– in which Dorn battles against entropy.
I’ve written before about my fear that circumstances will force me to do something that puts me at risk of catching the covid bug. Following the fashion of human-being psychology, I only really worry about the things that I haven’t done yet, my lizard-brain[what?] telling me that if I did it even once and didn’t die, it’s probably not worth worrying about.
What I haven’t done since February, not even once, is to have enter any building other than our house, or invite someone to come into our house, and what I’m fearing these days is that something will break that will require me to do one or the other of these things. And because it is a universal law that Things Fall Apart, I know I’m living on borrowed time.
Yesterday this warning light came on in the car while we were driving to the park for our daily walk. (See, even though we encounter other people, including gasping, spitting runners, while walking in the park, my lizard-brain doesn’t recoil. My spock-brain knows that our covid risk is only slightly mitigated by Kathleen and me wearing masks, since the runners without exception don’t wear them, but because it hasn’t sickened us yet, I don’t have the same visceral fear that it will.)
I’m not sure I could get my car’s warning light fixed without entering the shop building, and that fills me with dread. So I handled the situation in the government-approved manner: I ignored the warning signals, did nothing, and hoped the problem would magically go away by itself.
So far, I’m having better luck than the federal government in my risk-mitigation strategy—the warning light did go out, and so far has stayed out. Probably was just a glitch, or a hoax.
That technique also worked on our refrigerator. The ice-maker seemed to have stopped working a couple of weeks ago, which could signal disaster for our ice-tea sipping rituals during the heat of the day. But I hoped really hard for a magical cure, and sure enough the fridge healed itself, and started pumping out ice again.
Our fridge is pretty old and has multiple symptoms of breakdown. The other one I’m actively ignoring right now is its tendency to emit a loud pained groan every time I open or close the door. It probably means the door is about to fall off, but until it does, I’m sure not letting any repair man into the house!
Our pup Archie likes the cold, and loves to sleep directly under one of our air conditioners. The unit started dripping water the other day. Archie liked the cold water drip even more than he liked the continuous blast of cold air (no judgement, but eww), but I’m pretty sure this isn’t how the AC is supposed to work. In this case I couldn’t bring myself to just ignore the malfunction and hope it would heal itself in time. So I’ve turned the unit off, but haven’t been brave enough to call the HVAC guy. Poor Archie!, now he just has a fan.
Archie is getting pretty old himself (75 year-equivalents, by one count), and when he has to get up from a nap makes pretty much the same groaning noises as the refrigerator door. He does this stretchy thing that creates an alarmingly loud popping sound, just like that thing that Mr. Smith, the villainous computer program in The Matrix, does with his neck.
Archie’s aches and pains are not a breakdown that we’re willing to ignore. Fortunately, Archie is not saddled with my reverse-agoraphobia, so is willing to go into other buildings. His vet will see him in his office without requiring any humans to accompany him, so Archie has been able to pass his routine senior exam.
Me, I’m still stuck at home. I’ve developed a cavity. I’ve been able to feel the spot with my tongue for months, but the tooth hasn’t degraded to the point where I absolutely have to do something about it, so I haven’t. I’m not afraid of the dentist in non-pandemic times, but even so I’m glad I have a valid excuse ready for when he eventually asks why I waited so long to have this seen to. It was the coronavirus! Woo hoo, scott-free! (Damn! If only I had thought of this when I way playing the “Thank God It’s Covid” game!)
I’ve got other examples of things and people falling apart here, particularly related to our old house, the building style of which might generously be referred to as “rustic country”, but might more accurately be called “drunk fisherman”. But I think our house merits a post all its own, so I’ll save the rest for later.
Writing this post made me think of a good book I read, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. It’s not a new book—it’s a classic of African literature, and is so old that it is almost as old as I am (published in 1958).
It’s the story of life in the Nigerian village of Umuofia, and especially of Okonkwo and his family, at a time when British overlordship of Nigeria has happened, but the effects have not yet been felt in the remote villages.
Okonkwo is respected by his neighbors as a good man, although by our standards he might be diagnosed with toxic masculinity. He’s a fierce warrior, having killed several men from other villages during their frequent wars, and kept their heads as souvenir drinking vessels. He’s a good husband by their standards—he is able to provide food, shelter, and a domineering discipline for all of his wives and children (there’s a surreally touching scene where Okonkwo worries that his son will not grow up mean enough to beat his wives when required for proper decorum).
The book is full of snippets of precolonial Nigerian village life that I found fascinating. Their world was as full of memes, mores and legends as ours, and much of the book’s actions are explained by references to fables that are only incompletely described. This left me with the sense of the observing a rich and strange culture often without knowing exactly what I was seeing.
Their codes of conduct could seem silly, or deadly, or both at the same time. Men in the village who had earned the honorific title of ozo were forbidden to climb trees. Twins, and people who developed certain diseases, were considered abominations and cast into the Evil Forest to die. It was acceptable, honorable even, to murder a child if the village oracle told you to, but if you killed a fellow villager without such sanction, even accidentally, you were banished and your houses and crops were burned.
If much of the societal motivations of the villagers of Umuofia were alien to me, they were also mutually incomprehensible to their Christian missionaries and British governors, who through much of the book appeared only as rumors about things that had happened in other villages. The eventual clash between Umuofia and the British was chilling to me not for its violence (there was some, but not much more than seemed to be daily Umuofia fare), but for the fact that throughout out it all, neither side understood the other, or even tried to. As often happened when pre-industrial villagers confronted Imperial Britain establishing its colonial rule, the collision was disastrous for the villagers of Umuofia, and amounted to scarcely a footnote in the annals of the British “civilizing” the dark continent.
Sad ending, but an engrossing, sympathetic book.
Thanks,
Dorn
7/19/2020