bad plumbing

Happiness is:

1) A strong gin and tonic at cocktail hour, courtesy of one’s loving and wonderful spouse

2) Turkish red lentil soup with lots of butter, mint, and red pepper flakes

3) Mustard greens, as perfected by one’s loving and wonderful spouse

4) Eating in front of 30 Rock, courtesy of Netflix Instant

5) The not-so-distant dream of a taking a shower or bath in a new bathtub, a bathtub unblemished by mold murals or flaking, the bathtub, in fact, that you chose from Home Depot a few days ago, the installation process of which began that morning by two contractors who have already done excellent work for you in the past

Happiness is not:

1) One’s loving and wonderful spouse yelling from downstairs: “Oh my God! Stop whatever you’re doing!”

2) You yelling from upstairs: “What?! I’m not doing anything!”

3) The spouse yelling, “There’s water pouring into the kitchen cabinets from the ceiling.”

4) And: “And the dining room light fixture.”

5) Everything that comes after that.

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These condos were built in the early 1970s, and I’m starting to think that whoever did the plumbing was hired based on his skill with bong piping. Maybe he found a way to hook up a line of about six bongs to each other so that a hit from an individual bong unit reverberated throughout the entire bong community and became a shared experience among bong users. Everyone thought this was pretty awesome, so they decided to try it with sinks and showers. At that point, the awesomeness wore off, shared plumbing offering little improvement over mind-altering substances as a social lubricant. They threw up walls between the kitchens and bathrooms and retreated into their individual holes, which they came to call “condos.” Next, they succumbed to the lure of free market individualism and started selling the condos to unsuspecting passers-by, who moved in and lived in ignorance until the day when they decided to redo their bathroom, whereupon the vestiges of a failed and bitterly repressed communal past came gushing in, riding a flood of the neighbor’s shower and sink water.

As of now, at the end of a grueling day for our contractors (who I do not blame for this problem; it isn’t their fault our plumbing was designed by complete jackasses), and, frankly, for me, we seem to be closer to a solution to this mess. They’re coming back tomorrow, though the head contractor, as gentle a man as you would ever hope to run across, commented that the person who plumbed these condos should be shot. If there is another deluge between now and then, I am going to the basement with the gin bottle, and I am not coming out.

Well, that’s not true. If there is another deluge, I will grab buckets and towels and I will hyperventilate and between Eric and myself we will use every article of profanity in our vocabularies and then, after whatever comes between that and sleep, assuming sleep is in the cards, I will probably take a Xanax. But I am choosing, for once, extravagantly and in defiance of superstition, to operate under the assumption that we will not have another catastrophe.

There is a lot more to this story, but I need to go take a walk or do some similar sanity-generating activity.