Plunging A Drain Works!

[I guess I like to write about bathroom stuff, judging from the subject matter of many of my past notes. Maybe I’m overly fond of toilet humour. Maybe I need to get my brain out of the drain, my mind out of the grime (that’s not actually an expression, I’m just hoping you’ll be impressed by the rhyme and not realise). But there’s a lot that can be said about bathrooms; toilets especially. Not only are they different the world round, they offer insight into that particular culture, that particular house, that particular owner (not to mention user – and I promise I won’t end every sentence in this note with a parenthetical aside). Or perhaps it’s simply that, seeing as most of my brilliant ideas come to me when I’m in the shower, those ideas are in fact directly tied to the environment in which they are conceived. Whatever it is, this is another piece about bathrooms; well, home waste disposal systems anyway, as you probably gathered from the title, and it is, IMHO (the ‘H’ in this case standing for ‘honest’, rather than ‘humble’) quite a good piece at that. If at the end you want to protest that it’s in fact as much about words as it is about drains, well, 1) that’s what the comment function is for; 2) that’s kind of what I’m all about.]

I live in a big house. I mean very big. Big as in you look at the front and you think, wow, that’s a big house, and then you go round the side and you realise that what you thought was the front was actually the side and the real front is at least as long. And even though it’s what you might call a duplex, meaning we don’t have access to the entire house and sometimes hear strange noises coming from the half we aren’t in, the part we do have access to is plenty massive. Basement, ground floor, first floor (which I’m used to calling the second floor), and attic – three kitchens, three toilets, two showers, seven bedrooms, one living room. It’s huge.

Right now I have all of that to myself, because my six housemates have all gone home for the summer. I chose not to make the expensive flight back to Japan and instead look for hopefully-peace-studies-related work here in Bradford. Happily I’ve found some work; sadly, it doesn’t pay, so I’ll need to look elsewhere for dosh -perhaps Youtube. And while my house contract expires at the end of this month and I’ll be moving in with a friend, for the next to weeks I am the king of this mansion, king and pretty much every other title except landlord.

Mansion is a nice word, isn’t it? At least for me, it conjures up images of a grand old manor with many rooms, elegant architecture, and most of all, history. Stories. Perhaps an elderly man in a robe wandering the property to tell them. But the old in this image is the good ‘old’, not the bad ‘old’. My house could be called a mansion, I suppose; after all, it is grand, it has many rooms, it’s made of Yorkshire stone which I hear back in the day was a pretty penny (oh, and I might mention that it’s not one of those rowhouses you see elsewhere in Bradford – one house that looks like a giant caterpillar of about six houses – mine is a double at most, proportionate, and situated at the end of the street. Cobbled street, mind you.) If I take the role of the elderly man minus the robe, and yes, I am about to tell you some stories, my house could rest quite comfortably in the mansion-class lounge at the airport. Or wherever else mansions go to hobnob. However, the ‘old’ of my house is most definitely the bad ‘old’.

All the kitchens and toilets make for a lot of potential drainage problems, and the datedness of the building makes it not even worth including the word ‘potential’. We’ve had cloggage issues all year long. I’ve learnt a valuable lesson about mopping up the excess grease in the frying pan with a paper towel and throwing this away rather than pouring all the grease in the sink for it to congeal around the U-bend. But I’d like to think I haven’t been the primary source of these problems. Barring a detailed analysis of the contents removed from these pipes I guess we’ll never know, and for that task, my hand isn’t raised.

During the year, when something would stop up, someone would call the landlord and he would get someone in to fix it. I was certainly doubting the proficiency of this particular plumber as, this month, everything seemed to be once again clogging up around me, but that lack of faith wasn’t the reason I didn’t want to phone the landlord.

