The Soylent Green Company truck stopped by the house today and pumped out the septic tank. The first house on this lot had a privy. A year before we built our house on the land where my wife’s grandparents had their house (long gone), the county changed its rules about septic tanks. Previously, a simple perc test was all it took to get approved for a septic tank. But then progress came along and septic tank systems had to meet stricter requirements and that cost a lot more money.

My comment when we found this out late in the home building game was, “So there are 80 cattle doing their business on the other side of the fence without any restrictions, and you guys are worried about the two humans inside the house?”

Apparently so. There’s not a lot of money in the nigh soil business these days. We’re more toxic than the birds and the bees and the critters out there in the woods.

So no, I did not take a selfie of myself posing in front of the honey wagon and post it on Facebook or, worse yet, keep it to share with all of you in this post. In fact, I don’t know why I’m writing this post.

That is to say, modern-day job hunters aren’t flocking to the septic tank business in droves. And, a career as a night soil coolie never caught on in this country. Actually, I thought about all this yesterday when I was writing about climbing 8,000-meter peaks where the problem, on Mt.  Everest, for example, is dealing with human waste. It’s out of control, actually.

Short term, we could FedEx that waste to Putin. Long-term, what the hell do we do with it? It goes to waste treatment plants, though I often wonder how much ends up in the river. Or the food trucks on main street. Or gravy.

—Malcolm