I am sitting here, about to begin the usual, sporadic tippity-tappety routine that usually ends up with about 4K words spewing out on some memorably immemorial topic that has flashed through the deteriorating gray-matter of my (once acute) mind like a blazing shart (i.e. a ‘payload’ carrying fart), shooting straight out of the arse of the Universe.

In this case, as I prepare to exploratorily render the breathtaking (and nose-holding) subject of blocked sewer lines, I am given brief, preliminary pause to reflect on the sad fact that despite my regular and characteristic ferociously opinionated literary broadsides sent to ostensible friends and acquaintances, the concept of ‘correspondence’ for me has come to be a process of me sending out thousands of words and getting squat-all in return (from said recipients).

I often have puzzled (a word not to be confused with ‘pizzle’, which is a bull’s penis) over why, exactly, my friends have become so incapable of articulating more than a few words in response to the receipt of one of my grandiose Unified Field Theories (on just about any and everything). Is it the fact that Americans have today become so inarticulate that they are too mentally challenged to compose a meaningful sentence? Or perhaps it’s due to the fact that what I have to opine on various subjects is so utterly irrelevant to the lives of those I consider confreres?

This mystery has typically stymied my attempts to understand it, until recently, when I think I finally found the long-sought answer. I strongly suspect that we have the present state of electronic communication technology to blame for this. That is, not indirectly, that same old boogy-man the more intellectually astute among us frequently single out for criticism…the internet and the world-wide-web. More precisely, SOCIAL MEDIA (or as I like to refer to it, ‘Anti-Social Media’).

Social media has in the relatively short span of less more than a decade or two, reduced all human social communication to Tweets and Instagrammatic selfie images. It has further eroded basic literacy to a series of short, coded substitutes for words (example: “How R U?”), etc.

There is a term for this frustrating (to a linguist or grammarian, at least!) habit of young social media users who have such attenuated spans of attention and patience that they can’t bear to spell things fully and properly! That term is ‘Acronymic Initialism’.

Naturally, such literary shenanigans couldn’t exist without some sort of technological hardware ‘enforcer’ to both promulgate and promote the present tendency towards barely adequate conveyance of meaning in written communication. That technology takes the form of the modern ‘smartphone’ (surely a devilishly unjust oxymoron) and the use of texting to communicate ideals, opinions and information instead of writing things properly out at length.

Smartphones therefore, in addition to greatly enhancing the possibility of communicating, ALSO encourage laxity, laziness and inexactitude, since most people are in such a hurry (more on this shortly) that they simply are too impatient to do so. ‘Acronymic Initialism’ is more than likely the result of the fact that in our consumer-driven American capitalist culture, ‘urgency’ is an integral part of deliberately contrived consumer sales psychology.

Human beings function variably under pressure but most typically, people tend to perform less adequately when subjected to increased amounts of it. When pressure is applied to the process of selling something (a commercial product), the intentional dynamic underlying it is that a person under pressure is less able to think rationally, analyse problems and (ideally) arrive at a logical decision. With less time to make a rational assessment of a situation (or in a selling context, come to a self-beneficial conclusion concerning what’s worth buying and what is not), a consumer is far more susceptible to third-party (commercial) inducements or encouragements.

So all-pervasive has this deliberate effort to speed up our lives (to serve consumer-sales processes) become that the entire pace of America’s social economy has been speeded up almost exponentially. We see this even in the way people drive their cars on the streets and highways. Rather than take the time required to assure personal and collective safety among automobile users we are on the road with, there is an unspoken but strongly implied emphasis on speed for speed’s sake (i.e. “I’m faster than you, turkey!”). This is the reason why people habitually travel on freeways FAR faster than reason and/or conditions warrant. It has resulted (in the case of the automobile analogy) in people routinely ignoring speed limits and traveling AT AVERAGE at least 10-15 or more mph over the posted speed limits.

Regrettably, the average individual seems largely incapable of examining this particular aspect of their life and realizing that ‘speed’ is usually NOT in their best interests.

However, in a society such as ours, with its long history of glorifying extreme speed as a desirable end in itself, the carryover into every-day life has become almost hardwired in the American psyche. This builds upon the century-plus fascination Americans have had with both their automobiles and powerful, blindingly fast vehicles in general.

