My typical morning
routine is, I get up in the morning and I
pee in the
sink. Now, you may well be doing a grossed-out double-take, as though this were some horrible and unnatural thing, as though some great
moral code was violated by peeing anywhere but the
toilet, possibly the
shower, maybe the
bushes in a tight spot. But actually, there's nothing wrong with it at all, and a great deal which is right about it. Firstly, you see,
urine is largely sterile. Secondly, I don't simply whiz and walk away -- I have a
routine. I pee, then I rinse with mouthwash, some pretty strong homemade stuff with a little
vodka and healthy doses of
ginger and
mint, a little
baking soda, a dash of
sea salt -- well a half a cup of that spat in the sink chases any memories of my pee down the
drain, and after that I wash my face and brush my teeth (more cleaning products being splashed down the sink, leaving it probably cleaner than it was when I woke up).
Now, all of these activities are using up some
water, probably more than a cup or two for each step, and I would be doing all of them, each morning, no matter where I happened to pee; and if I peed in the toilet, well then I'd have to
flush, and there's more of that most precious aquavideous resource being swept away for purposes which, in my mind, are repetitious as to what I accomplish by instead using the sink. Think that through, dear friends, on the bigger scale of life itself. A toilet flush carries away some two
gallons of water -- two gallons!! For my mere cup or so of my misty morning
bladder scatter!! So that's sixty gallons a month, over seven-hundred gallons a year, gallons which must be pumped from somewhere, and to somewhere, at someone's
expense and by the
exhaustion of some stock of
fuel. So for the simple sake of peeing in the sink, I instead use only the water I use every day anyway for morning
hygiene tasks, and rather than adding some strain to the
ecosystem, I subtract some, at no
detriment to any living thing.
And imagine the savings if everyone did that, millions, tens of millions of people, so doing instead of engaging in a morning routine which literally pisses away volumes of H2O in one vessel and then expends more of the same -- more than enough to carry off any traces of that first step -- at other equally routine tasks. And the only barrier to break to pull off so steep a savings, running into the billions of gallons of water annually, is getting over the initial unease of cleanly peeing in your own sink!!