Ain’t This Some Shit?

Holy shit what a couple of days it’s been. If for no other reason I’m writing this blog to organize my thoughts. Second goal is to have a written documentation of the events that unfolded on Valentine’s Day, 2019. Thirdly, I want something I can point to when someone asks, “Where have you been the last few days?” I’ve been through the shit, both literally and figuratively. Lastly, I wanna make myself feel better, because this shit has me in a black mood. So let’s talk it out.

Thursday, V-Day, I used the bathroom, as one is wont to do upon first waking, and as one also does, I flushed the toilet. There came from the pipes a burbling, then a bubbling, and finally a great rumbling, like the bellyache of a buried god. Needless to say, I got the fuck out of the bathroom, hollering for my wife, as any strong, independent man will do. Chelle hollered her usual, “What, fool?” (Gregor, if you’re reading this, you’ll know she didn’t call me “fool”.) About the time she said “Fool” there was a sound like someone was trying to talk under water. That sound would persist for almost an hour.

At the end of this hour, the bathtub had filled with shit. Literal shit. Feces. The human variety. Threaded through this mass of anal leavings was veins of undissolved toilet tissue, like the caramel swirl in Moose Tracks. I thought toilet tissue decomposed in a septic tank. Seems it takes longer than I imagined, because what I imagined was instantaneous. Yeah, not so much.

The bathtub effluvium escape didn’t stop there. The speaking-under-water sound had stopped, but the shit just kept right on coming. It overflowed the edge of the tub, splashed down on the step (we have a garden tub, peeps; that’s how much shit there was), and proceeded to cover the bathroom floor. This was the master bathroom, so the carpet in the bedroom I share with Chelle was ruined. A good three feet had to be cut away. It now resides in our trash can, which is stationed at the curb because it smells just heavenly; I mean holy shit.

This all happened over the course of an hour and a half, total. That’s when the near-constant onslaught of sewage stopped pumping from the tub drain, at any rate. What started as a simple bubbling turned into about $1,500 worth of damages. The carpet in my room will need to be replaced because there’s no way we’re gonna find a remnant that even remotely matches the seventies-era bullshit that once was, and the emergency shit truck cost another $600. Why so much you ask? Well, it was Valentine’s Day, which I’m only assuming is a federal holiday in the world of shit removal, because everyone I called said it would be Monday, at the earliest, before they could get here.

Fuck that noise. I continued to call, extended my search to the next town over, then finally two towns over, in glorious Deatsville, where a gentleman named Bruce, a septuagenarian who’s been pumping poo his entire life, was on call for emergency dookie dispatch. Bruce came to our rescue for double the going rate, which was $300*2. Good guy, even if he was ridiculously expensive. He pumped our pooper and told us a gleeful tale of how ours was the third worst case he’s ever seen. Honestly, to the two that beat us, I’m sending you my sincerest condolences. If yours was truly worse than ours, you have my sympathies to the umpteenth degree. Bruce then postulated that there had been a gas build up in our tank that popped when I flushed the john after my post-awakening constitution. The resultant pocket of air caused a reverse suction, much like how you get gasoline out of a car’s gas tank with a length of water hose. And blamo, tub fulla shit. He said he was surprised it didn’t keep going until the tank was empty, but was happy, for our sake, that it didn’t. Me fucking too, Brucey, ya goddamn optimist, you.

Alas we were left with a bedroom, bathroom, and bathtub filled with shit, our own waste come back to visit us like bi-polar in-laws hopped up on crank and tequila. We took a quick jaunt to the nearest Dollar General to buy supplies, returned packing heavy, like a Schwarzenegger movie, plugged in the Shop-Vac, and got to work.

I filled a six-gallon Shop-Vac a dozen times. And that was just the bathtub. Where’d I put all this shit? Right back where it came from. No telling what my water bill is gonna be like, seeing as how I must’ve flushed a hundred times between Thursday evening and Saturday morning. Chelle and I worked in shifts (Shit Shifts, if it pleases ya) until it was done. In between cleaning crap, I played Resident Evil 2, which I’m currently learning how to speedrun, and Chelle spent her off hours playing Borderlands 2 with Chris. Autumn was spared any refuse removal because she’s only thirteen and Chelle and I aren’t goddamn monsters. All in all it took us thirty-two hours of sucking and flushing and scrubbing to clean everything to the point that our house didn’t smell like a Louisiana rest area in August. (If you’ve driven through LA in the summer you know exactly what I’m talking about.)

How glad was Chelle that I got the use of my leg back this month and was able to help her? I don’t think such happiness can be measured by mortal man.

So yeah, I didn’t get any reading done this weekend. Too exhausted. Could I have been reading instead of playing RE2? Sure. Did I want to do anything but kill zombies and other G-virus monstrosities in the quickest possible way? Fuck no. But you wanna know the most impressive thing about this entire situation?

The amount of people on Twitter who, in response to my tweet of “Today is a bath tub fulla shit kinda day. Fuck you, Septic Tank.” had this to say:

“That’s shitty.”

Fuck all y’all.

Seriously, though, if it wasn’t for you, this would’ve been an unmanageable disaster: physically, mentally, and monetarily. The only reason I had the $1,500 to take care of this mess is because all of you show me so much support by buying my books, watching the YouTube content, and pledging on Patreon. I’m lucky enough to support a family of five (my mother included, now) solely on the income from my creative endeavors. That amazes me. You guys really saved our asses. I’m a lucky guy to have such a wonderfully supportive community, even if you do have the shittiest sense of humor.

deuces and smooches

E.