A tale of two toilets

Our water company is a predatory monster determined to loot and pillage whatever meager wealth the mostly poor residents of my particular area of outside-the-city-limits central Texas have managed to acquire. The first full month’s water bill we received when we moved here actually made me spit my water out in shock. I’ve never seen such a thing.

We had two toilets with slow and constant leaks. Len is — well, this is not a medical diagnosis, exactly, because he refuses to get tested, but he is freaking deaf. He could not hear that the toilets were always running, around the clock, and so I suppose he decided that I was either engaging in hyperbole or lying or maybe delusional when I informed him that they were. It was not until he was confronted with an actual bill, which he confirmed by looking at the meter himself, showing we — just two people — were somehow using 13,000+ gallons of water each month that he finally accepted that perhaps I was actually just sharing important information and maybe we should take care of the toilet problem.

Look, it’s a constant source of friction and no, I do not know what his problem is. When asked, he will tell you that not only am I not a liar, I am also smarter than he is, and he knows perfectly well that he should both trust and listen to me. And yet he doesn’t. He won’t even take my word for it if I take a guess at how old a particular actor is or if I tell him who sings a certain song without Googling it for himself. But we’re not talking about that right now. We’re talking about the toilets.

So we found a dual-flush toilet for $99 at Lowe’s, bought two of them, and brought them home. I’d guess it took about 2 hours in total, maybe 3, for Len to remove the old ones and install the new ones. This was back in early February.

We just got our first water bill for a full month with the new toilets, and it went down by 36%. It is still a number that I feel is insane for water, but at least now it is not “Insane + $45.” It’s probably about as low as it can be considering the astronomical monthly base charge.

We moved in at the end of October. I noticed the toilet problem in early November. We fixed it in early February. We are finally seeing results now, in April. If we had fixed it when I first became aware of it, we would have seen the benefits in January. That’s three months of water wasted and three months of $45 a month wasted. The stupid toilets would have practically paid for themselves by now.

All this because Len just straight-up didn’t want to deal with it, so he pretended I was making it up.

You see what I’m getting at, yet?

**

January 22: “We have it totally under control.”
February 2: “It’s going to be fine.”
February 24: “The coronavirus is very much under control.”
February 25: “We’re very close to a vaccine.”
February 26: “The 15 cases within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.”
February 27: “One day like a miracle, it’ll disappear.”
March 2: “A lot of very exciting things are happening.”
March 6: “I think that we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down. A tremendous job at keeping it down.”
March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine-tuned plan at the White House for our attack on the coronavirus.”
March 10: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
March 13: All hell breaks loose.

**

It’s not like mobilizing against a deadly pandemic is the same thing as replacing a couple of leaky toilets. Except… it’s kind of the same?

We’re talking about problems that were known and obvious months in advance. The people in charge of managing these situations chose to ignore them, alternately denying there was a problem and accusing the messengers of making the problem up. There were consequences for those choices.

No one is going to die because it took me three months to convince Len we needed to replace the toilets. The cost is simple to calculate. His stubborn stupidity cost us $135 that we have already absorbed without undue difficulty. But how many people will die because Donald Trump waited two months to decide this was really happening? And is that a cost we can just absorb?

How many people are suffering, scared, alone, unemployed, fighting for their lives, grieving, right now, because Donald Trump thought it was more beneficial, to him, to accuse the media and the Democrats of being out to get him than to address a looming problem head-on?

How many people will suffer, lose their jobs, lose their homes, lose their lives, because Donald Trump and his Fox News flunkies told them this was a hoax, it was no big deal, it was just a bad cold?

There is no way to ever know that answer. We can say with some certainty that fewer people than this would have become sick, fewer people than this would have died. The economic impact? That’s a whole other kettle of fish. It’s largely out of his hands, too — but it’s very hard for our elected representatives to enact any kind of real public relief when the president is pretending nothing is happening.

(It is very hard for our elected representatives to enact any kind of real public relief at any time anyway and I do not have high hopes for their ongoing support, but the president’s two months of head-in-the-sand lies caused incalculable financial damage to millions of Americans.)

This is a devastating, crippling failure on every level. It is shameful and embarrassing. Every terrible thing about our country has finally been fully exposed, and the full picture is ugly beyond description. And yet.

It is never too late to do better.

We have to do better. We are the heroes we have been waiting for. (Spoiler: we have always been the heroes we have been waiting for.) We are competent and capable and compassionate grownups who can build a better world for ourselves and our children. And quite frankly, an awful lot of us have nothing better to do right now anyway, so we may as well start. Today. Right now.

First things first: STAY HOME.

**

I have been looking online for materials and patterns to make cotton face masks. I am not a sewer. Wait, that’s not right. I am not a seamstress. I have not used a sewing machine since I was in 7th or 8th grade. I do not own a sewing machine.

But I am pretty crafty. I am fairly dexterous. I am good at following patterns. I feel confident in my ability to complete this kind of task.

And so I am looking at sewing machines on the internet at 2 in the morning. Apparently there is already a whole cottage industry springing up around this on Etsy. I feel uncomfortable presuming I will be able to do this well enough to charge people money for my work. I feel weird and bad about potentially profiting off of it. But I also feel helpless and useless, especially while my partner heads into his “essential personnel” job each day and I sit at home, pacing and snuggling the dog.

My preferred coping mechanism in troubled times is getting out into the world and interacting with other people, especially strangers. I can’t do that now. So… I suppose I will learn to sew.

I have a roof over my head. There is plenty of food in the kitchen. I love people and I am loved. We can pay our bills. We can even pay our bills if Len loses his job. I am so damn lucky. I always have been, it’s turned out, when everything shakes out.

Time to give back. Whatever little way I can.