Mr. Leaver Outee

“Thanks for the help, Mr. Leaver-Outtee!” my wife bombed at me in a mixture of frustration, rage, bewilderment, and more rage. She calls me this, if you can’t guess, because I have a tendency to take things and leave them out on any one of the surfaces in our home, rather than put them away. These surfaces, covered either partially or totally with change, receipts, keys, tape measures, mugs, pens and other small pocket sized bits of life, are things that she spends considerable effort and time keeping smooth and clean. She’s right, of course. I am responsible for the vast majority of these things being placed on these surfaces. And honey, I’m sorry, but…

“Now see here, Mrs. Antique Canned Goods…” I usually begin my defense with an in-kind insult. You see, there are two kinds of people, those who can’t stand the sight of a mess and those who can’t stand the thought of a mess. My wife can’t stand the sight of a mess which is why she needs those surfaces to be clean. I can’t stand the thought of a mess, which is why I need to empty out my pockets. There is no point in my mind in taking the mess from my pockets and hiding it in some drawer, bowl, cabinet, or folder. I might as well leave it in my pockets, ready to transfer to tomorrow’s pockets, which I would do, were it not for the following rules of engagement regarding my pants.

The second my pants hit the floor, they contact a surface. This surface, before it was marred by my dropping pants, was clean and cleared of clutter, owing to the aforementioned efforts of my wife. Thus, my pants set off the equivalent of an air-raid siren. Rotating red lights come on and a calm but serious voice comes on over the loudspeaker, “Danger, surface has been compromised, floor breech, pants down on level 4, DEFCON 5, ladies and gentlemen, we are at war!” Being a loving parent, I dash to find my son. I scoop him up into my arms and dive under the nearest table. There I sit, either naked or in my underwear, cowering as the squadron that is my wife’s cleaning instinct flies overhead to neutralize the threatening armada of my pants. She seizes them, takes them prisoner, whisks them down to the interrogation room, tortures them briefly with some stain removing agent, and then drowns them in the wash. “Okay folks, it’s all over. You can go back to your homes.” the obviously relieved voice intones.

So, if I don’t remove the stuff from those pockets, its going into the wash, too. If you don’t believe me, just ask my wallet, or my paycheck, or that napkin on which I wrote that phone number. They know. The screws I need to put the door back on its hinges know too. Unfortunately, they are embedded in the lining of the dryer, accounting for its permanent clank, and because they are inaccessible, you can’t ask them anything.

These two personality types are actually just manifestations of two different reactions to the same situation – what to do with stuff. You can immediately tell which type you’re dealing with by looking in a kitchen, a desk drawer, a car, a purse, almost any container. I have always been accused of being a slob. I leave stuff out. This stuff includes tools, clothes, dishes, toys, parts, things of all kinds. My wife has been forever on the other end, given to missing appointments, dinners, functions and anything with a schedule, because she was obsessively neat, clean and tidy. Neither of these characterizations are accurate. I am not a slob, and, though she is chronically late, she’s not chronically neat. The situation was most apparent before we were married. One look at my apartment would suggest “So, a coyote lives here, right?” A closer inspection, however, revealed the truth. Open a drawer. A model of organization. A closet. Shirts, slacks, blankets stored neatly and efficiently. The cabinets under the kitchen counter? Empty. I mean, completely empty. For years. It wasn’t as though I couldn’t see the mess. It was just that I couldn’t hide it. It would have been very easy to take the stuff from the surfaces and stow it underneath, but the thought of that stuff, under there, messy, made me panic. At work, I was the same way. My desk was always trashed, unless you looked in the drawers, which were either organized or empty.

On the other hand, my wife, before we were married would have a spotlessly clean floor, counter, bathroom, everything, but she was endlessly cleaning. Why, I thought? Because on the few occasions that I would clean my apartment, really clean it, it stayed clean for a long time. I thought she was obsessive. In truth, she had filled every drawer, closet, bin, cabinet, nook, cubby, and cranny to capacity with the mess she couldn’t stand the sight of. And there was the difference between us, the thought of mess versus the sight of it.

Neither one of these two methods of dealing with clutter, possessions, junk, valuables, whatever you like to call them is better than the other. In fact, neither is particularly good at all. A mess on the desk is just as messy as a mess in a drawer. A concealed catch-all is just as disorganized as a visible one. My wife isn’t obsessively neat and I’m not compulsively sloppy.

These people attract each other. I always admired her polished exterior (though I incorrectly assumed it extended below her countertops) and she looked at my hopeless unkemptness and said “here’s a guy who could really need me”, though she never realized how organized and well kept I am inside.

My sister’s like me, she’s a closet coyote. She’ll spend a whole day cleaning out a drawer or a closet. Her husband will come home and immediately, without thinking about it at all, grab the magazines and catalogs that came in the mail and wad them right back into that drawer. He’ll take some shoes, a broom, an umbrella, some kids toys, the dog’s leash and cram them into the empty closet. She’ll watch him for a while, getting angry and hurt, until she can’t take it anymore and accuses him of trying to hurt her feelings and he just says she’s obsessive and unreasonable. You’d think these two personality types would be better able to get along. After all, one of them could clean the counter, the other could clean the cabinet beneath. What a team! In reality, it ends up being more like “I’ll dig the dirt out of this hole and put it in that hole. You take the dirt out of that hole and put it in this one. With two of us digging, we should be finished in no time. Let’s get to work!” This relationship tension is particularly insidious because it seems that people – both kinds of people – often resort to cleaning and organizing as therapy when they’re particularly angry or frustrated. Watching the two of them after a hard day is like watching people play tennis with lightning bolts.

I remember before we were married, I took a day off and cleaned out the canned goods from underneath my wife’s counter. First of all there were things in there, in the back that hadn’t seen daylight in 15 years. There were things in there that I know she had just purchased anew, as though she needed them. There were brands and labels that were so old that you could have sold them on ebay as collectibles. There was enough tea to fill a clipper ship. I took garbage bags of duplicate stuff over to my apartment and had a whole new pantry full of stuff, so much in fact that I became highly uneasy until I chucked it or ate it. Needless to say, this gesture was not appreciated. This is probably because I wasn’t addressing her problem, I was addressing mine. She just viewed it as me picking on her.

