Culture in the Toilet – Pt.1, Germany

I had the very good fortune to spend the Summer of 2019 vagabonding around Europe. As an American who had previously traveled mostly within the US, I came to expect toilets everywhere to be pretty much the same. Here in the US, from sea to shining sea, we are one nation with one language and one toilet. In this country, the American Standard porcelain throne is the only thing more ubiquitous than McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Coca-Cola, but things are very different in Europe.

In Europe, if you drive all day, chances are, that the people you talk to at the end of the day will speak a different language than the people you spoke with at breakfast. If, like me, you are an American, you probably won’t understand either of them, but if you did your homework, you will know one sentence in both languages that can save you a lot of embarrassment: “Where is the toilet?” Although every European country has these facilities, the hardware you encounter within them varies widely from country to country. I became rather fascinated by these cultural differences, and documented them carefully. Eventually, I came to realize that the toilets people use speak volumes about the cultures that created them.

In Germany, the most “developed” nation in Europe, I encountered the most advanced, high-tech toilets I have ever seen. Germany’s high-tech toilets are so advanced that most people would rather pee outside behind a bush than use them. I don’t blame them a bit. The first, and perhaps most annoying thing about German toilets, is that you have to pay money to use them, and they have the most convoluted and maddening way of making you pay. I would not have believed it myself, had I not seen it with my own eyes.

First, to enter the facilities, you must pass through a turnstile. A coin-operated machine attached to the turnstile requires you to deposit .70€ (about 85¢ ). That struck me as a pretty hefty fee to use the bathroom at a truck stop on the Autobahn. Also, there’s no such thing as a .70€ coin, so you have to fish around in your pocket for a .50€ coin and a .20€ coin, or three .20€ coins and a .10€ coin, or maybe five .10€ coins and a .20€ coin, or fourteen .5€ coins, or you drop a 1€ coin and hope the thing makes change, before you pee you pants.

Then, once you’ve inserted the proper coins, the machine spits out a little paper receipt. I looked at this little paper square and wondered if it was my allotment of toilet paper. No, instead, the little slip of paper informed me that I could redeem it for “.50€ off” of any purchase made in the establishment that hosts the facility. Of course, after you’ve relieved yourself, and you go shopping to see if you can reclaim your half-Euro, you discover that prices have been jacked-up so high that your “.50€ off” coupon amounts to a less than worthless invitation to throw more of your money down the toilet.

But back to the toilets themselves. The first technological marvel I noticed about German toilets is that they attach to the wall, rather than the floor. They stick out of the wall, like an open drawer, leaving the floor beneath them clear, for easy cleaning, I presume. That struck me as a rather cool, gravity defying, feat of engineering. However, the toilet bowl itself was rather long and shallow, and when I sat down on one of these high-tech German toilets, my penis came to rest on the bottom of the bowl, a sensation I did not much like. I also felt bad for withholding this piece of information from my girlfriend, so I found the whole experience both unpleasant and emotionally distressing.

From my experience with these toilets, I can only assume that German men have smaller than average penises. This would explain a lot, historically, and it would also explain why German men insist on driving over 200kmh on the autobahn. I can think of no other reason why German men would tolerate, let alone design such appliances.

These toilets flushed themselves, like some American toilets I’ve seen, but these German toilets have a robotic arm that emerges from the back of the toilet, holding a sponge, that automatically wipes and disinfects the motorized toilet seat, which rotates 360 degrees beneath it. Unfortunately, the toilet was equipped with no such device to clean and disinfect my penis.

If you had the misfortune of spending almost a buck just to use a urinal, you were in for a real treat, because they had a TV channel just for you. Pee-TV mounted right in front of your face as you stand at the urinal, running a continuous loop commercial for coffee. They show you a steaming hot latte, while a manicured female hand stirs foamy milk into a heart shape. Words like “Ahh…the aroma,” “the taste,” and “the satisfaction of a hot cup of freshly brewed coffee” appear out of the steam. How cruel is that? You just paid almost a buck to empty your bladder, and they use the opportunity to sell you more coffee.

The mirror above the hand-sink also had a TV built into it. This one showed an ad for a travel agency. I can understand the logic of that. By the time you have finished using a German toilet, you wish you were anywhere else in the world. We spent a couple of weeks in Germany, and several of those nights at rest areas and truck stops. I quickly learned that the locals do not use these facilities at all. Instead, they look for clump of trees or bushes, or they go behind a building. Even at public facilities that did not charge money, I saw whole German families heading off to the cover of a few bushes, rather than use the public restroom. That’s the paradox of German culture. The ingenuity of German engineers is only exceeded by the practicality of German people.

