The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

As a home improvement specialist I had a set of toilet seat hardware break, no big deal, just buy the replacement parts and attach them back on the seat and top. Trouble was, when I did just that, the seat top had to be held so that it wouldn’t slam back down. The seat and top were custom fit by me about 30 years ago when I built the house, big thick curly maple and maybe the new hardware wasn’t spec’d out for twice that thickness. Although … it had worked well enough for 3 decades. Plumbing, as any of you know who have ventured into that matrix of horror, is as mysterious as it is implacable, a labyrinth of broken dreams and leaky futures a mere mortal might emerge from babbling and cursing. Me, I have been there many times and some might conclude that this is the reason for more than most of my, let’s call them ‘problems’.

Today I spent four hours assembling new hardware. Backwards, upside down, inside out, you name it, I screwed it in, I screwed it out and I screwed it up. Nothing I did seemed to work, most were just total lack of engineering brains, something I have none of apparently. I have the kind of brain that is spatially dyslexic, so I flip the hinge backwards, then realize my mistake. And then do it again. And possibly, later, one more time. Something in my synapses is short circuited, I don’t know what else to call it.

In the end I had a toilet seat whose lid had to be hand held to keep it up. I suspect some evil femme in a factory somewhere in Hunan modified the design to accommodate women’s pleas to us men to leave the damn lid down when we’re done peeing, but of course the problem is more likely in the design of my weak brain. Finally, out of frustration, I took an old wood toilet seat from the shack and replaced it with the Chinese revenge model, then hauled it up to the house here and installed it. Thirty years on that curly maple throne and now I’m stuck with a store-bought.

Nevertheless, all dark toilets have a silver lining, isn’t that what they say? And mine is to hurry down to the patent office to lock in my new specially designed SEAT DOWN commode for the women of the house whose husbands refuse to listen to their laments and protestations and leave the seat down when they’re done. I expect to make a fortune and trust me, I don’t care how many threatening messages I get from pissed off men who tried to fix that seat on their own so it would stay up. Of course I’ll pass some of the royalties on to that Chinese factory worker. If I can ever locate her….

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