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Moment | Dec 10 2002

My button fell into a toilet full of pee. I had to reach in and fish it out. I’ve been having this problem for some time now; months: the button falls off when I unbutton. It’s annoying. It’s the button on my pants, the one above the zipper, the one that, together with the zipper, holds my pants shut. What’s happening is, the little hole into which the button goes so as to attach it to my pants has torn or worn slightly, so that when I unbutton the button, the button pops out. Sometimes I don’t notice it until I feel the button roll down my leg or wedge against my thigh. Other times, like today, it pops out, like today, straight into the toilet.

The moment I grasped the two flaps of my pants and realized that the button was gone and that it had to have fallen into the toilet and that if I wanted it back I was going to have to reach through all that pee (I’d had a long, satisfying urination) was not let me tell you a happy moment.