The Psychrowave

April 25, 2018.Reading time 3 minutes.

The microwave is talking to me. It isn’t the normal chatter. It’s not telling me the time or that my food is hot. No, I am convinced it has something important to say and so far, I’m just not getting it.

It started off with what my wife deemed a malfunction. Every so often, it would flash gibberish across its digital display. As with all things electronic, she throws up her hands in disgust and claims it to be a conspiracy against her. I start from the top and unplug the thing in an attempt to reboot.

The psychrowave is happy with that… for a time. But soon it starts merrily flashing its symbols again.

It always works just fine if you pushed the “Add 30 seconds” button. But if you try to input a time and temperature combination, it freaks out and starts flashing codes. Maybe it’s just tired. “Add 30” is easy. It doesn’t require complex computations and hard math… it’s just 30 seconds. We can all do life in 30 second increments.

No one else in the house appreciates the fact that our microwave needs to rest. They huff and hoot about how we need a new one. But me – I can relate to wearing down and needing a rest. Life can be exhausting and I’m sure heating food on command is hard work.

Then the sounds started. The psychrowave began calling to me during the night. Miscellaneous beeps emanated from our kitchen during the wee hours of dark. Because of my hearing loss, I was immune to the agony. But the others were upset and began unplugging it every night. This saddens me because the poor thing is trying to communicate and I just don’t know what it needs.

This morning I saw my name.

In one of its cycles of gibberish I swear it flashed “Mark” followed by something I interpreted as “Robot chicken.” It dawned on me that what we see as gibberish may actually be some complex language… a form of ancient runes! As an aside, it is entirely possible that this new theory is related to the fact that I just read all seven of the Harry Potter books. I’m starting to think the microwave is my horcrux and its gibberish is my parseltongue.

This whole situation is maddening for me and I’m sure my ineptitude at deciphering the code is equally frustrating for the psycrowave. We’ll get there. We will reach an understanding: the microwave and me.

Tonight I’ve spent hours transfixed at the glowing light of its code until I heard something new. A familiar female voice behind me said one of us needed to be replaced…

I’m just not sure which one she meant.

The Meaning of Life

April 2, 2018.Reading time 4 minutes.

Epiphanies usually come at the oddest times. Strange moments birth ideas that blossom into either absolutely nothing… or a golden opportunity. They often materialize when performing a mundane task or in that twilight between sleep and almost awake when we don’t yet have the cognitive ability to scribble them down.

“That idea was so great I’ll remember it,” we think before we doze back to sleep.

When morning actually comes, all we remember is that we had an idea and it was a great one. But the actual content is long gone.

I had one this weekend, though – and I was awake. I knew it was the mother of all epiphanies the minute it popped into my brain. It is:

The meaning of life

I kid you not! It’s time to buy the robes, find my mountaintop, and plop down. I figured it out – the big idea! And it is simpler than any philosopher ever tried to reason.

It started thusly.

My children love having pets. We have two dogs, three cats, and they have always begged for more. My issue with the pets we have and the pets they want is that I seem to be the only one qualified to clean up the poo. With three cats, this is a daily requirement. I think my kids are recreational pet lovers; they like the fun stuff, but not the dirty obligations that are a companion to pet ownership.

I have lived my life on the premise that there is nothing I can get on my skin that I can’t wash off. When I relayed that to my daughter, she just said, “Ewwwww!!”

So I clean the litterbox daily and every Saturday I pick up three to five pounds of poop in the yard. I don’t love it, but I like having pets and understand the responsibilities involved. It hit me Saturday while I had the scooper in hand, that this is it.

The meaning of life is cleaning up crap. Wiping the backside. Picking up piles. Scooping the poopy.

You laugh, but(t) think about life in stages.

Someone else selflessly wipes your backside.
Through the joy of education and experiment, you learn to wipe your own.
With experience, you get better at it and refine the skill until it is automatic.
If you’re lucky enough, something comes into your life (animal or tiny human) that you deem worthy of wiping or cleaning up their crap. And you do.
You are no longer able to reach your backside and must depend on another. If you’ve loved well, someone is willing. If not, you’d better have cash.

It’s the circle of poop. And it moves us all.

Think of the parallel to life as we know it. We move from a selfish human who needs someone else to a self-sufficient master of our domain to eventually selflessly doing something dirty and disgusting for others. This is a tangible metaphor for what a life well-lived becomes: from selfish to selfless – served to servant.

There are some tiny humans whose diapers I changed many years ago, much to my chagrin. I admit that I did not wipe nearly as many shiny hinys as my wife and I was rarely gleeful about it. But I did it. And while they moved to stage 3, I cleaned up after all of their beloved pets. And hopefully… hopefully… when I revert to stage five, those children will realize that the circle of poop must continue. Because I’ve got some surprises in store for them.