i fished my first thing out of the toilet for reuse. it was a pair of tweezers. i saved them for two reasons. first, i didn't think i could successfully flush them down and secondly, we use tweezers a lot in this house. unfortunately, we don't use them for fun things like shaping my chest hair into a bold triangular mass like nic cage had in valley girl (although, if i had more than seven chest hairs spanning my chest, we just might be doing that). we instead use tweezers for splinter extraction and dangly skin removal and dropped screw (in toy) retrieval.

losing a pair of tweezers to the toilet was inevitable because of the way alex uses them while going pee. you see, alex is a nail fetishist. he loves clipping and pruning and detailing his nails. marty or i haven't clipped his nails in over a year. i'm sure 6 in 10 korean nail places would hire him tomorrow if i'd allow it. a couple times a month you'll find alex standing before the toilet, his batman underwear pushed down around his ankles, his wispy thighs leaning against the bowl's rim supporting his weight, his bladder long since emptied, even that lingering hanger-on drop has fallen or dissipated from his penis. he is lost in what he's doing. all his focus is directed at a single fingernail. all of this energy is put towards manipulating the too-large and hard-to-hold clippers to make that next cut just right. when he's shaped and cleaned his last nail he looks up and slowly reorients to his surroundings, coming out of the temporary fog he was standing within.

having watched his ritual more than once it is easy to know it would take just one lapse in thought to loose the clippers or tweezers to the bottom of the bowl. on the positive side, it's impressive it hasn't happened before now. on the down side, in the best of scenarios, you know you have at least one tiny bladder's worth of urine waiting to coat the fallen instrument when it does go in the drink. the most encouraging part of this story is after he asked me to help and after he showed me what happened and after my face sagged at the sight and after i showed him how to fish them out with a bent coat hanger and after we washed them in the sink, alex turned to me and said that he though about just flushing the toilet but knew that was a bad choice and came and got me instead. if that isn't a happy ending to a very long chapter, they just don't exist.