As I’ve mentioned before, many things remain a mystery to me, even at my rapidly advancing age. For instance, I don’t quite get the whole “foaming hand soap” thing. Never mind that I’ve never quite understood the need for liquid soap in the first place (I mean, bar soap was goddamn good enough for me, and for my father, and no doubt for my father’s father – get much before that, and I’m not sure what they used. Probably some sort pf paste made from sand and lye, or maybe they just took the kids down to the river and beat them clean on the rocks back then – I’ll have to look that up). I suppose the justification might be that soap is “dirty” because people rub it on themselves. But, please, GMAFB. If you’re that frickin’ delicate, then just use two fingers to pick the shit up and rinse it off or something. And do what we’ve done for decades – just don’t think about where that bar of soap was before you started rubbing it all over your face (could be good, could be bad – best to just not think about it).

That’s why people are so goddamn sick these days. Teevee has tried to sell us a line of bullshit that says you’ve gotta live in a freakin’ sterile operating room environment (and worry about our toilet paper leaving lint on our asses, ferchrissakes), so any little germ that happens to hop up your nose damn near kills you. In my day, we rolled around in the mud and ate dirt and didn’t go crying to mommy to clean things out every time we got a cut (for one thing, if we did, we got iodine shoved in it, and that shit hurt). If a cut turned red we didn’t whine about “infection” – we just kept picking the scabs off ’til they went away. And we were better off for it, damnit. If we lived, we built up an immunity to pretty much anything. If we didn’t, well, that’s just natural selection at work, baby.

Anyhow, those little plastic soap bottles just seem terribly un-green to me. I mean, with a bar of soap, you just have a little piece of wax-coated or whatever it is paper to make and then recycle (when it bar gets small enough, you just magically stick it to a new one, and you’re good to go – no waste), whereas with the liquid stuff, you have the plastic bottle and the little plastic pump gizmo, plus that spring thingie, and then you still might have a little paper or plastic label thing to put on it, and then that crappy plastic “tamper resistant” cover thing that has to be on everything nowadays thanks to that Tylenol tamperer asshole back in ’82, and then that tinfoil coated Styrofoam disk seal thing that you have to pull off and throw away. Lots of moving parts and extra packaging just to solve a problem that didn’t exist. Oh, sure, you can buy the big gallon jug refill thing, but that’s still extra plastic and packaging and sooner or later you still need to replace the little dispenser bottle, ‘cuz it breaks.

Ah, but then they came out with “foaming” soap. WTF? Talk about solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Oh, I just don’t have the time to waste working up a lather with my liquid soap. Can’t we have soap that comes out pre-lathered? How stupid is that?

Plus – and here’s the part that’s really mysterious to me – my wife continues to try and put the non-foaming liquid soap refill from the gallon jug into the goddamn foaming soap dispenser.

It doesn’t fucking work.

To get it to work, you have to add water to thin it out and then shake it for like an hour and it’s a pain in the ass and you still have the regular un-thinned out soap in the little straw thing so it’s damn near impossible to push the plunger down, and then the pump breaks prematurely and, well, goddamn it, it just doesn’t fucking work, and AFAIK they don’t make bulk “foaming” soap gallon jugs (because I think the shit turns to foam as soon as it’s exposed to the air – not unlike that batch of homebrew I made a while back).

So just stop buying the shit, OK?

The I can get back to worrying about whether or not I’m going through life with pieces of toilet paper stuck to my ass.