by John Hodgman
I noticed then that Daddy Pitchfork stopped talking to his son. He looked up into some middle space and smiled. I did not notice then that Professor Mark did the same thing, at the same time. I do not think Daddy Pitchfork noticed this either, but at the same time they stood up. Then they saw each other and walked to my corner of the room, where I stood with my phone and my one Elvis Costello song. They knew this song. They put their arms around each other and sang it, knowing the words by heart, by friendship.
To my eye it was clear: Daddy Pitchfork wanted to be a friend to his son, who was growing so quick. And also he didn’t want to get old and die. But when it came down to it, he was a grown man. And this grown man didn’t want to be thinking about Purity Ring or memorizing the discography of Tame Impala. Part of him just wanted to be back on Rocky Top, singing the old songs, with his old friend. And I made it happen. I got the best friends back together again. And that’s when I turned to Pitchfork Jr., preparing to say, “Check it out, son. I win. I stole your dad!”
But Pitchfork Jr. was gone. Somewhere in the middle of “Oliver’s Army” he had gone outside, probably to smoke marijuana, maybe with the young woman from psychology, and definitely without me.
I never did end up having any marijuana that night. However, I did succeed at blacking out.
I drank many bourbons of both the Professor Mark and the Daddy Pitchfork vintages. And then I woke up, and it was morning, and I didn’t know where I was. I just shot up in bed, on top of the bedspread in what I did not remember was my bedroom at the Guest House. It was early morning. The window was open, and the sheer curtains floated on the cool spring breeze.
For a long time there was only that window and the scene it framed: a ribbon of bright blue sky shimmering above a ribbon of bright green forest; the ribbon of spring trees floating above a ribbon of bright blue river; and the river finally lapping up to a ribbon of bright green lawn. That combination of colors was all there was in the world, and all there was of me.
Gradually, I came back to myself. I slowly recalled the night before, and the dissolution of the party, and my good-byes and my trudge upstairs. Then I remembered other things, like my job and my name and the names of my wife and children. But that morning in the window was so vivid and otherworldly that I wondered if everything I remembered was in fact a dream. It seemed possible, then, that nothing I remembered was true. And when I stepped out of that bedroom door I would find a different life waiting for me. Maybe this was my own house, and not the Guest House. Maybe I would be younger or older. Maybe downstairs I would not find my wife and children, but a different family. Maybe I would no longer be an only child. Maybe I had a brother, and maybe we were going to a wedding.
And who knows? Maybe that is what happens every morning. Maybe we wake to a new life every day and grasp sadly at disappearing memories of the last one as we awaken, until they are finally burned off by the sun.
Obviously, I am not the first and far from the best to express these ideas. But I include them here for my children. I want to show them that you don’t have to smoke marijuana to get deep and have sophomoric thoughts about the universe.
And of course, I was still me. Everything that happened that night had actually happened. I knew it for two reasons. One, I was still wearing my sweaty corduroy three-piece. And two, as I stood and smoothed myself for the journey home, back to my real family who had not disappeared (I am so lucky), I found something in my jacket pocket. It was something that had not been there before.
It was a CD-R (remember, this was the past). There were two words written in orange Sharpie on it: “Frank Ocean.” And then there was a yellow Post-it: “John, check this out! Hope you like it.” It was signed with the real first names of Daddy Pitchfork and his son. Had they handed it to me in person, there would be no need for that note. The conclusion was inescapable. They had written the Post-it and put the CD in my jacket as I slept.
So, children, please don’t go to college and drink to the point of blacking out, even if you’re in your forties. If the worst thing that happens to you is some dude plants a mix tape on your person, that is violation enough. And to Professor Mark and the Pitchforks, I hope I have not hurt you with these revelations. I had a great time, and I am your friend.
