Before I start, I should point out that summer is not usually a particularly silly time here in our happy little burg. It’s true that the kids are all out of school now, save for those who find the modern curriculum of pabulum and political correctness too educationally challenging to qualify for social promotion, and so the kids are out doing the things that all normal, healthy kids do at this time of year like robbing liquor stores, beating up old people, and setting fire to stray cats. While this sort of thing is occasionally unsettling, it does little to upset the calm and orderly progression of life here; the kids take their cues from their parents and in the main parents here in our happy little burg do not act in a radically silly manner. There are always exceptions to the rule, of course, but they are few and far between.

It is summer, after all, a time when few people want to behave in a seriously silly way, except at the beach, where the intense sunlight has the unfortunate effect of making large numbers of people who should never be seen without their clothes on suddenly decide that the one thing in life that would make them happy is to display themselves to a horrified American public in all their avoirdupois magnificence, thereby scarring the psyches of many a small child for life and permanently blinding large numbers of family dogs. The vast majority of people, however, simply want to kick back, mellow out, and enjoy the long sunny days and maybe take in the occasional movie at the drive-in or bring the family to see a ballgame. Even our civic affairs take a back seat to the demands of the season, as our local solons usually decide to not decide anything until after Labor Day. It therefore came as a bit of a surprise to all and sundry when one member of the city council proposed that henceforth all public housing built here shall come equipped with environmentally sound dry toilets instead of the flush toilets that have made American civilization the envy of the modern world.

The economic rationale behind this proposal is simple: the ecofriendly dry toilet will save water and will, as a result, save the city millions in sewage treatment costs. At least, this was the explanation given at the city council meeting; the vast consensus of opinion at Don German’s Hair Cut and Hand Gun Emporium, as well as at most other tonsorial establishments throughout our happy little burg, is that this particular member of the city council is a jerk and a jackass, when he isn’t actually aspiring to the elevated status of complete moron. I do not hold this somewhat low opinion of the councilman, although in the interests of full disclosure I should mention that I did go to high school with him and that when I was a senior his first wife gave the varsity football team a particularly nasty case of the clap, costing the team a place in the semifinals for the county championship that year. I know that the councilman is a serious environmental activist and always has been; even in high school he led clean-up drives and recycling efforts years before it became the thing to do; and I believe that he made this proposal with every intention of making his community and his planet a more environmentally safe place in which to live. I also think he is full of toads’ gonads.

A more dispassionate observer than I, however, might choose to question the motives of the councilman and all his plumbophobic ilk. Why this sudden demand to do away with indoor plumbing, surely one of the hallmarks of a civilized society? Why, in this day and age of incredible scientific advances, should our modern post-industrial information age society turn away from Sir Thomas Crapper’s gift to the world and return to the outhouse? Let us look first at the outhouse, or rather, let us smell the outhouse, since we will be able to smell the place well before the outhouse comes into view.

I know this for a fact, for my family home once came complete with an outhouse. This was long ago, of course, when my family came up to our happy little burg from the great metropolis to the south for the summer, an annual trek we made every year in order to keep my brothers and me off of the streets and out of trouble, and a removal that became permanent when I was eleven, at about the time when my ability to turn the five-fingered discount in bulk was becoming somewhat notorious with the merchants on our block. Although my father plumbed for a living, he hadn’t actually gotten around to putting in a toilet in our house until the summer before we came here permanently, and so every year we marched through the high grass in the back yard (Pop disliked mowing the lawn, and he especially disliked mowing the back yard, his reasoning being why should he expend time and effort on something nobody would ever see) to the outhouse. It would be hard to imagine a filthier, more disgusting, more feculently crapulous and noisome hellhole than that outhouse, the overpowering stench of which made my brothers and me evacuate our bowels with a single-minded determination and alacrity we seldom displayed beforehand and have never displayed since, and get the hell out of there forthwith and in a hurry, too. It is difficult to imagine the sighs of both psychic and physiological relief we expressed when Pop first tested our brand new flush toilet in the summer of 1969, and it was with no end of fraternal glee that all the brothers together pulled down the old outhouse and set it on fire, and then filled in what had to be simultaneously the most loathed and the most fertile spot on the property.

