Where Do Homeless People Shit?
I feel so bad for homeless people.
I think it should be a right for everyone to have a safe place to sleep and a place to go to the bathroom.
Everywhere I go, I end up having to use the bathroom. Now every bathroom has a codes to them, even at the coffee shops and Starbucks. Most gas stations don't have bathrooms anymore that you can use post Covid. Michaels. Supermarkets and Yes Whole Foods and big supermarkets, malls generally have a bathroom, but I'm a white guy walking in to use the bathroom and a paying customer. No Way a Homeless guy can wander in and take a big dump in Whole Foods.
So where do homeless people go to the bathroom?
People wonder there is shit all over San Francisco. I take like five shits a day. And I pee, I don't know, 20 times. I drink like 10 cups of tea and water.
Constantly hydrated Yo.
I've gotten much better about retaining my pee driving in LA. You can't really pull over on the way to LA or the way home from LA, and it can often take three hours. You just hold it. And then once you start doing that, it gets easier. So just wondering do homeless people hold their pee all day? For weeks?
I had to pull over and just pee in some corner parking lot, I think five times this month, and I'm not even homeless, and I work from home.
Version 2
I can't stop thinking about homeless people.
Not just the obvious challenges they face, but something we rarely discuss - basic human needs. Everyone should have the right to a safe place to sleep and access to bathrooms. Full stop.
Here's what got me thinking: I'm constantly looking for bathrooms throughout my day. Post-COVID, everything's locked down with door codes - coffee shops, Starbucks, gas stations, you name it. Sure, places like Whole Foods and malls still have accessible restrooms, but I'm walking in there as a white guy who's clearly a potential customer.
A homeless person? They don't stand a chance.
So I keep wondering - where do homeless people actually go? When people complain about human waste on San Francisco's streets, are they even thinking about the why? I'm someone who takes multiple bathroom breaks daily, probably peeing 20 times between all my tea and water intake (staying hydrated, yo).
Living in LA has actually trained my bladder pretty well. Those three-hour drives with no real stops force you to adapt. But that's just a few hours. What about people who face this 24/7? Do homeless people just... hold it? For days or weeks?
Just this month, I've had to make emergency stops to pee in random parking lot corners five times.
And I'm someone with a home office. The irony isn't lost on me - if I'm struggling with this while having a home and resources, what's it like for those who don't?
It's a basic human dignity we rarely talk about, but maybe we should start.