pranged

A very tender spot over my left eyebrow is keeping me from rubbing my eyes, which are always very dry about this time of the morning.

Kids, pay attention: One of the warning signs of old age, like hair growing long enough to dangle from your nose like the legs of a dead fly, is dry eyes. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night to toddle off to the bathroom for yet another pee (old-age warning sign), I have to keep my eyes shut because the insides of my eyelids are so dry that opening them feels like dragging sandpaper across my eyeballs. When that happens, they’re usually still so dry in the morning when I get up for real that I have to view the world for fifteen minutes or so through the blurry slits of my barely-opened eyelids. I want to rub them so bad to get the tears going, but when they’re that dry I’d rather stab them with steak knives than rub them, because stabbing them would feel a lot better. When I can finally open my eyes all the way they sting for about an hour, and then the dam breaks. Tears flood my eyes so freely that I have to grab a hankie to dab them away and blow my nose over and over again. This goes on for about ten, fifteen minutes, and then I feel almost normal again, but I look like a teenager who’s broken up with his girlfriend and has been crying for days. So you have that to look forward to.

Anyway, back to the tender spot over my eye: I pranged my head on the windowsill yesterday afternoon because I pinched a loaf that plugged the toilet. This will all make sense if you’ll just give me the chance to explain.

I have this superpower. It’s not the superpower I’d want. That would be the power to fly through the cosmos at hyperlight speed, but what I’ve got is the power to clog any toilet with my over-muscular poo. I can even clog those pneumatic toilets in public restrooms that flush with a whoosh like a jet engine. Not every time, but often enough to make it embarrassing. So like most people I try always to wait until I get home, but not for the reasons that most people do. And I always have a plunger in hand when I flush because I know that, more often than not, I’m going to need it.

And this is no wussie plunger. It’s one of those plungers with a nozzle extension, the kind that plumbers use. It’s so effective I feel I could probably plunge a basket full of golf balls through the toilet with this baby. Even my monster dookie cannot resist the relentless crush of this plunger. So when the toilet continued to back up after I gave it a plunge yesterday afternoon I was surprised, but I wasn’t really trying very hard. I just leaned into the handle and gave it another good, solid thrust, then stood back to watch it drain.

Still no joy. Well, crap. So to speak.

The water was rising at an alarming rate at that point, so I carefully reseated the plunger in the drain at the bottom of the bowl to make a good seal, then pumped with all my strength three or four times with no regard for slosh or splatter. I could easily wipe up a little slosh. I did NOT want to deal with overflow.

But when I withdrew the plunger from the bowl, expecting to hear the satisfying gurgle of water rushing down the sewer stack, I heard no such thing. The water continued to rise and was just an inch or two from calamity. Panic set in and I dove to shut off the water by turning a valve under the tank.

It’s important to picture our bathroom at this point. It’s a very tiny bathroom. Before we bought this house, I didn’t know houses had bathrooms this tiny. I thought only airplanes and trains did. It’s more like a utility closet about four feet wide and maybe six feet deep. The toilet is at the far end, between the sink and the wall, and the toilet tank is almost rubbing shoulders with the wall. There’s barely room to get one arm between the wall and the bowl to reach for the shutoff valve, so when I dove for it, I misjudged the space and pranged my head on the windowsill, hard. Really hard. So hard I folded up into a fetal position, rocking on my heels while pressing the heel of my hand against my cheek to cover my eye. So hard I couldn’t even utter words. I think I made a noise, but it probably wasn’t recognizable as a human sound. The total panic that had possessed me was gone and my brain could not spare a single synapse to think about what was happening to the toilet because there was too much pain to process.

When I could think again, I stood and opened my eyes, expecting to see a pestilential flood. Instead, the clog was gone and the toilet bowl was drained. I blinked at it, unbelieving, then I turned to the mirror to see if my eye was turning black and blue yet. It wasn’t. It still hasn’t*. I should have put some ice on it but I didn’t think of that then. I was just too dazed, and perplexed that the toilet didn’t overflow. If I had to guess how that happened, I would say that maybe my real superpower is that when I hurt myself in a panic, I can emit waves of intense pain that can move poo-poo, but I’m not willing to duplicate the circumstances to see if I can do it again.

[*P.S. It really hadn’t when I checked this morning, but not more than 15 minutes after I wrote this I was passing the mirror in the bathroom and I caught my reflection and went WHOA! What the hell is THAT? Looked like I was wearing red eyeshadow.]