The house has only one bathroom, and someone was in it, and it wasn’t me. Waiting my turn is usually not a problem, but that morning the need was urgent, and waiting was not an option.
Like the Boy Scout I never was, I’m prepared. In a corner of my room, there’s an emergency toilet. It’s simply a big bucket with a toilet seat on top and a plastic bag inside, so on it I sat, and into it I shat. That’s what it’s for.
Then I closed the lid, put the emergency toilet back in its corner, and forgot about it. The contraption is airtight when the lid is down, so it stayed in the corner, un-touched and un-stinking, for the next month and a half.
Which brings us to yesterday, when the scent of stale cat litter reached me in my recliner, and it was time to dump the litter, not merely scoop it.
Instead of using a new plastic bag, I remembered that the spare toilet had a bag already open and in it. I pulled the bucket out, opened the lid, and poured the cat litter into it, atop my poop from August.
The stink almost made me puke, but I’d expected the stink. What I hadn’t expected, and what actually did make me puke a little, was the bugs.
Inside the plastic bag inside the poop bucket, were thousands of small, mostly dead bugs. Some few were crawling on the inside of the plastic bag, but almost all the bugs were resting in peace.
I’ve tried to figure the science of it. Follow my logic, and maybe you’ll need to puke too: At first I figured most of the bugs were dead because, as already noted, the toilet bucket is airtight when the lid is closed — so they’d suffocated. The few still crawling probably would’ve been dead too, if I’d waited a few more days to open the lid.
But the bucket is airtight enough that no odor gets out, so how did the bugs get in? I didn’t and still don’t like where the logic led me, but there must’ve been microscopic bug eggs in my poop. Probably I should wash my hands more often.
Usually my poop is flushed, so I’m unaware of the bug eggs. That particular poop had festered for weeks, though, allowing an entire society of bugs from inside me to hatch, to live, probably to spawn new generations of bugs, and then most of the bugs had died, all during a month and a half in a plastic bag inside that plastic bucket in my room.
That’s disgusting, but also it’s fascinating, so why stop now? Instead of taking the poop and kitty litter to the dumpster, I closed the airtight lid and put the bucket back in the corner of my room, to see what happens next.
9/30/2023
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