Feeling flushed

The plumbers came by recently to relieve me and my wife Kara of a problem we were having with our discretionary income. Luckily, they were able to come dry it all up before we did something stupid, like buy a rotisserie chicken machine from Ron Popeil or pay the mortgage.

I always used to think of water as my friend. I’d eat some pretzels or mow the lawn, and there water would be, waiting for me, cool and crisp, ready to wash my hands before I’d pop open a can of soda. But water is only your friend until you buy a house, at which point it becomes the worst enemy you’ve ever had, not including the bully who put your head in the toilet in the seventh grade. But come to think of it, water was part of the problem then, too.

Being a homeowner has afforded me all sorts of thrills to which I’d previously been uninitiated. Now that I’ve been through it, though, I can authoritatively say that you haven’t lived until you’ve been sitting in your living room on a quiet, cloudless evening, when in the back of your consciousness, you hear the distinct pitter-patter of rainfall coming from your basement.

“Ahhh, what a peaceful sound,” you think. Then you go back to wondering if anyone has ever tried to ride a moose like a horse, and if so, were the results hilarious, tragic, or both? But then it clicks in your head. Wait a minute. It isn’t raining outside. The shower isn’t running. I’m continent. That can only mean…

Some people pay good money for the kind of adrenaline rush you get when that realization hits. We eventually did, too.

Now I enjoy a nice cool rain shower as much as the next guy, but it is difficult to muster up that “Singin’ in the Rain,” heel-clickin’ spirit when the nimbus cloud overhead is your toilet. As I stood there helplessly watching the water fall from the ceiling and splatter onto the basement floor, I couldn’t help but wish I was back in seventh grade with my head in the john.

Three plumbers and three thousand dollars later, we were back in the Age of Indoor Plumbing, which is much more pleasant than the Age of the Backyard at Night. I won’t complain about the cost more than I already have, because if you can’t spend your money on the luxury of a functional toilet, then what can you spend it on, besides yourself, and the people you love, and maybe a couch that doesn’t have ferret holes in it?

Looking on the bright side of the whole fiasco, our toilet is finally firmly anchored to the floor for the first time since we’ve lived here. It used to rock around so much that our guests would mistake it for a mechanical bull. To make it seem normal, we used to have a honky-tonk band playing in the shower behind chicken wire, and we’d serve peanuts in buckets and let people just throw the shells on the floor. I’m glad those days are over; the bathroom brawls were getting out of hand.

The absurdity of the situation strikes me every time I flush. I’m too cheap to buy myself a thirty dollar ticket to go to a waterslide park, but my toilet water gets its own three thousand dollar flume ride. Sometimes life just doesn’t give you any choice but to flush your money down the toilet.