Golden shower

Let me reassure you that I am not purposely trying to raise this site's Google ranking, even though I've written blog entries entitled Fornication, Fellatio, My black penis, and Anus. My life just seems to invoke porno culture more than others, that's all.

Take this morning for example. It's almost lunchtime and it's Monday and I'm starving, but before I leave my desk, I need to do something about that strange dripping noise coming from the ceiling of my office. It's bugging the hell out of me, that tapping sound I hear against the cheap mineral fiber ceiling tiles, like: thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud. The tapping/dripping sound that has passed the "unbearably annoying" threshold ten minutes ago, I don't know why it's happening. Sure it's a rainy day, but I don't have a window office. Why would there be water in my ceiling?

A couple of my coworkers start zipping up their jackets in front of my door -- their sign for "it's time for lunch, Pete, let's get going" -- but I hold a finger against my mouth and try to listen for the dripping sounds.

"You guys hear that?" I ask.

The blank looks and shrugs force my hand. I push my chair over to the corner of my office and then stand on it while cupping a hand around my ear, tilting the side of my head carefully towards the ceiling.

"I... I just don't understand. Why is there this sound coming from my ceiling? How can there be water up there?"

And then suddenly, comically, inevitably: water sprays me in the face, like it's angry with me, like it's a water-squirt flower from a mischievous clown's lapel. The ceiling has obviously sprung a leak.

Everyone -- my lunch buddies plus a handful of other curious passersby wondering why I'm standing on my chair -- laughs their asses off, until, in unison, our eyes notice something completely disgusting.

The water leaking out of the ceiling is yellow.

Turns out, right above my office is the 20th floor men's room. Turns out a toilet had flooded really bad up there. The building's chief engineer told me he'd caulk the tile around the toilet upstairs so this would never happen again in the future, but what's done is done.

These are the kind of things that happen to me. I don't ask you to understand why or how, because trust me, I'm absolutely clueless. It's frustrating. Am I just the unluckiest person in the world? Why is it that the one time I sit up in the front row of an improv sketch show at Second City, one of the performers accidentally spits into my open, laughing mouth? Why is it that the time I take a picture of a high-rise squeegee guy from outside my window, I almost send him plummeting to his death because I forgot to turn the flash off of my digital camera? Why is it that when I go shopping for a baby shower at the last minute, the only thing left to buy on the registry is a, oh God, a breastfeeding pump? Why? WHY? WHY?! Why me?

"Your life is such a movie," my roommate said after I told him the story and showed him a picture of the vase I used to collect the leaking urine from my ceiling.

I sighed. "No, my life is a porno."

Then I looked once more at the photo of the pee-filled vase, laughed a little, and added, "And I suppose this is my money shot."