I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a manly man. I generally don’t watch sports on TV unless I have some other reason to be in the room. I often carry a man-purse or murse or manbag or whatever you want to call it. I really don’t need to be the one ‘manning’ the barbecue grill, even though I seem to end up with that responsibility when the others get bored. I don’t mind clothes shopping, and sometimes I catch myself making shockingly effeminate hand gestures while speaking, like Chris Bosh-level effeminate (does the name-dropping and clip redeem me from my statement about sports?). I can’t – and this is the worst, probably – drive stick. Most of this doesn’t bother me terribly, although I do plan to someday learn how to charm a manual transmission. But I hate being helpless. I hate not knowing how to fix stuff that I use. I don’t have a car but if I get one I want to at least know how to make simple repairs on it. Changing a tire is a test of manliness, and if my memory of driver’s ed serves me correctly I believe that I could pass that test, should the need arise. I want to be able to do basic troubleshooting on a computer, though in some respects increasing computerisation is at odds with traditional measures of manliness. In light of this development it is even more crucial that I, as a man, be able to handle elementary mechanical difficulties. And what’s more, when an appliance refuses to cooperate, I take it personal (not ‘personally’, seeing as I also get more American when my authority as an operator is challenged).

In other words, to call the landlord is to admit defeat, and I hate admitting defeat. The more something matters to me, or the more I think I should be able to do it, the more I hate admitting defeat. It’s like using a cheat in a video game, or referring to a walkthrough someone’s put online. In the video game of Bradley the Travelling MK and Budding Man versus the World, specifically in Chapter 22: 1 Melbourne Place – Level 31: The Clogged Shower Drain, I was not about to admit defeat.

The shower was the worst, at least in terms of usage impediment and added disgustingness. When the ground floor kitchen sink got clogged I just started taking my dishes back upstairs to wash them in my kitchen (I’ve had to cook downstairs for the past few months due to my stove not working – I don’t consider the inability to repair gas wiring an affront to my manliness) or else I would use the clogged sink anyway and then just exit the scene and leave it to drain at a snail’s pace. The latter option increased in frequency when the upstairs kitchen sink clogged as well. However with the shower, I had to deal with several inches of soapy scummy water sloshing around as I cleaned myself, and though I could employ the ever-useful exit-the-scene recourse there as well, the next morning I would have an abundance of hairs and scum decorating the shower floor, staring back at me. Yes, I have a lot of body hair. I used to be more self-conscious about it, but now it only really bothers me when I see it in places other than on my body. I’ll be grateful for my pelt density when all my peers are going bald, and as I established above I don’t have enough manliness points accumulated to sacrifice them to chest-shaving or waxing or whatever the cooligans are doing these days. At any rate this was the drain’s problem, not mine.

I don’t know what made this morning THE morning. Maybe I’d just reached my breaking point. Maybe it was the fact that I gave it a thorough clean with a sponge and spray and then realised all the scum would come to rest exactly where it had been because the drain was refusing flat-out to take it. Whatever it was, I went looking for something to stick down it, something like a wire clothes hanger.

This wasn’t the first time I’d attempted to solve that problem myself. About a week earlier I’d read online that baking soda and vinegar worked well for dislodging drain blockages. Unfortunately, all I had was baking powder and wine vinegar, so all that gave me was a wisp of smoke and some froth. I found some bona fide drain unstopper in the middle (ground floor) kitchen and even though the website containing the baking soda/vinegar combo had propounded the evils of unnatural solutions (pun intended – isn’t it annoying when people say that just to highlight their cleverness that they’re certain you’re too dumb to catch without blinking neon signs pointing to it?), after a few days of being intimidated by the ‘For professional and trade use only’ warning, the annoyance grew larger than my preference to be ‘natural’ and I poured this self-assured 95 per cent sulphuric acid down that shower drain. It smoked more than the baking soda. It smelled like rotten eggs (or at least what I assume rotten eggs smell like, having never actually smelled rotten eggs). It too proved ineffective.

Back to the present. The website had also talked about fishing the clogging substances out with a wire clothes hanger, of which I had none, not having been able to collect any in this particular chapter of the Bradley game. It or anything like it was nowhere to be found in my inventory, you might say. I tried sticking a knife down the drain, as that had been useful in Level 30 – unclogging the sink drain in my kitchen – when combined with unscrewing some piping below, but the knife was to wide for the shower drain. The only other similarly-shaped object I could find was a pen, but upon approaching the drain wielding it, I thought better of that tactic. I would’ve dropped it in, most def.

All this time I knew I could use the basement shower, but enough was enough. However, I was out of ideas. I got into the shower (as that intent was what had triggered all this activity this morning, which explains for you why I was naked this entire time – I wasn’t kidding when I said ‘minus the robe’, you know!) and was just about to turn on the water for another scummy jab at my manliness when my eye fell upon none other than the plunger.

