No water

My Privy, with BioLet

We’ve all been aware of this threat for years. We did what we thought we could do to help: put a bucket in the shower and used the leftover water for our gardens; learned to turn off the water while we were brushing our teeth; gave up on the notion of having a lawn; tried to wear our clothes and use our towels a little longer before sending them to be washed.

I have no idea whether any of this helped.

My plight is not so dire as what will face all of us when our water really is gone; my problem is an old pump and a failing part that maybe can’t be replaced. There is water in my well—I even saw it—and if worse comes to worst, I can find some rope and lower a bucket. Meanwhile, I do have a privy—a composting toilet in a beautiful frame hut; we should all have gone to this years ago but some memory of the stinking old outhouses of our great-grandparents’ day maybe held us back. My composting toilet works beautifully, requires no water—and it’s so simple! And then there’s the mixing bowl in my indoor toilet.

What a contrast to the unsolvable confusions of my attempt, now several days long, to buy a new iPhone for my trip tomorrow to Denmark.

Verizon is faceless, or at least, its face here in Santa Fe is the bewildered face of a very young salesman. It took me only about two hours to actually buy the phone, but then a problem with the password sent me back to the store. The problem couldn’t be solved, even when the salesman hitched my phone to my laptop and tried to erase the mistake that way! After four tries, he gave up and said I would have to call Apple. Knowing the amount of time it takes to reach that faceless entity, I gave up. I’m now wondering why I need the gadget anyway.

The recent New Yorker has a hard-hitting article (“Facebook Wants Us to Live In the Metaverse”) about Mark Zuckerberg and his “messianic” message that Facebook will join us all more closely and create community. Anyone who has been on this earth for a few years knows that no device can reach those lofty goals; it just doesn’t work that way with human beings. And yet we have all fallen for the foolishness: the crowd was dense in the Verizon store.

Instead, as The New Yorker article states, Facebook has given us a new way to hurt each other. So easy to do when you can’t see your victim’s face.

It’s called The Culture of Sadism.

In New Mexico Facebook BioLet