DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Christmas shopping season has already begun. I believe the traditional start is one day after Thanksgiving, because Americans only have the mental capacity to plan one holiday at a time, and if Chrismas shopping really began this early, kids could end up with miniature roasted turkeys in their stockings, and little pools of potatoes and gravy coagulating beneath where they’ve leaked out through the toe.

Nonetheless, the catalog onslaught has begun. I fear my mailbox. Inside, every day, two or three glossy full-color catalogs appear, hawking everything from egg coddlers to synthetic-fiber briefs.

The worst of it is, the catalogs I’m drowning in aren’t even mine. Years of guarding my address have paid off — I get very little junk mail. The current deluge is for the people who just moved out of this house. Now I know why they moved away from this amazing place… they’d bought so much crap via mail-order that they ran out of space to store it all. Or maybe they’d spent so much on shipping that they couldn’t make their mortgage payments.

They received nearly every specialty-clothing catalog I’ve ever seen (J Crew, LL Bean, Patagonia), and some obscure titles that probably appeal to a smaller audience (mysportbra.com?!). They had more travel-goods and gadget catalogs than SkyMall (Sharper Image, Hammacher Schlemmer, Brookstone, Herrington, Magellan’s, Travelsmith). And they had the oddball base covered too, especially the countrified kitsch variety (American Girl, Hearth and Plow). The shocking thing is that each one of these catalogs had a customer ID on the back, indicating that the vendors hadn’t simply rented the name and address — the people who used to live here had actually bought stuff from every one of these companies.

Wait, did I forget housewares? (Williams Sonoma, Crate and Barrel, Hold Everything, Macy’s). They sure haven’t forgotten me. Macy’s puts junk in my mailbox three days/week.

One of the ironies of my life is that I always loved to receive mail. All manner of exciting things could show up. But as I’ve gotten older, this simple pleasure has been stripped away by a world full of shysters. Nowadays, most of the mail I receive makes me angry or depressed: bills, political pitches, the inevitable catalogs, mail-grams from unknown mortgage brokers that quote the details of my mortgage in a terribly misguided effort to convince me that I should trust them with my money. (Perhaps that’s a rant for another time, but excuse me, why is the amount of my loan considered public knowledge?)

At my old house, it would occasionally happen that we’d get no mail. At the time, those days made me a little sad, as if I’d missed out on something. Now, I look forward to the quiet. So does the guy who hauls away my recycling.

Five years ago, before moving out here into the boondocks, I went into the local Post Office to rent a Box. The postal clerk was the most engaging, friendly, honest and helpful person I’d met in weeks — of course, I’d been dealing almost exclusively with bankers, brokers, and real estate agents at the time, so perhaps this isn’t saying much. This guy made an impression, though.

Soon we moved here, and I ended up going to the post office every couple of days to pick up my mail, which for lack of available PO Boxes was being forwarded to “general delivery.” I suppose that option exists at every post office, but I don’t suppose clerks in big-city post offices recognize their customers and greet them by name, saying “Let me get your mail.” I felt like the theme song from Cheers. This became my “life in a small town” story (replaced over time with other warm-and-fuzzy small-town experiences like neighbors sharing produce and meeting reclusive local celebrities and the inevitable septic-tank pumping).

Years passed. I stopped going to the post office as often, because that would entail putting on shoes. But I noticed something that made me uncomfortable about my favorite postal clerk — I could swear I remembered his name, but the tag on his shirt said something else. Was he borrowing a shirt that day? It was unsettling, but again, I didn’t go to the post office too frequently any more, so I never built up enough data to be certain.

Another year or two passed. I’d given up on addressing the clerk, for fear of getting his name wrong. And he didn’t seem to recognize me any more, either. Until last week… when he saw me come in, pushed away the little sign at his station reading “closed”, and called out a hearty greeting. “Is it Matthew or Michael?” he asked me, which made me laugh because often my parents (who have sons named Matthew and Michael) ask me the same thing. But here’s the impressive part — from the dregs of neglected synapses I managed to recover the clerk’s original name, the one he’d introduced himself to me as, and the mysterious shirt-name from years later, and asked him the same question back. I was extremely impressed with myself. It turns out that both the names I remembered were correct; the clerk had changed his name in the year after I moved here. And, he got new shirts.

Anyway, it was “nice to be seen,” as a friend used to say.

Let’s just put it right out in the open: this is a story about farting. If you’re easily offended — wait, never mind; you would have been offended a long time ago. Read on with my blessing.

I was sitting in a stadium of 80,000 people on a gorgeous Fall day, all blue skies and warm sun, with my favorite team (inasmuch as I can be said to have a favorite team, given that what I know about college football can be inscribed in 48-point Aachen Bold across the spine of the thinnest of the six O’Reilly titles in my collection) fighting the good fight down there on the field, when, four or five times during the first half, the stench of sphincter came washing across the stands. It was rank.

One row below me, a group of fellow sufferers were waving their hands in front of their faces, in what appeared to be some kind of failing tribal/pagan ritual to convince the wind god to blow the other way. It was similar to, and as ineffective as the flapping motion some people make when they put a forkful of 200° food in their mouths and realize that the only thing that would damage more tissue would be spitting it out, so they wave one hand (two if it’s really hot) and widen their eyes until the heat dissipates, or all the nerves in their mouths die from the third-degree burn, whichever comes first. The women were sitting with their sweatshirts pulled up over their noses. After the third attack, one of the guys announced to everyone in earshot, or maybe nose-shot, “OK, that’s it. Someone needs to stop farting right now.”

We suffered twice more, and then to our relief it was halftime, and we all said a little prayer of thanks (it’s a Catholic university, after all) that the perp might go vent his horrible bowels in the restroom, or at least somewhere downwind.

And then the marching band came on the field and played “Classical Gas.” Seriously.

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.