On the Black Goo

I’m not much of a handyman. Nobody in my immediate nuclear family was ever super into tinkering. Sure, I have cousins and uncles whose garages were always full of car parts and dirt bike engines, whose fingernails always had motor oil under them, and whose hands were calloused with the signs of mechanical knowledge gained…but my parents? They were more into the, “call a professional who has spent years of their lives to understand how these complicated doo-dads work and let them parse out the problem,” method. I’ve been in their camp for most of my life, but recently, I grabbed our tool bag and figured some shit out myself…and it was pretty gross.

Disclaimer to our landlord who definitely doesn’t read this Substack, but knowing my luck would absolutely read this one: this is an entirely fictional series of events and is intended only as entertainment and not as a breach of some strange clause in our lease… ;)

For a few weeks now, maybe months, our bathroom sink has gotten progressively worse and worse at doing its job, draining. We’d tried everything we could think of to make it better: mostly ignoring it and hoping it got better on its own. We also tried taking turns telling each other that we thought it was getting slightly worse…surprisingly neither of these approaches fixed it.

When we finally actually tried snaking the drain…the drain stopper wasn’t centered enough to allow the snake to do its job. We were once again, back to telling each other that it was getting worse and then doing nothing about it. Sure, we could email our landlord, but what if they found like… too much hair or floss or something in there that would let them bill us thousands of dollars?? So, we just went back to ignoring it.

That is, until one day when I went under our bathroom sink to grab extra toilet paper and noticed that our pipes…weren’t that complicated…and probably wouldn’t require special tools to take apart…and were calling to me like some sort of plumbing siren. I told Cece, “Hey, I…uh, think I can take apart the sink and try to fix it.” Like the angel she is, she told me to knock myself out.

One day, after another twenty fruitless job applications, I rolled up my sleeves and decided to take destiny into my own hands. I grabbed our bag of tools, some rubber gloves, and a big bucket, and I took that mother fucker apart…and my GOD the STENCH of the BLACK GOO that came out of those pipes!

I know plumbing is full of gross stuff but this wasn’t a toilet, it wasn’t even a kitchen sink full of food scraps! It was a bathroom sink and it was DISGUSTING. The things I pulled out of there didn’t even make sense physics-wise. They were like non-Newtonian fluids! I spent the next hour snaking that drain, pulling scientifically mysterious substances out of it, and periodically going into the kitchen and dry heaving over a different sink.

By the end of my journey, though, the sink drained, I hadn’t destroyed anything (except my appetite for dinner), and I felt a sense of accomplishment I’d only ever seen sitcom fathers attain. I also realized that plumbers deserve to be paid exactly as much as professional athletes! 

What household tasks have you accomplished that you thought were outside of your abilities?