Tuesday, February 28, 2023

A Smart Ass Cripple Tip for Young Criplets

 

I always love giving tips to young criplets about ways I’ve found to navigate through the world as a cripple. I strongly believe that young people represent the future and it’s not  just my obligation but my honor to use the benefit of my experience to help them get ahead.

 So my tip for today is: Save your empty mayonnaise jars so you can piss in them. When you reflect back on it years later, you’ll be glad you did.

One of the first life challenges every wheelchair cripple faces is finding an adequate vessel to piss into. We wheelchair cripples (who have penises) piss from our wheelchairs, sitting down. I pissed into a mayonnaise jar when I  was a kid. But I’m not suggesting that all you criplets reflexively do the same just because I  did and I’m your role model because you admire the shit out of me. Consider the sound reasoning behind it.

The mayonnaise jar must’ve been my mother’s idea. She had good instincts as a mother of crippled kids. She probably calculated that a mayonnaise jar was precisely the right receptacle for her dear son to piss into.  A pickle jar was too bulky. The opening on a pop bottle was too narrow, leaving very little margin for error.

But my mother’s primary motivation was probably her legendary frugality. She wasn’t cheap. She was frugal. A cheap person does everything they can to keep from spending their money. A frugal person tries to get the most out of their money. A good way to accomplish this is to figure out ways to get more than one use out of things. That’s why my mother loved shopping at resale stores.

My mother approached problem-solving from this frugal perspective. So I imagine that one day while contemplating how to reuse an empty mayonnaise jar, a light bulb went off in her head.

I don’t piss into mayonnaise jars anymore, but I do retain my mother’s frugal value system. And I defend my actions by saying that I am being an environmentalist. Like for instance, when I  get carry-out food and it comes in plastic containers, I keep the containers  for a while and use them for storing other leftovers in my fridge,  thus shortening the time  these containers are cluttering up some landfill. I’m waging war against the destructiveness of America’s disposable consumer culture. I’m saving the earth, just like I was doing when I pissed into a mayonnaise jar.