Ah, the plunger. I am no stranger to that most oddly-built of implements, I must admit, though thankfully I had not previously required this particular plunger in its traditional capacity, our middle toilet – cracked though it may be – repeatedly proving itself quite up to the task of digesting my excrement. Other toilets in my life have been less satisfactory; American ones especially, which is odd considering they serve a clientele of much larger average body size than their high-tech multifunction Japanese counterparts. But you can read more about that in another of my articles. Suffice it to say that I have honed my plunger skill over the years (as well as, in lieu of a plunger, the strategic use of the exit-the-scene course of action) but had never applied it to a non-toilet drain. Considering someone had mentioned it in the comments on the natural solutions website, I thought it at least worth a shot.

In my early plunging days, when I was but an amateur, I used to go for large pulls, hoping to time it for precisely when the pressure from the rising water level was at its highest. This method was unreliable and inefficient, as it limited plunging to once per flush which meant waiting until the water slowly drained to where I could flush again. In the worst cases, when the water level was virtually at a standstill, it was useless, and worst of all, it sometimes led to disastrous splash-back. Ugh. Fortunately over the years my technique matured, notably following the discovery of the push-pull maneuvre in which the user gently pushes the plunger into full suction and then executes a series of rapid pulls and pushes up and down, without breaking the seal, which creates what I imagine to be the equivalent of an underwater earthquake in the general vicinity of the U-bend and, in my experience, effectively unclogs the toilet 100 per cent of the time with minimal risk of splash-back. Oh the elation of seeing the murky water swirl down the hole with a glorious glug-glug-glug!

And so armed with this plunger (a conventional red; cup, not flange, well-suited to this task, I later learned) and the wisdom of many years of plunging, I approached this boss-level blocked shower drain and applied the suction. It was a foreign application of a familiar operation and I was dubious as to its chances, but nevertheless entered the push-pull phase.

There were a few moments when nothing seemed to happen. Then, with a quietness incommensurate to so momentous an occasion, a hole appeared in the water above the drain and the rest flowed over the rounded sides into the narrow abyss. I couldn’t believe it! In so little time and with so little effort it seemed my troubles were at their end! It took the rest of my shower for me to really believe it, but the drain clarity held and I finished my cleansing ritual swimmingly, which in this case ironically meant without swimming. It had been a long time since I’d seen the shower floor at the end of a shower (and it was perhaps my preoccupation with this while towelling off that caused my elbow to knock one of the three soap/shampoo racks off its screw; however, this far along in the game I was well-accustomed to dealing with such petty foes, catching it in midair and returning it to its place without fuss).

Jubilant at this victory (on a par with the Queen at her 60-year celebration, I daresay), the much-awaited clearance of Level 31, I proceeded to (yes, i know that phrase is over-used, but I wasn’t the one to over-use it and I quite feel that it’s justified in this case) the middle kitchen with plunger in hand. Would it work on a sink as well?

I turned the tap on drizzle and watched the sink fill slowly – disappointing specimen – then assumed the position and began. But this opponent was equipped with a defence mechanism; my first vigorous thrust was returned in kind with water shooting back at me from the overflow hole! I retreated to regroup. Should I try something else? Having nothing else to try (I’d already previously unscrewed the piping below and scraped it out, which hadn’t worked like it had upstairs; rather, it’d left the piping clogged AND leaking) I closed in once more. Holding my hands above the level of the overflow hole eliminated that threat, but it did mean that I needed to stagger my thrusts to keep the drain flooded and therefore pressurised. It took longer than the shower, but in time this adversary did too acquiesce. And this time, it rewarded me with the fading, defeated cry of ‘Glug, glug, glug…’.

And so ends this particular episode in Chapter 22 of Bradley versus the World. I sense the finale of this chapter drawing near, and fear that this was not actually its big-boss level. What will that be? The skies are growing darker.

However this clearance was glorious and I intend to savour it gladly. I hope you’ve enjoyed this walkthrough; though Bradley is still in beta-testing and not yet available to the public, you may be able to find applications for these techniques in other games. Myself, I’m thinking that perhaps ‘master plunger’ would be a skill worth adding to my CV in Level 28: Getting a Job, yet uncleared. Is there anywhere I can get certified for that sort of thing, I wonder?