Nerve Food
We were in our early thirties when we took on our house in rural western Massachusetts. We were grown-ups, but only theoretically. When you live in New York or any big city, it is easy to fail at growing up. The city is designed to keep you in a state of perpetual adolescence. You never need to learn to drive if you don’t want to. And even if you do drive you can go back to that bar you went to when you were twenty-one, and it will still be there, and it will still be called Molly’s, and the older waitress there will still remember you and let you sit where you want. And five years later, when she is no longer there, when there is just a picture of her above the bar in a place of sad honor, and you know what that means and you don’t want to think about it, guess what: you do not have to. Because no one is driving home, and you’re back again, listening to “Fairytale of New York,” which is still on every jukebox, falling into the same conversations you had with the same friends in the ’90s: about how the internet is going to change culture, and what you are going to do when you grow up.
Or let’s say later you move to Park Slope, Brooklyn, in your late thirties because you suddenly, impossibly, have some money coming in from television. You are able to actually buy an apartment, and you think, this is it: a mortgage, real estate taxes, a sleepy neighborhood full of strollers and unexciting restaurants. You have grown up. But it turns out all of Brooklyn is suddenly alive with a not-growing-up renaissance. You can walk for the first time to the newest bars to hear comedy and new music. You are surrounded by people younger than you whose sense of style is to look like you. Young men grow dad beards and cultivate pallor and belly chub. You are struck by how much the young barista’s glasses look just like the ones your mom used to wear—square and huge, overwhelming her face—and double-struck by how much Twin Peaks trivia she seems to know. And you know that this is just fashion, that dressing like an old person is exactly what you used to do when you were a pretentious young person, but you bury that knowledge and enjoy the illusion: I am just like you!
And even if you are lucky enough to own your own apartment, it is not a freestanding house. It is still a glorified dorm. If something fails or breaks or clogs you do not need to fix it yourself; you call the superintendent or some other surrogate daddy to make it right. You do not need to shovel a driveway or clean a gutter. You certainly don’t need to drive to the dump or know what a septic system is. I still don’t really know what a septic system is, and technically, as of this writing, I own two of them.
A few years ago in rural western Massachusetts a sound started coming out of the woods. It was a low, repeating, guttural sound that I will perform for you if you meet me. It sounded like three honking calls from a dying swan—HYUHH, HYUHH, HYUHH—organic, but with almost a machinelike precision as it repeated itself.
HYUHH, HYUHH, HYUHH . . .
HYUHH, HYUHH, HYUHH . . .
HYUHH, HYUHH, HYUHH . . .
One evening, as we sat on the deck, bog-gazing, my wife turned to me and asked, “What do you think that sound is?” The sound had been going on for twenty-four hours a day for about five days, so her curiosity was piqued.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Tree frogs?” Which was not a terrible guess. By then I had learned enough of the country to say that frogs, tree and otherwise, make some crazy croaks, drones, chirrups, skree-skrees, and hyuhhs and really do keep it up for a long time. If anything was going to sound like a dying robot swan, it would be a tree frog. But my guess was wrong. It was the sound of our septic pump failing.
I should have known something was going wrong. In our basement, on the wall, is a box. This box contains the septic control panel. And on top of the panel
there is a red dome light, like you find on top of an old police car. This light had turned on some days before and was now revolving, filling my basement with the pulsing scarlet light of EMERGENCY. It was not like I had not seen this light. I had gone down to the basement a couple of times to use the dryer. I knew that it probably indicated bad things for our septic system. My solution was to stare at the light for a minute or so, and then turn around and go back upstairs. My experience with computers had taught me to trust that a spinning red alert light is probably all part of the process. If I turn it off and on again, or just leave it alone, it will probably fix itself.
It did not fix itself, and so we had to call the Septic Daddy. It was an expensive lesson, but that doesn’t mean I learned it. Even now my brain refused to absorb the explanation for what had happened, or the solution. It involved the relocation of the leach field, I think. But then I may only remember that because I enjoy the term “leach field” so much.
