The World's Shittiest Metaphor

The Curse of Generation-X: a Septic Saga as Allegory

I didn’t want to write about raw sewage overflowing the landscape. I really didn’t. But here we are. And when literal shit begins to surface, it brings the figurative feces to light, too.

Growing up as the caboose of the Generation X train, in a hipster boomtown, means carrying a lot of baggage, most of it heavy. When I was still a teenager, my peers started dying. Not my classmates, but the older people I spent my extracurricular time with: my companions in smoke-filled dance clubs, weed-smoking buddies, high school pals to skip middle school with, and general slackers hanging out on the drag, in coffee shops. To this day, friends of the last three-plus decades and I will ask each other, “Is it normal to have lost so many people in our circle?” As I quietly slip into middle age, it seems possible that it is not typical, and that the countless drug overdoses and suicides punctuating the years are like grim signposts hinting at something rotten at the core of my generation’s soul.

The past is, as they say, prelude.

Act 1: The Past Comes Back to Haunt Us

Growing up Gen X in Austin, Texas meant always being in the thrall of sneering, edgy white guys. My entire youth was spent in the shadow of angry young men wielding the puffed-up, projected sword of their intellect to cut the world down to size—if only in their minds. Riding high on the misogyny, casual racism, and homophobia of the 80s, the men dominating the scenes I orbited created a toxic atmosphere where the only way to thrive as a young woman was to become one of them. Sleeping with them lowered you to below their level, but meeting them where they were—laughing along, cultivating a snide cruelty of one’s own—could at least ensure a place at the table. I took my seat and feasted, realizing too late that intellect without compassion is the blade of the vivisectionist, rather than the surgeon. I was a bleeding heart surrounded by butchers and their apprentices.

My 82-year-old mother-in-law is easy, as MILs go. A considerate and doting guest/Granny (so politely British, I joke that if she cut a finger off she would timidly ask us if it’s not too much of a bother if she might please have a plaster to stop it from bleeding on anything). Plus, she comes during school holidays, which—despite keeping us tethered to home—allows us a reprieve from Charlie’s bottomless need for attention. This spring break, her presence meant we could don our gay apparel (canvas overalls, goggles, leather gloves, and cutting apparatuses) and get down to some extensive, much-needed outdoor maintenance.

First, we cut down an Elaeagnus, a hulking shrub whose entire purpose on our property seems to have been the harboring of other even less desirable invasive plants: brambles and elderberry saplings. After battling this beast for hours, we were emboldened to weed whack (Chris uses the more civilized term “strim,” a diminution of “string trim” which feels too sanitized for me) the north side of the house, a riot of weeds contained by a long fenceline. This side of the house is no man’s land, shaded by a huge acacia and framing a magnificent view, but always overgrown with nettles and brambles, teeming with chiggers in the summer, and overlaid above our home’s crude and poorly designed wastewater drainage system.

I cut the area back once a year to harvest the tart red plums on an ancient wild plum tree straddling the fence line between us and the neighboring farmer’s cows.

Feeling feisty, he with his gas-powered machine and me with my electric, we whack the shit out of some weeds. The work is tiring, loud, and satisfying. By and by, the ground becomes visible, the area passable. We are civilizing this jungle! We bring order to this chaos! Behold, we are imposing our will on this land, and it will soon be tamed so that we can dare venture here without protective gear. Pulverized nettles hit my face, stinging slightly. Brambles as big around as my index finger are loosed from their moorings and thornily spin around the head of my weedwhacker, menacing as a medieval weapon. Wet clods splash my cheeks—crushed snail? juicy stem? something worse? I don’t worry about it. We descend the slope, edging ever closer to the massive junipers at the corner. The dreadful corner where the mysterious septic system lurks.

My weed-whacker battery dies, and I hear my husband cursing. Loudly. Uncharacteristically loudly. The man IS British. {The only time he shouts is in his workshop—and I come running, certain he’s cut off a finger in one of his huge machines, he looks at my terrorized expression dumbfounded and explains some minor machine issue, and I feel relieved, and annoyed. We repeat this at least every couple of months and I never, ever, ever assume anything but the worst every time he shouts in his workshop, even after years of this routine.}

”The septic is overflowing”, he says grimly. His expression is dark. “I’m going to have to see if there’s a clog.”

I have feared this day for years. We both have. Raw turds waft, stinking, from an overflow.

A septic reckoning has arrived.

