This started out as an attempt to seek the humor in something otherwise normally not considered humorous and was composed during the several hours it took to remove the existing ceramic ‘convenience appliances’ in our home and replace them with new ones. When the plumber had finished the job, I presented this finished story to him as a token of his work and I hope he enjoyed it as much as I have enjoyed setting it down on paper. It’s not quite up to Richard Brautigan standards, but hey!…he’s no longer among us, and I am! So, neener-neener-neener!
By Kalkiano Kalei
Today is Let a Hundred Toilets Bloom Day (trust me on this, eh!) and what more appropriate day one could accidentally pick to remodel one’s toilets simply staggers even a bizarrely creative mind (what little I have left of it, of course) like mine. Today we finally arranged (Madam Chairman and I), after a prolonged & sometimes contentious domestic battle over this issue, to agree on having both the toilets in our 1957-constructed home replaced with modern counterparts by a professional plumber. This option selected over the protests and objections of wifie, who (along with her baby-sister) thinks that because we have the complete 90s edition of the Home Depot Homeowner’s Do-It-Yourself Library (12 volumes, illustrated), such a ‘simple’ task as removing an old toilet and installing a replacement only requires a workman skill-level rating of Minus-1 and the hand-eye motor coordination of a recovered Cerebral Palsy victim.
As a house-husband who at one time successfully (I like to think) replaced our home’s entire front door and frame assembly myself, only to gain the resulting eternal dissatisfaction and disapprobation of the Sweetness and Light person I am married to, I have ever been reluctant to commit myself to further home remodeling projects, since although the front-door replacement has been judged to be a complete success by almost all of my male contemporaries, wifie somehow has never been satisfied that her male house-mate (I would like to say ‘soul-mate’, but one sometimes wonders about that highly euphemistic phrase!) has anywhere near the same level of skill as her younger brother (who seems to have been born with a hammer in one hand and a contractor’s license in the other).
