LP’s, H₂O & Man

I have a friend who purchased the oldest record store in Fort Worth. If you’re from that narrow — and some might say “elite” — segment of society comprised of TCU alumni, you’ll be familiar with Record Town, started by the Bruton and Kathleen Sumpter back in the middle of the last century just off the TCU campus.

On a Saturday morning, I embarked on a Fort Worth road trip to tour my friend’s newly acquired business and get a look at all those vinyl classics. As fate would have it, I based my drive-time estimate on previous trips to and from that great Western metroplex during rush hours.

Saturday morning traffic proved much lighter and faster, landing me at Record Town a full half-hour before our appointed meeting time. Fortunately, there was a combination bookstore and coffee/tea shop next door which was open for business. As the only customer in the place that time of day, I took a seat at the counter and struck up a conversation with the owner.

What caught my eye first and became the topic of our back-and-forth, was the menagerie of water filters and plumbing attached to her back wall. She patiently explained to me that you cannot brew quality coffee or tea unless you use pure, good tasting water, and good tasting water requires myriad filtrations to eliminate the pollutants.

Water
Whether you’re washing your car, throwing those nasty carrot skins in the disposal, or flushing the remnants of yesterday’s tasty repast down the toilet, it all ends up at the municipal sewage plant.

Less than motivated city workers apply chemical and mechanical cleaning methods to reduce the pollutants and meet the bare minimum EPA definition of “clean” water.
Then, they ship it down the local waterway to unsuspecting municipalities further South. Sadly, that process began far to the North of us and has been repeated multiple times before the water exits our taps. Yep, we’re drinking their minimally treated sewage.

What we’re tasting is the residue that eluded filtration. The water we drinking is really a compilation of all the nasty things that happened to it after it emerged from the Earth or fell from the sky. And those nasties multiply until the water reaches the ocean and enters the grand cleansing cycle.

We euphemistically call the place where the river meets the ocean, the “Mouth” of the river. More realistically, we should call it the “Rectum” because that’s the point of the river where water is the foulest. Fortunately, the closed system we inhabit includes two incredible cleaning mechanisms – evaporation and the rock cycle.

We will never run out of water but if we overload those cleaning systems, we may well run out of drinkable water and be forced to drink Guinness Stout Ale. (Check the history for yourself.)

People
People are a whole lot like water. We’re a compilation of the pollutants that have entered our lives since we were born, either via nature or nurture? The sediments of those events are embedded deep in our psyches and some are seriously hard to filter out.

“Normal” people — and I use that word intentionally — are those who have undergone the difficult filtering to rid their lives of unnatural pollutants. They are individuals who can function in society without a need to demand special treatment because of their past, even though some of those pasts are atrocious.

You and I interact with those people daily without ever knowing the difficult pasts they’ve overcome. We also interact ever-increasingly with people who are either too lazy or too intentionally self-centered to do the hard work of filtering out the sewage. Those are the folks we have to tiptoe around lest they become triggered or offended.

What is the psychological standard towards which we should all be striving? Is it rooted in a cosmic norm which provides balance to all of creation or is it just a series of faddish social mores that evolve through progress and decline through social entropy? Is the norm based on ego? Or consensus?

Water has a minimum standard beneath which it’s unusable, even deadly. What about people? Are we wrong to expect our fellow adults to meet a certain minimum norm? Or, should we just say, “to Hell with it” and live out our days amidst a chaotic caldron of nut jobs?

A meeting of great minds who think alike