Top 10 “Dick Moves” by the NCJ in 2020

Using the term “dick move” as a synonym for “an act of obnoxious behavior” seems to me as insensitive as using the term “pussy” as a synonym for “coward.” or “blonde” as a synonym for “dumb,” but as a “woke,” “new-age” guy, I understand that I am responsible for genocide, slavery and misogyny, as well as their aftermath, and that considering the millions of people I’ve personally killed, raped and tortured through the eons, it seems a bit petty of me to complain about the mere verbal denigration of my genitals, so I won’t. Besides, I know that a lot of you really love “dick” and some of you aren’t getting enough of it because of the lockdown, so no offense taken. However, in the recent piece titled “Top 10 Dick Moves of 2020” the North Coast Journal continued its own maddening pattern of obnoxiousness. You could say it “triggered” me. In response, I offer my own “Top 10 Dick Moves” list of small, vile things the NCJ did in 2020 that pissed me off.

Let’s start with “dick move” number 10: Fear-Mongering, the NCJ continues to sensationalize this disease as a “killer virus” when the CDC’s own numbers tell us that, for the vast majority of us, Covid-19 is no more deadly than the flu. The NCJ has ramped up the fear so much that they can’t believe that the state would relax restrictions in the face of our current outbreak, but the graph in the article tells the whole story: While the number of positive tests continues to soar, almost no one dies of this disease except the very old and the very sick.

Even the state can’t deny it any longer, but the NCJ can, even though the picture does not lie. Suicides are up. Drug overdoses are up. Assaults, domestic violence and child abuse are all on the rise while poverty, homelessness, and unemployment have gone through the roof, but does the NCJ tell us those stories. No. Instead we get wall-to-wall, red-letter fear-mongering about the “killer virus.”

People dying in nursing homes is not front page news. People die in nursing homes all the time. The average life expectancy of a nursing home patient is about 11 months. There’s a place in a newspaper for people who die in nursing homes. It’s called “Obituaries.” The story about nursing home patients dying of a new form of viral pneumonia, rather than the more common, bacterial pneumonia, belongs in a medical journal, but there’s probably space for a synopsis in the “health and lifestyle” section. Turning an obituary into a cover story is distortion. Distortion: “dick move” number 9.

“Dick move” number 8: Hypocrisy. Remember how even handed the NCJ was when it came to the needle-exchange program. It didn’t matter that it has been scientifically proven that needle exchange programs save lives, and that all your best doctors strongly recommend these harm-reduction efforts. Any deranged alcoholic who staggered into a city council meeting to rant about “degenerate junkies” and complain about needle litter was described in the NCJ as a “community member” with “legitimate concerns” and quoted sympathetically. The NCJ didn’t run an editorial telling people to “Just pick up the damn needle and throw it away yourself, and while you are at it, why don’t you pick up the beer bottles and cigarette butts too.”

I would have thought that a courageous stand for a local paper, and I would have been proud of the NCJ for making it. Meanwhile, back in reality, I see no courage or even-handedness when it comes to Covid-19 coverage in the NCJ, just “dick move” number 7: Pushing Compliance Instead of Reporting the News. “Just wear the damn mask!” Unbelievable! We are not your children. Don’t condescend to us. If you don’t have the balls to cover a big story like this with some skepticism and objectivity, then don’t.

Really, please don’t bother covering this story because you aren’t helping matters any. Look, nobody expects you to be anything but a fluffy entertainment weekly, and you could do a lot of good as a fluffy entertainment weekly. Forget about news and use the column inches for lavish coverage of our local art scene. Art matters, especially at times like these, because art speaks to the heart, as well as the intellect, and it asks aesthetic questions, rather than logical ones. Art can change the way people see the world and every great movement of humanity, begins in an artistic expression, but art can only change the world if people experience it, which brings me to NCJ “dick move” number 6: Lame-ass Coverage of the Arts.

The NCJ discontinued Colin Yeo’s column “the Setlist,” the only column devoted to the local music scene, early in the pandemic. Musicians are among the hardest hit by the lockdown, and they need the attention of the press now more than ever, but in the NCJ, Theresa Frankovich, Ian Hoffman and Anthony Fauci are rock stars, so who needs noisy peasants or their arcane caterwauling.

The NCJ’s dismal coverage of the arts motivated me to write them a letter a couple of months ago after their annual “Best of” issue included eight categories for “Best Cannabis” but only one for “Best Artist,” which reminds me of NCJ “dick move” number 5: Pandering to Advertisers. I’m sure their “Best of” issue is not the only example of advertiser influence in editorial decisions and content. When you see all of those ads for cannabis dispensaries in the NCJ, you need to remember that Humboldt’s cannabis industry does not give money to anyone who doesn’t serve them.

