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The Tale of the Tricky Toilet

First off, two more baseball-related goodies over at Bugs & Cranks:

A Series for the Cynics — Are there chinks showing in the Braves’ early-season armor?

and(!):

A Smoltz with a (Bum) Hand Beats Lerew from the Bush (Leagues) — Braves and Red Sox. Day-night doubleheader. It was wacky, and I saw it all live.

And now for something significantly more disturbing:

My wife and I are having a problem with our toilet.

Now, before we go any further, I should mention that it’s not a serious problem with the toilet. It’s not as though it’s backing up, or shooting stinkwater out the valves, or growling ‘GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!‘ when we reach to flush it. Those would be serious problems. Our problem isn’t nearly so bad. Or poltergeisty.

Our problem is merely with the toilet seat. And the problem is that it’s somewhat unstable, wiggling and shifting undercheek while we sit. I’ve traced the problem to two screws that hold the seat down and seem to have loosened themselves over the past few weeks. Tightening them should be a simple matter — except that every screwdriver in the house is in the basement, two flights of stairs away. When you’re perched precariously on the john playing a game of ‘Slip ‘N’ Slide’ and trying desperately not to lurch your bare ass onto the floor, trudging up and down two stories is well off the menu. And once you’ve finished your business, you tend to figure it’ll be someone else’s problem next. Such is the life of a couple with a short memory and regular bowels.

“These days, it’s a little like trying to poop in the dead center of one of those twirling teacups at DisneyWorld.”

And so, our saga of the shimmying seat continues — and worsens by the day, as those screws get looser and looser. At first, it was a minor nuisance. Then, it was a challenge; so long as you held on tight and braced your legs, you could treat the toilet like any other. And now? These days, it’s a little like trying to poop in the dead center of one of those twirling teacups at DisneyWorld. Which is neither easy to do, nor well appreciated by anyone in the vicinity.

(In my defense, I didn’t know that wasn’t allowed on the teacup ride. I’d just seen a bunch of kids lose their lunches on the Tilt-A-Whirl; I just thought it was ‘that kind‘ of amusement park.)

At this point, I can see this little episode ending in one of two ways, neither of them good. In one scenario, my wife — whose balance is infinitely better than mine — will get fed up with all of the wiggling and shifting every time she needs to tinkle, and she’ll hound me and poke at me until I trudge down to the basement for a screwdriver to fix the damned seat.

Rightly so, of course. After all, it’s my tool box that the screwdriver is in, and my wide shifty ass that probably loosened the screws in the first place — unless the dog has been using the toilet seat as a tug toy when we’re not looking. So she’ll probably point these facts out soon enough, and that’s one way the scene could end.

The other way, of course, is that one day I’ll attempt to sit down, slip around the seat, fall over, and end up face-down and ass-up in the bathtub. That’ll probably be just enough to convince me that a trip to the basement is worth the trouble.

Unless it happens when my wife is out of the house, of course. If a jackass slips in the bathroom and no one’s around, it never happened.

You hear me? Never. Happened. I don’t care what my lying mutt tries to tell you. She’s probably the one who tore down the shower curtain and kicked over the towel rack, too. Come on — who are you gonna believe?