Forty-seven seconds. I guess Pavel had to get to his concrete apartment block before curfew. Maybe the commies were rationing notes back then. Maybe Pavel couldn’t sing for more than a minute without passing out because all he had to eat that day was a cube of suet, a slice of bread cut on a bandsaw, and a shot glass of sour acidophilus milk.
You must admit, though; it’s forty-seven seconds of concentrated awesome. Buddy Holly wasn’t a musician. He was a savior sprung from Eisenhower’s fivehead descending from the heavens in a Cadillac chariot pulled by Sun records. .
This aggression must not stand, man. My little son will watch This Old House but passes on an offer to watch his father fix the old house he lives in. There’s a danger there. It’s not simply that the attention span required is too long. Of course a TV production removes dead time. All the preparation is excised, and even most of the work itself. There is a constant patter of a kind I call “refreshingly information-free.” Most of TV and the Intertunnel is made up of this intellectual equivalent of a cow’s cud. You chew it for a while, swallow it, and hurl it up to chew again later. Nothing is accomplished and no benefit is accrued but passing the time.
That is not the danger I referred to. The danger is much more profound. My son was exhibiting in a small way what it manifest in spades in everyone else: It’s not real unless it’s on the TeeVee. My sons have seen less TV than your average Amish kid, but the world’s view on things intrudes even into a somewhat isolated life: You’re no one unless the TV pays attention to you. It’s a dangerous idea.
I’ve been on the television a few times, and on the radio lots of time. I’ve been in the paper a goodly amount over the years. I’ve been all over the Internet like a rash. None of that holds any terrors for me. But it’s not real life. None of it is even a funhouse approximation of real life. It is a closed circuit feed being broadcast to itself. My wife drove to the grocery store yesterday, and when she switched on the radio, there was an advertisement being broadcast for an Unorganized Hancock show. She got a chuckle out of it, but my 12-year old wouldn’t have cared. He is never interested in watching any of his videos after they’re made, and you can’t offer him any praise when a performance is over. He immediately goes back to being a little boy in the real world. He thinks Rhett and Link are like Salk and Pasteur because they’re on YouTube. He’s on YouTube, too, but somehow he doesn’t count because he knows he’s real-real, not YouTube-real.
I had to find a way to make real life real for my son. I coaxed him to join me while I installed the convenience outlet. I could have forced him, but that would never achieve the desired effect. He would simply learn that working with his father is a travail and be programmed to avoid it at all costs. I must actually do work, however, and can’t turn it into playtime. That’s the danger of things like Sesame Street. Educational shows aren’t. The alphabet doesn’t get up and dance and sing. You have to make it.
I struck upon the idea of making it real using his own stuff. He has Snap Circuits. His aunt and uncle gave them to him for Christmas a few years back, and he loves to make little electronic trifles with them. I told him we would use Snap Circuits to fix the house. He followed me like a puppy.
I explained to him that the electricity in the wires was strong enough to kill me, and that I must be careful. I told him that I did not trust anyone that had installed wiring in the past, so I could not be sure that anything already in place was safe. We must determine it ourselves. We fetched a battery pack with two AAs in it and an indicator light from his Snap Circuit toy.
We went down in the nasty Basement Basement. That’s adjacent to the Regular Basement, which is located above the Car Hole. The Car Hole used to be Frosty Hobo Central, but we fixed it so hobos can’t get in any more and freeze to death so we changed the name.
I explained that I needed to make sure that the wire that was already in place but not being used was the same wire at both ends. I thought it was the same wire, but part of the wire was inaccessible so you couldn’t be sure without testing it yourself. I turned off all the electricity in the house, and let my son hold an electric lantern like a character in one of his video games, which he loved. We hung the battery pack on the black and white wires in the Romex cable on one end, and then went upstairs. I connected the two leads of the Romex wire to the indicator light, and it shone brightly, much to the little boy’s delight. It was a real thing made real in terms he could not only understand, but enjoy.
We were not solving a technical problem. We were actually solving a logic problem. IF all the wires in the house are not electrified because we turned off the main circuit breaker, THEN only the wire that has the battery pack will light the light, OR ELSE dad is electrocuted because he trusted the label in the Service Panel and threw the wrong circuit breaker. That results in my children GOTO: circus.
A few minutes ago I went up stairs and checked what he had learned:
-How many volts in a regular house circuit, son?
-About 110, I think.
-How many amps?
-15
-How many amps in a kitchen circuit?
-20, or 40 for the stove.
-What color wires are in electrical cable?
-Black, white, and a copper one.
-What do the colors mean?
-Black for hot, white for neutral, copper for ground.
-What colors are the screws on a convenience outlet?
-Gold, silver, and green.
-What wire goes where?
-Black on gold, white on silver, copper wire on green.
