Slightly Off the Mark

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            Last week, I described how preparing to fix my home’s only toilet turned into a half day ordeal. The rest of the day went pretty much the way you’d expect:

            After staring at the instructions for half an hour and muttering to myself, I figured out how to get the new piece of toilet innards in. (At about that point my wife popped her head in, and I went on a ten minute diatribe that basically consisted of “Easy! They said it was easy!” along with some hysterical laughter.)

            The new piece had to be reconnected to the water line, and the instructions gave four different ways to do that, depending on the incoming line. Flared? Flanged? Screwed? Something was screwed, all right. (Later I would mispronounce the word “flanged” to the guy at the hardware store, even though I knew how to pronounce it. My head was that screwed—and nailed—by then.) My setup, I determined, was flanged.

            That took the “already installed” washer, which I’d thrown aside because it had deteriorated to a little ring of black pond scum. The rubber washer that came with the new parts, which took me ten minutes to separate from the other washer that came with the new parts, wouldn’t be necessary. Really?

            With the old washer back in, everything was complete. Right? By then I’d skipped over steps fourteen through seventeen and was desperately craving a beer, even though I hate beer. I headed downstairs to turn the water back on. Instantly the sound of the tank filling could be heard upstairs.

            At least, that was hopefully what the sound was. Running upstairs revealed that the toilet was indeed filling, and it even stopped when it was supposed to. I’d saved the day!

            Of course, there was also that water spraying out from under the toilet.

            It may seem like a good idea: Constantly cleaning your bathroom floor with a good, steady spray of water. In reality, I’ve learned that water spraying all over a room tends to end badly. I ran back downstairs to shut off the water. Then back upstairs to tighten the nut. Then back downstairs to turn on the water. Then back upstairs to get sprayed in the face, and tighten the nut more.

            The old rubber washer, built by Korean kids who are now Korean elders, just couldn’t handle the strain of being taken out, then put back in again.

            I ran back downstairs and turned off the valves, which also turned off the supply of water to my home’s heating system. One of the valves sprayed me in the face.

This was new.

            Apparently that fixture also had a rubber washer that couldn’t take the strain.

            By now I’d run up and down the stairs often enough to prepare for a marathon, my back was screaming in agony, and I’d started to wonder where that half bottle of vodka had gotten to that I stashed away somewhere after New Year’s, 2008. But I persevered, because when you gotta go, you gotta go, and my property’s outhouse disappeared a long time ago. I tried to tighten the nut again, and when that didn’t work I started going through the steps, one by one. Again.

            The dog, by then, had retreated into the living room and was lying on the couch, trying to be invisible. He began casting fearful looks in my direction when I wandered into the room, compulsively folding and unfolding the directions, clothes soaked and eyes wild.

            “I have to start over from scratch. Heh. It must be the washer inside. I gotta start all over. Ha. Ha ha. Hahahahahaha!!!!!!!”

            At which point the dog wisely left for wherever my wife was hiding.

            At the hardware store, the hardware guy patiently listened to my explanation of what I needed, which was peppered with a lot of “little round thing”, and “goes on the other thing for the stuff”, and a few words I can’t relate here. Finally I demonstrated on an actual model of a toilet, which I discovered was bolted to the wall when I tried to lift it to show him the bottom. It occurred to me later that an awfully lot of people must come in there, trying to describe the things they need for their stuff.

            But finally he understood. “We don’t have that.”

            Uh huh.

            What he did have was a little package of plastic pipe connector whatsits, which included a little plastic washer, which might or might not do the trick. “I’ll try it – why not? Also, do you have any whiskey?”

            Looks like I picked a bad decade to give up drinking.

            I completely disassembled the assembled assembly, reassembled it, added the new washer, and tromped downstairs, where the water spray soaked me until, ironically, I turned the water back on. Then the leak there stopped, and since that valve has to be on to supply the furnace, I figured it should be called even.

I heard the sound of rushing water. Edgar Allen Poe never wrote a more suspenseful moment.

            Upstairs, I discovered the toilet was working perfectly. Also, a little stream of water was wandering its way down the water line behind the toilet, onto a pile of wet towels. Absolutely nothing had changed since before the job started.