It wasn’t my aim to do that, but she was right of course. If she had come in and cleaned my place I would have hated it. She would have taken all the junk that had been sititng on my counter because there was no good place for it and put it in my gloriously empty cabinets. I have things that have sat around my place for years. They move from surface to surface without ever finding a home. I had an old bolt that sat on various tables, windowsills, sofas, and tv tops for most of my adult life. The only reason it isn’t still on one is because I can’t remember what it was for. I know it was important though, so I have it neatly tucked away inside an otherwise empty box.

The only reason that my wife and I can cooperate in this activity is that we’ve both decided that we don’t want anything anymore. We’ve decided that both the stuff on top of the table and under it are equally complicating and we want it all gone. I like to look at things with detachment. It’s fun to go into a person’s home or office and instantly tell who they are. Open a drawer. Does it have tools, twist ties, pens, playing cards, and lasagna noodles all piled in a jumble. You’re in a squirrel's house. If the drawer is totally empty except for the sawdust from when it was built while the countertop above isn’t even visible, you’ve found a coyote.

Squirrels or Coyotes. Love 'em or leave 'em. The only other option is to live alone.

Taxes, Shmaxes

I can't find my article on taxes. But here it is on NPR's Marketplace, about a million years ago. Some good tips, here.

Can I send Email from an old leather boot?

A couple weeks ago I got a package from my mother in Florida. It arrived by express mail, insured for four hundred dollars. In it was a surge suppressor. One of those big rectangular jobs that your monitor sits on and your computer sits under. I recognized it as the same one that, in the mid 90s, I personally placed under the monitor and over the computer that I bought for my mother.

This computer, from "Zeos", I think, had a catchy name which I've forgotten, and was marketed as an all-in-one, "zippetty-doo-da" fast, productivity-increasing, feature-packed system, from a company who'll be there tomorrow. It was, like most computers you'd buy for your mom, immediately obsolete, but great for email. It was also great for playing computerized bridge and pinochle which is as far as my mother wants to go in computer gaming. For a couple years this Pentium 75 zippety-doo-dahed along quite happily, raising my mother's productivity considerably before trying to retire early, by pretending its motherboard was fried. Unable to convince it otherwise, I buried the "fried" motherboard unceremoniously at the curb and replaced it with one scavenged from a derelict PC carcass which was camped in my office.

This "new" PC was even faster than the previous, which made it about as current as writing email on parchment with an ostrich feather dipped in India Ink, but bought me another year of not buying a new system. That was a little over a year ago. A few months ago, that computer died too. So, a new computer was ordered, with a place to plug a complete modern life right into the back. USB ports, Serial ports, Modem Ports, Mouse ports, Ethernet, Fishnet, Parallel ports, Perpendicular ports, car ports, Video out, Video back in, and PDA handheld-infrared-ultraviolet-see-in-the-dark-intradimensional wireless toaster ports, pipe anything and everything into a tiny beige box. This box is great for email, and for playing computer bridge and pinochle.

For a month, my mother became really productive (mom's productivity is measured in forwarded joke emails), and then, abruptly, stopped being productive at all. Concerned about the uncharacteristically empty "Mother" folder in Outlook Express (a subfolder of "Deleted Items"), I sent several emails which went unanswered. It occurred to me that she might have been sucked into some port on the back of the computer and was deadlocked in a virtual game of computerized cribbage with either Keanu Reeves or a rogue supercomputer from IBM, but I didn't follow up on this. The next time I heard from her was on my answering machine - "You can cancel my internet access, I've packed up the computer and put it in the closet. Bye."

My mother's messages often sound like epitaphs, but this sounded particularly dire. I knew that either Keanu had beaten her in cribbage or her computer had died. Despite being totally generic, the new computer was still new and still under warranty, a warranty that the computer gnomes in her closet were unlikely to honor, but which my local computer supplier probably would. I took drastic measures and called her. A frustrated woman answered, close to tears "Well, it stopped getting email two months ago and then one day I turned it on and no picture showed up and I didn't want to bother you because 'You're so busy' and I know its my fault and…"

She was not particularly helpful in troubleshooting the problem. Furthermore, the computer's condition of being unplugged in a dark closet made successful diagnostics so grim a prospect that I patiently explained the whole "gnome-warranty" thing to her and asked that she send it back to me. Swayed by my logic, she agreed, and several days later a package arrived from her.

Understandably excited by the prospect of fixing a computer I bought because it wouldn't need much fixing, I tore open the package to reveal one unremarkable, heavily over-insured surge suppressor. Remember the surge suppressor? Confusion descended. I felt as though I'd ordered a latte and been handed a stapler. Was it the words I'd used? Did the gnome story scare her? Did I say "Please just send me any object and I'll use it to fix your computer from a thousand miles away." Again, I took emergency measures and called her. I pretended that I hadn't opened the box in case it was an early Christmas present. "Please tell me this is an early Christmas present" I said. "No, it's that damned computer" was the reply that I both feared and got. Because this surge suppressor is about as mistakable for a computer as an old leather boot, I had two painful options; one of making my mother feel like a total boob, and the other of configuring an email client on a mid 90s surge suppressor. Boob it would be. I said, as delicately as possible "Mother, this isn't a computer, it's an old boot!"

On my desk now sits the multi-port roadster of a computer that arrived today from Florida. Sure enough, there's the bridge and pinochle CD still in the drive and, sure enough, it doesn't work. I suspect that the huge dent in the case, indicating some sort of collision, trauma, impact, stampede or other violence might have something to do with that. Maybe the tech gnomes took a whack at it. Whatever. She's my mother. I love her. I'll just fix it.

