If there’s anything that this recent quarantine has taught me, besides the fact that my musical interests are about diverse as the day is long (see previous post), it’s that a running toilet fucking sucks. It’s true, I’ve been forced to both accept and face the fact that I have a running toilet in my basement that I have more or less ignored for, oh, say three years now?

Now please don’t misunderstand me, it’s not that not that my toilet has been running for three years, rather it’s been three years since I’ve been able to take a shit or piss without also having to wait an extra minute or so afterwards while the tank fills itself again so that I can carefully remove the tank’s lid in order to jimmy the big, bulbous floaty thing inside upward to stop the water from running endlessly.

It’s been a total pain in the ass and one that I’ve put off far too long in dealing with. As it is currently, I have completely tarnished the sanctity and therefore ultimate enjoyment of my beloved “Man Lair” (click HERE), more so now than ever that I have had to use it as my sole bathroom in the house for the past ten days. Any idea how damn annoying it is to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night, and then have to stand around groggily to perform all that necessary “lift, jimmy, and replace” bullshit so that I can get back to fucking sleep again?

Take my word for it: it sucks.

I have taken it upon myself then to do something about it … finally.

And no, I don’t mean ‘call Danny’.

Even the “Master of Machine” himself needs a day off, so I YouTube-ed that shit, bitch.

Much to my surprise, it looked almost … doable.

Even for a chimp of my abilities.

And thankfully, it required no power tools whatsoever.

In light of my recent interest in DIY projects (albeit limited), I was almost giddy at the prospect of trying something new. In fact, I haven’t been this excited since my mother allowed me to stay home from church one weekend to watch Tito Santana defend his Intercontinental Championship against George “the Animal” Steele.

Good times.

*sigh*

This kind of felt similar in magnitude, monumental even; something that I would remember for the rest of my life and I immediately resigned myself to what I was committed myself to taking on …

… I was going to plumb!

(Don’t worry everyone, I had Danny on speed dial.)

So once we had successfully completed our recent quarantine and I could venture out into public safely again, I knew what I needed to find.  I had gleaned from the multiple self-help videos I watched that I would need to purchase what’s known as a “Ball Cock Valve”.

I feel dirty just typing that.

Believe me, it was with great trepidation that I entered that into my laptop’s search engine, but thankfully it didn’t explode in a mushroom cloud of pee pee’s and wee wee’s and such.

Okay, there was ONE … but that’s s it!

And I never clicked on it.

Anyway, it turns out there’s nothing particularly depraved about the back of a toilet bowl and that these things were readily available in the ‘Kitchen-Bathroom’ section of any local hardware store, so I drove to the RONA building center optimistic that I could find what I was looking for.

But I have too give pause here for a moment to explain how much I actually hate hardware stores.

I understand that for most men it must be like walking into Valhalla, something on par with entering Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom for the first time as a child, but for me it’s more like walking straight into an Escher painting with smocks … lots of smocks. Suddenly it’s all ‘two by fours’ this, and ‘eight sixteenths’ that … “what kind of torque pressure do you need on your steam hammer, sir?”

People might as well be speaking Bushman for all I’m able to understand.

It’s intimidating.

But I managed to keep my collective shit together and quickly figured out that there is no ‘Kitchen-Bathroom’ section anymore, there’s just a general ‘Plumbing’ section.

Okay, duly noted.

Thanks, Candace.

See? I’m learning shit.

(Shoot me.)

So yeah, once I found the right section I quickly located my kinky-sounding prize pleased I didn’t have to actually engage in conversation about it with anyone as, seriously, I’m not sure that I would have been able to actually ask for it without giggling, and I cashed out at the self checkout aisle for more or less the same reason, I wasn’t sure I could make eye contact with the cashier without blushing.  I practically charged out of the store too.

You’d think I was trying to smuggle a dildo out of a porn shop in the middle of the day.

Not that I know what that feels like.

But regardless, I had my ‘Ball Cock’ thingee in hand, so it was full steam ahead with what would hopefully not end up being my personal ‘Quest for the Holy Fail’, with my basement looking like a set from Waterworld.

But whoa, hold up … first things first.

As limited as my experience in basic home repair is, even I know that it is considered absolutely crucial to the success of the project to do it with your pants off so, yeah, the first order of business then before getting started: remove pants.

CHECK!

Remember that I don’t write the rules folks, I just follow ‘em.

According to the videos, I was going to need the following tools:

And yes, the beer is absolutely to be considered as a “tool”, and a very important one at that.

