Toilet trouble.

Well, now. Not a very promising header to this post, is it?

Come with me, my friend, as we solve one of the great toilet mysteries of our time...

[Scene wavers like on old sitcoms when they would do flashbacks]

There is a toilet in the house, right outside my office, that is my toilet. Ha ha! I mean, yes, others may use that bathroom, but they seldom choose to. Its position and the fact that it has the shower that I use really makes it my domain. And I am king of my domain. (When asked what the secret to a happy marriage is, my wife says "Separate bathrooms.")

I had noticed something strange about my toilet, though. Something that seemed to indicate a problem -- perhaps with the plumbing? Or perhaps... DEATH?

The problem was not that the toilet wouldn't stop running, although the flapper had reached the age where some handle-jiggling was occasionally required. No, the problem was the black gunk that was appearing in the bowl. Little flecks of black coating the bowl in the water areas. Nothing like this was seen in other non-me-related toilets.

Weird! Is this some strange byproduct of the man who uses it? Some sign of kidney disease? Colon cancer? DEATH? 

It probably did not originate with me, I reflected. The water spouts in the toilet rim were blackened too, as if the water was itself poisoned with some blackish, brackish residue.

Hey, I drink this stuff! So does my wife! Well, after it's been turned into coffee. So do the dogs! We're all gonna DIE!

But then there was that pesky matter of the other toilets not looking this way.

So I would scrub the bowl as needed and figured I'd eventually find out the answer to the Case of the Blackened Toilet or die.

Then the day came when I had enough of that stupid handle jiggling. I found a new flap in the cellar, brought it upstairs, opened the tank, and -- gasp! -- there was a piece of metal sitting on the bottom of the tank, a small chunk of steel. Had it broken off from some toilet part? Is that why it's still running?

Well, no.

What you see here is the rack that hung on the side of the tank. The rack held two reserve rolls of TP. There was a clip that held it on, a clip that rusted off in time and sank to the bottom, where it steadily degraded into black flecks.

Mystery solved.

[Scene wavers again like on old sitcoms, returning to present]

Now, you may say I'm an idiot for worrying about this instead of just looking in the tank, and you'd be right. But I had looked in the tank and saw nothing. The clip was seeding the water before it rusted off entirely, and I didn't notice that was degenerating from the bottom up until it came off entirely.

So, not my finest handyman hour, but the mystery was solved. The rack is gone; spare rolls are kept under the sink as in days gone by. No more black stains, and I'm not dying anymore. Plus the toilet doesn't keep running after you flush. My kingly domain is once more at peace.