Distracted? Attach Things to Your Head

Some laws seem incredibly stupid at first and only prove themselves after going into effect.. So, when New York's "no handheld phone use in car" law went into effect a few months ago, I was initially wary. It seemed to be another waste of effort Band-Aid law which addresses one symptom instead of treating the disease. However, after using a headset for a few months now, I'm convinced. Strapping things on your head is the only way to drive safely.

I'm an inventor, so, I've since invented several new headsets which allow people to do more things while driving than ever before. First, is the Whopper Champ. This allows busy, but safety conscious drivers to eat on the go, without looking at their food. It has a platform which holds a large fast food sandwich, fries, and has a three foot straw for a soft drink. The sandwich is fed to the driver at intervals, giving time to enjoy each bite interspersed with French fries which get vacuumed from their packs and launched into the mouth along with aerosolized ketchup. Just clamp the Champ to your head and chow down in perfect undistracted safety.

I've also developed the Coffee and Doughnut Focuser, so called because it let's a driver keep driving while it focuses on morning coffee and doughnuts. I had a few bugs in this one, at first. It turns out that coffee sucked through a straw is hotter than coffee sipped from a cup. I can't explain this, but its true. Tests also indicate that people prefer not to have coffee and doughnuts pre-mixed. This made one clever single-straw design unacceptable. The current design features a spring-loaded doughnut hopper, which ratchets doughnuts one at a time into the driver's consumption chamber...err...mouth. The driver sets the pace and, yes, it also works with bagels. Warm (not hot) coffee is sucked from a sponge leading to a coffee cup.

Another new headset I call the Babysitter. There's nothing more distracting than a child, particularly an infant, sitting in a car seat in the back. Kids say all kinds of distracting things from back there; like "I want more Juice, Dada!", "I wanta Get out!", "I need a new dinosaur, now!", "I took my diaper off", and "Who's this stranger back here?" The Babysitter solves all that by constantly stimulating a cranky child with a selection of favorite toys, snacks, beverages, and soothing songs, all while perched on the driver's head. If the troublesome child becomes too unruly, the Babysitter can calm him or her with a patented Ritalin-derived vapor called Happy Gas.

For myself, I know that pretty soon I'll have so many headsets, that I won't be distracted at all. I am already so keyed-in to my driving that I hardly pay any attention to my conversations anymore. In fact, half the time I don't even know who called. I just venture a tentative but highly undistracted "umm, what?"

I may have become too undistracted, in fact. I keep thinking about a headset that let's me take up smoking. And because I have developed so many headsets, I now seem to need a Headset Manager, which I think should also be a headset, called the Headset Headset, or maybe the Head Honcho.

I really want to thank New York State for making this article possible. After all, without this law I might have blown all my driving attention on holding my phone and wouldn't have been able to write this piece safely, using Head Pen and Head Paper, on my way to work.

The Dog's Point of View

Sometimes the difference between a prized possession and a money pit is simply a matter of perspective. For instance, I have a pure bred dog. She's a Belgium Tervern...Turvyuren...turveyon...a Belgian Turv. Her given name is Bora, which I think is Belgian for "expensive". I call her MooCoup Bucks, because that's what she cost - about twelve hundred of them. Her nickname is Moolah. She arrived as a puppy, making her worth about two hundred dollars a pound. I thought that was excessive. "Ah, but she'll grow" the breeder assured me with a twinkle.

You'd think that certain undesirable traits could be bred out of a dog - like chewing, barking, digging, and running away. But Moolah does all of those. Mostly though, she chews...and chews...and chews. She chewed the bark off the peach tree, which then died after making only one peach. A three hundred dollar tree. She chewed the seat-belts out of the car...all the seat-belts - nine hundred bucks. She brought back a neighbors shoe and chewed it in half. They won't sell you just one shoe so we replaced the pair. A hundred and fifty bucks. She chewed several toys, my gloves, a pillow, 2 dog beds, a shovel handle, her own leash and an old hat on the same day.

She also digs. And after pulling a handful of my son's beloved plastic dinosaurs, all with their heads freshly chewed clean off from one of her excavations, I knew I needed to find a new way of thinking about Moolah. So she became an investment.

To protect the neighbor's footwear, I surrounded about three acres of land with Invisible Fence. It cost about two grand and increased her value accordingly. I added everything up including her crate, air fare, collar, training, the tree and the other chewed items and figure she's still worth $200/lb...only now she weighs about 70 pounds.

I now look for ways to increase her value, like tying pork chops to 100 bills and leaving them in the lawn. I smeared peanut butter on the rest of the fruit trees, hoping she'd debark them and further add to her mounting worth.

In all truth, I know that I'd take a beating if I tried to sell her, but the bank doesn't know that, so I took out an equity line on her and if I do sell her, I should be able to declare the loss on my tax return.

The breeder was right. Moolah has grown. She's grown from a soft fluffy ball of liability into a beautiful full grown asset. And no matter what,she’s still beating the stock market over the past three years. See? It's all about how you look at it.

Partially Hydrogenated

I made some hydrogen last night...well, I didn't create it or anything...I just liberated it from a glass of water. The exotic equipment I used consisted of two #2 pencils, two wires, a 9 volt battery, and, of course, a glass of water. I strung it all together until hydrogen bubbles formed, and went to bed. In the morning, I still had plenty of water left - a nine volt won't drown you in hydrogen - but I reminded myself how simple it is. For those who don't know already, water is 2 parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. To get at the hydrogen, plug a DC current into water and hydrogen collects at one electrode and oxygen at the other. Pretty easy, but if you want to make a lot of it, consider joining the battery club at Radio Shack.