The cannabis industry knows how to leverage the most out of their advertising dollar. They know that the more anxious people get about Covid-19, the more weed they smoke, and the less they worry about environmental destruction in the forest. Anti-drug propaganda used to tell us that marijuana causes laziness. I think there’s some truth in it so far as the NCJ is concerned. The steady flow of cannabis advertising dollars and the spectacle of Covid-19 allows the NCJ to print page after page of whatever is being spoon-fed to them by “official sources” without having to care about what’s going on in the rest of our local economy, let alone cover it.

“I just spoon-fed the media a pound of really old salmon.”

That’s NCJ “dick move” number 4: Journalistic Laziness, and NCJ “dick move” number 3: Failure to Cover Impacts of the Lockdown on Our Local Community. It gladdened my heart to read that Siren’s Song had the courage to defy lockdown orders and host live entertainment. I think they could have had a lot of good reasons to do that, and I would have appreciated it if the NCJ would have helped us understand theirs, rather than denigrate them as they did in their own “dick moves” column.

Which brings us to “dick move” number 2: Dehumanize Anyone Who Disagrees With You. By dismissing a local business owner’s courageous attempt to save his business, the livelihoods of his employees, and the very foundation of democracy, as a “dick move,” and disparaging every side of the story except the official one as “conspiracy theories” the NCJ has forsaken any illusions they may hold about themselves (or that we may hold about them), as “Guardians of Democracy.” Instead, In this year of “dick moves” their crowning achievement of transforming a liberal entertainment weekly into a mouthpiece for authoritarian propaganda, practically overnight, tops my list as the NCJ’s number 1 “dick move” of 2020.

I am not afraid of Covid-19. Either I will catch it, or I won’t. If I catch it, I will either die, or I won’t. That’s life. I do fear, however, that that we will look back at this pandemic, the way Germans look back on the Reichstag fire of 1933. It was a bad thing, but the response to it unleashed something so much worse. At this critical juncture in history we need courageous hard-nosed journalists who aren’t afraid to challenge the voice of authority. I guess we won’t have any of that from the NCJ.

I don’t think anyone denies that we find ourselves in the midst of a great tragedy. The great tragedy of our time, however, will not just be the death toll from Covid-19. The great tragedy of our time will be that we abandoned our neighbors, our principles and our civil liberties, for an empty promise of security, because we are a nation of blonde pussies.

Not Fit to Read or Burn

I appreciate free newspapers. I pick them up religiously, regardless of the subject matter because I need kindling. I need to find three or four papers every week, just to have enough dry tinder to get through the rainy season, and it’s getting harder to find enough now that the Redwood Times has ceased publication, and the NCJ has gotten so much thinner.

I read them too. If I can find anything remotely interesting in them. I also look at the ads, and I feel a warm sense of appreciation for the companies that help me get my wood-stove going on a cold rainy morning.

Lately, I have found a lot of new publications about cannabis, and the lameness of these publications amazes me. Sensi, Emerald, Skunk, Leaf, the list goes on, I’ve picked up dozens of these rags by now and found nothing redeeming about any of them. I love cannabis. I’m a lifelong fan, a true enthusiast, a connoisseur even, but I have found nothing worth reading in any of these publications. Since they are all printed on glossy paper, they don’t even make good kindling.

All of these magazines have the same format: big color ads for cannabis products, interspersed with profiles of people in the industry and one-sided reviews of the advertised products. Could this industry possibly get any more self-absorbed? Could they possibly show more indifference to the interests of their customers? When these people brag about their idyllic little farm in the forest, or show off their their fancy new dispensary, they seem to forget who pays for it all.

Cannabis entrepreneurs should remember that the people who buy their products mostly live in rented apartments and work at high-stress, low-paying jobs, yet still pay ridiculously high prices for cannabis, especially if they buy at a dispensary. Do you think they really care that they are supporting “small family farms,” “community values” or “stoner owners.” Listen, we have enough trouble supporting ourselves these days, and we’re tired of watching other people get rich off of the money we spend on weed.

There are really only two reactions a cannabis consumer will have when they see page after page of stories about unremarkable white people enjoying relative affluence through their cannabis business:

1. “Wow, these people all seem to be making pretty good money, maybe I should get into the cannabis industry.” or

2. “Fuck these people! How much longer do we have to wait for Walmart, Inbev, or RJR to figure out how to grow pot efficiently and sell it at a low enough price that they will put these bloodsuckers out of business for good?”

Neither of these reactions, it seems to me, really helps your brand. Showing off your wealth and ego in a glossy color magazine, that doesn’t even make good kindling, let alone reading material, doesn’t make me want to buy your products.

Lets face facts: Farming is boring. Farming is literally as boring as watching grass grow. Sure, there’s an art to growing good weed, and farmers love to talk about it endlessly, but the rest of us, not so much. I can tell the quality of the product in one toke. I don’t need to read about who made it or how. I know how you made it. I know that producing marijuana is dull work. That’s why I pay you to do it for me. Magazines like these just remind me that I still pay too much.