One of my worst personal qualities is my tendency to turn minor, everyday inconveniences into a moral showdown with inanimate objects. I just can’t seem to help myself. The other day I opened the door to the refrigerator, and a bottle of hot sauce fell out and broke all over the floor.
Instantly the thought occurred to me:
THIS WASN’T MY FAULT. I mean it lit up the inside of my skull like neon. I really hadn’t had enough time to assess whether this was even true, and besides which, there’s really no need to immediately assign fault in an accident like this one. No one had suggested it might have been my fault. But I was prepared for it, in case somebody did. But if you’re looking to spice up your domestic routine, and to find new ways to irritate the people who have to live with you, I recommend dealing with mundane household accidents in the following way:
- Find at least two things to blame besides yourself. Ideally one of these things will be a person and the other will be inanimate: a system, a routine, an appliance. That way, if the human scapegoat refuses to accept the blame, you still have something to fall back on that can’t argue with you.
- In my situation, I chose my wife Grace, who had improperly loaded the hot sauce diagonally across the rest of the jars on the shelf in the middle of the refrigerator door, thereby creating an unstable logjam, and the plastic shelf itself, which was already partially cracked from overloading.
- Importantly, I did not choose myself, although I had previously noticed the crack in the plastic and declined to fix it, as well as the precariously-loaded hot sauce. I merely gave myself credit for noticing the problem in the first place, not blame for failing to fix it sooner. Other people like hearing that you have anticipated a problem before it happened. It makes them feel looked-after.
- When the disaster happens, immediately shout “Oh, no” or “Fuck” in your darkest tones, filled with unspoken meaning. Do not follow up. Resist the urge to say “I’m all right” (if indeed you are all right! You probably are covered in hot sauce and nearly dead) or to explain what has just happened. Let a leaden silence fill the air afterwards, so that everybody else will have to get up from whatever they’re doing to find out.
- Mournfully announce to your audience your findings: What systems error, or more likely, what individual failure, has nearly killed you? Remember, this is not just “one of those things” that happens to everybody sometimes. This is a crisis of the first order, and a harbinger of far worse things to come.
- If you have children or pets, you can try to rachet up your bid for sympathy by saying “Imagine if it had been the baby instead of me!” This lets everyone know that you don’t care a fig for your own well-being — you are simply deeply and uniquely committed to safety! The only one in the house who cares!
- At this stage, refuse all offers of help. You have successfully distracted everyone else in the house from whatever they were doing, and demanded immediate attention and sympathy. Now, if they offer to help you clean up, it is very important that you decline. You only wanted to interrupt their work, not try to work together! You have suffered alone, and you will make the repairs alone! Now everyone feels annoyed for having been called away to do nothing, and they have to watch you do additional work, thus earning extra points on the great invisible Chore Wheel that turns about in revolutions of fire in everyone’s mind.
If you follow this blueprint exactly, you can make almost any situation worse in five minutes or less, at no additional cost to you, the consumer.
I even drew a little illustration of the encounter. I’m afraid it didn’t turn out very well in the end. The idea I wanted to communicate was one of being a beautiful hero against the treachery of objects, and spiritually wearing a fox-fur opera cape and top hat.
The fridge is all right. It looks more like a partially-finished apartment building than a refrigerator, but you get the idea pretty well. I learned how to draw cubes from third-grade art class, and I remembered to put the freezer on the bottom and the handle on the right-hand side of the door. The little panel in the middle might look like a window, but it isn’t. It’s just a little electronic display that tells you what the temperature inside the fridge is. I have no quarrel with the panel.
You can tell just by looking, I think, that this isn’t a very good fridge; I think I’ve managed to capture something of its perfidious and perverse nature in the line work. On first glance it appears fairly ordinary — maybe a little narrow, but pretty ordinary nonetheless — but something about the arrangement unsettles the soul.
I mean, you’d know pretty quickly to be on your guard against such a fridge just from looking at this drawing. Just look at it! The fearful symmetry, et cetera.
I’ve drawn myself on the right, nobly and manfully objecting to the refrigerator’s behavior. Not complaining, mind you, and without the slightest hint of a whine, but righteously indignant about the existence of such wickedness. I took a
J.C. Leyendecker drawing as my model. You can see for yourself that things didn’t turn out quite right.
I suspect that J.C. Leyendecker has probably had more practice, and was not hampered, as I have been, by having only a Paper Mate Flair medium felt-tip pen to work with. It’s a poor workman as blames his tools, I know, but how else to explain why the shadings of the cheekbone that look so natural on his fellow look like wrinkles on mine?
And I haven’t gotten the size of the top of the head right, either. Anyone can see that. And the ear is all wrong. I’ve filled it with some sort of Masonic sigil, instead of a few delicate little scribbles that nonetheless immediately and accurately communicate the inside of the human ear. Well, you can’t have everything in life.