To be fair, we treated that septic system badly. The house came with a garbage disposal, which was exotic technology to us at the time. We had both had them as kids, but when we moved to New York they exited our lives. You were not allowed to have a garbage disposal in Manhattan then; the sewer pipes were too delicate. But now, with a disposal of our very own, it seemed a direct link to the kind of easy suburban lifestyle we thought might never be ours. So it is fair to say we went a little disposal crazy.
Our first summer there my wife discovered a cache of old pantry items my mother had hoarded and left behind. Can after can of beans and soup and olives that were all now past their due date. “What is all this stuff?” she asked me.
I didn’t know. It was upsetting. I do not know why my mother had bought all these cans of food, never to open them. When you get a can of soup, the date printed on the bottom is a distant future, impossible to reach. To hold a can of tomato soup now, two full years past that date, was like holding betrayal. You were supposed to last forever, I wanted to tell it.
My wife wanted to lay claim to this house and clear all this dead food out, and her plan was to disposal every last bit of it. She started opening and grinding, opening and grinding: cans of Stewart’s shelled beans and jars of old pickles and capers. It went on for hours. It was a hot Saturday summer afternoon. I sat at the kitchen table, watching her sweat and open and grind. It was probably the most erotic moment of our marriage.
Eventually she found her way to the back of the cupboard. She dislodged three boxes of Cheerios, yellow and blue. They were five years old. She showed them to me.
“What are you going to do with that, baby?” I said.
“I’m going to disposal all of this,” she said.
“That’s fucking right you are,” I said.
She did. It was a terrible idea. Here is some homeowner’s advice. Do not put even a single box of stale Cheerios down the garbage disposal, never mind three. Because when you grind up Cheerios into oat powder and shove them into your pipes with a bunch of water behind them, the Cheerios do not slide easily through your pipes to the leach field (maybe?). They absorb the water and swell up. And then you have a Cheerio tumor in your pipes. And then you have to explain that tumor to the plumber you have had to call to cut it out. He will stand in the basement with his hacksaw, tapping at the Cheerio metastasis, the pipe making a solid, grim thunk.
He will look at you and say, “How did this happen?”
And you will have to say, “I’m sorry, Pipe Daddy. We were just having a sexy disposal time.”
Here is another bit of homeowner’s advice. If you have never owned a freestanding house that is heated by propane, you may not know that the propane does not arrive by magic. This came as a great surprise to me. If you had asked me that first year we spent in rural western Massachusetts where the propane came from, my best guess would have been: “Um, tubes of some kind?” And beyond that, who knew?
I didn’t know what that giant white metal Tylenol out in the backyard was for. I thought it was just some weird personal submarine my father had collected. But that is not what it is: it is a propane tank. If you want it to be full of propane, you have to call the Gas Daddy. And if you do not call him, the Gas Daddy will not come.
And that is when you arrive at your home in rural western Massachusetts in November. You will have a baby in your arms, and it will be late at night, because you had to stop twice along the way to feed that baby. Your house will be cold and smell of garbage. This will not be because of the five bags of rotting garbage you left in the garage the last time you were here, two months ago. No, the Gas Daddy will explain when he arrives that night to fill your tank: the propane itself is purposefully made to smell like rotting garbage. That way, if you have a gas leak, you will smell it. Or, if you are running out of propane and it won’t light anymore, you will smell it and call to get more. That smell is the propane’s way of telling you that you have an emergency, he said. It smells like garbage because you are garbage: garbage people who do not deserve to own a home. We got better at it, but it took a while.
Unlike the city, where you are surrounded on all sides by humanity’s tributes to its own false triumphs (condominiums and Whole Foods), the structures you build in the country do not protect you from all those things in the woods: the tree frogs, yes, but also the ants and the mice that will find their way in, and the wasps that will nest in your eaves and attack your baby for their own sick fun. Once a raccoon made a latrine of our porch. That means it shat all over it. Why mince words? A raccoon wouldn’t.
