The Toilet Queen

Well, strike up the marching band and scatter the rose petals. I am the Duchess of Dookieville.

I fixed the toilet.

It's just a little thing I thought I'd try. It's been decades since I could trade on my looks and even then I was just scraping by. I've always gotten a lot further with my sense of humor. But these days people are liable to just stare at you when you crack wise about the old Studebaker and having to go stand in line at the bank for money. I've decided to learn how to do some shit myself in case all my dwindling powers of ingratiation leave me stranded.

The toilet would be a big deal. I don't know much about plumbing but I do know it can make grown men cry and throw things. I do know every time I noticed a new plumbing issue, I would attach a note to the dog and send her out to find Dave. I do know that he would invariably tackle the job and eventually solve it but not without skinned knuckles, bruised ears for blocks around, and eighteen trips to the hardware store. Plumbing involves striking a balance between one's brute strength and the sensitivities of the pipes in question. Things need to be Goldilocks tight and no tighter or looser, but the little blonde is long gone. You think Papa Bear is scary? Give him a plumbing project.

I figured if I could fix the toilet myself I'd have enough credits lined up to allow me to be a jerk for weeks. Dave and I are very close to our toilets. You wouldn't believe how close, really. Downright intimate.

The toilet in question still worked, after a fashion. You could flush it and everything. It just took a day and a half to fill up again. You'd want to do the very best job you could before you flushed, because you were going to have to wait three whistleblower scandals and a paid-off porn queen before you got another flush out of it. I was puzzled. Then I realized there must be debris in the uppy-downy contraption where the water comes back in. I you-tubed it. My diagnosis was sound.

The trick is to get in there and screw off the tippy-top of the uppy-downy and flush it out. This was a little fraught because all the parts were plastic, and reluctant, and you don't want to snap anything off that can't be resnapped later. But I did it. Then you hold a cup over the top of the valve and turn the water back on. We have excellent water pressure. I nearly drove the cup into the ceiling. Then you put everything back together again and hope for the best. A body can hope, right?

Sure enough I flushed the toilet and the water came charging back into the tank. I was the Toilet Queen! Bow down before me! Run a damp towel and some Lysol around the floor while you're down there!

The next time I flushed we were right back where we started.

This was, I'm sure, a direct result of the dishwasher fiasco. The installers insisted I bring in a plumber to fix the shutoff valve and the plumber turned off the water for the house. When he turned it on again, all the faucets and toilets made an explosive horking sound the first time they were used. I figure rust nuggets from 1926 are on the loose and one of them was now a Toilet Bolus.

Which means the entire uppy-downy thing needed to be replaced. That was eight and a half bucks of potential glory in one little box. The hardware store lady said it was easy. I wasn't born even close to yesterday. I ratcheted my expectations way down. But it was easy. Even all the little nuts and washers spun right off and back on again. I was a hero. I was the Countess of Caca.

Dave taught me long ago that an essential step in any successful personal project is to grab a beer and position a chair so that you can admire your work. It's a little tight in that room, but I'm going for it.

Tuesday, November 19, 2019, was World Toilet Day: "Leave No One Behind."

New Zealand: Where Tomorrow Begins Today

It takes about thirty-two hours to get to New Zealand from Oregon, the way we did it. I had a petite cold before we left and distributed the last delicate strands of it over the air circulation system of a series of airplanes, but it took Dave to make something manly of it, ramping up to a galloping bronchitis upon our arrival, where we met our traveling companion Betsy. Betsy has a raft of fine qualities. In fact she is very accomplished, for a woman who could totally have made it on her looks alone, but it was her stash of potions that really stood out at first. "You have a sore throat?" she said, animated, pulling out pharmaceuticals from her luggage like scarves from a clown's sleeve. "Gargle with this. It's really stinky, but it works great." Instructions on the bottle echoed her advice, as well as going on to explain how to clear slow drains and repel mice. Dave performed a glum, heroic garble and went straight to bed in horror. Betsy funneled three thumb-sized capsules into him and tamped them down, and when he came out of the coma twelve hours later, he was measurably improved. We got set for a hike.

It was supposed to be a five-star beauty, through the bush [hee hee! they say 'bush'], around a turquoise lake, with the promise of parrots, and the likelihood of biting flies. I was stoked about the parrots but Dave whimpered. "Oh, you attract bugs too?" Betsy said, animated. "I've got this amazing stuff. Wipe it on yourself. It's really stinky, but it works great." Dave wiped.

Rachael, demonstrating youth and springiness

The remarkable Linda organized the whole trip as a sixtieth-birthday present for herself, which is making me rethink my own plan to splurge on socks for my own. Going anywhere with Linda is a ticket to miracles. For instance, she dramatically improves one's odds of finding an insect with a tubular snout. There are wonderful things to see in any new place, but sometimes it's the humdrum stuff that catches my attention. Right off the bat we were able to witness the southern-hemisphere Corolla Effect wherein all the cars circled the wrong way around the rotary. Fortunately we were chauffeured by Linda's daughter Rachael, whose brain is still nimble enough to override habit. The signs facing us as we approached the rotaries said "GIVE WAY" instead of "YIELD." Variations on idioms charm me, and I traveled the world's rotaries in a daydream: "ACQUIESCE POLITELY" (U.K.); "SUBMIT" (China); "PREPARE TO DIE" (France).

