Also Broke Zarathustra

I like to picture, as I open my garage door in the morning to embark on my day, this scene:

The sun glints over the frozen lake to my right, golden-orange rays speckling through the bare tree branches and glinting off the snow, scattered into the window of my garage door. The door, white and gleaming, rises slowly, revealing my black shoes, then my pants cuffs, moving on up my trench coat. As the door continues rising, someone outside would see me, with the sunlight illuminating the right side of my body, my left still in shadow, holding my coffee mug and staring into the distance, a sense of noble purpose visible on my face. In the background, the drumbeats and trumpets of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” grow louder and louder until the door is open all the way and I am cast into the light of a crisp new morning.

That’s how I like to picture it, every day. Here is what really happens:

The sun glints over the frozen lake to my right, golden-orange rays speckling through the bare tree branches and glinting off the snow, scattered into the window of my garage door. The door, white and gleaming, rises slowly, revealing my black shoes, then my pants cuffs,

Then drops back down with a crashing thud, and I have to set my coffee cup on top of Vuey and reach down and pull on it, helping the ancient, creaky “automatic” garage door opener get the door up far enough to the point where momentum pulls it the rest of the way, while I eye it warily and try to brush the spiderwebs off of my hand and wonder if the spiders are crawling on me.

Instead of a sense of noble purpose illuminating my eye, I’m sweaty from lifting the garage door and twitchy because I think there’s spiders in my collar. Before you think I’m crazy, I should tell you that once, I was right: once, there were spiders on me. Well, spider. But I was right, nevertheless. I had lifted the garage door and gone through the whole drill and gone to work and felt, the whole time, the whole commute to work, like something was crawling on me, to the point where I couldn’t even think straight, but I kept telling myself that it was just my imagination. Then I got to work, turned on my computer, set down my coffee, and picked up a pen, and out of my sleeve crawled a spider the size of a dime.

I’m twitchy right now, just remembering that, and my skin is crawling. I don’t even know where the spiders are coming from. It’s zero degrees, or colder, almost every day, and our garage is not heated. Don’t spiders die? Or hibernate? And why would they keep spinning a web on the garage door handle I knock the webs off of every day? That doesn’t speak well of evolution, that they can’t learn. Which is fine with me. I don't got no truck with spiders. I know that spiders exist solely to poison me or drop into my mouth while I'm sleeping, and the fewer of them around, the better.

Don't contact me, either, to tell me about how wonderful spiders can be or how they eat bugs and help balance the ecosystem. The abundance of spiders around my house has not made a dent in the bug population, as far as I can tell. And I'm perfectly willing to give up having an ecosystem if it means no more spiders.

The garage door is on its last legs, and so are a lot of things in our house. Locks are breaking, the grandfather clock weight dropped off and it won't work anymore and I don't even know how to find someone who repairs grandfather clocks (I asked my mom who used to fix hers, and she said "We just called him the clock guy.")

I'm the one that broke the clock, too, which is bad because what's the point of having kids if you can't blame them for breaking things? It was so bad, I couldn't even frame The Boy by rigging it so it would look like he did it the next time he wound the clock. Not that I'd do that, of course. I did, to be honest, ponder whether The Boy had framed me, but I couldn't prove it.

I didn’t know that turning 39 meant that nothing would work quite right anymore. Things are falling apart or not being held together or just not working the way they should. The light fixtures in our house, for example, appear to be going on strike. First, one in the kitchen died over Christmas. Then I replaced a bunch of bulbs in the dining room this weekend, and now the others have all begun burning out bulbs at the exact same time. I came downstairs just this morning and turned on one of the remaining kitchen lights we have, to get my coffee in near-gloom instead of perfect-dark, and it didn’t go on. So I did what everyone does in that situation: I flicked the switch on and off.

Ever think about that? We flick the switch on and off when a light goes out. Like I’m priming the pump or something: flick it faster to get the electricity flowing again. And what if that worked? Shouldn’t I assume, then, that there’s some kind of short or loose wire that I jogged back into place, and be more worried?

Not that it ever works, but I try it anyway, the way I’ll also try the handle of the car door I know is locked, with my keys inside, and then try it again a minute later in case I might have lulled it into a false sense of security.

I’m not limited to the flick-the-switch remedy in our house, though. I have another option, because our house was wired by the previous owner, and he used a “creative” system of wiring, a system the home inspector didn’t pick up on when he looked things over and told us there was no reason not to buy the house. He spent 1/2 hour on the fact that there's no railing on the front walk, but somehow missed the fact that the house was wired by a crazed electrician. (He also missed $12,000 worth of dry rot in the roof, but that was last year's adventure.) The system the previous owner used was, so far as I can tell, based on this theory: “attach as many wires together as you can and hope for the best.” Everything in our house is wired to everything else, and everything is interconnected in ways that cannot be fathomed. We have holistic electricity.

One circuit breaker controls ½ the kitchen, an outlet in the family room, and the back porch. Another seems to control nothing. There are three outlets on the upper level, in three different rooms, that are wired together. We found that out because when you plug the vacuum into any one of them, you trigger that circuit breaker and knock out power to all three of them. We have outlets that can’t handle the amount of electricity needed to operate a $39 Wal-Mart vacuum. I sleep soundly at night only when I can stop thinking about that.