So why, you ask, would anyone possessed of all their wits actually advocate a return to such a primitive method of sewage disposal? To understand the war on the flush toilet, you must first understand the mindset of those who want to ban this paragon of Western inventiveness. The modern environmentalist is, in our current political climate, most often associated with those who believe in the power of the state to correct all of society’s ills. There are many reasons for this, one of which is that environmentalists like to tell people what to do, and the state’s ability to make the populace do things they don’t want to do is even greater than your mother’s, if you can believe such a thing. In order to get you to do what they want, they have to nag and nag and nag, and sometimes they’ll make you fork over a stiff fine for not listening to them, and at other times they’ll send in SWAT teams, but mostly they simply annoy you until you do what they want you to do. But to annoy you, they have to get at you, and they can’t get to you if you’re in the lavatory copping a squat on Sir Thomas’ pride and joy.

This is true, believe it or not. The vast majority of Americans own more than one television, but they don’t keep one in the bathroom, and until the cell phone came along, most people didn’t have a phone in the bathroom either. The bathroom was a place of solace and rest, where the harried citizen could simply sit and read and go about his business without the constant pressure to do one thing or another, simply because they were already doing one thing or another and they had to prioritize. The bathroom was the one place where an American teenager could read without their friends knowing that they were actually looking at a book, because books are gay (actual quote, people, I kid you not) and not at all cool, and social standing, as we all know and remember from high school, is everything to an adolescent. One can only imagine what will happen to the collective American grade point average when students can no longer use the bathroom for any prolonged period because of the room’s intense crapulence, or what will happen to the social life of teenaged girls when they are no longer able to use the bathroom for so long that you wonder what the hell they are doing in there? It seems clear, therefore, that this push for the ecofriendly toilet is little more than an attempt to rid this our Great Republic of the last bastion of personal privacy left to the common citizen.

And for what? To expand the already increasing power of the state to interfere in the ordinary lives of the citizenry, and yes, to serve the interests of those with a vested interest in increasing that power, such as all civil service unions, most Democrats, some accordion manufacturers, and my classmate the councilman. As I said, I am sure that in making this proposal the councilman is doing what he thinks is best for the people of our happy little burg, and indeed, for the nation as a whole. That being said, and again in the interests of full disclosure, I must say that I never liked him or either of his wives, and let me be among the very first to say that he can have my flush toilet when he pries it off my cold dead ass.

Story: AKAKY

Photo: DAH

 

54 thoughts on “akaky says…”

  1. bob black

    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

    btw:

    HAPPY CANADA DAY!

    hugs
    b

    ps. david: great pic too…family meal and road trip, my favorite things in lifE!

  2. david alan harvey

    BOB..

    i am going to start looking for candidates of witty or truly important text in comments to get front page treatment for up to a day..Akaky just happened to hit it right today, but you are THE textmeister…so the best of it has a chance at the top of the page…go for it..today Akaky , tomorrow Bob etc etc…photo by whomever has one….woulda run an Akaky shot if i had one…just happened to have shot one yesterday that i thought fit…besides, the colors matched the Burn typography nicely!!

  4. david alan harvey

    MARCIN.

    oh yes, for you totally lost in translation..for us too actually…we will see how a comment text at the top works from time to time…maybe yes, maybe no…just playing….

  7. bob black

    DAVID :)))

    cool…if i write a text exclusively for BURN (like everything i write here), can i pic a photo?…i mean, give me a couple of days to get my senses/gears back and i’ll write u with an idea for text….will email u later :))))

    by the way, i wrote 3 long comments today for new essay and bruce too….not ‘front page’ stuff, just so you see i saw the essays :)))

    ok, must run…dinner for dima…

    hugs
    b

  8. bob black

    MARCIN :))

    akaky’s comment is not only brilliant and hilarious but…well…i don’t won’t to write why it’s so good….as i writer, i want to only add what i wrote above:

    :))))))))))))))))))!!!!!!!!!!

  11. a civilian-mass audience

    BOBBY…u are next…u have been warned:)))))))))))))))

    can’t wait…

    and AKAKY…I am a slow reader…but a photo always helps…
    AKAKYIRL…eat my chickens now…;)

  15. Frostfrog

    Brilliant.

    From his comments, I always deemed Akaky to be a bit insane. The insanity of genius, perhaps. Another reincarnation of Mark Twain.

    Nice match of photo and word.

    In Alaska, there is a thing called the honey bucket, because in permafrost, an outhouse does not work.