Another good example of this may be seen in the typical television auto advertisement, in which a new car is shown literally slashing at a reckless rate through rough, off-road conditions. The inference is that the car is so well-built and rough, tough and ‘bomb-proof’ durable that you can ‘conquer nature’s worst’ with it…not that it is smooth, comfortable and well-engineered. Speed (along with raw horsepower), again, is purpose programmed into the sales equation, relentlessly and continually.

Mind you, this is not a military grade HUMVEE being sold in these ads but a regular old Ford passenger car, but the unconscious, subliminal message carrying through it all is “fast, faster, fastest”. The rough analogue equation would be: “Speed = penis size = ego!”

OK. Enough said about our obsessive American preoccupation with speed. I think I’ve made my point here, that this grossly perverted speeding-up of the pace of our lives carries through to all levels of our social interactions…including social media connections and texting venues.

This, and the fact that the average smartphone’s teeny-tiny keyboard makes typing anything at length an inordinate chore, results in that bane of literary types (like me), ‘Acronymic Initialism’ (and all its permutations).

Further, given the perfusion of smartphones and the increased reliance upon them for all communications, such relatively recent modes of communication (as E-mail, which is only about 4 decades old), long the standard for most business and many social applications, is now ‘officially’ on the ‘endangered modes of communication’ list (it has even been officially pronounced as ‘dead’ by today’s hipper and cooler-than-thou Millennials).

Other factors, such as the drop-off in numbers of home desktop and laptop PCs (increasingly replaced by smartphones and tablets), have also encouraged the fall from popularity that has impacted E-mail.

In short and regardless of all the contributing precursor dynamics, today’s chief culprit for youthful incoherency, fuzzy thinking and attenuated attention spans is the smartphone!

And it is of this that I must constantly remind myself when I reflect on the fact that almost all of my friends and acquaintances simply can’t be bothered to even reply at all when I send out lengthy items for their reflective consideration. I personally know people who groan when they receive anything in Email form that is longer than a single paragraph!

For a dyed-in-the-wool writer (and corresponder) such as myself, that is a hard blow to accommodate, I must admit, but I often times feel that I might as well just spare them all that mental demand on their attenuated analytical facilities and simply stop communicating completely.

But what a lonely existence that would be, since I don’t write for others’ sake! I write more for my own benefit, as a sort of reflective sounding board to air out and hang up to dry my various thoughts, ideas and reactions to the human living experience…given that almost all of my friends now live well beyond reasonably direct social contact range.

So, for me I guess writing at length today serves more as a form of personal mental exercise and therapy than as a means of staying in touch with others whom I do know or have in the past known. Although I DO often actively resent the fact that the flow of communication is virtually 100% uni-directional, at least I don’t have to put a shrink on retainer to help me sort through some of the knottier intellectual quandaries my mind has backed me into a corner on.

All-righty-then, now that detour’s out of the digressional way, onwards to deeper and more pungent thoughts of excremental elementalism!

A Tale of Two Toilets Revisited

Those of you who follow my literary perambulations (if I may be presumptive enough to opine that there actually ARE a few of you who are sufficiently masochistic enough to do so) may recall that I posted a story on AUTHORSDEN about the replacement of toilets a year or so ago ‘Fa-Mulan Meets Her Match’); if you are sufficiently moved (no pun intended) by this sort of ‘wasteful’ expostulation, you may refer back to it, but good luck relocating it (I’ve also previously mused on the tendencies of toilet tissues like those made by CHARMIN that are so ‘wonderfully soft’ that they rupture right smack in the middle of a modest swipe at the tan-track outlet orifice). Leaving that all behind us (no pun intended), let’s turn on the virtual air-circulator device and let it blow things where it will as I relate to you the latest result of public works archeological exploratory digs in our home’s back yard!

About a year ago we decided to replace the two toilets in our 1957-built home with new ones. After debating the relative need for this particular home improvement, we finally decided that due to aging GI tracts AND aging home infrastructure, it would be a very prudent idea to attend to this matter without further farting around (!), so we hied ourselves down to the local MEGA home improvement retailer and purchased new porcelain thrones befitting the regal personages we are.

