misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

During a recent weekend away at Mystic, Connecticut (don't ever forget when you have to spell Connecticut, to spell connect first, then add the i cut after ... else you'll start adding an "a" or an "e" and things get all fucked up fast), I realized that I had forgotten to pack my toothbrush and toothpaste. These are the most commonly forgotten items because 1) They are easily replaceable if forgotten, unlike, say, pants. So I don't think too much about them and 2) I usually pack the night before I leave on a trip, and I have to leave out my toothbrush and toothpaste so I can brush my teeth in the morning before I go, so my breath doesn't smell like a corpse's rotted vagina, and thus I usually leave it in the bathroom (the toothbrush and toothpaste, not the rotted vagina).

In any event, upon realizing I had forgotten my teeth maintenance supplies, I headed across the street from the B&B to the local store. After walking up and down the store's aisles for a couple of minutes, I realized something was wrong. This wasn't a normal store. It was a specialty store -- selling nothing but all-natural, environmentally-friendly, recycled crap. Now, there are several problems with the increasingly-popular all-natural market. Firstly, as a general rule of thumb, if it is all-natural, it is all-expensive.

To demonstrate this point, the average price of the toothbrushes they offered was about eight bucks. The toothpaste was about seven bucks. So, I was looking at fifteen bucks for a toothbrush and toothpaste. Secondly, there is a reason not everything is all-natural. Namely, an all-natural toothbrush sucks shit. It is made of reclaimed plastic material and has bristles made of some horse-hair type material. Not exactly the soft, cleansing synthetic material found on an Oral B. The toothpaste (this Burt's Bees wax-flavored mouth glue that had the texture of melted bananas) was equally disappointing. Even a whole mouthful of it didn't offer me any foaming action. To further piss me off, the $8 dollar toothbrush was useless after one use. The all-natural horse bristles/porcupine quills broke apart after giving my gums a good medieval bleeding. And the $7 dollar toothpaste left behind a filmy residue on my teeth that felt as if I had just eaten a metric mile of Strawberry Charleston Chews. So a single tooth cleansing cost me $15 bucks and had undesireable effects. And really, are you telling me we need all-natural toothpaste? I'm guessing they had all-natural toothpaste in the 15th century, and there is a reason we no longer use it.

Progress is good. Synthetics are good. They demonstrate the advancement of the human race. They have enabled cheap, effective tooth cleanings for all the world. This push to return to the days of pre-synthetics and non-chemicals is fine, but you better use the same prices from those days as well. I doubt that Marco Polo was paying $8 for a toothbrush. It is clearly a racket. All the organic, natural, and recycled industries are charging exorbiant prices and hiding behind the "good-for-the-world" arguments. I'm guessing it is good for your wallets, too. So next time I see the Burt's Bees guy driving in a $220,000 Mercedes, I'll know exactly what he's in it for. Somehow, I don't think it is my health.