To conclude, here’s a brief overview of some of the other levels I’ve cleared in this chapter.

Level 6: Insufficient Clothes-Drying Devices

Level 7: The Lack of Sink-side Towel Rack

Level 8: The Uncooperative Toilet Seat

Level 11: The Frictionless Showerhead Holder

Level 14: Attack of the Flies

Level 21: Save the House from Burning Down was a harrowing ordeal. I still don’t know how I managed to clear that one; certainly wouldn’t have without the assistance of the other characters in my party. I won’t give away everything but I will hint that you need to make sure that by this point in the game you’ve acquired the power to call in a fire department strike.

Bonus Level: Clean the Garden, which I haven’t completed but did have a go at the other day.

Till next time, this is Bradley the Travelling MK and Budding Man, signing off. If the next mission is what I think it is, it will be a doozy for which I must seriously prepare.

Makoto Fujimura’s ‘A Letter to the Occupy Wall Street Movement’

I haven’t made up my mind how I feel about the ‘Occupy’ movement sweeping the globe, partly because it’s become so massive and populous that characteristics and objectives must surely differ significantly between locations and, especially, between people, but most because I just haven’t looked very far into it. My dear Bradford has but a single white tent with a few picket signs outside of the town hall, and sometimes even a few people who aren’t just passing determinedly through Centenary Square, so I certainly haven’t felt to be on the forefront of the action, though I could easily go see what’s going on in Trafalgar Square down in London, and even more easily train over to Leeds for what they’ve got going on there (this reminds me, I meant to go see the Tokyo demonstrations while I’m back in Japan for Christmas).

Therefore I’ll pipe down with my own uninformed opinions and let far greater artists speak; specifically, Makoto Fujimura, an artist I hugely admire and have had the privilege to hear speak. Visiting his website today, I came upon a letter he wrote to the Occupy movement as a whole – which begs the question, who read it feeling it was addressed to them specifically, but perhaps you yourself can be the answer to that. I suppose I could copy the whole of it and paste it in here, but rather I’ll just post a link to the letter, that way you can enjoy it in its wonderful original context as well as the greater website in all its informative glory. Read.

Writer Movies

I just finished watching a writer movie, and was compelled to make a list of all the good writer films I’ve watched, so that you, dear fellow writer, may be inspired when you’re stuck and too lazy to read a book. Here are the ones I know of, in order of my knowing them:

1. Finding Forrester
2. Freedom Writers
3. Dead Poets Society
4. The Ghost Writer
5. Capote – though I haven’t watched it all the way through yet. The book was excellent – and I hope that when I say this you wonder why I said it, because you know that this is a given. If you don’t know this and are inclined to watch movies to not have to read books, well, I think you’d be better off elsewhere.

Those were the titles I could come up with, but not being satisfied with that paltry list, I went searching the troves of the internet. And of course I found stacks and stacks. But I also found something I was not expecting – a somewhat kindred spirit. As I hope you are. And this is what he said (my thoughts italicised):