Act 2: We Face the Fetid Music

We didn’t have cell phones, computers were few and far between. Our parents were busy and we let ourselves into empty houses after school. No one was watching out for us—not our parents or the politicians who quietly eroded every already-flimsy safety net protecting us from the worst. There were only a handful of homeless folks on the drag and we knew them all by name or made up names (i.e. the Karate Bum) for them. The Gulf Wars began and we learned that Arabs were terrorists. Monica Lewinsky happened and everyone laughed because she was fat, no one ever considered her a victim. We didn’t know it would take decades to recognize and heal from the wounds we received in this era. To grow up in this time was to mine for meaning in a dayglo wave of denial. We took a lot of drugs, trying to get away from a reality as banal as it was superficial. It was a perilous place for the soft, the sensitive, the gentle. So many of them didn’t make it.

At some point, my nonstop sarcasm slowed. Probably around the time I lost my mean streak and stopped trying to be perceived as cool. When I started wanting to give back to the world instead of just taking. Snatching a sense of wonder out from the jaws of the cynicism and growing materialism of the 90s is a victory and no small feat. A sea change.

There is no such thing as “away.” Something flushed does not merely disappear, in the same way that all of the horrors of the world don’t stop happening just because you close the browser window, turn off the TV, or fold and put away the newspaper. City people in the developed world don’t know this, because their sewer lines spirit away all of their wastewater into a larger municipal system, one where mysterious and highly technical processes are used to separate the solids (and I don’t mean “number 2” oh no, I do not) from the liquids. The solids — which include paper, tampons, condoms, Q-tips, dental dams, orthodontic retainers (I mean that’s where mine went, thanks Grandad, may you rest in peace along with my very short-lived straight lower teeth), baby wipes, Dude Wipes™ (dudes, you are using baby wipes, get over it, and also thanks for your contribution to the world’s Fatbergs™), unfortunate goldfish, hypodermic needles, narcotics, expired pharmaceuticals, and so much more — get separated from the liquids and skimmed or dredged off to the great landfill of eternity. Or at least the next several centuries. (the word for century in French is siècle, like “cycle” which I love) And the liquids get clarified, disinfected, and ready for another round of potable-quality life…as tap water.

But we aren’t city people, meaning that what happens in our toilet stays here at Guillamare, albeit in a dank and mysterious place, shrouded in darkness and underground. Where we like it to be. Away. Mysterious. Out of sight.

I’m going to be honest with you. I will fall down a rabbit hole of research at the drop of a hat. Do I need to know every single detail about Roman cement and how it was created? Absolutely I do. Is it critically important that I understand how ruminant animals ruminate? You betcha. My burning need to understand exactly how various types of rubber bands are manufactured is a sacred thing that I am willing to devote untold amounts of time to learning about. Ditto for cutlery fabrication.

When it comes to a septic system, somehow my curiosity meets a dead end. I know that it works and that is enough. I’m good. It's there and that’s all I need to know.

My husband is less lucky because managing the system since we first arrived has been his job. Let’s just say that we got a significant discount from the asking price on the presumption that we would have to replace the septic, stat. Turns out that no, it just needed a repair, and Chris managed it with little complaint because he is some kind of handyman saint.

This time, no luck. It couldn’t be unclogged. It was time to call in the pros.

Calling the pros here often means dealing with a secretary who may or may not have a Gersois accent thick enough to cut with a knife. She may or may not have much patience for our incomprehension. We put the phone on speaker because, at this point, calls like this require a linguistic team effort. After much back and forth, the exasperated secretary explains that we need to find the access to the septic and open it up before she can schedule a technician to empty it.

This is not good news. There is nothing that we want to do less than this task.

That’s not true. Using a camp-style bucket toilet for the rest of our lives here is less appealing than finding the opening to the Pit of Despair. So here we go. The moment of truth is upon us, and we are going to have to dig for it.

When he sold us Guillamare, Fritz (may he rest in peace) told us that his father once spent days with a shovel trying to find the opening of our septic tank, to no avail. He said a lot of things, variously true and untrue. We hope that this one was hyperbole.

We begin the process of digging, cutting, cursing. My face looks like this the entire time. I am trying to wear a game face, but it is not possible. My hyper-sensitive nose says NO.

And yet we persist.

We dig for a long time, in a large area. Mostly Chris digs. I make terrible faces and rake material out of the way. He hits concrete. The contours of The Truth are emerging from the muck. We discover a…layer of plastic. Of empty, thick plastic bags (the huge kinds that construction sand comes in, probably leftover from when our home was being built), multiple layers thick, rendered slick and black with time, moisture, and horror. Peeling them back, we discover the concrete lid to the septic tank.

A tank that has likely not seen the light of day since this house was constructed half a century or so ago. Chris uses the corner of a shovel to trace the perimeter of the square lid, cut into the concrete at a slight angle so it’s wider at the top. I frown my frowniest, most miserable frown. “I hope the lid doesn’t fall in,” he says hopefully as he pries open the edge.