  17. panos skoulidas

    I REALLY REALLY LOVE THIS:

    “It is summer, after all, a time when few people want to behave in a seriously silly way, except at the beach, where the intense sunlight has the unfortunate effect of making large numbers of people who should never be seen without their clothes on suddenly decide that the one thing in life that would make them happy is to display themselves to a horrified American public in all their avoirdupois magnificence, thereby scarring the psyches of many a small child for life and permanently blinding large numbers of family dogs”

  18. panos skoulidas

    “The bathroom was the one place where an American teenager could read without their friends knowing that they were actually looking at a book, because books are gay (actual quote, people, I kid you not) ”

    AKAKY YOU ARE BRILLIANT !

  19. bob black

    FROSFROG :))))))))

    i know something about the honey bucket too! ;))))))))))))))))))))

    and the garlic closet (in russia, my wife’s parent’s dacha’s ‘facilities’ means shitting in a green bucket in the small closet where the garlic and flowers hang to dry…later the bucket is thrown next to the closet, in the compost pocket….it involves lots of sweating and swatting away bees and flies: good for contemplation of self ;)))

    and this: the Red Bucket….my younger brother when he bought his sailboat in key largo, he and i sailed the boat back to Marco island, years ago…no head (meaning, the bathroom on a boat)…so we used the red bucket…and then ‘chummed the water’ after….what i remember best was trying to steady myself on that bucket while the boat was pitching and then, worse, tossing the bucket over the side, making sure the wind was cooperative…..my brother has pics…yours truly sitting on the red throne…alas, i don’t have them with me…alas….

    what we learn when we need to :)))))))

  20. panos skoulidas

    ” and let me be among the very first to say that he can have my flush toilet when he pries it off my cold dead ass.”

    now thats also bad ass;) sweet!

  21. bob black

    and i gotta say you taught me something not even my physics teacher could get me to remember:

    avoirdupois

    jesus, good-god….lovely to be thumbing the dictionary on the crapper looking up a word (i kid you not akaky)…

    i guess, god bless the modern convenience…and that one of my dictionaries is close to the bathroom……

  22. Carlo

    What a goood laugh that was….is it a fact or made up I wonder?!? It does not really matter.
    I almost pissed in my pants!

  23. panos skoulidas

    ok DAH,
    let be serious now! i think that BOB BLACK and AKAKY are they very very BEST writers by far…very far…!
    i think that BOB & AKAKY SHOULD HAVE THEIR OWN SECTION (maybe weekly? monthly? whenever they feel like?)awesome…with SINGLE PHOTOS FROM DAH ONLY..
    why?
    let me tell you why!
    because NEWER GENERATIONS they havent seen much of your earlier work etc..We would all appreciate i think to see more photos from the archive, your archive, even published, or even snapshots etc…dressing also AKAKY and or BOB at least for now until new writers/talents arrive…but for starters those two are the very best ..
    and who cares about the outcome?
    (just another job for you to do, thats all!! ;)

  26. david alan harvey

    hey i was just playing….spontaneous gut level editing…why not? or, should i say, it seemed like a good idea at the time…and sometimes i do not think, i just act….

    and Panos you are right, and you know damn well i did not do this out of any other reason than instinct…but yes now it seems to make sense…i did give those guys a special place already in Burn02 please remember…so this is not a new idea exactly but the spin of words and pictures is a miracle..i just shot that picture yesterday or the day before…at lunch….fits

    so we cannot do that every time, but maybe we can do it sometimes..let’s see what flows …there may be some other writer wannabees…everybody gets a chance..with pictures , with words…as usual, our goal is simply to rock the house down ..right?

  27. a civilian-mass audience

    ROCK THE HOUSE DOWN…!!!
    …I have many rocks…I can do this:)

    …can I sing now?

  29. mw

    Jeff Hladun’s a pretty good writer as well. Most recently did some nice art criticism under Gilden’s piece.

    And Bob, from your list, I’ve chosen News from the Empire. Am considering doing it in Spanish, cause it would really benefit me to get back up to speed, but should probably ramp up by reading the periódicos before tackling some kind of Mexican War and Peace.

  34. a civilian-mass audience

    and MIKER,yes JEFF and of course SIDNEY and GORDON,MW and KATIE FONSECA and REIMAR and EMCD and…
    hmmm…some ESL writers and I can sing too…no,PANOS,nope…you are to much to handle…hiii
    IMANTS and JIM …same goes for you…:)
    ok…I can go on…forever…(FROSTY…we know,you play north;))

    MR.HARVEY…amazing ideas …you have lately!!!
    shall we blame …the glass incident?;)
    ok,enough the joking…sending good energy and BRAVO!

    running
    like BOBBY

  38. a civilian-mass audience

    hmmm… it wasn’t fun PANOS…when you were “running with tears”…10 months ago…;)

    oime…you photophilosophers…you are weird people:)!

