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June 25, 2003

My Weekend as an Electramatician

This is a rather self-important piece probably and not worthy of a blog, but I'm posting it as an experimental bit since it's much closer to what I normally write (i.e. mundania mixed with egomania). If nobody posts, I'll know not to do it again.

The Dryer Story

“Am I not a man? And is not a man stupid?” Alexis Zorba in ZORBA THE GREEK (N. Kazantzakis)

And do not men decide they can fix things without calling a mechanic?

And do not mechanics charge $35 just to darken your doorstoop and then lots extra if they do anything that requires auto-motor skills?

PART I: THE WELL ELECTROCUTED REPAIRMAN

My dryer stopped working over a month ago and since that time I’ve been either drying things on my shower curtain rods (which lends a really nasty texture that explains a large percentage of 19th century domestic abuse cases) or trudging them over to the apartment laundromat and waiting for Pablo, Esteban, Ricardo, Soledad, Bonita, Chuck, Vincenzo, Ivan, Manuella, Annunciata, Pablo 2, Juanito, and Emiliano to stop swimming and come retrieve their clothes so that ultimately it takes more time than if I drip dried them. I’d considered calling a machinist, but as I said they all wanted a ridiculous amount of money just to make a diagnosis, and it’s a cheap dryer to begin with (I bought it on clearance for “about a hundred dollars, yeah…about a hundred dollars”).

So, says I, I have high speed Internet access and an odd assortment of tools, I think I’ll give this thing a look-see. The drum still revolved fine, it was only the heating element that wouldn’t work, meaning that the clothes stayed wet but got vertigo.

HOW TO MEND A DRYER IN 6 EASY STEPS by Jonathan Darby, aged 12 years, 174 months

Step 1: Remove the dryer from it’s apse

And this I did with little problem. I drug it into the kitchen facing me.

Step 2: Make a quick examination and search for the obvious

This wasn’t so much of a problem either, and there was an obvious problem. There are three places on the dryer that connect to wires from the electric cord- red, blue, and ‘not red or blue’. Hard to tell what the last one originally was since the cord had burned through and split in twain like Shields and Yarnell, its torso hanging lifeless and scorched like a fainting Muscogee princess and its connector half still clinging lifeless to the dryer backside like the severed hands of Joab to the horns of the altar of Yahweh. Ayup, says I to me, reckon those scorched wires and detached electrodes are a part of the problem.

Step 3: Disconnect the power supply.

I tried doing this but it wasn’t so easy since I was trying to squeeze my Burl Ives torso into an Emmanuel Lewis easement twixt the dryer and the wall. I had just taken hold of the thickly bound vinyl cord when it was time for

Step 4: Insert the onomotopoeia

These are your options and there are no wrong answers:
POP!
BANG!
POW!
HOLY SHITE!

Perform Step 4 whilst doing Step 5.

Step 5: Insert flash, smoke and acrid smell

There was a mini-explosion in my kitchen that for once wasn’t caused by attempts at Laotian cooking. I was looking at myself attempting to determine if I’d been electrocuted, but I didn’t see my body on the ground, which is just as well since I’ve missed my last few thousand workouts and it couldn’t but have been disheartening. Meanwhile I checked the door to make sure that my neighbors weren’t all screaming in terror and having flashbacks to the popping 30.30s that no doubt greeted them and their ancestors when they first came to America back in February. A casual check saw no mass exodus or squealing tires followed by a percussion playing of ‘La Cucaracha’, so I resumed my work.

Step 6: Disable breaker to dryer

After attempts to reach over the dryer to the breaker box with a broomstick failed (and I didn’t particularly want to climb on a piece of metal that had just onomotopoeiasized) I was able to reach the breaker with my shepherd’s staff, which is longer. (I keep it next to the shelf where I keep my Beretta .22, for my rod and my staff they comfort me.)

Unfortunately in so doing I first turned off the breaker to the lights in the apartment, leaving me in darkness, but as they say “When [insert deity here] closes a door S/He opens a window” (though it’s apt as not to be over a 14 story drop over a shark infested alley). The darkness remedied itself when the retreating broom jostled the dryer enough to jiggle the wires again.

Step 4: Return of the Onomotopoeia

“Bang!” went the dryer. “Shite!” went Jon, wondering at the same time if “England’s” King Henry IX, Cardinal York, brother to Bonnie Prince Charlie, cardinal of a duchy he never set foot in and king of a land he never saw, ever realized just how pathetic he was.