The joke is on us. The lid could never fall in. It is full. SOLID. Compelled to research French fosse septique systems that day, I had already discovered that there is a word for this in the parlance of French septic technicians: la galette. My friends. This is a solid mass of…shudder…decades of septic solids. And the French call it “COOKIE.”

I hope I haven’t ruined your lunch, or breakfast, or cookies. But there you have it.

We excitedly call the secretary to explain that we have opened the septic’s great unblinking eye and that it peered back at us: magnificent, putrid, and perfectly solid.
She assures us this is normal and schedules a technician.

We close the hatch on the galette and breathe a revolting sigh of relief.

The worst is over.

Act 3: This Hero Sucks Shit. (only a Gen Xer would type that)

The worst part about growing up in Gen X slacker culture is the nihilism, the cynicism, and the hopelessness we were expected to wear as a badge of honor. The original “you can’t fire me, I quit” crowd, ready to fire off a smartass quip and ride off into the next minimum wage job. We learned how to criticize a world we despised, but not how to imagine and construct one we loved. No one prepared us for the reality of being adults. The timeline littered with bodies as proof. How many years of deprogramming does it take to imagine oneself as part of the vibrant, beating world? To want to fight for a future we might not live to see? How many past selves have to die to give birth to one hopeful one, willing to carry a lantern into uncertainty? To roll up our sleeves and suffer not because it feels good but because we know it is the only way through? Because to be a part of this living, beautiful world is to at least honor it with some pass-it-forward decency. Because there is hope, and that is enough.

The day comes. Our hero arrives several hours early, before lunchtime. This is noteworthy because lunchtime is a sacred time for the French. You can invite your Dutch or British or German friends over for lunch at 1 o’clock, but your French friends? You better have something on the table at noon sharp, because that is the hour when approximately 68 million French people sit down and eat their lunch.

The man could be a university professor. His serious face is studious and bespectacled. He wears a worksuit and hat branded with the logo of the septic company. His enormous truck rumbles down the driveway, only possible because of the soul-crushing volume of low-hanging branches we removed last year to make way for the driveway repair job. I feel giddy, nervous, afraid. What does this mean, the “vidage” of a septic system? How does it work?

I do not shake his hand, mostly because he springs into action the moment he steps foot on our property. He drags an impossibly long snake of a tube across the west flank of our home, past the laying hens, and over the wall towards the ominous fosse septique. The man is wiry, steely, unflappable. His truck is bellowing, diesel fumes belching hotly onto a patch of grass near the foxgloves. The smell of burning diesel is unbearable even in a cacophony of unbearable smells. I watch from a safe distance.

He moves the tip of the tube to the surface of the galette, caressing the surface gently until the opening is parallel to the surface, kissing it with its open, gently roaring mouth. And suddenly, making contact, it’s engorged. The snake is writhing, rolling, jerking around like an angry, alive thing. The sun shines overhead and I feel something like joy welling up in my heart. I remember that “Septic Tank” is Cockney rhyming slang for “Yank.” As in Yankee. In some alternate linguistic universe, I am the septic tank. We are all the septic tanks of our collective lived experiences, for better or worse.

But that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to our toxic traits, our worst wounds and our angriest affects. Observing the septic snake disgorge decades of filth from the earth gives me a sense of newness. A break in the pattern, a stop to the limiting beliefs and smug cynicism of an inauspicious youth. The spice must flow!

The sucking goes on forever, lunch hour comes and goes, along with my appetite, frankly. I pick berries and pull weeds in the garden, peering towards the giant tanker in the distance from time to time, watching the hose twitch and roil with purpose. And then, finally, it is over.

The decades of effluent have been purged, our humble hero collects a well-deserved check for several hundred euros (a bargain by any measure), and drives off into the not-quite sunset, leaving a yellow, burned-out spot where the exhaust breathed onto the grass. The empty tank is immense, easily 15 feet deep. A chasm waiting to be filled over the decades to come.

Actual footage of me and Chris after Mr Vidage departs:

I’ve been quietly processing a lot lately, and gardening just up to the edge of physical injury. The exhaustion has been bone-deep, but so has the contemplation, the consideration, the sense of renewal, and the feeling of an opening up— a capacity for new and unknown things to come.

So, my fellow “Septics,” are you ready to purge some years of pent-up shit? It’s a weird year in a weird decade in a weird century in a weird millennium. The least we can do is be the change we want to see in the world by letting go of the baggage weighing us down. Or at least find a way to laugh about it.

As always, I send love, solidarity, and hope in a world that needs more of that and less of everything else.