Is the Ocean the World's Toilet or What?

Reader questions come to yours truly in all sizes and forms, from folded paper ninja throwing stars scribbled with questions about loneliness, to strange marriage proposals that wander off on a tangent like "Will you marry me and what the fuck's up with dollar bill changers on vending machines?" But my favorite has to be messages left on the commune's answering machine, like the following:

"Yo, I was just thinkin' about something. I flush my toilet, it goes out in the ocean, right? I mean, not my actual toilet, though that would be kinda funny if I was still sitting on it. Actually, funnier if it was my wife or my friend Ronnie and not me. Not both of them, cuz what the fuck are they doing on my toilet together? But you know what I'm talking about. The loaf. So that shit goes out in the ocean, or like if I puke on the sidewalk in front of Dairy Queen and the dude hoses it off into the drain, that goes into the ocean too, right? And if they're flying elephants on a cargo plane over the ocean and one dies, they just shove it out the back and it falls in the ocean, right? Fast, too, no need to waste a parachute on a dead elephant, you know what I'm saying? Whoooooooo-KERSPLASH! Wow. Anyway, so if all this crap goes in the ocean, what the hell are we doin' swimmin' in there? I'm gonna kick somebody's ass for not telling me the ocean was the world's toilet."

Not exactly the Maserati of reader questions, but it is the least stupid one I've received this month. Roll that factoid around in your head when you can't sleep at night, and see if suicide doesn't appeal. So before you roll your eyes too violently, remind yourself that in an alternate universe, you're reading my latest column on why some ninjas wear red, and whether or not that's supposed to be camouflage for fighting inside volcanoes.

I'll begin by answering one of the questions that came up later in the above caller's ten-minute ramble: Yes, if God took a piss, he'd probably take it in the ocean. It only stands to reason. As a matter of fact, everything that has ever taken a piss, ever, eventually all that ended up in the ocean. Keep that in mind the next time you're water skiing.

How do marine animals cope? Well, they're pissing in there too, so it's not like they can throw stones. The ocean is basically like one gigantic hot tub, and you know nobody crawls out of a nice warm hot tub and scurries wetly into the house just to piss in the sink like a civilized person. The ocean is like one big let-it-all-hang-out party where anything goes, which is why the church has always taken a hard line anti-ocean stance.

The reason all the animals in the ocean don't get diseases from swimming in pee all the time, like you or I would from using the pool down at the YMCA, is that ocean water is jam-packed full of phytoplankton, which is nature's answer to 2000 Flushes Blue. Phytoplankton are tiny, microscopic bugs that don't care what they eat. Seriously, they're so small everything looks like food to them. Try shrinking yourself down to one-tenth the size of a pinhead and see how well you can tell the difference between a turd and a Coney Island corn dog. Hell, try to tell the difference at your normal size.

Phytoplankton turn the world's shame into the basis for the oceanic food chain: themselves. Everything eats phytoplankton, usually on accident since they're so tiny and the water's packed with them like pedophiles at an Aaron Carter concert. Lazy fish just swim around with their mouths open all the time, receiving sustenance from the millions of phytoplankton that get stuck between their teeth. This provides a golden opportunity for marine pranksters like the sea otter, which love nothing more than floating unwrapped candy bars on the ocean's surface just to freak out open-mouthed-swimming fish.

Even phytoplankton won't touch whale shit, however. Once they settle, these colossal loads, known as "coral," provide shelter for thousands of other marine organisms that have no idea where coral really comes from. Everything else though, stupid phytoplankton gladly devour and ask for seconds.

So, the obvious question is, could you just buy a bunch of phytoplankton to keep in your toilet, freeing you from the constant daily grind of flushing and refilling the tank with a hose from the yard because the water company cut off just the water to your toilet to spite you for an unpaid bill and it doesn't rain enough this time of year to justify leaving the lid off and your bathroom window open? In theory, you could. In theory, you could also collect all the little broken bits from the bottoms of bags of pretzels and repackage them as a salty new breakfast cereal, but I wouldn't count on that ship coming in any time soon.

In actual practice, the problems with the phytotoilet are two fold: One, they stopped selling little packets of phytoplankton through the mail after Sea Monkeys really took off and fickle kids forgot all about the magic of microscopic pets. And two, even if you could get them, eventually your toilet would just become completely clogged with phytoplankton themselves, and then it's back to the soul-deadening grind of flushing after each use. Unless you trained your cat or ferret or something to eat phytoplankton, but that might be messing with evolutionary forces that could have disastrous effects millions of years down the line, I don't know.

So the next time you're swimming in the ocean, look for phytoplankton. Because if you don't see any, you're probably swimming in piss. I'm just kidding, they're microscopic and you're definitely swimming in piss. Until next time, I'm Griswald Dreck.

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