Hydrogen's been on my mind lately, because there has been so much talk about the hydrogen economy and, in particular, fuel cells powering our cars. Fuel cells take hydrogen, which is made with electricity and water and turn it back into electricity, and water. This may seem to be a rather pointless exercise, until you realize that hydrogen is very good at storing electricity, something windmills, solar panels, fusion reactors, and coal fired power plants are all very bad at. Lost in all the fuel cell fervor is that you can also burn hydrogen. Now maybe its just because I'm an American, and hydrogen's a flammable gas, and nobody burns stuff better than the good ole USA. Or, maybe it's because making a hydrogen engine isn't much, if any harder than making a gasoline engine. But, Instead of just turning our hard to make hydrogen back into electricity, let's make something else with it...like heat, expanding gases, and "vroom vroom" horsepower?I say, skip the fuel cell and just put a hydrogen eight cylinder in my SUV

Now, I like fuel cells, and the argument in favor of them is their high efficiency. It's sort of like this - We can increase a horse's efficiency if we turn him upside down, tie magnets to his hooves, and have his flailing legs induce a current in this special platinum coil. This argument, while compelling, doesn't mean that, while we're waiting for this breakthrough to hit the market, we shouldn't ride the horse to town the normal way. A hydrogen engine burns just as cleanly as a fuel cell, it just makes a little hot waste water at the tailpipe. I figure we can use that hot water to melt snow, or to clean off the windshield, or make soup...or whatever. It turns out that I don't hate inefficiency, I hate pollution.

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to have a fuel cell humming away in my basement, making heat, electricity, bagels, and whatever else they make. But to put the hydrogen economy on hold until they are workable enough to power our big fat American cars seems crazy. Some people have made the claim that the fuel cell in my new hydro car may produce enough electricity to power my home. That's great, but won't the refrigerator go off every time I drive to the store? Guess I better hurry back. I can just hear my wife "Hon, could you stay home today so I can turn on the lights and vacuum? No? Well, then could you leave the car? Thanks an mil!" Sure, dear, I'll just take the train...if there were any trains.

Still, the real problem is the hydrogen infrastructure. Yeah, I know there's a hydrogen fueling station in Las Vegas. And if I only lived a few thousand miles closer, I could make it there on a tank of gas. And the REAL real problem is that oil makes the electricity that makes the hydrogen that makes the electricity that makes the car zip down to Star bucks. So, no matter what turns the wheels, to make a big difference, we need a commitment to hydrogen production from green energy. Well, I've got a nine volt's worth of hydrogen floating around my house that says I'm ready.

Bad Pie in Hazzard County

I’m stupid. I had a girlfriend once, through no fault of my own. After our first date, I became aware that, although she was attending college, she didn’t actually live at the college. She just crashed with other college girls. When the date was over, she stayed…all summer. I didn’t really want her to stay, but I didn’t know what else to do with her. So she became my girlfriend, much to my puzzlement. I am aware, and was aware at the time, that this was not the way it was done, certainly not desirable, but it was one of many things with which I could not cope.

She moved in. This was not a long process, and really consisted of her not leaving. At some point we made a trip to her parents home to pick up some textbooks and clothes. This trip is the reason I mention any of this. Her name was...let's say Daisy.

Like most people, Daisy had no honest mechanism to get attention, so she used tricks. Her tricks almost always failed. For instance, she would fish for sympathy by telling me an anecdote about how she tripped over the dog and fell down the stairs. At least, I thought it was an anecdote, an entertaining one. She seemed puzzled and hurt by my snickering. The trick she used to make the trip to her parents’ house seem more palatable to me, was a picnic. This trick worked, though it accounts for my aversion to picnics. I’d heard her mother and she discussing the picnic but as she hung up the phone she rolled her eyes, sighing “My parents are having a picnic, and I have to bring dessert”. Though we had nothing in common aside from my apartment, I thought I identified with that gesture, which was probably why I agreed to go. Yech! A family thing. She hadn’t told me much about her family. Just that her father had two Maseratis that he was restoring, that her mother and she looked “so much alike”, and that there was a mansion down the street from her that she’d always loved. There were no tip offs, no red flags, no blaring air raid siren and a screaming voice saying “Don’t go to her parents house! You’ll die like the others!” I thought “Okay we’ll go endure it, together.” Nothing in all my experience as a human prepared me for this.

She made a pie. Now, I’m no baker, but I have cooked a meal or two and I’ve even eaten a few things that came out, well, not so good, but as I watched the monstrous, sticky pile of unsavory goo that she poured into a pie tin and called dessert, I knew it was not going to be a good pie. I said to myself, “Don, there is no way that crud is passing your lips”. I think I remember the recipe. For the crust, she mixed flour and water in roughly equal parts, and added a dash of absolutely nothing else. In third grade I made for a school project a volcano from the same ingredients that would have made a more appetizing pie crust. She smeared this wet mortar into a pie tin, sliced some apples on top, gobbed on a few more clots of volcano paste in lieu of a top crust, and into the oven. Twenty minutes later, as the flour had just begun to think about trying to cook, she pronounced it done. I pronounced it a different way. So she couldn’t bake. Who cares?

We packed up the “pie” and set out for the town of Daisy’s birth. Well, at least she had described it as a town, or at least a neighborhood…or at least a place. About 25 miles of rather featureless highway south of the city, we came to the exit. Then two quick rights and a couple more miles. As we drove, I noted that a fog had rolled in, making it difficult to get a handle on the terrain. Was it farmland? It certainly seemed flat. As it turned out, that fog had been obscuring the landscape for years, and had not rolled in, but had actually been generated, by what was not farmland, but swamp. We passed a large dilapidated farmhouse, uninhabited, except for some crows in what had once been a yard, its windows loosely boarded. In white chalk was handwritten “4 sale” on the front door. I didn’t realize the significance of this landmark, until Daisy mentioned “There’s the mansion I told you about.” Already the day had assumed the surreal character of a Vacation movie. I knew that before long I’d meet Uncle Eddie. It was still early.