While I selected a top-of-the-line Kohler, wifie, who is a VERY frugal person of the Chinese persuasion (there is a racially insensitive joke that ‘copper wire’ was invented when a Chinese merchant squeezed his pennies so hard that they became very long and thin…) decided that all she wanted was the bare, basic ‘American Standard’ model toilet…as long as it had a bowl, a seat and flushed, that was adequate!). OK, fair enough, since I tend to be a high-roller when it comes to material goods.

Thus, we hired a local plumber to install the two appliances for us, which he did to the tune of about $900 or so (the toilets themselves cost a total of about another $520, for a grand total so far of roughly $1450).

All fine and good, until about a year after the installation when wifie came to me complaining that her ‘new’ toilet had what people in the plumbing business refer to as ‘ghost flushing’ (or ‘phantom flushing’), a situation in which the toilet fill-valve will cycle itself on without an actuating tap on the flush handle. Given the usual gravity (not!) placed by wifie on domestic concerns and home issues, I immediately (and unthinkingly, of course) risked life and limb by invoking the spirits of long-dead ancestors whom I speculated were unhappy about the Guai-Loh who had married into wifie’s family and were displaying their displeasure by haunting her commode! [Not a move guaranteed to assure my longevity, since wifie keeps a very sharp meat-cleaver in the kitchen near her wok (and knows how to use it to expertly dismember luckless chickens; the application of said surgical-grade tool on human body parts is NOT to be disbelieved or taken lightly)!]

At any rate, I barely survived that potential near-death experience just by virtue of the fact that God watches out for drunks and ignorant Irishmen (thank you, Blessed Saint Bridget of the Perpetual ETOH Stupor!).

But returning to the perplexing ‘ghost flushing’ problem, I bellied up to the bar and undertook application of my minimal plumbing adeptness to see if I could resolve the problem without calling in another expensive plumber (my own, far more expensive Kohler was itself as blissfully quiet as the grave!).

This took shape in endless jiggling and juggling around with wifie’s toilet’s flush-valve assembly (and checking the tank flapper valve, since these two systemic components are…according to the Reader’s Digest ‘Home Repairs Made Easy for the Mentally Challenged’ handbook…responsible for approximately 95% of all mysterious ‘auto-flushing’ difficulties caused by leaks). No joy!

Next step was to purchase an entirely new flush valve fill assembly and install it (somewhat of a more involved procedure, since you have to empty the tank in order to do this and that means getting down on the floor in a tight and confined space). Still no resolution. Hmmm. No more burnt sacrificial chicken offerings for you, Ancient Ancestral Spirits!

That night, throughout the wee hours and despite a scrificial chicken or two for dinner the night before, the culprit toilet continued to noisily cycle itself, due to a leak somewhere that was so small I couldn’t even determine where exactly it was!

Finally, my habitually light sleep grossly insulted by this phantasmic noise from wifie’s adjacent bathroom, I relented and we called in another plumber, figuring this was like General Macarthur ordering the US Army Coastal Artillery to train their sights on the invading Japanese Imperial Army (the Chinese still maintain considerable enmity for its most recent occupation of China of about a hundred years or so, of course).

Our eeny-meany-miney-mo plumber arrived the next day and, from all I could make of his ritualistic incantations, formulaic hokus-pokus and ceramic ablutions, he did precisely…exactly…what I had done the previous day and installed another brand-new (and now redundant) flush-fill-valve assembly! And this for a further $120. Yoiks, gadzooks and calloo-calloy!

Finally, after going to bed later in the day, we dropped right off to sleep and were (until we both immediately plunged off the sleep slope and ended up in Zhou-Gung’s boat, which ferries the sleepy off into dreamland, according to ancient Chinese legend). Until about 2AM when the unmistakable sound of further ghostly flushing noises woke us both up again! More yoiks, gazooks and even a couple of ZOUNDS! As George Orwell would have phrased it: “Double-plus-UNGOOD!”