Finally the breaker was flipped, then the cord was unplugged, and the lights were restored and the stove fan took away some of the smoke smell. A couple of dead cockroaches had been revitalized, but otherwise no real problem.

I determined after some investigation that one of the problems with the dryer was the explosions. While they do wonders for making car wheels turn, evidently dryers run differently and aren’t supposed to do that.

After giving it some time to make sure there weren’t any straggling currents and sending in a canary (which returned with an olive branch, two socks, and strangely enough a laser disk of Jane Fonda’s CAT BALLOU which I certainly don’t remember purchasing), I took off the back of the dryer to look at a series of wires that probably bear a more than slight similarity to Ozzy Osbourne’s nerve endings. Blackened, some of them frayed, in short- a big ol’ mess.

Well, I’m not a smart man but I know that electrical systems don’t come cheap, so looked to me like twas time for a new dryer.

Not sure what led the dryer to it’s fate. Guesses:

1- The disembodied sprite of Flannery O’Connor, irked because I was playing a Dead Kennedys CD too close to the room that houses her library and typewriters, decided to reek techno-havoc.
2- The wiring in my current place is shoddy (which doesn’t seem to be the case)
3- The wiring in my last place (a 90 year old house) was shoddy, which is more probable since either a poltergeist or odd wiring caused lots of problems with appliances while I was there)
4- The back of the dryer was wettened by the illogical and video-game like plumbing system in the laundry room at said 1900s House
5- The wiring of the last place I lived in Americus was shoddy (don’t think so)
6- The wiring of the first place I lived in Americus was shoddy (wouldn’t be at all surprised, but then that was more than a year ago so why would it wait until now to complain?)
7- The wiring of the place I lived in Albany was shoddy
8- Five moves in two years did some damage to the dryer

Oh well, my dryer, the pyramids, and the real story of JFK’s death- does anybody really want the mysteries solved? Whatever the case, the next day I bought a new dryer at Lowe’s (GE, very quiet model, on sale for $200) and arranged to have it delivered Tuesday as that’s my late day at work. I told the sales lady “I go to work at 11:00 am, so I’ll need this delivered no later than 10:45 and I’ll need them to haul away the other dryer”, to which she responded “No problem, I’ll note for it to be the first thing delivered.”

I moved the old dryer to the patio so that it could participate in the recent Georgia tradition of basking in the sun rather than being completely cremated.

Today: 10:55 am- I called Lowe’s to ask for a status check. The seventh source at the seventh transfer told me “They left the store at 10:40 and yours was the first place on their route.” Irritating that it’ll be late, but well enough, for I am a reasonable and virtuous man.

11:30- Less reasonable and less virtuous, I called back. Wherefore is the dryer that the Lord hath promised me and for which I have paid with the sweat of my brow and a check?
‘Tis coming, my Lord, it comes… I can’t get in touch with the driver, but it comes’ said the Lowe’s rep.

12:30 p.m.- (or “By the Sixth Call Shalt Thou Know Him”)- I’m amazed how patient and calm I’m not as I get older. This time I told the person on the phone (by now I’d gone through Lowe’s employees like the armies of Hannibal through a Lusitanian whorehouse) “Look you good sirrah, call the delivery truck, have them bring the dryer back to the store, and there await me- I’ll come by the store, get a full refund on the dryer, and go to Sears or some other place…”

‘Oh but please sir, let us have another chance that we might find grace in thy eyes, saith he…

I must go to work to earn my daily laundry equipment, say I, and no longer can I wait. If it’s not here by the time I leave, deal’s off.

I shower, dress, and disembark and as I’m pulling out of my complex, what to my wandering eyes doth appear but a Lowe’s delivery truck where once I’d seen deer. (I’ve seen lots of deer since moving into this complex- Georgia’s one state where you don’t need to get out of the car to bag your legal limit.)

So I follow the delivery truck to the apartment. He asks “Do you know where this dryer goes?”. It’s mine, I responded, thinking that the address on the apartment and the slightly scorched dryer on the patio might have given some a hint, but apparently not.

Unable to get the dryer through my glass door (which was very odd you see, for it’s smaller than the current dryer which I got both in and out said glass door, though I should in the movers’ defense add that said dryer blew up), the emphasis switched to

PART II: THE DELIVERYMAN’S TALE

As some of you may have noticed, I usually wear an ankh ring on my left pinkie and it is from this that I draw 2/19 of my super powers.

