Slice of Life
From Savage Spear of the Unicorn
The toilet clogged this morning. When the landlady fixed my shower she also put some giant volume of something– concrete maybe– in the tank. So water isn’t being used in each flush. She’s been obsessed with this for years. First she tried a Mountain Dew 2 liter filled with seltzer, which gassed out and floated uselessly. Then a couple attempts with some kind of surgical bag full of gel.
The latest try she didn’t tell me about. Just the next day I noticed the water level in my toilet was one inch over the hole going into the sewer. This week I made spaghetti. Bought a 3 pound bag of frozen blueberries. My shits, giant and sticky and black. Every morning I flush twice. First flush just fills the bowl to the bottom lip with swirling dark turds and the one insulting wad of smeared toilet paper spiraling around. The second one, where I have to turn off the water at the wall first, then flush, makes it juuuuuust up to the meniscus, menacing the bathroom floor with agitated churning chunks of stool before slowly, slowly receding down after long seconds of suspense.
This morning I tried that trick again. Shit water oozed over the side of the bowl into the crack between the tiles. Almost out to the carpet. Had to sop it up with paper towels. Open the top of my old store brand cleanser with bleach spray bottle, which won’t spray anymore since a bug crawled in the nozzle. Dump the bleach on the floor. Walk in the wet spot to sterilize the parts of my bare feet that had stepped in shit water. Later I noticed bleach spots on my carpet. Like the man said: the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.