Put Your Hands in the Air for World Toilet Day

This post originally appeared in VICE UK​

Have you ever wondered how much one of Beyoncé's turds would cost? Like, on eBay, if eBay loosened up its frankly archaic turd-selling policies. I can tell you: $449. Now let's play a game of higher-or-lower: Is Beyoncé's shit worth more or less than one that came out of Ringo Starr's body? The answer is: less. A shit that came out of Ringo Starr's body would apparently be worth $826 on the open market.

Yeah, you knew there was a reason why you woke up this morning with a smile on your face: It's World Toilet Day, motherfuckers. Which means that there are a lot of weird press releases knocking about where some advertising agency has given an intern a calculator and a list of net worths and made them price​ some shits.

But it's also, like, an actual day. Not of celebration, per se, but of awareness, at least. Of respect. You don't think about the humble toilet much, do you, when you're retching the bad end of a tandoori into it, or filling it with piss? But it does an important job, and—as is the whole point of World Toilet Day—a lot of people don't have access to them.

Of the seven billion odd people on earth, 2.5 bil​lion don't have access to improved sanitation (i.e., a device like a toilet that separates them from their shit), and 1 billion people still defecate in the open. That weird dude at uni who moved out halfway through the year and left behind a wardrobe full of stagnant piss bottles? That maniac literally had it better than large swathes of the third world.

But sometimes we, uh. How to put this? We use toilets a little bit wrong. Like: " carefully ​disconnecting the plumbing in the back of a chain pub urinal and then putting your head and shoulders in it and getting wildly pissed on by unwitting strangers" wrong. Or using public toilets to find romance. Or by having sex standing up in a haunted toilet while ghosts watch ​on, ethereally aroused. Basically: Toilets are proof that no matter what the inanimate object, no matter how much it smells literally of piss and crap, someone will find a way to have sex on, near, or with it.

Either way: When you're having a tinkle later, turn round and look your toilet deep in the sort of eye bit and whisper, "thank you." Thank you, toilets. Thanks.

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