The senior deliveryman was portrayed in a restrained but noble performance by Samuel L. Jackson; I didn’t recognize the actor playing his assistant, but he was about 16-17 and I’m guessing the guy playing him was one of the lesser Gooding brothers. As Samuel did all of the hook-up work (save for the vent hose, which I did, for by God I do have some testosterone), Gooding Minor asks:

”What that is on your finger?”

It’s a scar from where I had a wart burned off in high-school.

“No I mean the ring…”

It’s an ankh.

“What an ankh?”

The Egyptian symbol for life eternal.

He nodded. “I knew what it wa’, just like I saw those idols you got in the living room. I see ‘em ever day when I get up and when I go home, but never saw a white man with one.”

Well, instantly I knew that there’s only one place within 20 miles where you’re likely to see an ankh as you lay you down to sleep. This is the official website of said place (scroll down to see pictures):

http://www.angelfire.com/oh/AncientKnowledge/

Here are some other sites:

http://www.augustachronicle.com/stories/062898/met_LG0421-7.001.shtml

http://www.reformation.com/CSA/york2.htm

Then you can create your own cult for extra credit:

http://members.aye.net/~abrupt/house/createacult.html

The Nuwaubians Mother Ship was supposed to come pick up the faithful on May 5, 2003, but either the aliens are pissed off that founder Malachi Z (father of more than 100 children, incidentally- not at all inconceivable that I was addressing one) is wrongly incarcerated due to circumstantial evidence and sworn testimony connecting him to a few hundred molestation charges, or perhaps the Mother Ship is dispatched by Lowe’s and had to make a few other stops along the way. Interstellar fanaticism is really not my area of expertise. (My area of expertise remains to be seen, actually, but I’m guessing that histrionics and trivia fit into it somehow.)

Back to the kitchen: the distressing thing is that this was clearly a bright kid with some intellectual curiosity and even some reading; damned shame he grew up home-schooled by people so loopy they got kicked out by Louis Farrakhan.

Examining my refrigerator magnets while Sam Jackson was continuing to fiddle about with connections, he asked

“This Shakespeare idn’t it?”

Yeah.

“Did he write the White Man Bible? I read somewhere that he wrote part of the White Man’s Bible?”

If the White Man in question was James I & VI, then it’s theorized that he wrote some of the prose, but there’s no real evidence. Most of that was done by a man named Lancelot Andrews.

“Lancelot… like Guinevere’s Lancelot?”

Same name, but he lived centuries after those legends.

“When did King Arthur live?”

The “real” Arthur (it’s hard to do “quotation marks” in speech, incidentally) lived in the late fifth-early sixth century, but the legends about him are from much later, mainly the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. The “real” Arthur was probably more of a barbarian warlord than a king. They tacked on various legends to him to make him more of an ideal.

“Kinda like the stories ‘bout George Washington cutting down the cherry… uh… or whatever.”

(AAGH! I HATE THIS! This kid is CLEARLY bright, but he’s embarrassed by it; that’s a perfect connection to make between Parson Weems and the embroidery of Arthur that lots of college students wouldn’t be able to make.)

So, Samuel Jackson can’t figure out how to connect the cord correctly (some say that when you die, the heavy vinyl coated electrical cord connecting you to your body snaps- I hope there aren’t sparks), plus he doesn’t have the right tool on him so he goes back to his truck. Gooding the Younger decides to wait inside, sipping a Vanilla Coke (which he’s informative to tell me he doesn’t like) and taking inventory of my stuff.

“Who this statue of?”

Saint Lazarus- he’s Russian. You pray to him for fertility. Please feel free to pick it up and turn it upside down like you’re doing.

“Where you got it from? You Russian? You don’t sound like you’re from Georgia.”

I’m from the part of Coosa County, Alabama that’s closest to Russia.

“What that book about… en-sickle-pedia of witchcraft and de-mon-ol-o-gee”

It’s about witches and demons. In encyclopedia form.

“What you have that for? Don’t this stuff scare you?”

It fascinates me. Please feel free to pick it up and browse through it like you’re doing.

“Says these nuns were possessed over in France…”

M-hmm. Well, let’s see if we can’t get that dryer attached.

One semi-attached dryer later-

“What that Devil’s Knot about?”

