The time was a Friday night 8 years ago, just after the start of the new millennium. The place was a local Chicago Irish pub, the kind of place where everyone knew yer name at the beginning of the night, and couldn’t remember their own by the end.

There was an old man named Whitey on stage singing those cliché “songs you know by heart.” There were about 100 people in the establishment, 99 of whom were singing along. The crowd goes silent as Whitey stops playing, looks directly at the one Barney who wasn’t singing along, and says: “You’re the type of guy who steps outta the shower to take a pee!”

The pub bowls over in laughter, and I think to myself, yeah, it’s that guy’s fault. The world’s energy problem. Global warming. Our spiraling economic deficit. All because that fucker doesn’t pee in the shower. What should I do about this? Should I kick his ass? Nope. Buy him a beer and give him a big hug for doing his part to spark the collective awareness? Yep. He just helped solve the world’s energy problem.

In the spirit of “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” we here at Tame The Bear offer the first tenet of our economic plan:
National Pee in the Shower Week.

Now I realize that most of my readers probably do not shower at all, so to them, I say, use it as a metaphor. Just say no! To flushing. The Tame The Bear marketing people tell me that “National Pee Wherever You Are Week,” while bohemian and well-intentioned, is a potential disaster waiting to happen. So, National Pee in the Shower Week it is.

The math is real simple. 300 million people in America. 7 days in a week. 1 flush saved per day. An average of 3 gallons per flush. (Note: While the new fancy flushers operate at an efficient 1.6 gallons per flush, these were all installed in the cookie-cutter condos that nobody lives in, as a result of the past 5 years of homebuilders building 5 condos for every American, living or dead.)

That’s 6.3 billion gallons of water, or 6.3 million units of water (1000 gallons in a unit) saved in one week. At a price of $2 per water unit, we just saved $12.6 million.

And while that will barely buy us 10 days of interest payments on servicing our national debt (the U.S. spent $412 billion in 2008 in interest), it will serve as a nice down payment for another $50 million corporate jet on the taxpayer dime for Citigroup, who just received $45 billion in bailout funds.

So, remember, the next time you have to piss like a racehorse (how does a racehorse piss anyway?), you can also help save the environment, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and help a Citigroup exec fly in style, simply by peeing down the drain.

More action items to come. We’re here to help.

In urine,
Eric Majeski

Photo by Pragmagraphr on Flickr.

Tags: Wall Street, weird