Life in the Big City: Public Defication

This is a shitty story: you might want to just ... pass on bye, don't look, hold your nose and pretend it never happened.

Actually, that seems to be the Best Practice in large cities all over the country.

I thought this was ... well, Urban Legend until I moved to a Big City in the 1970's:

San Francisco Launching New 'Poop Patrol' to Deal With Dirty Streets: While San Francisco has been doing its best to become a model progressive city by doing dumb things like banning plastic straws, its streets have gone to hell. Human excrement on sidewalks has become such a pervasive problem that the city is launching a “Poop Patrol.” Heather Knight reports at the San Francisco Chronicle:

In the  1970's, I moved to Portland, Oregon, from a rural farm community because I was "getting ahead" and could "find a good paying technical job". 

When I arrived there, and began walking the "mean streets" ... I understood what the term "Mean Streets" really meant.

My unfortunate awaking occurred when  I was walking across the Burnside Bridge, and noticed a scruffy-looking man squatting on the bridge with his pants down; he was "doing his business".   Being naive, I tried to ignore him while I passed him.  He glowered at me, defiant as if I was imposing on his privacy as he publically voided his bowels on one of the most heavily trafficked bridges in the City of Seven Bridges.

If the bridge didn't have guard rails, I might have kicked him off the bridge.  But of course I was too "civilized" to do more than hold my nose and hurry past him and his ever growing pile of shit. (I suspected that these citizens hold it until they couldn't any more, which contributes to the amazingly tall piles of shit.)

There's little more to the story.  I left my good-paying job in "The City", moved to a quiet little College Down on the Willamette river.

I checked; my town draws its water from creeks  rapidly flowing down from the surrounding mountains, well  upstream from the Willamette.    There are three processing stations which purify the water before it reaches the taps in my kitchen.

 But there are bridges across the Willamette River in my current town, and I've seen a lot of hobos huddling near the bridges.

I pity the residents of the State Capital (Salem, which id "downstream"), which draws a lot of water from the Willamette River.

Perhaps the effluvium from their drinking water explains ... at least in part ... some of the really crappy legislation which our state Senators and Representatives impose upon us.

As for me, I double-filter any tap water I use for cooking (boiling temperatures at least), and triple-filter and boil any water I use for drinking.

The plants in my home, though, seem to thrive on it.   I never need to fertilize them.