In the morning, after I was suitably rousted from somnolence by my usual jeraboam of Rambo hyper-caffeinated black liquid, I paused to mutter a last hopeful benediction to Saint Bridget and hied myself off to wifie’s bathroom to once again undertake Toilet Mission Implausible…

Now, the space around wifie’s toilet is quite small, so in order to be able to comfortably poke around in the tank guts of her commode I sat myself down on the seat-lid of her toilet facing it, preparatory to plunging into it…almost. Before I knew what was happening, I slid backward and downwards, involuntarily jamming my folded self into a space of about 1 foot and a half in the jackknife position.

S*IT and F*CK! (and other ancient Gaelic curses)! Although I had the presence of mind to twist slightly to the right and thereby take the impact of collision with the hard edge of her bathtub, I still took an awful whack on the right side of my back!

This put me out of business for several days, which just coincidentally coincided with a general strike that the workers employed at my health-care HMO provider (Kaiser Permanente), which meant that…also due to the combined difficulties imposed by the present and continuing COVID-19 constraints…I could just as well stay at home and rest as present myself to the overstressed Kaiser ER for xrays (there’s an old aphorism in the medical snake-oil biz that if you get the flu, you can either take two weeks of medical treatment or spend 14 days resting in bed at home, since both are about equally effective…make of that what you will!).

Fortunately (and probably owing to Saint Bridget’s transitory benevolence), whatever damage I seem to have done to my back was reasonably put to rights within about 5 days (rest & relaxation…the Universal Curative Therapy), although I still suspect that I somehow cracked a postero-lateral, inferior rib in the process.

This, however, left us right smack-dab back at the starting point…wifie’s trick-snickety convenience appliance was STILL merrily ghosting away! Time, I reflected grimly and flush with resignation, to bring out the BIG GUNS and do battle on a larger scale, yoiks and zounds notwithstanding!

Before I had a chance to act, however, wifie came back in the house after a backyard leaf-rake session and informed me that there seemed to be a ‘problem’ with the so-called sewer ‘clean-out’ access that lies half-way between the house and the sewer line’s connection to the city’s main sewage pipe! Knowing how wifie tends to habitually make mountains out of molehills, I rousted enough effort to go out and take a look…and sure enough, it was pretty obvious that the ‘clean-out’ was overflowing with effluent! Our Siberian pup, herself quite the gourmet of stinky, smelly, absolutely awful things, had already found his out, judging from the track of her mucky paw-prints across the kitchen floor. Yuk, YUK and DOUBLE YUK! So much for my earnest intent to light a candle of thanks to that sadistic Saint Bridget…

The next day I contacted that American Icon of all plumbing concerns, ROTO ROOTER, to request a full-scale assault on whatever this whole kerfuffle had morphed into and not without some resignation!

Thus, the battle had been joined and the next phase of the campaign took the form of what ROTO ROOTER somewhat euphemistically terms their ‘Water Disposal & Cleaning’ Commando. This took form in the shape of a jovial chap who showed up with a heavy duty, industrial vacuum and the news (after removing the surface lid on the clean-out and informing us of the murky mess that had been forced up from the sewer line) that ”Ain’t no plumber gonna touch that stuff, lessen I suck ‘er all up neat & tidy and get ‘er ready for him first!” Ah, the joys of our age of specialization! The ‘pre-disaster crew’ has to prepare the scene for the actual disaster response specialists!

He thereupon set to sucking all that excremental flotsam and jetsam up and advised us NOT to use our toilets until the REAL plumber showed…which he did, fortunately, in quick succession.

What remained a mystery to me was the fact that despite the obvious evidence of a major blockage in our line, neither of our toilets were backed-up…something that we had awkwardly experienced once before, about 5 years earlier, just before a scheduled departure for holiday, and had no wish to repeat!

At any rate, my having run out of explanative ideas as to what the %^%$#*! was going on with that sewage line, I turned the battle over to the plumber who showed up with his trusty device (after which the company is named), his sewer rooter machine (totally unrelated to the device that endoscopy specialists use to roto-root the GI system from its nether end, despite apparent superficial similarities, by the way!).

