Sippican: Excuse me. The Internet: Hello Mr. Sippican. Sippican: Come on with me for a minute. I want to talk to you. I just want to say one word to you, just one word. The Internet: Yes, sir.              Sippican: Are you listening? The Internet: Yes I am.                Sippican: Fernco.         The Internet: Exactly how do you mean?              Sippican: There is a great future in Fernco. Think about it. Will you think about it?  The Internet: Yes, I will. Sippican: Enough said. That’s a deal. That’s a bit of a strained metaphor, I know. It lacks verisimilitude, which is a writing term

I was no longer speaking to my son. We hadn’t had any sort of disagreement or anything. I like him a lot. If I didn’t know he was my son, and I met him, I’d probably like him even more than I do. Because I know he’s my son, I can espy resemblances to me, and that makes me discount his good nature a little, I’m afraid. I don’t like myself as much as I like him. No, it was simple weariness that had set in. It gets boring saying, “Go. Stop. Go. Stop.” It’s tiresome to say. It’s tiresome

It is an odd feeling to push all your chips into the middle of the table. Sitting in that frozen pit, holding on to a squirrelly cable while watching it spin in the pipe, I realized that everything that had come before meant nothing if this was as far as I got. I was to be judged solely on the outcome. There was no extra credit. No make-up tests. An “Incomplete” grade would be a notice to move out of my house or dig up the sewer line using money I don’t have and couldn’t get. The ground  was frozen

Sewer 101: Wear all the gloves in the house. Then drink the bleach. And so now we must get on with it. We sent an impromptu metal snake down the cleanout we’d discovered. It’s just a metal wire we use to “fish” electrical cable through wall cavities. I have a metal snake that’s made especially for sewer drains, but it’s much bigger, so it’s harder to clean off after you pull it back out. The wrong thing is often the right thing under the right circumstances. The poopoo porridge showing in the pipe was vile, and I wanted to keep

I nimbly recovered from my tool rental faux pas. I asked the rental dude how business was going, and he unloaded on me like a Home Depot toilet. Winter is the wrong time of year for construction in Maine, but that was the least of his woes, apparently. No one was doing nothing, he said, and I understood the grammar and the sentiment. I could have said or done any number of unpleasant things to him, accidentally or not, and he still would have been nice to me. I was renting something when no one else was, and by asking