Other road signs indicating locations with Maori names revealed that New Zealand is blessed with an abundance of vowels. This is usually good news. Your South Pacific nations have built entire languages around the prevailing human response to the weather, which is "aah, wow, wow," as opposed to the poor consonant-encrusted Eastern European countries whose founders were reduced to "brrrr" and stuttering. Our friends had just come off a tramp near Te Anau (pronounced "taaah-wow-wow") and snatched us up in Queenstown on Tuesday (pronounced "Wednesday").

Done right, this is what sixty looks like

I was looking forward to new flowers, new birds, and new toilets. In my experience, every country has its own proud toilet tradition. My dream toilet would feature the display shelf that I saw in Germany forty years ago, the little balconies upon which you can admire your glistening output properly before whooshing it away. New Zealand toilets are light on display functionality, but they get their own room and have their own majesty. At the press of a button all contents are shot straight to the center of the earth where they remain for millions of years before being volcanically recycled. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to demonstrate their powers right away. "You should poop," Betsy advised. "It's really stinky, but it works great."

The sun dawned bright on Double-Dookie Day ("Thursday").

I Got Yer Content Right Here

I'm fresh off the Willamette Writer's Conference here in Portland, where upwards of 800 other brilliant, ignored writers convened to learn the intricacies of subplots, polish their prose, and conspire to make sure no agent enjoyed an unmolested moment. Every attendee harboring a screenplay or a novel was desperate to find that one missing piece: the champion that would recognize the worth of her output and grease her path to acclaim. We are writers, with massive if mythical audiences, and we lack only the final link of representation to stand in the golden sunbeam of glory that is our due.

Well, close. Turns out we are content producers, and we lack only the will to tweet. In workshop after workshop we were implored to become web wranglers, riding the range of publicity and gathering our herds. Today we tweet! Tomorrow we will honk, or gabble, or yawp, or chase whatever tumbleweed will have replaced Twitter after it rolls out of favor. The news left the cohort in my general age group a little deflated. Our brains have changed since the days they were open to learning. They have already undergone a sort of fossilization process wherein the soft young spongy parts are gradually ossified into kernels of rigidity and grumpiness. All right, tweet we shall, if tweet we must. But there's a daunting array of buttons to push to make this happen and we're not at all clear about how this is supposed to work anyway. I did what comes naturally when I'm faced with a lot of stuff I don't understand. I retreated to something I did understand. I went off to take a dump. The toilet has always been the scene of some of my most reliable content production.

The bathrooms at the Sheraton are shiny and clean and freakishly eager. Anything you walk by is liable to go off. Paper towels grope towards you, water shoots out and soap oozes and beckons. I tried waving my hands in front of the mirror but my youth and acuity did not return. I chose a stall and sat down to ponder my literary fate. When I got up again to recombobulate my underwear, the toilet flushed for me. I should be grateful, but I am disturbed. I prefer to be more closely in charge of the flushing decision. There is only a thin line to cross before my appliances begin to judge me, and I get enough of that attitude from my computer. Worse, the toilet made only a half-hearted horking hairball sound. It was a premature evacuation; it didn't quite do the job. So I looked for a handle or button.

No handle or button. Obviously some kind of movement, other than the one I was trying to get rid of, was required. I waved at the back of the toilet. Nothing. I turned around in the stall. Nothing. I tried replicating the original motion of backing into the toilet. Nothing. I waggled my fanny at it as though I meant business. It was unimpressed.

There's something about this situation. Even though I was the producer of the contents of the toilet bowl, and had been in their immediate vicinity not a minute earlier, somehow I was loath to actually sit back down on the seat. Evidently we achieve emotional separation from our effluent very quickly, because I was now looking at it as though someone else were to blame. I did a version of the chicken dance and prepared to give up, timing my exit such that there would be no witnesses. But in the act of opening the stall door, the toilet, which is probably still chuckling with its buddies at its own convention, went ahead and finished the job. "And then I got her to waggle her fanny at me," it says, munching on a toilet cake. "Dude," its buddies say.

The fact is, there are certain things, and one thing in particular, for which you want your home toilet. Your home toilet might not be as good, but you're familiar with it. You have mastered the details of handle-jiggling and the toilet's own digestive limitations. And if something goes wrong, it's just between you and your plunger, and no one else needs to know. One of our toilets is delicate. The handle is more of a nipple and needs to be stroked upwards with a precise degree of care. Strangers using this toilet are more apt to yank on the handle, causing them instant regret and an intense yearning for their own home toilets.

There is no reason to expect the toilets at the Sheraton to stay mired in the past just to soothe my aging sensibilities. Time marches on, in the writing and plumbing worlds. I might think my shit is good, but I'm going to have to learn where all the new buttons are to get it to go anywhere.