I decided to move my desk into another room last night. It’s been in my dining room. I put it there because about five years ago I moved to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Actually, that’s not quite true. I moved to Rumford, Maine, which is more like Superman’s horizontal freezer inside his Fortress of Solitude. Rumford is colder than an ex-wife that passes by when you’re panhandling. The only heat in the house is the pellet stove in the dining room and I parked my sorry self within ten feet of it five minutes after I installed it. I’d get right in the hopper and button up like a Panzer tank if I could, but that would void the warranty, I think.
Unfortunately, it’s like a bowling alley in the dining room, and I need to think occasionally when I write. I don’t think about what I write, but I do like to think about central heating and other mythical creatures while I type. Passes the time. The dining room simply has too much hubbub, bub.
In order to move my desk into our bedroom, I needed to install an electrical outlet. Our house was built when McKinley was president, and I think he was the electrician, too. It still has knobs and tubes all over the place, and most rooms in the house only have one convenience outlet. The room where the kids practice music doesn’t have any electricity at all.
I know how to install electricity in a new house, and an old house, and a restaurant, and a gas station, and a football stadium, and several other kinds of places no one invites me to build anymore. It’s really very simple except the part where you’re dealing with what was installed in the mists of antiquity by an escapee from a support group for mentally challenged subcontractors with Frankenstein fetishes. The meetings were held in my basement, I infer.
So I had a hankering for electricity last night after supper. My older son usually helps, but he’s sick and in bed, and the little one is watching something on the screen in the living room. That left me by my lonesome to scurry up and down the stairs to find a spot to bring Romex up from the basement and into the wall on the first floor to install the outlet. I located a knot in the subfloor, and used it for a measuring point. I found an abandoned wire I could re-route from a clothes dryer from the seventies, and I followed it back to a spider’s cathedral in the ceiling of the other, nastier part of the basement where I keep my personality and the circuit breaker panel.
I had to hunt around for stuff. I couldn’t afford to buy a single screw, so everything had to be found in the heap of jetsam I keep handy in case I want to build an atom smasher or fix a window screen. I found an old work box suitable for a lath and plaster wall, a 15-amp duplex outlet left over from a house I built in the ninth century, and a cover plate still in its wrapper that included the rarest of things in the history of construction: a usable center screw. I found some wire nuts wherever you find wire nuts. No one ever buys wire nuts. You just find them in your basement, like mildew.
Now for tools: I located a hefty hammer drill that never had its perpendicular handle and will break your wrist like Rex Kwan Do if you’re not careful, which I never am. I put a comically big 18″ auger bit labeled the “Nail Eater” in the chuck, and prepared to drill a hole through 1.75 inches of subfloor, a little bit of the carrying beam of the house, and the 1-3/4″ sole plate of the wall upstairs. The idea is that the auger will appear magically inside the wall at the bottom of the correct wall stud bay, directly under the outlet box I just installed. That’s what I was preparing to do, as I said. I was expecting to drill through my wife’s foot, or come up in the middle of the lawn like Larry Fine, or some such.
I had to turn off half the circuit breakers in the house because everything’s labeled like jars in the dissection room of a dyslexia museum and I have no idea if I’m turning off some guy’s iron lung across the street or a lamp in my living room.
I was getting ready to actually drill the hole, so I went upstairs to warn my wife that the “Nail Eater” might be coming her way, and I had no idea if they were referring to toenails or framing nails or what. And there, in the living room, was my 12-year old son, watching an ancient rerun of This Old House on streaming media on the TV because nothing else in the house will turn on. Tom Silva was explaining how to drill holes in framing lumber so as not to weaken them unduly when making holes for electricity or plumbing. My son was watching it the way teenaged boys watch girls at the beach. So I asked my son if he wanted to watch his father drill a great big hole in some framing lumber in order to install an electrical wire.
All my friends aren’t imaginary, but they are theoretical.
I live in a world of ghosts and shadows. I look for fellow travelers but they all seem to have gotten off already and I think we’re all Bozos on this bus now. I’ll settle for people I never met and will never meet and shake hands in the electronic ether and be done with it.
The best band in Maine, Unorganized Hancock, has finally found a bass player. Her name is Laverne.
Like Charlie Maine (the guitar player), the Neon Kid (the drummer), and Slim McGillicuddy (he holds the sign and sorts the M&Ms) Laverne comes from something of a sketchy background. We found her hanging around the lumber yard, which is really no place for a lady. She looked really thin and lonely, so we took her home and adopted her. We tarted her up a bit, but girls secretly like that sort of thing. Even Goth chicks wear lipstick. It’s just another color.
Anyway, Laverne is a great bass player. She’s certainly the most reliable of all the bass players Unorganized Hancock has tried. She’s purdier. She never plays too loud. She isn’t shy, and looks right at the audience the whole time. All in all, she’s a pro, and a tad more intelligent than most bass players, and all drummers.
Maybe it’s just me, but I got a background vibe that Slim McGillicuddy is rather sweet on Laverne. Call me an old softie, but I hope those two crazy kids get together someday and have a baby or two. Their children would probably be credenzas or etageres or something, but their parents would love them just the same I’m sure.
Laverne!
Month: August 2015
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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