I can't believe this is my life

Longtime readers know that I am a huge fan of Toto washlet toilets, so much so that when I moved I brought my Toto with me.  Twas a toilet transplant--I swapped the standard toilet from my new house into the bathroom where my Toto resided in my old house.  Life is good.

The Toto is a beast when it comes to flushing.  It never backed up in seven-plus years of hard use, despite the insane amount of toilet paper the distaff members of zfamily require daily.  So I was very surprised when zwoman reported a clog.  I busted out the plunger and fixed it pretty quickly.  But the clog reappeared later in the day.

This recurred for a few days so I made an appointment with a plumber.  In the interregnum I plunged a number of clogs.  And eventually a hex-head bolt appeared in the bottom of the bowl.  I put on rubber gloves and fished it out.  Then I consulted my owner's manual to see where it came from.  It turns out the inside is the same as any other toilet, it's just a porcelain S-shaped tube.

There should not be a bolt in there.  It did not take me long to review my mental Rolodex of Toto users to identify the likeliest candidate to flush a bolt down the toilet.  But zson swore up and down that he didn't do it, asserting that he knew this would piss me off to no end and would thus never screw with the Toto.  This makes sense--he loves his devices too much to jeopardize them so stupidly--and one of his donkey friends had been over recently so I mentally blamed the donkey.

The plumber showed up, augered the toilet, and a few hundred bucks later all systems were go.  Until the Toto clogged again.  I made another appointment, which was $0 because it was a revisit to resolve the unresolved problem, and when the plumber got there I asked him to take the toilet off the floor and see whatever other nonsense was flushed down there.

The guy balked.  He hemmed and hawed at me for 15-20 minutes about how much this would cost, how it would be cheaper to buy a new toilet, and all sorts of stuff that might've made sense in different circumstances.  The toilet wasn't the issue--it was the foreign object lodged deep in the bowels of the bowl--so finally I started clapping really loud like a football coach and said something like "That's great, but let's do this!  I'm willing to roll the dice here!  Let's get this crapper off the floor!  C'mon now, let's go!"  The pipeman pursed his lips and reluctantly trudged up to the salle de bain, only to find that one of the screws holding my pride and joy in place was stripped.  Not a perfect transplant.  So I had to order funky replacement screws which took a few weeks to arrive.

The poor crapped clogged regularly while I waited.  I swore at it daily, stabbing away with my plunger, cleaning up foul fluids that splashed out from my vigor.  The new mounting hardware arrived just in time for the holidays when I had a houseful of visitors lodging all manner of excreta and giant wads of paper in my wounded commode.  The plumber finally emerged from his holiday cocoon, ready to spread his wings and tackle tough issues.   

He arrived with a helper, a veritable Mario and Luigi situation.  And again he hemmed and hawed about the expense, condescendingly telling me that he already augured the thing and it must be the toilet itself, the price of a toilet vs. the price of his work, and so on.  He did not understand my argument that buying a new Toto is wildly more than the price to remove the old one, and that I'd have to pay for that anyway if I got a new shitter.  When my patience ran thin after 10-15 minutes I repeated my old ball coach approach and harangued Leaky Pete up the stairs.  About 6 to 9 minutes later he called down to me, "Uh, sir?  You should see this."

So I went upstairs.  The toilet was off the floor, and where the hole in the floor should've been was a giant lump of shit and toilet paper.  Scooping this mess clearly wasn't part of the pipe whisperer's job, so I again donned some rubber gloves and retrieved the turd with a dog poop bag.  This is what I found twixt the dung and the drain.

For the uninitiated, that's a fidget spinner.  Some jackass flushed a goddam fidget spinner down my beloved Toto.

Incredibly, I didn't explode.  Maybe I'm older and calmer.  Maybe I'm resigned to the fact that I've been stripped of all dignity and can't have nice things.  But I didn't get upset.

And I was magnanimous towards the reluctant drain weasel.  I told him "I knew there was something stupid stuck in there.  There's nothing mechanical to the drain, but there was clearly something moving around that I could lodge loose with the plunger.  Had to take it off the floor to get to it."  He simply nodded.  After I paid, on his way out the door he opined "You were like a dog with a bone with this thing."  I smiled and shooed him out.  I'm mellowing in middle age.

Later that day I interrogated everyone who both (1) lives in zhome and (2) uses fidget spinners.  That's an n of 2 people.  zson realized the enormity of the situation, likely fearing for his life, and said "I didn't do it!  That's [zdaughter's] fidget spinner!"  I noted that ownership isn't relevant here--maybe zwoman flushed zdaughter's fidget spinner.  zson didn't think that story made sense but eventually saw my point.  And of course zdaughter plausibly stated "Why would I do anything that stupid?"  

So I'm blaming zson's aforementioned jackass friend.  On the bright side, the Toto flushes like a champ again.  This cost me close to four figures, but what's money?

A few days later, zdaughter came home with a huge smile on her face, walked into my home office, and said "You won't believe what the para gave everyone in class today."  She reached into her backpack and pulled out a little case, then she pulled back the lid as one would pry open a box while proposing on bended knee to reveal ... a new fidget spinner.

Sometimes I Don't Speak Right But Yet I Know What I'm Talking About

"This shoulda been a post." That's what I had written when this was a comment. Alrighty then!

Marls wins. Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues" was named for Deacon Jones.

On the origin of the song's name, Donald Fagen says, it was inspired by football player Deacon Jones, as they like the sound of his name: "It also had two syllables, which was convenient, like 'Crimson.'" The song, however, is really about "the ultimate outsider, the flip side of the dream, boy-o . . . call me Deacon Blues."

They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

Apparently Hall of Fame defensive end Deacon Jones was also a crooner, and in the late 60's he was fronting War (and its earlier iterations) on the LA soul scene. That's when ex-Animals lead singer Eric Burdon found them and joined up. Enter... Eric Burdon and War. Check out "Spill the Wine" below.

And when you do, please keep an eye out for Danish import Lee Oskar on harp. His words:

I was this white, curly-headed guy and I came to America to make it in the music business. That was my whole ambition to come to the United States. So I met first Hugh Masekela and Stew Levine, and they put me up for bit and then it was back to living on on the streets, and then I met Eric Burdon. And with Eric Burdon, he wanted to form a new band, and so he and I went to a club in North Hollywood that was called the Rag Doll, but we went to check out this band and the band was backing up a famous football player named Deacon Jones. When I walked in with Eric, Deacon was doing these one-arm pushups, singing a love song and I’d be pretty intimidated… a [guy doing a] one-arm pushup, singing, “I love you, baby.” And so, I jumped up onstage. And it was just packed with people in there; everybody wanted to make a record deal back then. And the next day I was sitting around the swimming pool in Hollywood with the nucleus of that band that was called Nightshift, and Eric and myself. And that became the backup band that I was part of [War], and that’s how it pretty much happened.

His harmonicas are famous now.

After "Spill the Wine" charted, Burdon's asthma kicked in onstage and made him say "I gotta get out of here if it's the last thing I ever do," the rest of the gang removed his name from the marquee and pressed on.

Cisco Kid. Low Rider. And yes, "Why Can't We Be Friends?" -- a terrific tune about getting along in this mixed up, muddled up, shook up world. Featuring, according to los interwebs, Deacon Jones on some of the many vocals. 

There's a lot fascinating about this, and Deacon Jones, the man who purportedly coined the term "quarterback sack" (and who would be 3rd all-time in that NFL category if they kept that stat during his era), was perhaps the most interesting man in the world in the mid-1970's. Or maybe it was Clifford Ray.

Now ya know.