            The instructions say the connections holding all that goshdarnit inside the toilet, and hooking it to the water line, should be hand tightened only. I got a wrench. Crawling under the toilet, I cranked that water line as tight as it would go.

            The stream stopped. The dripping started. Drip. Drip. Drip. Right down the water line, in a way that made it impossible to catch in a container.

            And that’s why, if you should visit my home and have the unfortunate need for a bathroom run, you’ll find a towel wrapped around the line under my toilet, a towel that has to be replaced daily. Hey, it’s a lot less water than was going down the drain before I started.

            Besides, I know when I’m beaten.

            Note: The toilet has since been replaced … but not by me.

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            There I was, happily whacking away at the keyboard, working on a story that poked a little fun at the space opera genre, when they tried to shut down my wife’s Girl Scout camp.

            Well, we couldn’t let that happen. So I came back down to earth, rolled up my sleeves, and began whacking away at the keyboard.

            What? I have only so many skills.

            Emily’s second home was Camp Latonka. She first went there when she was three days old, became a counselor in training as soon as she was potty trained, and at age 12 was made a wrangler and put in charge of a string of eight hundred horses, which were later used to film a Clint Eastwood western.

            It’s possible I’m exaggerating. Just the same, my wife did spend many a summer there, became a counselor and an assistant wrangler, which I think means she had to hogtie the bad kids. She took me to tour the area in the off season, and I was also enchanted with Camp Latonka: rustic in a good way, wooded and hilly, bordering a beautiful lake. It’s a place, to coin a cliché, where memories were made. And of course, as any Scout will tell you, once a Scout, always a Scout.

            Then they, by which I mean the bigwigs in the Girl Scout organization, announced they were shutting it and a bunch of other camps down. I’ve already written a column about that momentous mistake, so all I’ll add is that saving Latonka seemed a lost cause.

            And I’m a sucker for lost causes.

            I mean, the only sports team I even follow is the Cubs, so there you go.

But how could I help? With maintenance? Their insurance is nowhere good enough for me to man a power tool. I could help with first aid, but as long as I’m not doing maintenance they shouldn’t need much. About the only thing I could do, especially from 500 miles away, is write.

What if I wrote a short story and sold it, with part of the profits going to a fund to help Camp Latonka? And some of the rest of the profits could go toward getting Emily and me down there when we’re needed to help with various non-maintenance things? I did something similar with the Albion Fire Department, writing a book that to this day remains one of the top five books about the Albion Fire Department’s history ever written.

So I set out, writing a short story that turned out to be a novella, because that’s how it works when I get excited about a project. A novella’s like a short novel, only I think these days you’re supposed to call them “little novels” to avoid offending short writers.

That story, The No-Campfire Girls, popped up on Amazon around May Third. Why May Third? Why not?

My girl’s camp is not a Girl Scout camp, because I don’t own the Girl Scouts (if I did I’d sell the corporate headquarters, rather than shut down camps). So I made up a new organization, and set my camp in Southern Indiana. It’s more or less halfway between my home and Camp Latonka. That’s the beauty of fiction: It’s fictional.

But by then I was tired of making things up, so I borrowed some characters from stories I’ve already written. After all, I needed teenage girls (Wow, that didn’t come out weird at all), and I already had a popular one from my first published novel, Storm Chaser. Beth Hamlin also had her own tale in my short story collection, so why not use her again? We should all recycle. I added her two friends, minor characters in the first story, so she wouldn’t get lonely.

Beth is playing double duty this year, since she’s also a character in The Notorious Ian Grant, which comes out in October. She’s fifteen: Keeping her busy keeps her out of trouble. The camp story’s not related to the others, so keep it quiet.

Then, because I needed some more characters for Beth to bounce off of, I stole three from my YA mystery Red Is For Ick. Don’t bother searching Amazon.com—it hasn’t been published. Yet.

            It’s so much easier—and fun—throwing together characters who already exist. Now I understand the attraction of writing fanfiction, except this story we can sell.

            The plot? Well, a story should have a story, and Beth’s the kind of girl who would love campfires. So what would happen if there was a drought, and the camp was told they couldn’t have campfires this summer? What if Beth, a do something type of person, went to extreme measures to bring rain so they could have campfires? And what if her attempts went horribly wrong, in a comic-adventure kind of way?

