Plumbing

It's 12:30 in the morning and I'm awake. Not only am I awake, I'm spraying bleach on my hands and arms and pacing around like a goddamn crazy person. Why is this, you ask? Why, indeed?

Because the toilet is completely clogged up, of course. The toilet is totally clogged and my groovy cheap plunger, the one with the translucent green bowl thing or whatever it is that you call the business end of the plunger, and the white plastic handle, that looked so cute at Lowes and worked so admirably on the bathtub, is not working at all. Not working worth a shit, you might say - YOU might say, but I won't, given that it's 12:30 in the morning; I don't have another bathroom and I don't, through some kind of terrible life oversight, have a pair of rubber gloves. Rubber gloves are what you're supposed to wear at 12:30 in the fucking morning when you're plunging and flushing and bailing with the potting soil pitcher into a blue bucket and carrying that full bucket out to alternate sides of the house to dump so as to be an equal opportunity neighbor annoyer and then going back in with an untwisted wire hanger to probe around into parts of the toilet you never knew existed and, frankly, would be more than perfectly happy still to remain in that state of blissful ignorance. The internet will save me, you are thinking, but all the internet is telling you is to wear rubber gloves and not to use the kind of plunger you - and by you, I mean, of course, me, miserable me - own. And there are not going to be any handy plunger buying opportunities any time soon.

If you're awake, say a small prayer to the gods of white ceramic that the half bottle of generic drain opener I just found in the garage is working. While you're at it, go ahead and hope that spraying your arms with bleach spray works as well as rubber gloves so that I don't catch some kind of horrible cholera toilet disease.

And now I know why young M's phone is off and he is nowhere to be found. AAAAAARRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

UPDATE: The drain cleaner stuff did the trick. The toilet is fixed and, mysteriously, young M admits to no knowledge of how it could ever possibly have gotten broken. Must be the ghosts again. Damn ghosts. The moral of this story is twofold: 1) Do not buy plungers for their aesthetic considerations and 2) always, always have half a bottle of drain cleaner handy.