It Takes the Urination of Millions to Hold Us Back

December 20, 2022 3:25 PM

The art of urine in the age of fulfillment [ungated]
posted by chavenet (13 comments total)

"burn the locked bags and bury anything that remains."

-Howard Hughes. Note to Noah Dietrich, 1941.
posted by clavdivs at 3:46 PM on December 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I really enjoyed this, and not gonna lie, I am also obsessed with these pee bottles. For years, totally intelligent people of my acquaintance would deny that they existed when I was telling them that I saw them with my own eyes all the time. Like couldn't admit that even though we know Uber drivers and delivery drivers are being worked within an inch of their life, and have you ever tried to find a public toilet in New York? like this is not the OBVIOUS consequence.

If you don't read Harper's for a while and come across one of their articles it can seem really good! I remember seeing stats from Harper's Index put up on the between-acts chyron at the first Lollapalooza in like 1991. It was exactly at the right pitch to blow my 20-year-old brain!
posted by bgribble at 4:29 PM on December 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

I remember a tale told by someone whose job it was to mow highway verges about the dangers of gallon sized trucker piss jugs torn apart by the blades and slinging the sun baked liquid quite a distance. No one wanted to work on the machines because they smelt vile.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:55 PM on December 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

Cool and normal as they say on The Juice.

Even before robots were invented, we have wanted slaves and workers to be robots ut is an archetypal atavism thst we are gettting closer to actualizing and I can only imagine how bad life will be for everyone when we are no longer "essential" and become "superfluos".

Piss bottles plus drones could be a nice protest tactic. Too bad the boardroom windows don't open
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 5:24 PM on December 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

A good read, and notable for it being published mostly as written; the editors did not have a slash, this time.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:30 PM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Interesting point that plumbing has been part of progress and now we're going full circle in forcing workers to once again dispose of their body waste in unsanitary ways.
posted by blue shadows at 6:10 PM on December 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Way of the road, Bubs
posted by Chuffy at 7:16 PM on December 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Interesting piece, if a wee bit long.

sorrynotsorry
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:13 PM on December 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

Oooh, oooh...
posted by Mister Moofoo at 8:13 PM on December 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

It was because of these bottles of pee that I ordered Empire, as well as several other biographies

Please tell me the publisher picked this up as the cover blurb.

Anyway. Needs more Hot Piss.

And humanity needs more public, accessible, and free washrooms. Tax the richest among us into penury to make it so.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:21 PM on December 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

This was an unexpectedly good read! (One is tempted to say it meanders like the lazy stream on the floor of a men's room, but let's not go too far.) It's strange to see pee bottles everywhere, just part of the landscape now, something you have to be careful to step around. Stranger still that there's not a persistent public outcry about it. You'd think someone would be offended enough (in the real world, not on social media) that they'd go into town hall meetings to complain. I mean, it's pee--or, more to the point, it's someone else's pee. Are there really not going to be any enforceable regulations around bathroom breaks? This is just the sort of thing that would have enraptured the local news back in the 80s and 90s. There would have been interviews with stammering and disgusted locals. Stacks of letters to the editor. Where are the anti-urine-bottle billboards?
posted by mittens at 5:57 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm used to seeing pee bottles by the side of the road when I'm out cycling in the country. Very likely, the people who put them there would be heavily overlapped with the people who'd see them. And speaking of peeing and cycling, this recent comment on the rich-peoples'-triathlon thread really only applies to "elite" cyclists (or those who want to believe that they're such) who don't think that they can stop to pee; one of the advantages to riding out in the country is that, well, you're out in the country, so it can be much easier to find a place to do your business than an urban setting, usually. You just don't necessarily want to be especially near a house or a busy road if you don't have much cover, and if you're in the Midwest and the corn has some height, you've got cover. (I'm pretty sure that this is one of the reasons why RAGBRAI is run the last full week of July.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:38 AM on December 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I remember a tale told by someone whose job it was to mow highway verges about the dangers of gallon sized trucker piss jugs torn apart by the blades and slinging the sun baked liquid quite a distance. No one wanted to work on the machines because they smelt vile.

This urine-soaked scenario is also detailed in Derf Backderf's graphic novel about suburban Ohio garbage collectors, Trashed. Also included: runaway Port-A-Potties and many bags of dog waste.
posted by JDC8 at 3:54 PM on December 21, 2022 [2 favorites]