And every light has at least two switches. The switches have to be operated just the right way and in conjunction to work the light. The light I was confronted with this morning has a switch by the sink and a switch by the door. The switches are five feet apart and there’s no reason to have two of them; there's no convenience factor there, which makes me suspect that Mr. Previous Owner didn't plan it that way but had some extra wire and decided to use it in a "fun" way.

To make matters worse, one switch for each light is the “master” switch, and if that one’s off, then flipping the other one won’t do anything; the master has to be "on" before the other works at all. Thinking about that means, I guess, that the switches are both wired to the light and then to each other in some sort of circuit that forces the electricity to always flow through one switch, but, again, I don't like to think about the wiring because if I think about it too much I'll need therapy.

When the kitchen light didn’t work this morning, I had to cross the five feet, in the dark, to get to the other one and flip it (stepping on the cat food the cats sprinkle around the kitchen overnight). But the catch is that if the master was “off” and you flipped the other one, you might have turned the other one off, so flipping the master switch on won’t do anything unless you go back and flip the other switch on again, too. When I flipped the master switch, the light didn't do anything, of course, so I had to go back and flip that one -- going through the drill of flipping it a couple times in case the electricity wasn't warmed up yet.

I was in my kitchen, at 6 a.m., no coffee yet, walking back and forth over dry cat food, flipping switches. I finally decided that the problem was not the switches. I went and turned on the only other light we have, the 40-watt bulb on the fan, and examined the bulbs on the other one, got a chair, and changed those, then went through the process of flipping all the switches in order – seriously, it’s more complicated than a nuclear missile launch – and finally got some light.

I was at least able to fix that problem, unlike the lazy garage door opener that doesn’t open the door unless you help it, a task which is beyond me. I was on a roll with fixing things this week, things like my eyebrow cowlick.

Sweetie pointed out the eyebrow cowlick to me the other night when she complained about my eyebrow while we were giving the babies a bath.

“Fix your eyebrow,” she told me, and then before I could figure out what I was supposed to do, she stuck out her hand and forcefully brushed my eyebrow around. Having a woman forcefully brush your hair isn't any better at 39 than it is at 6, I can tell you. She examined her work and said “It’s bugging me. Go fix it.”

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“It’s sticking out weird,” she said. “Go look at it.” So I did. I checked it out in the mirror, to the amusement of Mr F and Mr Bunches, who find whatever I do to be either very amusing or so disturbing that they have to start crying. This time, they laughed as I looked in the mirror and saw that one hair – one hair­— on my left eyebrow was pointing straight out into the room. The rest were all more or less aligned and doing their jobs. This one, though, appeared to be reaching for something. So I tried to brush it back down, but it didn’t take. I wet a finger and tried again, but nothing. I pondered for a second. Should I mousse it? Am I really going to go that far? What if I end up like Andy Rooney? I seriously wondered about that. Sweetie puts up with a lot, but I can’t expect her to stay with me if I’m growing shrubs above my eyes.

In the end, I got a scissors and cut it, over Sweetie’s protest; she wanted me to tweeze it. But I’ve got too little hair to go around tweezing out the stragglers. And tweezing hurts. And it's kind of girly. Men don't use tweezers. The kind of men I am don't, anyway. Because they hurt.

I find myself at that odd stage of life where I don’t need to get my haircut but I do need an eyebrow trim now and then.

There were solutions for those two problems, at least. Solutions and causes. The third one, I’m still stumped over.

I got out one of my nice dress shirts the other day, getting ready for work, and put it on. I did the tie and put on my shoes and was ready to button the cuffs, but the cuffs weren’t right. They were twisted around somehow and not aligned and I couldn’t get them to align. All my life, I’ve put on dress shirts and the cuffs end up on the outside of my wrist, easily reachable and nicely buttoned, so that when I hold my hands out in front of me, the cuffs point to the outside.
Suddenly, this morning, everything was all higgledy-piggledy. The buttons and holes for the cuffs were on top of my arms. This is a shirt I’ve worn probably a hundred times before, if not more, and I never had this problem. I was twisting around and pulling at the sleeves. I checked the tag to see if I’d put the shirt on inside out (and don’t ask me why I thought I might have accidentally done that… again). Finally, I just sat down on a chair and stared, stumped. I had to sort of curl my arm around upside down and reach with the other hand inside the elbow to button the cuffs. Then, when I straightened my arm, the cuffs pulled around and the sleeve felt twisty, but it wasn’t.

Somehow, my shirt had stopped working. I wondered if the previous house owner was behind this, too. Some trap he'd left in the closet? I couldn’t tell. I still can’t tell. I have no idea what happened. I just struggled with getting it buttoned, worked my way downstairs, went through the garage ritual, and ended up at my office with crooked sleeves, spider-tingles, and an eyebrow cowlick.

It’s pretty obvious to me that I’m getting farther and farther from the kind of life that’s backed by a full symphony orchestra playing soul-stirring inspirational music. At the rate I’m going, I’d be lucky to get a banjo and mouthharp.