The Fiasco of Flushing The Toilet
I was listening to the radio this morning, you know the usual nonsense, when I heard a story about a solid gold toilet expected to fetch $10 million at auction. Naturally, my mind went straight to the Victorian disaster I call home. I had a quick moment of capitalistic fantasy: if I framed one of our worn-out, stained toilet seats, could I auction it off for enough to, I don’t know, cover the cost of a replacement seat?
Because when you talk about Bathroom Etiquette in this house, you’re talking about a void. No one, and I mean no one, cleans up after themselves. Thank the gods (and the landlord's budget) for the weekly cleaning crew, but even they only do the bare minimum. You can sense their resignation—this is absolutely not where they want to be.
When I moved in, the shower was less a place of hygiene and more a petri dish of evolutionary biology. The shower curtains were practically a solid, moldy textile. I started slowly scrubbing the place down, and I swear, every single tenant looked at me like I was the lunatic. But if I have to use it, it has to, at the very least, meet my tragically low standards. I even supplied a pump hand soap from the dollar store. Everyone used it, of course, but instead of replacing it when it ran out, they just kept adding water in a pathetic, transparent attempt to create more soap.
Then there's the delightful Downstairs Kitchen Bathroom. Try cooking your dinner while some old man is on the other side of the paper-thin door, grunting, groaning, and farting like a wounded boar. It adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the cooking experience. This is especially fun when Big Earl is using it, which means everyone else just has to wait until the ex-Marine has completed his mission. Sharing space is for civilized people, not Big Earl.
One time, the bathroom door had been shut and locked for a suspiciously long time. I knocked, no answer. My immediate thoughts were, "Either someone locked the door and walked away, or someone is dead." After waiting a dignified 20 minutes, I knocked harder. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Suddenly, a massive thump came from the inside! I snapped, screaming at the door, “ANSWER THE DOOR, ASSHOLE! I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!”
Another night, I woke up, stumbled to the toilet, and found a truly magnificent, unflushed payload. That wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that there was NO TOILET PAPER! WTF!
The structural integrity of this house’s waste system is also a masterpiece of failure. Sometime before I moved in, the cesspool was supposedly replaced. But we still have problems. From time to time, we get bubbling sewage erupting from the vent pipe in the yard. They send someone to snake the pipes, but no one ever cleans up the resulting deposit. As a result, the patch around that cleanout pipe is now the most highly fertilized spot in the entire yard.
Recently, our groundskeeper, Raul, left a large weed growing right on top of the sewer vent during his monthly yard work. Turns out, some idiot must have flushed a tomato (or just tomato seeds) down the drain. We now have a thriving tomato vine growing directly out of the effluence that bubbled out of the pipe.
Anyone want some shitty tomatoes?
Sometimes, I dream of winning the lottery and moving into a house with a working, private toilet. Then I wake up.
WTF: WHAT THE FIASCO!
