Water Saving Tips to Help Survive the Drought

 

Water Saving Tips to Help Survive the Drought

Despite recent rains, people around here are freaking out about water. The condition is serious. The few inches of rain we got last week don’t come close to making up for all of the dry months we’ve endured so far.

Endangered salmon, all but wiped out by rapacious logging practices of the past, now face unseasonably low flows in all of our local rivers, and tributaries aggressively dewatered by pot farmers, squeezed between deflated marijuana prices and inflated lifestyle expectations.

You probably think, “So what? Go ahead and liquidate (pun intended) the last wild salmon habitat in the lower 48. See if I care.” You’re a red-blooded American. You know that capitalism is all about transforming the natural beauty and bounty of nature into money, and everyone wants more money, right?

We don’t need slimy fish getting jiggy in creeks in the middle of nowhere. We need more shitty customer service jobs where desperately poor people can learn to kiss ass. We don’t give a fuck about lazy, good for nuthin’, low-life salmon who swim around eatin’ free krill all day, and we don’t want to see them loitering on private property, looking for a fishy piece of tail.

So face facts. We can either write the salmon off, as part of the cost of doing business, or we can admit that capitalism was a stupid idea, that never worked, and abandon it. If you want to live under a system that treats human beings as worthless garbage, then don’t expect overworked, impoverished or homeless people to give fuck about salmon habitat, you bourgeois elitist egghead. If you want habitat, dump capitalism, if not, then stop whining about the disappearing wildlife and fix me a cappuccino, and make it snappy!

Really, most people I know are about one eviction, lay-off or diagnosis away from killing themselves. Some of them will probably take out as many other people as they possibly can, first. Don’t bother them with your concerns about a fucking fish they’ve never seen, and can’t afford to eat, if you know what’s good for you.

On the other hand, we all need marijuana. None of us could endure another day of capitalism without it. That’s why every one of us needs to step up to the plate, and do our part to conserve water. Unless we all do our part to save water, Humboldt County’s pot farmers won’t have enough water to produce that bumper crop of bloated, over-fertilized, overpriced buds that we’ve become accustomed to.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s a list of simple measures that you can take to conserve water, in hopes that we can save Humboldt County’s marijuana crop from the insatiable libido of freeloading fish.

This fist tip seems like a no-brainer to me, but it always amazes me how many people still don’t get it. Here in SoHum, this concept remains quite controversial and hotly debated. It seems simple to me: When confronted with a container of fresh, clean potable water, even if it is only half-full, DON’T SHIT IN IT! Don’t pee in it either. Does that sound controversial to you?

I know we have laws that require every home, and most businesses to provide a refillable bowl of clean water specifically for this purpose, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it. We have lots of stupid laws that we’ve all learned to ignore; just add those to the list. We can no longer afford to participate in this misguided, wasteful, antiquated tradition. It’s time to get your shit up to date. Compost it, incinerate it, bury it, or eat it, for all I care, just don’t contaminate our water with it.

Pee on a tree, or pee into a jar and leave it along side the highway. If you find yourself forced to use a public restroom, relieve yourself anywhere but into the water. Shit in the waste basket. Pee in the sink, or on the floor, or on the toilet paper rolls, just not into the water. Show some decency for God’s sake.

Here’s another no-brainer that has the potential to save millions of gallons of water: STOP WASHING YOUR TRUCK!. Look, it’s a fucking truck. It’s not a status symbol. It’s a work vehicle. I know half of you don’t know what work is, but work trucks get dirty, and working people have better things to do than spend their day off detailing them. A little mud and dust won’t hurt your precious truck, and if you don’t like the color of Humboldt County dirt, maybe you should move.

Guys around here buy trucks, not so much for work, but to compensate for, how shall I put this, shrunken masculinity. They buy the biggest trucks they can possibly find, which they then wash, bumper to bumper, at least once a week. To compensate for a shortage of an inch or two, Humboldt County men waste thousands of acre-feet of water every year by excessively washing their excessive trucks. So, I’ve come up with a media campaign to address this, water wasting, target demographic. I encourage everyone to purchase, and proudly display on the bumper of your own dusty vehicle, this bumper sticker:

Well that takes care of the low-hanging (or I suppose, the not-so-low hanging) fruit, when it comes to water conservation. The rest of these tips will take some getting used to, but believe me, they are all worth the effort.

ENJOY YOUR COFFEE DRY. Did you know that it takes 80 gallons of water to make one cup of coffee. I heard that on KMUD recently. That must make some pretty weak coffee. If that is KMUD’s recipe, I’m never buying their iced coffee again. You can save all of that water if, instead of grinding the beans, brewing the coffee, pouring it into a cup, and adding cream and sugar, just eat the coffee beans dry.

A few dry espresso beans will get you moving in the morning as well as any fancy coffee drink, and you’ll save a lot of time, effort and expense. Espresso beans are deliciously crunchy, and only a little will stick between your teeth.

AVOID WATERPIPES. Smoke joints instead of bongloads. Bongs and other waterpipes waste water by making it really funky and gross. By substituting joints for bongloads, you might save as much as a gallon of water per week, depending on how much you smoke and how often you clean your bong.

SNORT YOUR MEDS If you take prescription drugs of any kind, you can conserve water by grinding your pills into a fine powder and snorting them, rather than washing them down with an unnecessary and wasteful glass of water. By snorting your meds you’ll find that the medicine gets into your system faster, and you may even experience a pleasant “rush”, which means you’ll start feeling better, sooner than if you had simply followed your doctor’s instructions. This will give those aging boomers a good excuse to dust off their old grooved mirror and sterling silver razor blade from back in the “70s.

Finally, even hard drug users can help conserve water by:

REJECT INJECTION Injecting drugs intravenously may be the most efficient drug delivery system, but each syringe full of meth or heroin wastes at least one full tablespoon of water. Remember, we have plenty of hard drugs in Humboldt County, but water is scarce, so buy more drugs and use less water. Here’s a little rhyme to help you remember: Buy enough to smoke or snort so our water supply won’t run short.

There we have a few simple measures we can all take to prevent a bunch of horny fish from ruining Humboldt County’s marijuana crop. And if you really want to save the fish, work to legalize marijuana, because until we get the marijuana industry out of the hands of drug-dealing dope yuppies, hiding out in the hills, and put it into the hands of competent farmers, working land where all of the endangered species have already been annihilated, you can count the last wild salmon populations in the lower 48 as the latest casualties in the war on drugs.