I had the shittiest dream

I dreamed the toilet overflowed in dramatic and horrifying fashion.

Way more shit came up than originally went in. There was also cat food coming out of the toilet. It was dry food and then also large chunks of seafood in serving sizes meant for a person, which my cats don’t eat. I was plunging furiously with a plunger that had seen better days. It was early in the morning and I had to clean it up before Steve got up to get ready for work. I warned him not to poop until he got to work but he said, “I don’t think it will hold.”

Mercifully, I woke up, so I missed how it ended.

This happened to me twice at the shore house. Not the cat food in the toilet — just the general idea of overflowing. The first incident was a few years ago. We had the bathroom used by the largest number of people and I guess after a few days of people pooping, the toilet had too much. I woke up to pee one morning and it overflowed. “Shit,” I muttered, aptly. I cleaned up but couldn’t fall back to sleep after that and it kind of set the tone for the day.

It happened again last summer. The odd thing was that we were in our own bathroom and nobody else was using it and the toilet still overflowed. It’s not like I had been crapping more than usual, either. It was intractably blocked and we had to call the real estate company so they could send a plumber over. The plumber said it happens frequently in that house. Maybe the week before it had started to stop up with the previous guests and I was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

This was especially annoying because we were conscientious enough to buy single-ply toilet paper that wouldn’t stop up the toilet and it still didn’t work. Is there anything more annoying than fixing a clogged toilet, especially on vacation?

Bathroom malfunctions bother me because we only have one so we can’t just start using the other toilet when something happens. Our toilet once had been draining slowly and I bought this unclogging solution just to prevent an actual overflow. It was some kind of acid that was so dangerous that the plastic bottle came wrapped in a plastic bag. I was too nervous to try it and risk hurting myself so I returned it. Luckily, the toilet started draining on its own.