DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Shortly after moving into the new house, I took the fancy double oven for a test-bake. I preheated the pizza stone, then slid a flax-sourdough boule on top. I knew immediately that something was wrong, because my face has been calibrated over time to recognize what 500°F feels like when I pull open the oven door. This oven felt cold.

The bake went poorly. There was no “oven spring,” meaning the bread did not rise during the bake, and it took about twice as long to cook as it should have.

So, I dug through a box of disused kitchen implements to find my ancient, bent, burned, not-especially-reliable oven thermometer. I had to do a sanity check — was the oven off, or was I? At four years, the oven is a lot younger than I am, but I suspect I have more experience baking.

The thermometer proved me right: the oven was cold by 75°F. And because the oven control maxes out at 500°, I could not simply compensate by raising the temperature. That is, I needed 500°, but could get only 425°.

This oven is a fancy computerized unit, so I checked the manual to see if there is a calibration mechanism. There is, in fact, but it failed to function as described. Curiously, the calibration procedure includes this senseless instruction:

DO NOT measure oven temperature with a thermometer. Opening the oven door will lower the temperature and give you an inaccurate reading. Also, the thermometer temperature reading will change as your oven cycles.

This struck me as suspicious, like when Microsoft describes their software as secure but refuses to publish the details so experts can verify their claims. Not that I’m an oven expert, but, what the heck, measuring oven temperature isn’t exactly cryptanalysis either.

When the repair guy showed up to re-calibrate the oven, I described that I’d measured the temperature and found it to be low by 75°. He looked at me disdainfully and asked, “It wasn’t a coil-spring thermometer, was it? Those are notoriously inaccurate.” And then as he unwrapped his fancy Digital Thermocouple With Remote Probe he made a little condescending chuckling sound and said, “These are a little more accurate,” but by “little” he meant “lot”, just like I do when I say he was a “little” rude.

He wore his superiority like a black leather jacket. I endured it like a guy who enjoys watching know-it-all jerks eat black leather crow when they have to admit they’re wrong. It didn’t take long — about 75° less time than he expected, in fact.

Of course he tried to escape without giving me the details. “The computer is blown,” he said on the way out the door, “so we’ll call you with an estimate.”

“Oh, did it measure low?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, volunteering nothing and pulling the door shut. I had no problem with this… It’s my door; I opened it up again.

“How low was it?” I called at his back as he quick-stepped down the stairs.

“Erm, 75°” he coughed over his shoulder. Imagine that.

The ridiculous postscript to this story is that the new controller board costs $860, installed. The list price on the oven, four years ago, was $829. I guess Whirlpool makes its money on parts.

My vision sucks like a vacuum with a brand-new bag. My eyesight is so poor, the optometrist doesn’t say “what’s the smallest line you can read;” he says, “Just point at the wall.” The kids didn’t call me “four eyes” because that wouldn’t have counted the two I was born with.

So I’ve been considering surgery. I don’t consider that lightly; I’m terrified. As poorly as my eyes work, they are critically important to me. I realize the value of decent eyesight because I so rarely enjoy it. In other words, it’s easy for me to imagine being blind, at least functionally so, because that’s how I wake up every day.

A friend with a comparable case of myopia was telling me about his recent LASIK experience. He’d been impressed at how easy and painless the whole prodecure was. He summed it up as a “non-event.” With admirable nonchalance he described the operation: the cocaine drops to deaden the nerves in the eyeball… the insertion of a speculum to keep the lids open… the incising of tissue from the cornea… the reshaping of the stroma via excimer laser…

The longer he talked, the more nauseous I became. True, I’d had a number of beers the night before, and the number was about 12, so I had a head-start on nausea. But the idea of someone taking a knife and slicing off the front of my eye is enough to make me writhe. I had to squat down on the grass and do breathing exercises.

I’m well aware that, afterwards, painful and grotesque medical experiences make fun stories, as if all the fear and anxiety suffered in advance pay off in entertainment value months and years later. I’m sure I could work up the courage to pay someone lots of money to cut a flap in my eyeball and shoot a laser into my skull… as evidenced by my friend’s experience, it makes a great story, and he wasn’t even going for the gross-out. My version would doubtless inspire acute squirming, even in people who weren’t hung over. And yet, somehow, I’m still ambivalent.

Surgicaleyes.org is a terrific resource, in both the common meanings of the word. The Image Center provides simulations of post-surgery vision abnormalities. The Bulletin Board contains tens of thousands of messages from doctors and patients, providing hundreds of pages of intelligent, generally well-researched commentary. It’s epic.

John — thanks for the inspiration, the story, and the link.

So it’s Wednesday, and I’m thinking I should write something for my journal, and as in all quests I take my first step: shove the plan aside and read my email instead.

But there’s nothing there, because I checked my email 10 seconds ago. And then I remember that Wednesday is “Cheap Eats” day, and I decide I’ll write about my celebrity neighbor and his irreverent foodie newspaper column, which is published Wednesdays in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Being constantly on guard for your welfare, and maximizing at all times your debris.com entertainment dollar (be a good lad now and click a banner eh?) (that’s a pitiful ad-revenue joke from the depths of 1999 for you) (you can forget, after that display, whatever it was I was trying to claim about providing anything resembling entertainment I guess) I decided to read today’s column before writing about it, although, really, the real reason was because it allowed me to postpone the somewhat arduous task of composing words for this space for a few minutes longer.

And then I got the shock of the week, besides last night at 2:30 AM when I was trying to sleep after having just seen Red Dragon and the noises outside the bedroom sounded like the neighborhood deer and turkeys but might also have been nutballs with buckknives and soft-palate defects sitting in a tree, when I read about myself in the second paragraph.

Honestly, I didn’t plan this. It’s just synchronicity.

Read about me (!) — Cheap Eats 10/9/02

Finally, after a year’s delay, the Triumvirat remasters are shipping. I know you’ve never heard of Triumvirat, but if you own any of these classic concept albums:

• Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick
• Genesis - Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
• RUSH - 2112
• IQ - Subterranea

or, really, any neo-progressive rock from Yes, Genesis, Camel, Transatlantic, Spock’s Beard, ELP, Porcupine Tree, etc., then you ought to check out these two albums:

• Illusions on a Double Dimple (samples) (Amazon)
• Spartacus (samples) (Amazon)

Nostalgia is powerful juju. A dozen friends, caught it its diamond-plated and keen-edged grip, were forced to strap drums about their persons and march in formation around a cold asphalt parking lot at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, just a few hours after having closed down area bars the evening before. This was described to me as fun, although that was earlier, before the hangovers and back pain had set in.

Still, the juju reached me up in the stands, and I had moments of regret about my decision to participate in the marching-band reunion only in my traditional capacities, drinking, storytelling, inspiring of embarrassed laughter. (Hey, it’s a knack.)

I have fond and vivid memories of my college years (and, given the types of recreation I pursued at the time, I have a number of other memories that come entirely from secondhand accounts) and none of it seems that long ago. That’s my subjective time. This weekend I got a faceful of perspective, and I realized, deeply and truly, what an old geezer I’ve become. And I don’t believe I’m going to age gracefully. This was proved over the weekend, when instead of pursuing activities suitable for my, err, current level of maturity, e.g. sitting around a warm fireplace with a blanket over my knees waiting for the kind nurse to come collect my teeth, I went carousing, and felt pain. After two such nights, I woke up to find my knuckles raw and bleeding — not because I got into a fight, not at all. I think it’s because I’d regressed so far the night before, my hands were actually dragging on the ground.

(The true explanation is even more pitiful: I’d forgotten to pack hand lotion. Sigh.)