Wasting Water

Like everyone else drifting on this rock, I use water. I drink it, wash everything that may need washing with it, and, occasionally, buy it. Using water is how we live as people. Water is always the base for social meetings, even if guised as going for a coffee or a beer. We as a civilization revere water. Obviously for good reason, we need it to survive and thrive. Maybe these are the composite reasons why watching water heave its way down the plug hole, a solemn death march, makes me uncomfortable. The grubby tap neck could be running all day without a thought, it’s only when it’s an unholy bucket-load that I seriously start to contemplate my actions. Maybe if I could just invent an elaborate, mechanical device made exclusively from zero carbon old plastic bottles, a sort of gutter out into a flowerpot to grow a one-hundred-foot-tall sunflower? Surely the leftover scraps, the detestable washing-up scum, would be good for nature to bare. Does no good for anyone all that shit going down my plug hole. It only creates an unpleasant improvised explosive in the sink, waiting for the most inconvenient moment to strike, spurting putrid filth everywhere like a muddy dog out of a bog.

 

I suppose the water isn’t the point. It’s the powerlessness to it, the implicit hand I unwaveringly have in the matter. If a charity huckster came round tonight and knocked on my door, shouting “Sir, open that door. We know you have grey water in there and we want it!” I would be happy to oblige. Sure, take the stuff. Do something with it, something I can’t dream of doing with that crap. That’s the problem with it too, that I want this scummy water to live on and remain useful but can’t picture how I live in Britain, it rains too much for me to bother saving it for that purpose. Maybe that’s it, start a serious vegetable garden, one that drinks grey water like a fish.

 

Water has somehow become a twisted currency too. I am here, comfortable, rambling about I have too much whilst someone less than 5 miles down the road won’t have any. They might not even have a bed, or a home for that matter. Maybe this is the product of years, hell a lifetime, of Conservative dictatorship. Not just conservative with a capital C either; the whole world is propped up on the idea of individualism, of isolationist views. We get taught faux truths about sharing, freedom, and expression, but none are seen as valid ideals in the real world. This country, the world maybe too, has gone too far down this insular path only leading to self-loathing and despair. There’s nothing worse than the thought of being helpless, but ultimately that is where humanity is at. The infinitely dwindling competency of the people in charge is a sad roller coaster, one where we are made too numb to even care anymore. Greed has eaten the heart; no more is there a pulse shared amongst those lizards up in their good prisons.