When this image was shared with me via instagram as a guffaw, a surprised “really?,” I laughed, but then mostly I felt empathy. While I’ve never personally been so desperate  to pin my papers together with a bobby pin, I’m not unfamiliar with those kind of days of humorous desperation that culminate in using a hair implement to hold it all together. Heaven knows I’ve settled for less.  Some days when I want to cry at the pathetic mess I’m dealing with, when I’m in the thick of a ridiculous drama I’m subject too or the originator of, I realize perhaps the reason I feel so frazzled is because I’m pulling double duty as the pitiable, and as my own comic relief.

I must crave excitement in some sick fashion that I seem to create bizarre tragicomedies on a semi-regular schedule. Inspired by this hilarious and horrible doo-doo doozy, and for your perverse pleasure I now offer you my latest: Sunday night, twenty-four hours after my grandpa’s funeral, entirely emotionally eviscerated, I’ve only been home for less than one, and I’m staring at the commode, assessing the damage I’ve just put not just upon it, but specifically inside it. No, this is not a piece of potty humor that sends my children to time outs in the bathroom, no this doing is my doing, but the doo-doo is the cat’s, which she should have put in the toilet herself, but since things did not go according to plan, I had to put there myself.

Let me start further back. I adopted a potty-trained cat. It’s terrifying and thrilling to know you don’t need litter box and then terrifying again to panic and wonder where the cat is going to go if she doesn’t want to go on the toilet all of the sudden.Or can’t. Which is exactly what happened. Someone left the lid closed one day and Puffy the Taco Cat  (yes, that’s what the kids named her) decided the next best place was in the middle of the tufted living room rug. (It is new, it iI did not agree. I collected the tiny cat turds, flushed them down the toilet, and then proceeded to scrub out the rug, while trying to channel inner peace to my chakras, for surely the cat didn’t really mean to do that doo on my fluffy rug, right?

But a day or so later she did it again.

In an act that of (sort of) charity, to avoid temptation for yelling and other rash behaviors I put the cat outside while I dealt with the second mess of cat poops in the rug. There was no peace to channel in that moment, so instead I thanked myself for being stingy enough to only buy her dry cat food, resulting in tidier turds.  Yipee.  After clean up and a essential cooling period grumbling to myself about how I should find this cat a home that is not mine, I finally went to let the cat back in on probation. She didn’t show. I did her special whistle (yes, I magically trained the cat to come at a whistled tune) and walked around the yard: no cat. Figuring she was an animal and would survive the wilds of our residential street and she was choosing to stay out rather than come in, I let her. And went to bed.

Fast forward three weeks and many lost cat signs posted around our neighborhood and many prayers offered by my children that the Puffy would return home, I got a phone call.  I had been vacillating between guilt and acceptance that perhaps she wasn’t our cat. (She didn’t love our crazy household or kids as she had come from an apartment of the sweetest cat-spoiling couple who gave her lots of expensive wet cat food and made the investment to toilet train her in the first place.) Hopefully she had found her true home and been adopted into some quiet home that she adored. Nope. Just when I had figured she was out of my life, “Hi, I’m calling about Puffy the Taco Cat.”

I coaxed her out of the storm drain she was found in a block away with that special kitty whistle surrounded by a crowd of on-looking neighbors, then carried the cat who was no longer puffy but half of her original bulk home in a borrowed beach towel. I wondered if she had lost her magic toileteering skills during her time in the wilds of the neighborhood. She used the commode once to prove she still had it and I relaxed. AND THEN SHE POOPED ON THE RUG. And again. And once more for gusto. All the while the facebook boards for lost pets are pinging me congratulations me on Puffy’s return that I am now wishing maybe hadn’t happened.

But then as I let her out she decided to start doing business outside while still peeing exclusively in the toilet. That worked and I got to stop disinfecting the rug and the cat who was on the brink of being voted off this island extended her probation. And that worked fine until my grandpa died. And we had to leave the cat for the weekend. Fearing the cat would choose the fluffy, luxurious rug over the john my husband tossed some flushable litter in a battered cardboard box as we headed out.

Back at home I decide to flush the used contents of the box. In my emotional exhaustion and absence of functionality I decide to do it  all at once. As soon as I dump it, I cringe at my utter stupidity; this job won’t flush. Which of course I try to furiously flush hoping the toilet won’t realize my gaff. No. Those biodegradable pellets are expanding in the toilet ping, ping, ping. And I can’t find any of our toilet plungers I sure thought we moved with.

I’m not about to borrow a toilet plunger from the neighbors- that’s a very personal item.

I don’t care if it is Sunday. I head to the hardware store; this is clearly an emergency.

With a toilet plunger in my bag on my bike I head to the library to drop off an overdue book since I’m not ready to deal with home or humans or that hairball cat  just yet. I go inside and use their functional toilet. Relief. And check out some book reading candy for more before I head home.

I shoveled out the muck into the trash can for half an hour, trying to plunge and flush and failing, until FINALLY it all worked, and the toilet was flushing again. I scowled and swore, and then I laughed and laughed because I was I ran out of tears and that’s all that was left.

Then in that instagram picture I saw that bobby pin and wondered if her day was half the tragicomedy mine had been and so could I high five her through the magic of the internet and say, Congrats on making it through that day. I hope your desperation wasn’t so desperate, that you could still laugh at yourself as you frantically pulled that pin from your hair to hold the paper you didn’t/couldn’t/forgot to staple together. Comic relief is necessary release.  

I’m sure I got more than I needed that day, riding around town the a plunger on the back of my bike and a trashcan full of sewage to keep me to fill me up instead of dwelling in the void I felt from the death of my grandpa.  I know it’s disgusting, ridiculous, and there is nothing to do but laugh.

So I did.  And I’m glad.

Not for mess or the epic story of how it got there, but for the ability to laugh at it.

At least I’m keeping myself thoroughly entertained.