A murder case in Arkansas in which three teenagers were convicted of killing three little boys as part of a satanic ritual. There was no evidence at all to connect them to the murders but they were trailer park whitetrash in a superstitious part of the country so two are serving life and one’s on death row.

“Hrmmph--- America. Best justice money can buy.”

Samuel Jackson then spoke: “Well, unless you wanna go through his closets or maybe take a look in his wallet, I think we’re done here. Got you all hooked up. Listen to it purr.”

On the way out he asked “Did you want us to take this blowed dryer with us?”

(DO THE PEOPLE AT LOWE’S NOT CONVEY ANYTHING?!)

Yes, please.

“Hmmm- hardly looks used. Guess that’ll happen though. They’ll strip it then melt it down for corrugated scrap you know. What a shame.”

What a shame indeed.

But somewhere along these encounters, I suddenly realized- I had become a man.

Well actually, that was about fifteen to twenty-two years ago, but I like to think that Samuel L. Jackson and a up and coming Gooding helped.

In other news from this weekend:

I watched two movies-

8 MILE- thoroughly enjoyed it. As I watched Eminem, defending his honor and his family by battling in brutal rap, a parvenu homeboy in an urban nightmare of a setting, it was like he was a up there a telling my story.
Really good movie. Eminem irks me because I think he’s psychotic white-trash with money, but I also think he’s extremely talented and more than a little bit hot. Maybe he’ll get therapy when he’s too old and rich to be a convincing gangsta in a couple of years and emerge as a better balanced character actor, or die young of a heroin overdose. Either way, good movie, and I think that rap battles should be a stage of both presidential elections and Miss America pageants.

BENT- probably the most disturbing and depressing and intense movie I’ve ever seen about the Holocaust. When even Mick Jagger (who was quite good in his role) in drag can’t break the tension… If you’ve ever had a nightmare due to something you’ve seen in a movie, avoid this one like it was popping boils. If you really want to feel the atrocity of totalitarianism, see it. (Interesting tidbit: BENT is about the experience of three homosexuals in Nazi Germany; one of the reasons Hitler hated homosexuals {other than Röhm} was because he thought they were as a rule intellectually and athletically superior to most other men and consequently exactly the ones who should be breeding, thus their failure to do so was racial treason.)

I’m also reading HARRY POTTER AND THE WHATEVER THE HELL IT IS THIS TIME. It’s darker than the others and suffers in the first half from the virtual absence of Dumbledore, Hagrid, and other Hogwartsians, though I do wonder just what the hell is up with Petunia. My theory (please don’t tell me if I’m right or wrong if you’ve read the book) is this: Potter is in fact a pure blood and his Aunt Petunia is a bitter squib who chose to go Muggle rather than feel inadequate among the witches, thus explaining another reason she so hated her sister and nephew. My other theory that I’ve had since book 2: it will ultimately be revealed that Harry and Voldemort, through a temporal split, are the same person.

In other news, my mommy’s coming this weekend (Marti in tow) that we might see MISS SAIGON at the Fabulous Fox in Atlanta. I’ve seen it before- mediocre story, hit and miss soundtrack, but visually stunning with incredible special effects (most famously the helicopter, but the Bangkok scenes and the Ho Chi Minh City street festival are also rather kick ass).

In yet other theater news, I am literally being begged by e-mail, phone, and messenger to come back to the Affirmative Action production of Guys & Dolls that I walked off of. They say they'll work around my schedule, but if only twer that simple- oy, what to do...
On the one hand I've suffered from a grievous blow, lesser by far than the one that landed Alexander Hamilton in his grave.

On the other hand there's a public that NEEDS me on that stage to restore their sense of normality, like Sarah Bernhardt singing the Marsellaise at the height of the Franco-Prussian War or Bob Hope assuring troops in Vietnam that all was going to be well not knowing that he was standing on tunnels.

But then again, I think of Tom and Andy, who looks to me as they would a father and who are no less dear to me than were they the products of my youthful assignations with the third daughter of a Thracian inn-keeper and her friend, a kindly Tibetan she-dentist. I see in their eyes the querie "Oh, surrogate father of an alternate reality, are PRIDE and JUSTICE to be bound and ravished, the noble but unwilling concubine on the couches of THEATRICAL POLITICS? Forbid it sir, say it is not so sir!" and life is turmoil again. Ahh, how lonely a life can be when duty makes it not your own.