Sometimes, I sit my ass on the toilet and it’s pure peace. A clean, effortless, almost spiritual bowel movement. One wipe, maybe two, and I’m done. In and out. Boom. But then there are those other times—usually when I’m in a hurry or have something important to do—when all hell breaks loose. Shitting becomes a full-blown ordeal. It won’t stop coming out, or worse, it doesn’t just sliiiiide out. Then comes the endless wiping—like a thousand swipes, and I still don’t feel clean. My ass is raw. I’m sweating. And inevitably, this happens in a public restroom.

It’s Murphy’s Law of Shitting: if something can go wrong, it will—especially in a filthy stall with no toilet paper and a seat that’s already been pissed on.

I never get diarrhea at home, mind you. No, it waits until I’m squatting over some gas station toilet that looks like it lost a war.

There’s gotta be a better way to shit.

Sir John Harington gave us the flushable toilet in 1596. Joseph Gayetty introduced toilet paper in the 1850s. That’s over 150 years of wiping our asses with pressed tree pulp. You mean to tell me that in the year 2023—when we can FaceTime across the planet, stream 4K porn in real time, and send people to live in outer space—we’re still using dry paper to scrape shit off our buttholes?

It’s barbaric. It’s caveman-level. It’s Third World.

But hey, who am I to complain? I could be squatting over a hole somewhere instead of perched on this (ice cold) porcelain throne. Still, here I am, sending this message not by snail mail, but via this beautiful monstrosity we call the internet. Through SCREW. Over Wi-Fi. From a smartphone that’s smarter than most people I know. We’ve advanced everything else—but when it comes to shitting, we’re stuck in the dial-up era.

Toilet paper is the rotary phone of hygiene. Squatting over a hole in Mumbai is “no signal.” Wiping with paper is “dial-up.” Where’s the fiber-optic of pooping?

There’s gotta be a better way to shit.

We used to settle for slow-ass internet, but we always dreamed of faster. And we got it. So why, in 150+ years, hasn’t someone rethought the entire shitting experience? I want a device that gently vacuums everything out in one clean swoop. Or a pill that turns everything solid and slick, like ejecting a poop-capsule that needs no wipe.

Think of the time we’d save. The trees. The embarrassment. The raw assholes.

Hell, why not a pill that separates clean H2O from waste, so we piss pure water and crap out a clean-burning fuel source? Solve the water crisis and the energy crisis just by shitting. Sound ridiculous? So did video calls in 1596.

Before we colonize Mars, maybe we should figure out how to colon-ize our colons. You think they’re gonna send a payload of Charmin to the Red Planet? They better start solving this shit now.

Seriously. There’s gotta be a better way to shit.

— P.

Phil Italiano

Publisher, Visionary, Provocateur

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