Another mile or so into the bog, we approached the home of my vagabond girlfriend. To this point, I hadn’t thought of her as a girlfriend and I couldn’t really think of the structure that we were approaching as a home, and the closer we got, the less I wanted either of those things to be true. As I pulled into the driveway time began to slow, seconds passing in agony as though they couldn’t believe what they were looking at. I was down with those seconds, hesitating before slowly ratcheting the keys to the off position. I didn’t hear the ignition click off or the engine go silent. All I could hear were the dogs. I didn’t know how I was going to live through that day. I mustered a significant level of detachment, not the same level as I would later have to muster, but still lots, and got out of the vehicle, the Jeep, my chick machine. I walked to the other side of the car and together we took our first steps through the front yard to the front door. I’m being generous. This was not technically a front yard. A front yard is filled with grass, shrubs, maybe a flower garden, a wishing well, whatever. This yard was filled with dogs. No fewer than four vicious, mangy, rabid, snarling, animal shelter rejects, barked and threatened and showed their yellow slavering fangs as they ran back and forth at the ends of chains secured to steel posts driven into the hard packed dirt. They were spaced at intervals such that the perfectly spherical dirt patches that each had made left a sort of natural walkway of relative safety up to the front door. “What are their names?” I asked. “They don’t have names,” was Daisy’s smiling answer. As the day wore on I would come to wish I had taken my chances with the dogs, but since they never stopped barking, I knew they were always an option.

The house was painted yellow...once. Now it was not really painted at all. And, yes, it was a trailer. The roof appeared to be constructed of a certain type of thick moss, mostly. Clearly, this natural fiber had been used to replace the less hardy shingles that, lets face it, don’t do much except keep the rain out. The garage, set back behind the house somewhat, was a handcrafted affair, which I didn’t get a real good look at until some time later. I was of course looking forward to checking out those Maseratis. We stepped up a double step into the front door (why replace those steps when you can jump?) which led into the kitchen and were soon greeted by Daisy’s mother, whose name was also Daisy. She was an unhappy woman, a woman who deserved better. She deserved to live in a trailer park, a place where you can be proud of your trailer, a place where this trailer would have been run out of town by the other trailers. I immediately liked her. Actually, I immediately pitied her, but I liked her better than my accidental girlfriend. The kitchen I now found myself in had a floor half-covered in speckled green tile. The other half had been pulled up in favor of splintering plywood and used, I believe, to redo the countertops. I can’t be sure, as dirty dishes obscured most of its surface. The problem was obvious. There were too many dirty dishes in the sink to put them anywhere else but on the counter. The removal of the floor tiles may also have been predicated by the large hump that was now where they had been. I’m not sure what caused this hump, more of a mound really. It must have been fascinating to set bits of dirt, unwanted silverware, old bones, and other detritus on its peak and watch as they rolled, tottered or otherwise migrated to the outsides of the room where they now sat, unable to overcome the inexorable force of gravity that had put them there. None of this was quite as horrifying as being introduced as “my boyfriend”. The rest of it had nothing to do with me, but “boyfriend”, that was a term I was entirely uncomfortable with.

We went to collect her books and some clothes. I have no idea what she needed books for, actually. I couldn’t remember the last time she had gone to class. We started down the hall, and on the way to an attic storage area, passed her brothers’ room. Room singular. Brothers’, plural and possesive. She had three brothers. I’m going to call them Enos, Cletus, and Roscoe. At least two of these, let’s say Enos and Cletus, shared a room, which both now occupied. Enos was watching wrestling on a small black and white TV on a shelf at the foot of his bed, while Cletus was playing Nintendo on a slightly larger color set. I have almost nothing to say about them, except that, it’s a good thing we showed up when we did, because later in the day their sister Daisy stuck a Tupperware bowl over Enos’ head and cut his hair in the back yard. The back yard, lacking the pack of dogs, was at least properly termed - it had grass and was in the back. The third brother, Roscoe, may have also had a room, or he may have simply taken shifts with the other boys. In any case I didn’t meet him until nearly dinnertime. When the books and clothes had been suitably secured in a paper bag and set by the door, I heard the unmistakable clank of a rusted out green-primer-colored van of questionable make and origin, filled with broken tools, greasy bolts, gunk, and other objects. Actually, mostly gunk. In truth, the clank could have been mistaken for just about anything, but that was what I expected to see, and that was what I soon saw. The objects in the van were the prized procurements of Daisy’s father, who termed them “still good”. I was certain he was misusing at least one of those words.

When we got outside, Daddy, whom I thought of as Boss Hogg, was unloading the van – that is, he was chucking selected rusty gems from the back onto the pile of junk that covered the sticky black concrete slab forming the garage floor. I remembered the two Maseratis. I couldn’t help wondering as we approached this enormous man, how two classic car restoration projects could fit into a single car garage filled with trash. A quick glance into the rafters of the structure, and I had my answer. There were two go-cart sized, soapbox quality vehicles resting in the normally unused space in the garage roof area. One look told me that they were “still good”. Apparently, in those parts, Maserati is used as a generic term for anything with wheels. As I mentioned, Boss Hogg was an enormous man. He was enormously filthy, enormously fat, and I loathed him enormously. Meeting him was exactly unlike meeting Daisy’s mother. I did not pity him. I did not like him better than my girlfriend. He did not deserve better. His enormous tee shirt was translucent with sweat and coated in much of the same grease as the garage floor. I couldn’t tell whether he had gotten the shirt dirty wallowing on the floor or the floor dirty wringing out the shirt. It didn’t matter. He soon removed the shirt to expose his filthy bloated hairy back and belly, and got an enormous beer.

The time between then and dinner was less remarkable. We walked the grounds. Since there were no neighbors, it was difficult to tell where the estate ended and the swamp began. I was pretty sure that homesteading here was just a matter of finding a bit of boggy land slightly higher and drier than the rest, parking the trailer and staking out the dogs. Who really cared? I’m not sure what we did for the rest of the day before the mosquitoes descended and we had to retreat inside, but I know I hated it, and I know also that it required me to, at several junctures, muster more detachment.

Dinner, on the other hand, was remarkable. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it was that anyone lived. Because there were so many of us - Daisy, her mom, Boss Hogg, Enos, Cletus, Roscoe, and me – there were not enough chairs at the kitchen table for everyone. The kitchen table had been placed directly above the mound in the floor. I think this was to keep the kids from climbing to its peak and plunging to their deaths. In any case there weren’t chairs enough for the seven of us, the family being unaccustomed to guests. In fact we were two chairs short. Maybe I wasn’t the only guest. The seating dilemma was handled neatly by, I think, Roscoe, the third brother. He secured two white plastic buckets, formerly used to hold spackling paste, which I assume had been wasted somewhere in the house, but had no doubt given its all. I was spared from actually having to sit on either of these overturned buckets, but it was clear that Roscoe bitterly resented my getting a “real” chair and angrily coveted my seat. He simply glared at me through the whole meal, which I was able to easily endure, by thinking of the story I could one day write, if I ever escaped the swamp.

