A Live Wire, a Total Crock, and Me

Pedro Pascal is, somehow, only the second-hottest item in this story. (I am not the first.)

Today, I find myself remembering that time my beans nearly burned my house down.

And it all happened because I—ludicrous and flawed human that I am—trusted people.

I really should know better by now.

People are not universally trustworthy at doing the right thing, or doing things well, or doing things at all.

Sure, without people we would not have (as a random example) Pedro Pascal.

But people are also the ones responsible for making the video game on which Season 2, Episode 2 of The Last of Us was based. And people are reportedly responsible for deciding that this—this!—was the best moment to keep a TV show fully true to the source material for the first time in recorded memory. And now, here I am, rooting for the fungus.

In my defense, the thing with the beans happened first.

My mistake was trusting that the people who work with electricity understand it. If electricity were my job, I would like to understand it. Electricity is far more interesting than marketing, which I have not cared to understand most anytime it has been my job.

But as it is, I don’t particularly care how electricity works, so long as it does, in fact, work. The electricity people can splice the wires, and I will unsplice the commas. This is how we will all make our contribution in the apocalypse.

So far, this trust in electricity people hasn’t failed me. I plug things in, and the lightning goes from the wall socket to my vacuum cleaner or my rechargeable dog nail grinder that I keep hoping my dog will someday let me use. And then I pay my electricity bill. This is how I hold up my end of the bargain. It also requires trust. I have no real way of knowing how much electricity I use, or if it—the electricity, not the bill—actually exists.

(I always pay the bill electronically. This way, if electricity ends up being one of those scientific frauds perpetrated on us all by pretending to make our lives better, then I can get my fake money back.)

This is the thing with trust, though:

I get complacent and believe in the systems on which our lives have been built ever since Benjamin Franklin days. And that’s the moment when everything melts down.

As a keepsake of this inevitable outcome, I kept the electrical outlet from the incident with the beans. It will remind me forever: NEVER TRUST THE ELECTRICITY. Or, maybe, NEVER TRUST OLD APPLIANCES. Definitely DO NOT TRUST PEOPLE.

Now I don’t remember exactly what I’m not supposed to trust about people, because I stuck the outlet in a drawer and didn’t see it for a couple years. But it reminds me, in no uncertain terms, NEVER TO FORGET IT.

This, I do remember: I, for once, was not at fault. At least I’m pretty sure I wasn’t.

Holding this half-deformed electrical outlet takes me back to the last time I pulled out my trusty slow cooker. It certainly did not have a familiar name brand that might come at me for damages.

I had cooked many beans in this electrical pot in my day, and I had cooked them slowly. Any problems I had with these many batches of beans were due to me and my microbiome, not the generic slow cooker, not the hidden workings of electricity in the wall, not the electric co-op that sends me bills.

And this, the fateful last pot o’ beans, came out as tasty as any of them. Even more so, in hindsight—the savory nostalgia of escaping death and/or an insurance investigation.

It wasn’t until I finally turned off the “keep warm” setting some hours or days later and tried to put the not-at-all-trademarked cooker away that I found I could not. The plug was stuck to the wall. Or, more like, it had merged with the wall. The two achieved oneness: the plastic of the socket, gone gooey and solidified again, claimed the prongs of the power cord as its own.

It melted.

The pot of crock melted the socket.

I did what any man would do in lieu of calling an electrician: I jiggled and yanked on that plug until I broke it free or the wall came down, whichever happened first. I still have a wall, so there’s that.

I did not want to know just how close I had come to my own not-so-slow-cooked end. So I left that socket the eff alone for a long, long time. Pretending problems don’t exist has often served me well.

The cooker? I shoved it, not unlike my sentimental attachment to it, to the back of a cabinet to deal with another time.

Eventually, I brought myself to the hardware store for a new outlet thingy.

I replaced it myself, with no electrical knowledge beyond “turn off every fuse in the box first.” I acquired a more modern, and presumably more trustworthy, brand of cooker.

Today, at long last, I threw out the melted outlet. I don’t need such tangible reminders of why I shouldn’t trust people anymore. I’m feeling weirdly optimistic about humanity; we haven’t burned down the metaphorical house yet, despite our most untrustworthy efforts. And everywhere I look, there’s Pedro Pascal.

So there’s that going for us.

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A version of this column appeared originally in The Durango Telegraph and is appearing simultaneously in The Abiquiú News.

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