Toilet Paper Mountain

 

While I was out walking in the mountains, I came upon a section of hillside that was comprised entirely of rolls of toilet paper. It had been an abandoned factory, an underground paper mill that had collapsed, leaving a feathery, pillowy wall of disintegrating toilet tissue as a memorial. Naturally, it was a sought out tourist destination for thrillseekers with a macabre taste for haunted venues.

People would reenact the collapse of the factory, entering the mineshaft-like maze through any number of manhole-sized passageways or bomb shelter door type openings at the top of the mountain, which had a well-maintained city park on its plateaued pinnacle.

I witnessed a bunch of people emerging from the mound, wrapped in shreds of the decaying toilet paper, laughing as if they'd just reached the end of a particularly exciting amusement park ride.

"Break on through!" and "Let's go again!" they shouted, wiping bits of tissue from their lips.

I saw Manuel Silva eagerly looking for one of the openings. He was with a group of people, but they weren't acknowledging him at all. One of them was McCoy, from Star Trek, and the other was that actor who plays Mini Me. They both walked faster and feigned deafness as Silva tried to engage them.

"Hey, wait, guys," he pleaded, to no avail. 

"They're gone, man," I told him.

"That's ok," he told me. "Looky what I found!"

His excitement was undiminished, as he'd found an opening to the factory. It was a standard manhole cover. He pried it open and found a small stream running beneath it. It was mostly filled in, and a person would have to crawl over some wet rocks for quite a ways in order to get anywhere. 

I was underimpressed and suggested we look for a different entryway. Soon, we found a more suitable entrance, an old metal plate door, typical of cold war era bomb shelters. He swung it open, and down we went into the cavernous labryinth. 

"Didn't a lot of people die in here?" I asked as we followed the shaft deeper into the heart of the mountain.

"More people still will," he said ominously.

The walls were a moist, mossy earth, and there was a chill in the stale air. We walked on until we reached a large open room near the site of the original cave in. It had been re-excavated at some point, and a car dealership now resided there. This open area was supposed to be the showroom, but it had a bit too much dirt still on the floors to be very showy.

"How do they get the cars in and out of here?" I wondered out loud.

I didn't get an answer. At that moment there was a rumble, and the walls started to shake. Parts of the ceiling were giving way, crumbling in a torrent of damp dirt clods. There was a growing excitement in the crowd.

"This is it! Break on through!" the enthusiastic tourists shouted.

With dirt raining down around them, they began frantically digging at one wall. After a seeming eternity, someone reached the layers of old toilet paper rolls which comprised the outside wall of the mountainside. Using a breaststroke-like technique, they swam their way through the fuzzy substrate, emerging, breathless, into the sunlight. 

"Hallelujah! We're born again!" the enthusiasts exclaimed. "Go again?"

I didn't opt to go again. I was magically transported, well, not so magically-- just a quick cut scene, and I was back at my house. I arrived just in time to witness a huge water drainage problem that threatened to flood my garage.

I'd dug trenches around the house and cleaned the rain gutters in preparation for the runoff from a recent rainstorm. The storm had left a permanent stream flowing right in front of my house, and there was a waterfall depositing water on my roof that was swelling my rain gutters to capacity. 

There wasn't anything more I could do, so I just stood there, mesmerized by the flowing water.

"Someone really ought to have planned this out better, when choosing this as a home site," I mused to myself.

Then I woke  up. I was 7:44 AM. Saturday, my favorite.