it is what people do in high trust establishments. A balancing factor can be to use full drive encryption and power off the machine to erase any access credentials which may be in memory. In this lifestyle people are probably accustomed to shutting down and powering up more than average—corporate workers typically sleep their laptop for months or years, while people with a shortage of battery power may do it as a habit because they don’t have enough available power to frivolously leave the machine running.