The meal consisted of three items. There was a package of frozen mixed vegetables prepared in the following manner: heated. There was a grey meat bundle, which, before it had met with a 450-degree oven for about 7 hours, had once been beef, probably. And then there was Daisy’s pie. To avoid this conclusion as long as possible, I ate slowly, thoughtfully considering each morsel, taking ridiculously small bites. I chewed using only my canine teeth. I knew that when I finished my slab of meat, which was completely unseasoned but for the questionable sauce of my appetite and tough as an uncooked antler, I’d have to face that pie. I prolonged it as best I could by forking up individual peas onto one tine of my fork, which, through an earlier mutilation, stuck out like a compound fracture, ignoring the other tines which lay roughly parallel. I further processed the vegetables. I cut the corn niblets in quarters. I peeled the lima beans. When the peas were gone I used my defective piece of garage sale dinnerware to impale the quartered corn, the carrot chunks, and finally even the inner lima bean paste and the empty lima hulls. God how I wanted to avoid that pie. I even took seconds on the antler meat. “Mrs. Hogg, I’d love a second helping of the…uh…meat.” But it was not to be. There was no way I was going to avoid that pie. The Hoggs were quick eaters. Soon the pie was on a plastic plate in front of me, staring at me, mocking me, punishing me for being too weak to bolt for the door earlier, too polite (or whatever it was) to drop this girl off back at the stop light where I’d found her, and too unimaginative to trick her into leaving on her own. I finally knew what the term “just dessert” meant. I sucked it up, mustered the last bit of detachment I had, and dived in. I greedily accepted the refill of my water glass. Without it I couldn’t have survived. I picked up slow forkfuls of that crippled pastry, swallowed the uncooked fruit whole and then pretended to chew with my empty mouth. It didn’t matter. I could just feel those slimy blobs of raw flour, swimming in my unwelcoming stomach like lumpy apple gravy. My gut wanted it out of me, but I was committed, committed to survival. Though I’m here to tell the tale, I’m pretty sure that bad pie is the most horrid food on the planet. I refused pie seconds, though I know it hurt Daisy terribly. I had a third glass of water, though I had real misgivings about what came out of the tap at this place.

I had to go. I made excuses that I really needed to get back to the city, work the next day, something that I don’t remember, but wasn’t true. Daisy, clutching her paper sack full of things, and I choking back regurgitation, said our thank-yous and good-byes. I climbed into the driver’s seat of my Maserati and sped off through the fog, leaving the hovel in the swamp behind forever, knowing that as determined as I was to rid myself of this girl, it wasn’t her fault.

I also knew that it wasn’t my fault, so she had to go. A week or so later, we parted ways. She called me a few times subsequently, telling me she had fallen down the stairs, shut her head in the door – something. I was unmoved. I didn’t want to be just friends, or even just acquaintances, so I took as few of these calls as I could and soon she, and her pie recipe, were gone forever.

Zen in the art of Snowblowing

I love snowblowing. I know that I love it because I get up early to do it. I stay up late to do it. In the middle of the night, I get up, just to look at the driveway to see if it needs blowing. I hope people will come over so I'll have an excuse to clear the driveway. I long for winter appointments so I can snowblow early to get out on time. I love the freedom that having a cleared driveway affords. The freedom to go anywhere I please no matter how crummy the weather. It is empowering. It is dangerous. It is affirming and masculating. Few things in the modern world compare to the primal futility of being out there when it's snowing 4 inches an hour, blowing that driveway. It's sort of like blow-drying your hair while you're still in the shower. Yes, I love snowblowing and, even more, snowblowers, and it has come to my attention that people in warmer climes never experience the mechanized wonders first hand. How empty must be their winters.

Picking out a snowblower is easy. They all work identically and equally - that is to say that if it has snowed enough to use one at all, it has already snowed too much for it to work acceptably. All snowblowers work simply by gathering snow and ideally flinging it somewhere else. Therefore, choose your snowblower by color and don't worry about how much it costs. The repairs you and others will make on your snowblower over its life will easily dwarf any amount you initially spend on it. Additionally, you will need to have a home for your snowblower. A medium sized barn should do. You'll need this to hold the tools, spare parts, gas cans and ice cold beverages that are required for normal use, maintenance and frequent repair of the brutish machines. A snowblower is a primitive beast, and you will revel in nostalgia as you purchase things from a by gone era when people used to work on their cars. Things like sparks plugs, starter fluid, and all but forgotten devices called "wrenches". If your small barn is heated, you'll need a refrigerator for the ice-cold beverages. If it's not heated, you can chill them in your hand.

The term snowblower, while wonderfully descriptive, is wholly inaccurate. The tiny crafts do not blow snow at all. And snow is just one of the substances snow blowers don't blow. Wind blows snow - hardest, when you're snow blowing. Snowblowers lob, rather than blow, the things they encounter. And they will lob rocks, twigs, pets, bolts and even parts of themselves up a chimney-like chute, bound for who-knows-where. Amazingly, though the snow, gravel and small animals are mixed and stirred together, they become desegregated the moment they leave this chimney. Thus, the thick slush and large snowblower-breaking- stones tend to land right next to you, ready to be re-blown on the next pass. These stones sometimes require two or three passes to break anything and I guess this is the way they get a fair shake. The smaller stones get thrown clear, into the yard, where they wait patiently for summer to repatriate the driveway through the shattered glass of your windshield. This is usually after the lawnmower has noticed them and, in concern uncommon to lawn implements, decided to help out. "Oh, look little stone. You've lost your way. Do not worry. It is I, lawnmower, who will return you to your stony nesting ground. Plus, I know a shortcut. Now hold tight and head for the car." Blammo! Lawnmowers tend to have the edge in muzzle velocity, but for sheer brutality, snowblowers are the kings.

