Doug Clark: Dreams of space travel down the toilet

I have given up on my lifelong dream of being an astronaut – and not just because I’m old, overweight and have been known to upchuck on carnival rides.

My spaceman desires died last week after reading the following first sentence of an Associated Press story:

“The International space station’s lone toilet is broken, leaving the crew with almost nowhere to go.”

Space. The fecal frontier.

That’s not the Star Trek image I grew up with.

And what’s this cockamamie “lone toilet” business?

I’m no rocket scientist. But a fern or our Republican county commissioners are smart enough to NOT design a space station with one potty. Make a mistake like that at a ballpark and you could have a riot on your hands, especially on cheap beer night.

Blasting off in a rocket once seemed like the coolest thing you could do. Visiting Uranus and wiping out Klingons had a whole different meaning.

Space was sexy, too. Like when Jane Fonda performed an anti-gravity striptease in the 1968 documentary “Barbarella.”

Nobody ever equated exploring the cosmos with broken commodes.

You don’t have to leave Earth to worry about stuff like that. All you have to do is own a home.

Speaking of which, the Clarks have been dealing with a haunted toilet. Really. The thing flushes at random and unsettling times like in the middle of the night when nobody’s using it.

“Ker-floosh!”

I’m sure there’s a completely rational explanation. A poltergeist with an overactive bladder, say.

It’s easy to take plumbing for granted until something goes awry.

Like the 2,000 gallons of raw sewage that accidentally oozed into Lake Coeur d’Alene the other day from a septic tank at an Arrow Point luxury resort.

Oh, well. At least it was affluent effluent.

The 11,000 gallons of raw sewage that poured into Hayden Lake was blamed on a pipe plugged by flushed diapers and baby wipes.

That’s way more disgusting.

The point is that being an astronaut is dangerous enough. They shouldn’t have to worry about septic failures.

The lack of gravity that made Jane Fonda such a flotation vice, for example, would have a disastrous effect in the event of a sewage leak. Can you imagine being stuck in a space capsule filled with floating poo-lution?

I’d order my crewmates to shove me out the nearest airlock.

The good news is that parts to repair the space latrine were supposedly on shuttle Discovery, which dropped by the international space station Monday.

Isn’t that just like NASA? Too cheap to send a plumber.

But at least our poor astronauts will no longer have to go No. 1 in the Soyuz return capsule toilet, which, according to the AP story, “has a limited capacity.”

I sure don’t like the sound of that.

The solid waste collector has apparently still been working. That’s a relief.

I logged some computer time last week researching the subject of space bathrooms and here’s what I found:

“The space station toilet … has leg restraints and thigh bars to keep astronauts and cosmonauts from floating away.”

Leg restraints? Thigh bars?

That’s no toilet. That’s Saturday night with Amy Winehouse.

And get a load of these instructions on how to use a Zero Gravity Toilet.

“When operating System A, depress lever and a plastic dalkron eliminator will be dispensed through the slot immediately underneath. When you have fastened the adhesive lip, attach connection marked by the large X outlet hose. Twist the silver colored ring one inch below the connection point until you feel …”

That’s it. I’m grounded. I don’t have the right stuff for space.

As Capt. Kirk once said, “Beam me up, Potty.”