The Lower Depths: Deconstructing My Plumbing

"No man can be judged happy until he is dead."  -  Solon the Wise

This cautionary ethical adage, instilling as it does the virtues of prudence, patience, humility and taking the long view, is the wellspring (if you'll pardon the expression) of my theory of plumbing. Aristotle demurred, on the grounds that happiness is not a state, but rather the active exercise of the virtues. My namesake on the other hand, with admirable perspicuity maintains that there's something to it. In this I am not an Aristotelean. It is, in a word, the whole matter, the kernel, the meat, the essence of plumbing. I have touched on this before.

If you give me an ordinary bicycle, let's say, I can probably fix it. I can usually figure out my way around it and, with a little trial-and-error and a modicum of profanity, I can put it right. It's quite simple, really. My technique is simply to buy the latest issue of Bicycling Magazine . . .

,

. . . riffle past all the articles about Lance's doping charges, go straight to the "Gear & Bike" section, and proceed to buy every tool the magazine recommends I own. So, for example, just to give you some limited idea, I now own the Crank Brothers multi-tool 19 ($33) . . . 

. . . Pedro's torque wrench ($140) . . . 

. . . the Giustaforza torque wrench ($185, just to be on the safe side) . . .

. . . the Lezyne Carbon 5 minitool ($80, also just to be safe) . . .

. . .  the Gimp Emergency multi/hanger tool ($40) . . .

. . . Pedro's Trixie ($30) . . .

. . . and a penis necktie for the post-ride pub crawl (priceless).

(More than just a) phallic symbol

Having assembled all my tools about me on the front terrace, my workplace resembles a shipyard.

In mere moments I can take an ordinary bicycle, disassemble it so that all the parts are laid out and visible, like this (always more parts than you expect there might be) . . .

. . . reassemble it, discard any "extra" parts, and Bob's your uncle. 

E pluribus Elliptigo.

But when confronted with a breech in the household plumbing, as I have been of late, no matter how simple on the face of it, I quail. Memories of past attempts haunt me. Investigating something as obvious as a leaky faucet, I encounter in the lower depths what seems (at first) easy enough, if always somehow inaccessible and usually something I've already fixed at least twice before . . . 

Investigating further, the system begins to branch out a bit, fractillate (if I may coin a word) beneath the house. The exact pipe I had located further up towards daylight seems to be deliberately sequestered by its compeers from discovery in the subterranean murk . . .

Following the tangled mass of iron onwards, I emerge into a neighboring back lot, where the system begins to build unaccountably into some hellish Escher puzzle based on exponentiality, the Simpson Paradox and Godel's Theorem . . . 

At last, having crawled on bloodied hands and knees for several miles, I encounter the source of the problem in a neighboring city . . .

There, with prayers and burnt offerings, I loosen the offending joint, valve, fitting, nut, or whatever is the source of the leak, putty it, tape it with plumber's tape, replace whatever needs to be replaced (after 27 returns to the hardware store and the plumbing supply), tighten it with bloodied knuckles and whatever remains of my vital force, and return to my home a shattered man. I hasten to the neighboring city several times during the night to ascertain that my repair is so far holding, the pipes are sound, the leak is dry, the water pressure normal. 

Thereafter on subsequent nights I lie half awake in a troubled doze, imagining that molecules of water are massing once again behind my shoddy work and my pathetic teflon plumber's tape, and having failed by main force to burst their bonds are insidiously attempting to undermine me, never sleeping, filing up silently behind the lead molecule to follow it through the microscopic breech that will open behind its escape, the whole mass of water tumbling through the tiniest issue in the valve, submerging me in my feverish plumbing dream.

Hence, after Solon, my compleat theory of plumbing - that no leak is ever finally repaired until a man is dead.

Mustard After Dinner

"I, who am on my way out, would readily resign to anyone who came along what wisdom I am learning for dealing with the world. Mustard after dinner - I have no use for a good thing of which I can make no use. . . . It is an insult and unkindness of fortune to offer us presents which fill us with a just resentment that they failed us in their season."

           - Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Book III, Essay 10, "Of husbanding your will")

Age brings in its wake benefits exceedingly dubious. To your face people call you "senior" and offer you "senior" discounts, while behind your back you are simply another old fart. Younger people are described as "fit," "athletic," or "buff"; older people are merely "active," like yeast or fungus, or (worse yet) "spry." And upon turning 50, there are the sudden attentions of the AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons. Ready or not, retired or dead, you begin to receive publications, notices and advertisements from an organization whose solicitations, a month earlier, you would have hotly regarded as an insult. 

But imagine my horrified surprise ("I, who am on my way out . . .") to find, in the latest screed from AARP, a full-page ad with the banner line "Sex. It's Never Too Late To Learn Something New." This page flogs a 50 percent discount on "4 Better Sex Videos" plus three free videos entitled "The Art of Oral Loving," "The Art of Sex Positions," and "The Art of Orgasm" (which latter promises "secrets for intensifying 'the Big O'!"). (Oh, please.)

 "You didn't even take off your turban"

I say horrified surprise because . . . well, for any number of reasons. First of all, this appears in what I had taken to be a staid and age-appropriate publication, never previously having troubled myself to thumb its graphically perky but otherwise dreary pages. I mean, thought I to myself, this is like learning that my grandfather might have used Viagra, had there been such a remedy when he most had need of it. 

Before Viagra

It seemed unbecoming to find such explicit rubbish in pages I had supposed devoted to "senior" issues like how to choose a Medicare plan or how the latest Congressional shenanigans will hasten the End Time.

But fundamentally I found it horrifying because I thought that sex was what I had been doing for nearly five of my alotted decades. I've been around that block often enough; I'm familiar with the Grand Tour, so to speak. I've pretty much done it all - the instinctive and puzzlingly-named Missionary and the Missionary-cum-Pony variation, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans . . . 

. . . the Seal and the Nun, the Walrus and the Carpenter, the Priest and the Bicycle, the Lotus and Bamboo Shoot, Little Red Riding Hood . . .

- you name it (thought I), I've probably done it. Or haven't I? Maybe what I've been doing wasn't sex?  No, I realized, what they're selling here is better sex. It's technique. They think to change the rules of engagement, which as everyone knows is a) the Approach With Bribe,

"I brought you a little. . . ummmm . . ."

. . . b) Getting Her To Your Place . . .

. . . c) Getting Her Settled . . .

 "I won't be a minute, just checking e-mails . . . "

. . .  d) and the Engagement, or more vulgarly, the Business:

Four simple steps. How much could all this have evolved? And why offer all this new information now, as though to rub my enfeebled nose in it? Why weren't these lessons included in My Weekly Reader when I was only eight and might have profited by them sooner and for longer?

 "Sure, I've got a firehose, kid."

But on calmer reflection, I realized that these things are as much a matter of Nature as they are of Art. "The laws of Nature teach us what we rightly need," my alter ego reminds us. From time immemorial, on any other Grand Tour, things have remained pretty much the same - whether it's the Vuelta a Espagna, the Giro d'Italia or the Tour de France, a man rides a bicycle pretty much as he has always done.

Uh-oh - what the hell is this?!!