Truesday: Trapped In My Closet

I’m a pro-green kind of guy. I like the idea of conservation. Conservation of various things. I see them as limits, really. I like to ‘limit’ certain activities for the sake of my own long-term benefit. I actively work to limit things such as water usage, energy loss, and my exposure to fresh human waste. I’m no tree-hugger, really, since I see these things as simply socially responsible and usually more economically efficient (long view).

Which is why I happily enrolled myself into Austin’s free-toilet program! The idea is this: if the city gives away a free water-saving toilet to each current holder of a water-wasting toilet, as a city of asthmatic toilet users we will collectively limit both our use of potable water and production of waste water! And I’d get a free toilet out of the deal! To put my ass on! It’s like a win-win-WIN situation!

But the toilet totally loses though, no matter how you arrange the equation.

And so it came to pass that I got my notification from the city that my old, billion-gallons-per-flush toilet (which actually had this awesome dual-flush action where it would literally flush itself TWICE in immediate succession each time you hit the lever, thus making it a guarantee that you wouldn’t have to manage any surviving floaters) qualified me to garner a new 1.28 gpf model.

Needless to say, I was excited. And so was my ass.

I took my voucher to the pick-up location, nabbed my throne, and returned home for a fevered installation. I’d never installed a toilet before, and suffice to say, I remain pretty unimpressed with the process.

The gist is this: your toilet has a hole in its base, from which your rejected food items will be spent. The floor of your bathroom also has a hole, into which your rejected food items are to be received. Two holes, which are supposed to seal with one another in a preferably, necessarily water-tight manner.

Wait, two holes?

Yes. Two holes.

I can imagine the various design discussions surrounding the creation of this conundrum, which have obviously never occurred on a regular enough basis.

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Toilet Designer 1: So there’s a seat here, and a handle for the expulsion method up there, both very user-friendly in placement. I recommend we use water to push the refuse out a hole of some sort rather than your plan to have it incinerated on site.

Toilet Designer 2: I concede. Though I love a partially-controlled shit-fire as much as the next guy, you’re probably right. It just isn’t practical in small, enclosed spaces. Plus, in our tests, peanuts tend to smolder for hours after ignition.

TD1: Right then. So we’re set on water.

TD2: Or gasoline.

TD1: Water’s easier.

TD2: But not near as entertaining, and since we’re in the way-back past, gas is like five cents a gallon while potable water is almost completely unavailable.

TD1: True. But trust me on this. Water’s the way to go.

TD2: Perhaps we should use the blood of the Irish instead? Lots of that around.

TD1: Nah, I hear it’s unclean.

TD2: What about an animal of some sort which lives in there and just takes care of the waste for us?

TD1: You mean… eats it?

TD2: I don’t know. Sure, it eats it. Or uses to make a house. Like a beaver.

TD1: Beavers don’t use feces or urine to make their home.

TD2: They use mud, though. And that’s got to be close in consistency.

TD1: Well… wait, no, we can’t. Not enough beavers. We’ll just have to stick with water for the time being.

TD2: Right. Now we’ve got to figure out how to connect this new waste-capturing contraption to a subfloor. This seems like it might be important for some reason.

TD1: Oh, that’s easy.

TD2: Oh, is it?

TD1: Oh, yes it is.

TD2: How?

TD1: Two holes, pointed at one another.

TD2: Two holes! Brilliant! No one would ever think to consider that solution! Let’s make a suicide pact to mark the occasion.

TD1: Indeed. We’ll use my phallus to pen the document. Hand me that pencil sharpener.

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There are a number of ways in which one can adapt the female-to-female connector issue here. Most are unreliable, and some are almost guaranteed to fail. The most common solution is a ring of wax. That’s right, your body secretions just sort of slide between the two open holes through a brief tunnel of brown wax. That’s what separates your preciously bleached floor tile from the putrid expulsions of your entrails. My guess is that even though toilet technology is rapidly expanding, along with floor covering technology and hole-making technology, NO ONE is interested in addressing the bridge of this system. NO ONE wants to test it, and NO ONE wants the reputation exposure involved (if the seal simply doesn’t work well, like for instance, a shitted-on shitty wax ring). So we’re stuck with the first effort of our toilet-installing predecessors.

It’s like cave science, but in your home.

So I install my low-flow toilet, the first time, with a single wax ring. Several days/flushes later, and I note that there’s water collecting about the base of my commode. Hm. That can’t be spring water. Yet, it doesn’t have the same odor as the stuff I typically deposit into my toilet. So that’s strange.

But I’m not particularly concerned with the liquid’s fragrance, really. It’s that it exists at all. That’s my real issue. And at the crux, it’s purely emotional. I don’t want any kind of water leaking from any kind of part related to the toilet system. As far as I’m concerned, once that water even enters the tank, it might as well be poo water.

Based on the dubious hole-to-hole design of the connection, I assume the worst.

So I pull that bastard out, examine the ring, note that it’s the same nasty brown as it was when I first unpackaged it, and then discard it. I put in a fatter one. That should dam up the flow, right?

Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. One week later, there’s that same evil pool about the base. Laughing at me. Mocking me with a frowning reflection of my dismay. I might as well be pissing on my feet. Hell, IT might as well be pissing on my feet. Go ahead and take a dump down the wall. Just relieve ourselves wherever, practically. This is lunacy, this is. To not have functional plumbing in this time and place of over-abundance… I envelope-calculated that I was about a week away from contracting typhoid or perhaps diphtheria. Whatever that is.

The third installation finds me partially insane. I simply stacked two rings together, high enough so that the toilet actually sat a good two inches off the tile, and then I sat on the beast to crush all chances of a base leak. It sat atop a small mountain of wax. I tightened the bolts, reaffixed the tank, turned the water back on, and then proceeded to laugh the laugh of a man who has conquered death. Conquered nature. Conquered that leak like Louis conquered the gardens of Versailles.

Then I took a big dump in it. Just to show it who’s boss.

That was yesterday.

But a strange thing happened this morning when I woke up an hour before normal, just so I could punish the toilet a little extra before heading to work. The unthinkable. The impossible. The illogical.

That goddamned puddle was there again.

Happily growing as always.

With steadied wit and unmatched patience, I followed the slow, infrequent drip.

And found the source, at the furthest point in the system away from where I had been looking.

It was the tank that was leaking all along, not the base. I tightened the lead line, and now there’s no leak. Strangled the pool’s lifeline. With just two turns of a wrench. After hours of bitching about the hole-to-hole design, not to mention the amount of wax that perished needlessly in the process, it was as simple as- well, whatever, it was frustratingly simple.

But somehow, I already know that shitting in the tank won’t help me feel better about the whole thing.