Raccoons are beyond fear, and they are assholes. I tried to chase a raccoon off our porch as it was casually emptying our bird feeder into its fat mouth. As I yelled, it turned its head and eyed me with such casual contempt that I apologized to it. Once a raccoon used its little mutant humanlike hands to open our screen door while we were just sitting there, gin-and-Scrabbling. It poked its head into our human house and just looked at us sadly, as if to say, “You guys know I could come in here and kill you at any time, right?” I would soon learn that the raccoon was telling the truth.
This time, when we left our house for several weeks, a raccoon saw our porch and said, “This is all mine now,” and just started pooping. By the time we returned, the latrine was a really developed and, I must confess, admirable heap of feces, both fresh and dried. I was about to sweep it all away when some reptilian survival impulse stopped me and sent me to Google. It turns out that many raccoons are infected with a parasitic roundworm, Baylisascaris procyonis. By “many,” I mean that it is estimated that some 72 to 100 PERCENT of all raccoons have this worm inside them and are pooping out its eggs. If you were to accidentally inhale such eggs, say, by sending them into the air by sweeping a pile of old dry raccoon feces off your porch, they will hatch into larvae inside your body. In a few weeks you may begin to experience increasingly serious symptoms, which the CDC lists, with admirable comic deadpan, as “nausea, tiredness, liver enlargement, lack of coordination, lack of attention to people and surroundings, loss of muscle control, blindness, coma.”
That quick trip from nausea to coma is for grown-ups only, by the way. If you are a baby and you get infected, you could die. That is why raccoons and wasps are such good friends: shared interests. The risk of infection is so serious that the CDC, a federal agency, goes on to suggest that the best way to deal with raccoon feces on your porch is to attack it and your own property with a propane torch. So call your Gas Daddy: nature is cruel, and it makes you cruel too.
It was in rural western Massachusetts that I confronted that cruelty, and a profound moral paradox. I was caring for a beloved pet dwarf hamster during its end-of-life cycle. If you have ever had a pet dwarf hamster, then you know that its end-of-life cycle begins about five days after you buy it for your young son. That is when it suddenly stops eating and starts becoming a hairless, half-filled hacky sack of wheezes and ragged bones that you are holding in your hand, hopelessly trying to force
-feed medicine from an eyedropper that was sold to you by a veterinarian/con man for five hundred dollars.
This is what I was doing in our kitchen in Massachusetts one evening: keeping one dwarf hamster alive, while at the same time, just on the other side of the kitchen door, in the dark of the garage, I was murdering dozens of field mice a week with traps and poison.
Now field mice are the exact same size as dwarf hamsters. They are somewhat more dusky in color, and somewhat more likely to sneak in through the garage and live in the walls and hide caches of seeds underneath your pillows if you are not around for a few weeks. But otherwise they are the same animal. The only difference is that this rodent, the one dying in my hand, is the one we chose to dignify with a name (Flurry!). This is the one we decided, arbitrarily, had value ($13.99, I think) and deserved love.
Even Flurry knew this was bogus. There she was in my hand, waving off the eyedropper of medicine with her withered paw, as if to say, “This is some insane cognitive dissonance. Please just let me die.”
And I said, “No, Flurry. I won’t give up on you. You are going to make it! Now you just rest quietly here for a moment while I go out to the garage to see how many of your brothers’ heads I’ve smashed in today.”
Because that is the humane way to kill mice that are invading your home: you quickly smash in their heads with a snap trap, rather than snaring them in a glue trap so that they can slowly starve to death. (Yes, you can catch them in a humane trap and return them to nature, where, having lived warmly in your walls for their whole lives, they can now revel freely in an exposed ditch somewhere until they are eaten by a hawk. Nature is the meanest trap of all.)
Every week, I would go out into the garage and collect the bodies, crushed in the spent traps, and throw them away. It never got easy. When you humanely crush a mouse’s head in, their eyes bulge like dark blackberries full of shock and confusion. Their eyes seem to ask, What happened? Why did it happen? And why did it happen to me, and not Flurry?