The Dwyer Underbelly

Our target market 

is the man who can cut a hole in his roof 

while his wife is watching. 

- Owner of a do-it-yourself skylight company 

(that is probably not in business) 

While I'm nursing an ankle injury I suffered at Spartan Race three weeks ago, I'm not feeling very manly. I thought I'd try practicing the art of follow-through. Follow-through is the "six-pack abs" of virtues, and I've always had a beer belly when it comes to this one. So, today's show and tell is the equivalent of me moving beyond the wimpiness of my air brushed metaphysical abs. Besides, when your 1920s home has yet another clog, there's only so many times your manhood can bear your wife asking you, "Do you want me to call my dad?" This is rock bottom. It's what brings a man to resolve. 

A man sharing his plumbing project with the internet, is as naked and self-revelatory as you can get. It's the underbelly of his underfanny. Literally, when the pooper clogs, life clogs. Constipation of his pipes is constipation of his life. It's scary and emasculating. Constipation in life is what I regard as THE fundamental disease. It's stuckness. Lack of freedom. Lack of flow. It's trappedness. It's frustration. It's creation of walls and boundaries and borders and categories and classes and stale concepts and biases. It's entrapment in wells and pits of despair and ruts and inertia and shit in brains as much as shit in pipes. It's belief in permanence, in isolation. Fundamentally, it's a deception. 

Now, I'm NOT the kind of handy-manly man who rents a concrete saw for a weekend to cut a hole in his basement slab. Even less I'm I the man who digs a 10 foot trench to rebuild broken sewage lines while my wife watches. That's why I waited till Susie was 5500 miles away, in Istanbul Turkey.  Fundamentally, I HAD to try to unstick my stuckness. I HAD to agitate the system. I HAD to buy a sledgehammer and seismically shift things to the astral plane. 

Hi Honey! Have fun at Suleyman Mosque. We miss you.
Look what we did with the house while you were gone.

BEFORE - The 4" PVC ran above the slab. It was my plumber-endoresed temporary fix
while I saved money to pay for a safety net in the event that my DIY project went awry.

THE PROBLEM - one of many 1920's clay pipe joints that is broken and/or clogged with roots

MID PROCESS - It's beginning to come together. Plumbing is like a 3D jigsaw puzzle.
I have no spatial intelligence, so I had to call in help from a friend who's dad is a master plumber.

AFTER-- a smooth basement floor with a sewage line and floor drain that work!