  41. skiwaves

    Hey David,
    Be careful on that bike, lots of errant drivers up & down the beach this weekend.
    But opportunities abound…
    Mike

  42. eva

    Akaky, you usually make me smile.. but also think (now not sure that this is a good thing or not ;) ).. thanks!

    Civi.. it wasn’t me this time, whatever you’re talking about, I pledge innocent!!

  43. a civilian-mass audience

    EVA…credit when credit is due…
    thank you…and you are not innocent:))))))))))))))))

  45. Akaky

    WHAT THE FRICKIN’ HELL?!!!!!!! I WAS AT THE TOP OF BURN WORLD FOR HOWEVER LONG I WAS AT THE TOP OF BURN WORLD AND NO ONE BOTHERED TO TELL ME? I’M GONE FOR A WEEKEND AND STUFF HAPPENS AND NOBODY SAYS, “JEEZ, MAYBE WE OUGHT TO TELL AKAKY ABOUT THIS; HE MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN SOMETHING LIKE THIS!” WHAT THE FLYING JESUS H. CHRIST IS GOING ON HERE???!!!

    AKAKY IRL: It’s because they hate you.

    AKAKY: No they don’t. You’re being silly.

    AKAKY IRL: Dude, I am never silly. Ever.

    AKAKY: True enough, I guess. You always were a regular hard ass.

    AKAKY IRL: Thank you. I try. And they do hate you. Otherwise they would have told you, right?

    AKAKY: I suppose so.

    AKAKY IRL: There’s no supposing involved, bubba. They hate you.

    AKAKY: But why would they hate me? I’ve done nothing to any of them, I think.

    AKAKY IRL: Maybe they’re relatives.

    AKAKY: Hardly likely.

    AKAKY IRL: You never know, guy, not with the crew of cretins you’re related to.

    AKAKY: Still not very likely.

    AKAKY IRL: Or maybe they’re Democrats.

    AKAKY: I hadn’t thought of that.

    AKAKY IRL: Think of it, guy. It’s a definite possibility. Democrats don’t like to be told that the only way they’re getting your flush toilet is by prying it off your dead backside. They like to ease their way into things, like the way they’re replacing regular light bulbs with those annoying dim green thingees. I think it’s time for you started your own lobbying group, dude, something like the National Rifle Association, only with toilets. Modern plumbing is a right worth defending, like thirty minute pizza delivery or free Internet porn. It’s something to look into.

    AKAKY: Internet porn? I don’t think so, pal; that’s a quick way to lose my job.

    AKAKY IRL: You really are pathetic, aren’t you? Your friends should hate you. You’re eminently hateable.

    AKAKY: Thanks. I’ll say something nice about you some day.

    AKAKY: Don’t bother, bubba. I’d probably wind up hating myself.

  46. david alan harvey

    AKAKY

    since i flipped your comment into a front page story within minutes of you posting, i assumed, you being a regular readier (i thought), that you would be the first to notice this little surprise..the fact that it took you five days to figure it out is more than a little disappointing…if you pay attention, and i try to keep you in the loop on your own material, then i think we might be getting somewhere…that is if you consider here to be somewhere….stay tuned….

  47. Akaky

    Sorry to disappoint, Mr Harvey; I was finishing up a ton of work before the weekend and never got a chance to come back and look at Burn; I posted and ran. Thanks for making the thing so prominent; I certainly didn’t expect to make the front page, not by a long shot, and illustrated by yourself as well. I am going to enjoy the moment before IRL starts whining again.

  48. a civilian-mass audience

    AKAKY says…
    “I was finishing up a ton of work before the weekend and never got a chance to come back and look at Burn; I posted and ran…”

    Civilian says…
    “blah,blah,blah…”

    what else…blame the relatives,aha…and the Democrates…aha,sure…
    and the Greeks…oh,yeah…
    bring it on…

  51. a civilian-mass audience

    Don’t mind me, folks, I just wanted to turn the page…

    AKAKY…51 for you…and don’t even think to bring in…AKAKYIRL:))))))))))

  53. Akaky

    Thanks again, Panos. And IRL says you can go blow it out your ass…sideways. [My apologies for IRL, Panos; he’s not feeling well today]

  54. Akaky

    Akaky also says that those who haven’t checked out Michael Yamashita’s book about Marco Polo should; great pix and history at a reasonable price.

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