“I first came to Los Angeles many years ago with the hopes of doing a lot of writing (always the hope, always the hope), but instead I did a lot of walking (sounds like my first time in London). Given the profoundly accustomed car culture (blech) of the landscape, I was an anomaly (don’t I know it – scenes of me biking along the freeway perilously close to the rushing traffic on the outskirts of Philadelphia come to mind) as I walked everywhere and glimpsed at apartments (no ‘at’ there, mate) I would never live in (is this a common writers’ pastime?), restaurants I wanted to eat at but never got around to, and bars where I wanted to drink at with friends I didn’t have yet (nice – that’s the spirit). Los Angeles was my compromise (hmm?), one of many in a lifetime (the truth hurts).  Los Angeles is the city where people who are too afraid to go to New York end up, in the same way that Chicago is the city where people who are too afraid to go to Los Angeles end up (he had me with this line – there’s a quote for sure). But in my heart, New York was supposed to be mine (wait – I thought it was supposed to be mine).  I had always wanted to be a writer living in the Big Apple (are you channeling me? Am I channeling you? Am I not alone in my dreams after all? I kid you not, I see this in my head all the time) – it was a desire straight out of a Woody Allen movie (will have to check out Woody Allen then).   The mosaic colors and mental acoustics were so vivid with this dream that it painted me as occupying a nice apartment in upper Manhattan (yep) with my junior editor at VOGUE Euro-Asian girlfriend who had enough style to make up for my lack thereof (this is reaching a self-fulfilling prophecy level of ridiculousness; the parallels, I mean), while I labored away at my great American novel (mm, guess it’s not a complete match), at my desk under my framed Velvet Underground poster, in the evenings after a full day’s work on the staff of THE NEW YORKER magazine.  Well, ahem (ahem, indeed).  In the cosmic battle of dream versus reality, reality won (I intend to win my cosmic battle, that’s why I’m wasting so much time right now not writing), and instead, I ended up in Hollywood (tough break, lad), suffering writer’s block on an untitled science fiction screenplay I couldn’t for the life of me figure out the ending (were you channeling Chuck Lorre as I channel you now?). So instead of hunkering down to finish my script I walked everyday to my local video store and rented movies about other people writing (such an alluring rut suddenly so deep when one wishes to climb out – immersing oneself in other lives when one’s own fails to provide, usually thanks to oneself). Something about watching movies about writers inspired me (and yet the inspiration is so short-lived; by the time the film finishes all I want to do is watch another).  I remember a former creative writing professor once told our class that when you sit down to write you should surround yourself with books (books, that’s the key) by your favorite authors.  It’s akin to the philosophy that being around smart and creative people will only challenge you to elevate your own game. “Hang out with your heroes,” the professor would trumpet (which leads me back to the ever-hanging question: why am I still not studying writing?). And hang with my heroes I did – some of them characters from these movies, some of them filmmakers of these movies.  Not only did movies about writers put the fire to my ass but it also kick-started a prodigious creative period that led to my first writing assignment at a studio (that could be the problem – TV being inspired by TV. The blind leading the blind, except in this case it’s those who can do nothing but watch leading the same. But I don’t mean to sound so harsh, man).  Oh Hollywood, compromise and all, I’ve finally arrived (I just prefer to hang on to my New York for now, thanks).

The art-critic Robert Hughes once wrote, “There is no tyranny like the tyranny of the unseen masterpiece.” (Oh the beauty of true words) For us writers, that is what inspires us to put pen to pad at our desks at home, in our cubicles at work in between spreadsheets, and in our beds before surrendering to slumber (These days I wish it would go more on the night-time offensive, not these mid-day ambushes). When our muse heads for the door (Oh Calliope, where art thou, and why hast thou forsaken me), we follow her outside to park benches, to cafes and restaurants, or as Chuck Palahniuk once did, wrote the pages to his novel Fight Club underneath the cars he was fixing or as Michael Martin who wrote the pages to his script Brooklyn’s Finest while working the New York subway system (is it really thought that Americans don’t get irony?). David Mamet deplores writers who write in public.  “When did writing become a performance art?”  He bitingly asked in one of his essays. As per usual, Mamet is right.  Writing is not a performance art.  Insular and singular in its act of cerebral stewing, writing lacks the dynamism of dance or the force of slam poetry (I find myself not much into slam poetry; it’s like the pop of music – obvious, beating, and usually shallow. But it has its place, and at least poetry continues to morph). The act of writing is dull to everyone but the writer (word).  Sometimes it’s even dull to the writer (double word).  Nothing is more boring than filming someone writing.  But yet there have been many great films about writers and about what inspires them and what tortures them. Here is my list of the 20 Greatest Movies About Writers.”

And you can check out this list if you’re still interested. I found that by this point I cared very little about what I’d originally come to the page in search of – that want was lost in the excitement of once again finding someone whose thoughts had at least once traveled along paths so similar to the ones mine traverse all the time.

I was inspired, not so much by the writer movie I’d just watched, though it did do a bit for me, but more by a post listing good writer movies. Ha. What are the odds. Oh, inspired enough to revisit my neglected blog page.

And here you are.

I am still writing up my December blog, by the way, slowly and not always surely, but it will get done. And I am still, though undeserving, being graced with various events taking place in rapid succession, connected in my mind to string me along to all sorts of cognitive destinations.

(I seldom end these on a note related to the bulk of the post, do I? Always promising more, never delivering. Always plagued by a guilty conscience for not.)