That was high school, and the feeling was mutual. College was a little more fun. We got to go on interesting field trips, like the one our Biology class took to the sewage treatment plant. What bliss! There we were, away from the confines of the classroom, enjoying the sunshine and the large pools of, well, of shit.

That much human waste concentrated in one place tends to be a bit rank. It got me to thinking about people sending it swirling away into darkness in house after house, in business after business... and here far from their sources, the individual bits of waste congregated in the sun, as if preparing to plot against us.

I can tell you that it didn't smell good at all. Here we all were, diligently taking notes as the professor paraded us past pools and arcane equipment. This was, I had to admit as I surveyed the setup, at least marginally better than the ancient practice of dumping slop buckets full of filth out the window every night. The Black Death taught us some lessons, at least. People were now protected from such sights and smells -- except if you happened to work at the plant, or if you had the bad luck to be in that particular Biology class.

The professor turned to me at one point and asked, "Well, what do you think?" I smiled back at him, and since I wasn't really any more mature than I had been years previously, replied, "It makes me want to go swimming." His response, in retrospect, was similar to that of my Spanish teacher: "Ugh!" He even shuddered a little. At least he stopped asking me questions.

There was a mechanical device whose function was to skim the solid bits off of the surface of this fecal soup -- step one in a process that would end with the water being re-useable. The mystery of where the solid bits went was solved when we descended a flight of metal stairs and walked along the side of the holding tank. My memory of the spigot jutting from the side of the tank casts it in a Dr. Seuss-ish light: all odd angles and strange geometry. I'm sure it was more mundane than this.

Underneath the spigot, in a brilliant yellow cone-shaped pile, was the corn -- no doubt harvested from many fields and purchased from many sources. These lucky kernels had evaded molars, survived stomach acids, traveled through bowels (both literal and figurative), and at long last had resurfaced here.

...Only to be re-eaten by a large number of small, hungry birds, who hopped excitedly around the pile, like pirates around a chest of gold. I decided at that moment that this had been a worthwhile excursion after all.
J8(7)