Any other materials that have made it up the chimney, usually require immediate medical attention. Snowblowers are rife with safety features. Despite this, every person who uses one for any length of time eventually loses a finger. With luck, this will only be a finger of a glove or a lesser-used finger like a pinky. But, because the chimney becomes clogged with detritus with every few feet of use, and because of the trust engendered by the built-in safety features, you will break down and clear that chimney with your hand. At this point the idle blades will whirl to life and you will lose a finger. This is known as a freak accident and it happens to every snowblower operator. Your owner's manual will have instructions for producing this situation. These should be memorized and pondered carefully as you search through your lawn for your finger.

One safety feature is a clever little device called a shear pin. Shear pins are glorified bolts that are designed to break. Their invention went something like this - Problem: "Dogs getting caught in spinning blades of blower" Solution: "We'll make these tiny pins that break when there's an obstruction - They'll shear off when put under x pounds of tension and will come to be known as a safety feature." So, rather than shred the dog into ground chuck and fling him out the chimney onto the lawn, you can just maim him and take him to the vet in a blizzard to have them put him to sleep - after you're finished blowing the driveway, of course. All parts of a snowblower are designed to break under certain unreasonable loads, so you should not be disappointed when this happens. After all, it is the operator's fault for exceeding the design specs and if you consult the owner's manual, it will tell you that you shouldn't have done whatever it was you did. It will also tell you that you can avoid this problem in the future by not doing it again. I have broken starters, cords, clasps, bolts, springs, gears, chains, cranks, and switches. No part, however, seems to have been designed to fail so well as the shear pin. In one 18 hour marathon of snowblowing last month, I broke and replaced 12 shear pins which is the primary reason the marathon took 18 hours and is in part a tribute to a truckload of large stones left over from some home project that got dumped in the driveway. It is amazing the lesson in principles of friction that you learn when blowing snow. It seems that small grade gravel and sand provide traction for your car and therefore are acceptable things to have in the driveway. Large stones, however, get coated with ice and form giant frictionless Teflon globs. Parking in this substance is akin to parking on overgrown tapioca pudding, except that this tapioca pudding snaps shear pins like toothpicks. Highway departments have learned this lesson and this is why they sprinkle sand and small pieces of rock salt on frozen roadways instead of boulders. I've learned my lesson, but the rocks themselves don't appear convinced.

When a shear pin breaks, the snowblower immediately lets you know by pretending to behave normally. Unless you've broken the shear pins on both sides, it will continue to gather snow from the unbroken side and will even keep firing snow into the air. Your first inkling that you might have a problem is usually when it appears that snow is being plowed on one side rather than eaten. Because of the stresses produced by this phenomenon, you may find that you can no longer snowblow in a straight line. Some newbies to snowblowing have walked in circles for hours before realizing they had encountered one of these lifesaving drawbacks and blown crazy conch shell patterns in their driveway. It's easy to see how it can happen. When you suspect that you've trashed one of these little jewels, the first thing you must do is to confirm that it has, indeed, saved the dog again. This brings up another clever, but unfortunate, benefit of the beasts. In order to see if the blades are still spinning, you must go to the front of the snowblower while it is in operation. This seems easy until you consider that to do this, you need to hold down the lever which engages the blades, which is in the back of the snowblower. Unless you snowblow using the buddy system or have arms double the length of any human's, this situation necessitates that you circumvent the safety feature. I have found that the best way to do this is to remove a glove and cram it over the handle, engaging the whirling blade mechanism, in reckless violation of the owner's manual's cautions. Now you can confirm that, sure enough, it's broken.

Snowblower repair is made troublesome by the fact that certain tools needed to make said repairs work poorly under conditions of extreme cold. Chief among these are your fingers. Because of the previous step of removing your glove to confirm disrepair, one hand is already, well, not warm. For me, this is my right hand (I'm a rightie). Despite the fact that I know I'll need it to hammer out the sheared part of the shear pin, I always use my right glove, and thus start out every repair with an ice-cold right hand, which I use to chill beverages. After clearing the accumulated glacier of compacted snow from the incapacitated maw of the machine, you are faced with the challenge of aligning the quarter inch hole in the now freely moving circular blade with the worthless metal slug that used to be a shear pin. This cannot be done if both shear pins have broken as the only clue to this location is the other, still in tact shear pin (if both are broken, you will need to move South). The most obvious method of removing the broken metal chunk is to pound it out using a new shear pin and of course, a hammer. There is less than one inch of clearance between the head of the new pin and the eager blades of the snowblower, so instead of taking a good smack at it, you usually bash it with the force of a barely audible whisper. So, instead of the rhythmic tounk! tounk! tounk!
three strikes it's out noise you should hear, the noise resonating throughout the barn is a frenzied tic-thud-tic-thud-tic-thud.

The issue is clearance. Removing the pin takes about as long as parallel parking in a space 5 inches longer than your car. It is at this point that you realize that obvious and good are not synonyms and that the most obvious method of parallel parking your shear pin has resulted in stripping the threads off, such that the nut that was supposed to hold it in place, won't. Luckily, you have many, many extra shear pins, sold in packs of 2 for $7.94 at very, very few hardware stores. The great thing is that once you finally get the pin replaced, you can regain composure by heading straight back into the blizzard to walk back and forth over the frozen driveway. Simply tighten down the nut using an appropriately sized socket wrench and a pair of Robogrip pliers and you're back in business.

