The mental image of being held down and having water poured over you to the point that you feel as if you are drowning only to be given a moment's respite to gasp for breath before once again being plunged beneath the water is truly awful and terrifying. It also seems to very much akin to the experience of owning a home. Well in particular very much like owning my home.
Homeownership seems to be at best a zero sum game. At worst, i.e. at present, it is far far below coming even close to balancing out. After every trial, after every tribulation, after every problem, after every new expense there is always another. With barely a moment's respite to regain your breath between each saga before being once again plunged into the despair of the latest project/disaster/flood etc.
Last night I ended up having a rare evening of being at home rather than out working and also not feeling so beat down by the world that I actually felt like getting some things done instead of making the committed effort to vegitate into a barnacle like growth on my couch. I made dinner, did a backlog of dishes, vacuumed, cleaned up, took out the trash, etc etc etc. In all, a remarkably productive evening for me. So at around 11pm at the end of my whirlwind of effort I headed downstairs to throw a load of clothes into my new modern state of the art laundry center. And as I came to the bottom of the basement stairs I stepped onto the basement carpet and felt and heard a "squish".
Having just signed away my life, first and second born children, and a kidney or two to pay for repairs to the sewer system; the worst most tortuous awful thing I could possibly have heard was the sound of more water in my basement. The feeling goes beyond rational or even irrational emotions. Dumbfounded and flabbergasted only begin to crack the surface of defining the feeling. Waterboarding comes perhaps only slightly closer.
There is no emotional outporing that can come close to expressing this feeling of utter and abject despair. No amount of yelling, crying, pounding fists, screaming or anything else seems to provide any relief whatsoever.
After spending a few stunned seconds squishing around at the foot of the stairs letting the weight of things settle in, I began to search out the source of this water. It turns out that it is at least not directly related to the recent sewer work. That all seems fine. Turns out the crack-addicted, half blind, mostly retarded, idiot plumber that the former owners must have hired to have plumbing work done around the house had... we'll call it "botched" (in a fairly large way) the connection from the washing machine drain connection to the rest of the plumbing system. As best I can figure most of the water that went into the washer to do a load of laundry ended up leaking out around the pvc connection they failed to glue and thusly ended up on the floor.
At this point the emotions shift back to the realm of expressable. Cursing, yelling, throwing things and punching walls are well suited means of expressing the grief, anger and contempt for the work of this former plumber.
With hacksaw and pvc glue in hand I crawled behind the washer and made a temporary repair to the affected drain. Tonight, or at some point this weekend I'll go head over to my good friend Homer's for some plumbing parts to complete repairs and once again restore order and some semblance of dryness to my basement.
Of course at this point I'm torn. If I move forward on reparing this problem and once again fix things I would then once again at a point of contented stasis. This state of well-being and contentment seems to be heavily frowned upon by my home. Maybe by leaving this alone and dealing with water water everywhere will appease my home and we will be able to agree to disagree.