This he wielded with both perspicuity and alacrity and within a 20-minute span was able to reveal that…once again…our old (and now removed), ancient Camphor Tree’s roots had again been responsible for the latest blockage. Using one of those handy-dandy sewer camera thingies (that are quite similar to our medical endoscopy/camera systems), he also captured the whole procedure on a flashdrive for us, so that now whenever I have the whim, I can recapitulate and review the whole journey down that sewer pipe and view not just the tangle of roots which he had to penetrate, but exciting visual details of all the odd bits of brownish lumps and fragments of dissolved Charmin Toilet Tissue (“Dissolves in the septic tank, NOT in your hands!”) that hadn’t quite yet transited all the way to the city’s main sewer line.

I have to admit that the total charged for both the ‘water disposal’ clean-up and the consequent sewage line endoscopy procedure and accompanying Cinematic film production (about $900) has to be the most expensive movie ticket I’ve ever purchased, bar none!

OK and all-righty-then, before departing, our kindly ROTOR ROOTER man explained that we were probably going to have a repeat of this event at some point in the near future, since tree roots LOVE raw human sewage and they would likely grow back through the two fissures in the pipe that they had insinuated (even when trees are dead and gone…removed…their extensive root systems can and will continue to grow appreciably). BUT…big pause…they could dig up the fractured pipe, replace it with a fresh pipe section and then do a thorough flush-out of the restored line for a mere $3500 additional charge! It’s a matter of ‘do we want to take care of the problem for a good 15 years (with the sewage line’s fractured pipe segment replacement) or risk having another similar blockage in another 5 years or so?’ A faecal Hobson’s Choice, reduced to a rather stinky analogue, I reckon!

Reluctantly, we took the $3500 route, since in about another 15 years both of us will probably be fertilising daisies ourselves, LoL…

And so, the very next day a duo of plumbing apprentices appeared, armed with shovels and sizably steroid-assisted biceps to dig a 4-foot-deep rectangular pit, exposing the fractured line. I got some great pictures of it, lying down there in that pit in all its gory glory, if you’re into that sort of visceral (sic) media!

Today (not yet begun) the specialist plumbing crew arrives once more to do the actual pipe segment replacement and I won’t say we’re waiting with bated breath, since it’s more like waiting with overly pressurised bowels, hoping that the two toilets are restored to full working order as quickly as possible!

I estimate the grand total cost of resolving our ‘simple’ sewage line blockage has now run into about $5000+, more or less; not to mention several days disruption in our respective daily schedules and missed walkies for the pup. That’s the cost-equivalent of a modest cruise on a Viking European River Cruise down the equally polluted Seine!

I suppose I am writing this breathless (you really don’t want to breathe anywhere near that mess, needless to reiterate) tale of our Great Plumbing Adventure partly for the fun of it, but also partly in hopes that it will help ease your financial shock when you suddenly find yourselves faced with a similarly inconveniencing, critical sewer line blockage in your own 50s era home. I pause briefly here to reflect in passing that buying an older home in today’s grossly inflated real estate market (with the December 2021 AVERAGE home price estimated to be about US$500,000, used or new alike), the actual purchase is just a start of a long and potentially quite costly encounters with home-repair disasters…not dissimilar to just being able to afford a ‘poor man’s Porsche’ and then finding out that you also need to put a German mechanic with teeny-tiny hands on retainer for emergencies!

But that’s life in modern America, isn’t it? Meanwhile, we’re just Biden our time, waiting for the upcoming final investiture into the Harp & Wings Pantheon of Departed Humming Beans. [I think I already explained somewhere else that the name ‘Biden’ is an Anglicised variant of the President’s original German surname ‘Beiden’, which translates roughly to ‘both’…as for ‘both’ of what, exactly, I’ll let you decide!]

I’ll leave you with a new word you’ve doubtless never heard of: Philocynys/Philocynic/Philocynism. [Of, or pertaining to, a love for the companionship of dogs!] Ain’t that a doozy to impress all your Cat-Lady friends, tee-hee?!

Happy Holidays, regardless of your personal ‘critical race’ persuasions, religious preferences and/or PC credos! And may your toilets never fail you in your recurrent, daily times of need!