Having found everything I needed in the garage, the actual first step of the project was to turn off the water to the tank which, truthfully, sure sounded easy enough.  However, for whatever reason, I had always imagined this was a much more difficult thing to accomplish than it actually is and sadly, there is no impressive looking master kill switch that you literally have to put your back into in order to activate; something that resembles those huge levers Obiwan Kenobi was throwing on the Death Star …

… or rather, something an evil villain might look to throw in order to, say, blow up a small island.

Ya know?

Nope … it was just this:

That’s all.

Turn it.

Again … learning shit.

But of course, it wasn’t to be that easy … no sir!

Having likely never been turned in like, ever, it was absolutely 100% fixed in place.  Fortunately, there’s a YouTube video for that too and so with a good deal of WD40, some “forceful but stringent” elbow grease and, get this … a hair drier.

Ya …

Who knew?

After a few minutes of squirting, twisting, wrenching, swearing, sipping and blow-drying, I finally managed to get the damn thing to turn and thereby shutting off the water to the tank successfully. From there on in, it was only going to get more complicated but by now I was all fired up from having successfully turned a dial in a clockwise fashion, so I more than felt up to the task and there was no stopping me now.

Whatever doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger, right?

I’m not going to bore you with the details however, because that would be silly given there’s already numerous videos of much handier people than me doing it, albeit not as cute in their underwear of course.  So I’ll spare you the gory details and simply suffice to say that it was actually pretty easy: just loosen this, unscrew that, stick the thingamabob in the thingaringer, connect the whositnow with the gollywhichit and, Bob’s your uncle, you’re back in business (figuratively and literally).

Sorry if I got too technical there.

I will admit though, it was rather nerve wracking turning the water to the toilet back on again to learn if I had done everything correctly, i.e. it doesn’t a) explode, or b) a tsunami of water doesn’t begin to cascade out and consume my basement.  Thankfully neither happened, buuuuuut the water level didn’t seem to be right as only half the bowl had filled, and Lord knows I’ll need more than that to wash down my handiwork in the morning … if you know what I mean.

It took a little finagling here and there to get the water level just right but again, thankfully, there’s only so many things you can get a wrench around or stick a strew driver into, so it was only with a little stubborn perseverance and figuring out before I was able to coordinate my twists with my turns properly to get the water just right again after only a few test flushes.

GO ME!!

Apparently the Plumbing gods were smiling on me this day.

But now for the real test ….

God help me.

The inevitable worst case scenario has finally overtaken the sanctity of our once sterile and germ-free home: we got the COVID.

Well, the girls actually got the COVID but, regardless, all of us are now bound to quarantine ourselves for the next five days (six nights) independently from each other, as well from the rest of the world.

Oh joy.

Don’t get me wrong though, I have been requisitioned to the basement complete with big screen television, Netflix, a record collection of nearly three thousand albums and a bar fridge within arms reach of my favourite comfy chair, so things could definitely be worse.

Having said that, I still hate being confined downstairs from my family with little else to do all day other than lie on the couch and work on my bedhead which, for the record, turned out to be pretty epic.

I mean, really, remembering my other past follicle disasters (click HERE ), it’s little wonder.

To help pass the time I started keeping a list of all the different albums (records) that I’ve listened to over the past five days of this godawful self-imposed exile, as I was genuinely curious to see how many different musical rabbit holes I would end up exploring, or what particular ‘itches’ I might feel the need to scratch, per se.

Honestly, I’m just obsessive-compulsive and like to make lists, but just go with it will ya?

However, merely listing those albums for you would be no fun whatsoever.

Instead I decided to go all fancy and make one of those pretentious “album flip” videos you see on the internets, to showcase those specific albums in the exact order that they were played from my Quarantine’s beginning to its ultimate end five days later because, yeah … I guess I was a little bored.

What can I say?

I had time on my hands.

So without further ado, here is the video of my complete COVID playlist of records as enjoyed over the past five days of my ass sitting on the couch, bored out of my fucking skull:

—

How’s that for an eclectic taste?

(I’m a mad scientist, I know.)

Following up the Hollies early 1967 psychedelic masterpiece with the modern psychedelia of the Flaming Lips on the first evening alone?

That’s crazy!

(But genius)

But then somehow making the leap on the first official full day of quarantine from trucker “road music” (Red Sovine) at some point to big, brassy orchestral fanfares that would later on inspire Hollywood composer John Williams to score his better-known themes to such classic films as Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park (Gustav Holst), before arriving at the modern weirdness of Frank Zappa and Brian Eno … madness! 