On the positive side, snowblowing is not very demanding cognitively, so one option while you're making the circuit is to meditate. However, because the engine driving the blower is rupturously loud, some form of hearing protection is required. The form I use is beer. This allows me to Zen out, and enhance my calm. I am not the only one who has reached this conclusion. Last week, when I went down to the corner gas/mini-super-convenience-fill-up-quick-stop-express-mart to replenish my own meditative supplies of gas and beer, I noticed that others had those items on their shopping lists. In spiritual brotherhood, one of my compatriots in line to pay for his beer remarked "guess I'm not the only shmuck who snowblows drunk". Indeed not, my friend. And, though it is with considerable chagrin that I leave five empties in a snowbank in the morning, hey I blew the driveway, what are you bitching about? It is unprecedented for me, however, to purchase beer that is "Just for me". To think, "this is my beer, because I am blowing the driveway." Perhaps this is how much of the world works, but for me, this is unique to snowblowing. It's almost as if I'd dare anyone to raise an issue with me. How many beers have I had? I don't know, how many shear pins have you changed? Though no one has actually raised the issue, I am very ready to defend my beer and myself.

Still, you have to stay sharp. Because you might need to drive. Luckily, not far. For various reasons, my driveway has 5 cars in it. Most people only have one or two, but I have the extra challenge of coordinating a parking ramp full of vehicles with snow removal. In principle, its simple, blow one area, move cars, blow area cars used to be. In practice, all madness requires method and the cars need to be prepped before they are moved. This means that the snow that has accumulated on them must be either removed or otherwise dealt with. I heard a radio program once, which basically dealt with weather conditions in extreme northern lattitudes. In the course of the broadcast, they said that in some areas, it's so cold that they just leave their cars running all the time. This way, they don't have to worry about whether they'll start or not. Sort of like talking constantly to ensure that you're not losing your voice. This is the method I use. I start all five cars, and crank the defrosting mechanisms on the front and rear windshields. I guess my hope is that they will heat up to the point that the snow will melt and run away in rivulets rather than my having to blow it away. Or perhaps I'm hoping that the cars themselves will melt. This does incur the disapproval, if not the overt wrath of the cars' owners, because, though the cars don't actually move more than about 18 feet at a time, they do use fuel, sitting there, running. And, when you burn up a half tank of gas and don't go anywhere, fuel economy goes straight to hell. This week, I got no miles to the gallon. It has happened that I've left the car running all night, morning snowflakes bursting into steam as they near the red-hot windshield. Anyway, the old, melt and move method works pretty well if you plan far enough ahead, but sometimes you forget to start them, and you end up with a huge 30 inch ice cream sandwich on the top of your mother in law's car that, in good conscience, you can't leave there. So, you can either brush it off and blow it around with the blower or, provided you're not too deep in meditation, you can drive it off. Snow removal by the dragster method is a terrible idea and therefore, it only occurs to you after participating in another terrible idea, snow blowing. After enough shear pin madness, you're ready to go for a spin. After all, the car's been running for 5 hours, and is hotter than Hades. It's simple, just drive far enough and fast enough that the air whipping over the vehicle wipes the snow from the roof, hood, and windows, leaving the car looking as though vultures have picked it clean. Far enough is easy, about five miles. Fast enough however, is about 90 to 100 miles/hr and is not achievable usually in a blizzard or in your mother in law's car. So, through some unpleasant physics and realities, far enough becomes farther, infinitely farther. So, when you return, in failure, you still have a huge dollop of accumulated snow on the roof of the car and have not really done anything except make it darker. This waste of time is not a secret, but you do it anyway because, you never, ever, ever break a shear pin this way.

The hardest truth about snow blowing is that almost all of it occurs in a two-foot wide swath at the foot of your driveway. The uninitiated might think that this must be because it snows harder in this two-foot section. Perhaps that's what Northerners mean by Snow Belt. The truth is far less believable. Coincident with your snowblowing, area roadways are being cleared by particle physicists driving enormous truck mounted positron colliders known as snowplows. These gargantuan vehicles perform miraculous feats, pushing limitless piles of particles around, accelerating them until they create a plasma of nearly infinite density. These particles, known as "flakes" and the plasma is known as "slush", is so dense that nothing, particularly your car, can escape it, which is why you have to remove it from the two foot swath at the foot of the driveway, where the snowplow has put it. Slush has infinite density because the entire volume of snow from the road you live on has been compacted into plasma and delivered to the your personal nine foot wide Snow Belt.

Because I am not a particle physicist, I tend to consider this part of the job in a way that does not involve Special or General Relativity. Thus, I use the metaphor of peanut butter - frozen peanut butter. Thick, chunky frozen peanut butter made from huge prehistoric petrified peanuts, quarry stone, and ice. If you've ever tried to push start a car uphill, you'll know how disappointing it is to try to use a snowblower on peanut butter. That's why choosy snowblowers choose shovels. Instead of the bright fluffy white plume of cotton candy snow thrown thirty yards away, you basically move a thick brown slurry of crud three inches closer to your lawn. And, because you're blowing the same thick brown slurry again and again with every pass, it gets heavier and heavier, browner and cruddier, and breaks more and more shear pins until, you give up. You say, screw it, I'll just shovel. How bad can it be? The hideous reality is that this is the worst shoveling you could ever do, so the answer is, pretty damn bad. It's like trying to shovel water from one side of the bathtub to the other. Eventually, though, enough water slops out of the tub that you can say, enough, it's done.

Eventually you have either blown or shoveled things to the point where they are passable. How passable is up to you and for me ranges from barely to generally. It will, when I'm finished, be possible to access the mailbox, and there will be a clear, if not wide trail down the walk to the porch. All five cars will be able to exit the driveway and also enter it at least from the downhill direction. At this point, assuming the particle physicists don't return with another load of plasma, you are basically finished with the snowblower and may return it to its structure.

I know that this may not sound like the liberating experience I first described. But this is the American dream. I'm not shoveling snow. I'm bashing down the walls of wind blown tyranny. I'm not just out there, digging out my car. I'm snow blowing for America. And when I leave home in my car after that driveway is clear, I take a shovel, so I can determinedly shovel to park, then proudly shovel so the U.S. postal service can deliver my bills. Then I'll cram in an hour or so of patriotic duty known as work, before calling in to see how that driveway is. Has it snowed so much that I should leave early and blow the driveway again? I hope so. I'm only too happy to answer the call, and I could use a beer.