Ass Wipe Gold
1- In Spain they call it “papel higienico,” hygienic paper. A couple walks down the street in my Madrid neighborhood and the woman and the man are both carrying an economy-sized pack of toilet tissue under each arm: a reaction to crisis. Some 3,000 kilometers from here, there is a war raging in Ukraine. Closer to home, the nation’s truck drivers are on strike. Some folks I pass by are probably leaving the market with dry goods to send to the war victims, but even some of those shoppers have been sure to pick up their own paper to stock in abundance.
All this is fairly new to me. I had been breathing air for over fifty years before I learned that people hoard toilet paper when things get weird.
2- My parents once bought a house that had a cinder-block bunker built in the small hill in the backyard, probably circa the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In it were racks on the walls to hang sleeping cots. If you walked into the shelter before your eyes adjusted to the dark, you’d trip on the old cans of paint and turpentine my father would store there along with broken down lawn care equipment. Off to the right was a small closet-sized space with a toilet we’d never used. And no tissue.
3- When the Covid pandemic hit, toilet paper was one of the first things to go scarce in Madrid. We had the supermarket deliver groceries to our flat, and ordered more rolls of tissue than we needed, hoping some of it would arrive along with the other goods. Sometimes we’d get lucky. Eventually the stores caught up with the demand. Then came a storm named Filomena, the first blizzard to bury Madrid in fifty years. TP ran out again.
4- A photo from inside a Charmin factory made the National Public Radio news site during the height of the pandemic: men are posed in front of two giant paper roll feeders, wearing their surgical masks and gripping bags of the paper products the factory churns out in shift work.
One worker says “at least a third or half of my neighbors stop me and ask about Charmin inventory and jokingly ask, ‘Can I get them some?’ ”
5- The History Channel asked why we hoard toilet paper. The Chinese, as in many other fields, were centuries ahead of the West in the production of the stuff. There, “paper became widely available in the 15th century,” whereas 300 years later, most Americans were reaching for a corn cob to wipe themselves. Then it was newspapers, magazines, almanacs: any paper that could be hung in the outhouse.
Covid or no Covid, what’s with all the modern day fuss? Is there an historical explanation?
“It’s psychological,” says Morrison. “We hoard toilet paper because we fear having to face our poo. If we run out of toilet paper, how will we wipe our bottoms?”
6- In Mexico, used toilet paper is thrown into a small wastebasket next to the john. I learned the reason for this from a guy named Jerry who I met at an AA meeting in Cuernavaca (he used the word john). Jerry wore a flattop haircut. The plumbing has smaller pipes, he explained, and it won’t accommodate wads of tissue. Then he complained about the plumber who’d done his house. At the meeting he talked about how his drinking ended with him in a “shit-hole Mexican town.” I winced every time he said “shit-hole Mexican town.” He probably used too much paper for the “shit-hole.”
The tourist resorts in Mexico are fitted with wider tubes in their plumbing to ensure that foreigners can flush their paper directly.
7- Since the pandemic, we’d been maintaining a surplus of toilet tissue in the meager storage space for our Madrid condo. That reserve began to dwindle just as the twin threats of Russian aggression and the truckers’ strike prompted a rush to the shelves in our local supermarket. My wife reminded me to add a few rolls to our groceries list.
I scanned the offerings in the store and began to grab for the one labeled “ECO toilet paper.” The paper was bleached white, the rolls were skimpy (a waste of the inner cardboard tubes) and overpriced. But it touted a 50% recycled plastic content in the packaging, as though that in itself were a special achievement, meriting the ECO logo.
NPR quoted a big Oil industry insider from a 1974 speech: “There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis.” NPR “found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn’t work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.”
8- Toilet tissue, used or not, is generally not recycled.
In January of 2015 (five months before Donald Trump announced his intention to campaign for the presidency of the United States of America), FOX Science News bit on the claims made by a Japanese “scientist” who has managed to harvest the protein from human sewage waste and “found a way to extract it, mix it with steak sauce and create a fecal feast fit for a king.” Fox was joined by other national and international news outlets in reporting this story, based on one shitty, dubious, YouTube video.
9- I watched a girl giving a TED talk who had almost completely eliminated consumer waste from her life. She brought a small glass jar to the show-and-tell which contained every scrap of trash that she’d produced during her 3 years of frugal, ecological living. Her long brown hair was lustrous from whatever natural products she’d been using to clean it with. Her skin and her eyes gleamed clear and healthy.
“The question I get asked most,” she smiled. “is how do I wipe my butt.”
10- (Journal studies reviewed by )The National Center for Biotechnology Medicine reviewed studies of Covid-time hoarding and identified “[s]ix case reports of pathological use of toilet paper hoarding… One study reported a case of a patient with therapy-resistant OCD who spent hours on the toilet with excessive anus wiping, using at least 10 rolls of toilet paper per day (Klimke et al., 2016). Interestingly, with only two applications of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), the patient showed immediate improvement (using less than one toilet roll per day).
Two case reports indicated suicide by mechanical asphyxia using toilet paper … and another study reported the case of a homicide by toilet paper smothering in a patient with Alzheimer’s disease (Saint-Martin, Lefrancq & Sauvageau, 2012).”
“Two other case reports described patients with pica, a syndrome characterised by unusual craving for the ingestion of either edible or inedible substances, who ate toilet paper (Chisholm & Martin, 1981; Fisher et al., 2014).”
11- Knowing paper isn’t necessarily loving it. When toilet tissue finally became commercially available in the West, according to the NCBM “The reception of toilet paper from the medical community was not positive, and in an ironic note published in the Lancet in 1869, the idea of toilet paper was defined as ‘the last absurdity.’”
People, it was esteemed, wouldn’t bother wiping their ass with the stuff.
12- Headline in the Irish Examiner:
Now you can literally wipe your arse with gold
“An Australian toilet paper company is now offering a product made of 22-carat gold.”
13- The next pandemic we’ll face will be tickborne. When the ticks bite, they will inject a sugar into our bloodstream which our bodies cannot assimilate through that channel, and this in turn will trigger an immune system reaction that turns any mammal meat or its byproducts toxic to us. Just the smell of meat could do us harm, so people will be masking around outdoor barbecues and tailgate parties. The disease already exists. It’s called the Alpha-gal Syndrome and it’s coming to theaters near you, according to Jane McGonigal. McGonigal is the same woman who created an online gaming forecasting scenario that had players role-play through an imagined respiratory pandemic that would take place in 2020, that originated in China, and that would play out exactly as would Covid-19. This experiment was carried out in 2010.
Those afflicted by Alpha-gal won’t be hoarding toilet paper, they’ll be getting rid of it, since most brands are made with gelatin that comes from the bones and skin of animals. It’s used as a binder and softener.
14- We were to stage a Christmas play at our school in which the curtains would open to reveal the angels themselves, singing in Heaven. Everyone quickly agreed upon the material we should use to create the clouds of Paradise.