And who could ever have anticipated Day 2’s ultimate trifecta of albums: Harry Belafonte into Miles Davis into Genesis …

… but somehow, it all magically made sense.

Maybe it was all the Pfizer antibodies coursing through my veins.

Who knows?

Day 3, which also brought about our first true winter storm of the season with over 15″ of accumulated white shit and the need to shovel out our driveway (twice!), seemed to be about flowing through the different styles of jazz (fusion, bossa nova, acid, big band, etc.), with some elements of prog rock, a touch of World music thrown in for culture sake, and a splash of the blues to call it a day.  Day 4 though, for whatever reason, focused more on traditional (and not so traditional) country and western, Americana and outright grungy bar rock and roll.  And then lastly, on my final day of quarantine I leaned further back into exploring the blues that I had begun on the previous’ day with some reggae to cap it all off.

Because why not?

I am a unique and beautiful snowflake if nothing else.

And while our quarantine is now “officially” over as designated by Health Canada (or whoever it is that comes up with these bullshit protocols), we still really can’t go anywhere safely … so yeah, what’s another five lonely days of records?

God help me!

(Edited five days later … )

Perhaps not as plentiful (I found some other stuff to do), but certainly no less robust selection-wise.

–

And seriously, TWO albums featuring a rooster on the cover?

Fuggetaboutit!

As it is for me with most things in life, I have a certain ritual that I follow early in the morning when I wake up. I suspect that most probably do and like mine, it probably involves a little “alone time” in the bathroom for the whole “shit-shower-shave” routine that we all maintain at some level. Of course there hasn’t been so much shaving these days, but there is still plenty of the other two going on, trust me!

Too much info?

However this morning’s routine was completely thrown off when I was greeted first thing by this vile-looking thing just sitting there – openly – on my vanity counter:

Seriously, what the fuck is that?

How did it get there?

My brain started to implode in on itself with questions.

But first, perhaps allow me to try and set a fuller picture for you regarding it’s discovery.

The downstairs bathroom is considered my “Main Lair”, my sole bastion of sanity in this house of female crazies; a literal “No Fly Zone” for anyone but myself.  So essentially, where most lucky dudes have their garages like my handy neighbour Danny, “the Master of Tools” (click HERE) – I have a basement shitter.

Not glorious, but I’ll take it.

The girls avoid this downstairs bathroom at all costs and would never even so much as dream of breaching it’s sacred threshold to sully the sacred fixtures within, no matter how dire or urgent their “business” was. It is my own personal Fortress of Solitude, a place where I can get away from others to think, reflect, drink mead from the skulls of my enemies, that kind of thing … important stuff, ya know?

Occasionally (ie. in the mornings) I will even take a shit in there too.

And seeing as how it’s my own personal space, it’s also the only room in the house where I have complete and utter autonomy over the decor which, at the moment, just happens to be a lot of cartoon women riding horses.

Regardless, it is my space so I can  account for each and every item that is, or has ever been contained within it and therefore, believe me when I tell you, that I had zero fucking idea what this weird plastic, alien-looking thing was or how it came to be there at 5:42am in the morning.  I probably looked at it in much the same manner of confusion had I just witnessed a monkey driving a tow motor at Costco.

Something like this probably:

Was it a sex thing?

Is this one of those Fleshlights I’ve heard about?

I swear, honey!

Did my wife put it there, or perhaps leave it there by accident?

Was she trying to tell me something?

I started having am extremely potent mid-life crisis right there in the middle of my bathroom, and I hadn’t even taken my first dump of the day. 

And then my imagination took me to an even uglier place …

What did it do?

Where did it go?

What did you do with it exactly?

Too … many … questions …

I’m fairly confident it was at this point, without the benefit of yet having my morning coffee, that my brain started to literally short-circuit and I’m pretty certain that I also detected a slight whiff of burnt toast in the air, so stunned and confounded was I.  I simply froze in terror before the thing as all these random ideas peculated through my lizard brain; you’d think I was afraid the thing was going to leap out at me.

(Thankfully, it didn’t.)

Finally, I gained enough wherewithal to know that I was in way over my head, so I instead just flipped off the bathroom light again and quickly retreated from the room altogether to leave the thing sitting there alone in the dark once more; I would just have to poop elsewhere.

“Fuck that”, I thought to myself.

“It’s too early for that shit.”

God help me.