the power of poop

sweet, sweet football. you have returned to us. oh, how we have missed you. those silly exhibition games which put together comprise something called the preseason are only a terrible tease. but now you have truly emerged from your hibernation.

the steelers destroyed the browns sunday, but i don't think that it was a particularly helpful tool in evaluating the steelers. my take on it is that most high school teams would have beat the browns sunday. still, a win is a win, and the steelers are 1-0 to start this season. we have buffalo coming up next, which will be a fun game.

football feels great.

standing in poop soup? this does not feel so great.

that's right. this weekend i moved the old bowels. not something we talk about much in the course of our polite conversations, but something most of us do regularly, nonetheless. following the ritual cleansing, i flushed the toilet only to realize that it had been previously clogged ("dang it, shannon! i thought to myself, "don't you know how to use a plunger?"). so i fetched the plunger and proceeded to plunge. now, this isn't pleasant. you need to know that. it just isn't okay to stick a rubber tool into a bowl of water, urine, and feces. but we do what we have to do, don't we?

feeling that i had sufficiently sucked the clog from the pipes, i flushed again. this time, though, the toilet didn't retreat. it attacked. it began to push the stew of waste closer and closer to the rim of the bowl. having experienced similar trauma before, i knew that i needed to shut off the valve, and post haste. but when i tried to to turn the valve (righty-tighty) it wouldn't budge. it was stuck. i began to panic.

what does one do? before the crap hit the...floor, i grabbed a bucket and a flower pot that happened to be fairly close by. i began scooping 'stuff' from the toilet and into the bucket. fortunately all the 'stuff' made it into the bucket, but, by this time, there was water flowing all over the rim, and covering the bathroom floor in a flood of feces water.

stunned, i recovered fairly quickly, opened the tank and realized that a part of the toilet innards had busted and this thing wasn't going to stop until i got that valve turned. i ran upstairs and got a jar opener, ran back downstairs, waded through the growing pond and finally successfully shut the valve.

but by then there was a river of tainted water in my basement. and all over me. i wanted to just sit down in a heap of laughter/crying, but i didn't want to get this water all over my butt, too (isn't that ironic?). so i stayed standing. actually, i went immediately into intense-cleaning-man-mode.

hours later, the house smelled like pine-sol and bleach. ahh. much better.

you know, the power of poop seems completely inescapable to me these days. if i'm not cleaning it out of jack's underwear or off of cade's back, i'm mopping it off the floor. it is odd to me that we are so uncomfortable with our own waste, but i am thinking that there has got to be a lesson in there for me somewhere. i don't know what it is yet, but i am still thinking about it: my life is punctuated by poop. you might be perfectly content to flush it and forget it, but someday, sooner or later, it will get you. you will have to face down this fact-of-life foe and do some real soul-searching about your issues with what comes out your backside. until then, enjoy your comfortable ignorance. i miss it.

excuse me, something stinks.

jack, did you.....?

greg.

ps. just to sum up: if you were going to start a new sports team, let's say its a NFL team, what would you name them? something strong and ominous. something powerful. ooh, i know, how about the browns? do you see what i am saying? poop is everywhere!!!!!