            Good questions.

            It being me, I threw in lots of disasters, along with humor that, as usual, I hope is humorous. It should be a fun read, and 30% of the proceeds will go to a good cause.

            Of course, proceeds of my next book after that will also go to a good cause: my retirement fund.

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            Every now and then a concept just makes me stop and gape in amazement. The designated hitter, Joe Biden as Vice-President, a transistor radio you can listen to in the shower …

Mostly terrible ideas. Ever try to dance “Thriller” in the shower? Better have an anti-slip mat.

            But this one, which struck me as both a great and terrible idea, seemed even more amazing:

            Powdered alcohol.

            Party in your water bottle.

            Apparently this isn’t a new idea, but it was new to me. Everyone who remembers surfing the internet for the first time understands how that goes. Back in the 70’s the General Foods Corp. filed a patent for powdered alcohol, which they made by absorbing ethanol into carbohydrate powder.

            “But isn’t too much carbohydrate bad for you?” Seriously, that’s your only health concern with this?

            This time around a fellow named Mark Phillips decided having a bag of powdered alcohol with you at all times would be a good idea, and came up with something he called Palcohol. I could do a column just on that name. Phillips, who describes himself as an “active guy”, wanted to have some fast booze dust available, to wind down after a hard day of hiking, biking, or camping.

            Heaven forbid such activities would call for Gatorade.

            But I know many people who are incapable of calling a day fun unless they top it off with the alcoholic beverage of their choice, so I understand where Phillips is coming from. He developed six varieties of powdered alcohol: vodka, rum, and four cocktails. Those last are Cosmopolitan, Mojito, Powderita (!) and Lemon Drop, and shouldn’t that choice satisfy any extreme sports fan?

            So what did they miss? Well, what would many people want to hold under a garden hose after, say, wrecking cars, blowing up outhouses, or shooting stop signs? That’s right: Beer. You’d think that would be the easy one—don’t they actually make it with carbohydrates?

            So I hit Google, and sure enough: powdered beer. The Beer Street Journal (no, that’s not a typo), says the Alaskan company Pat’s Backcountry Beverages has created a waterless beer that has flavor, aroma, and alcohol, and even bubbles thanks to a carbonator bottle.

            Again, just to be clear: Not making this up.

            But over with the highbrow booze, Phillips ran into trouble. The Federal Government—you know they’d show up in this tale—supposedly gave label approval to the dry idea, but then said the approvals were issued in error. In a cloud of dust, the ability to fill your pocket with vodka disappeared. Well, you could still do it, but you’re in trouble if the plastic bag breaks.

            The strange thing about this is that a product like Palcohol would have gone through an extensive permit process before ever getting to the label approval stage. This was noted by Robert Lehrman, who runs a beverage law website and reported on the idea of an extra-dry martini. Shaken, not blown.

            Yes, a beverage law website. Surely you’re not surprise?

            Lehrman thought this approval, followed by a rapid disproval, didn’t ring true. He figured some lawmakers wanted more information before proceeding with the approval.

            Some people are blaming Big Liquor for the delay. (I’ll let you insert your own joke, there.) I think the lawmakers did the same thing I did: They saw “powdered alcohol”, stopped in their campaigning tracks, and said, “Wha—? We need to check this out.”

            So now we await the chance to always have a bag of booze in our hats, hidden in our boots, or mixed with our Metamucil. Yeah, someday soon grandpa will be much happier about his diet.

            I’m of mixed feelings about this, and on a related note, do the powder packets come with little mixing sticks? And are the sticks hollow, so you can drink through them? On the one hand, I don’t see how this will be abused any more than liquid alcohol will, although it may make things easier. Any place that doesn’t allow alcohol, but does allow soft drinks, will find imbibers experimenting with a whole new taste sensation.

            “How did you like the movie, honey?”

            “Bweaugh …. Blaaaagh!”

            “So Quentin Tarintino makes you sick, too?”

            But I suppose if somebody really wants to act stupid and make dumb comments in public, they’ll either carry one of those little flasks of liquid or run for Congress. My bigger concern (and this doesn’t apply to Congress) is not how they’ll harm others, but how they’ll harm themselves.

            The best example: The product’s website warns people that the alcohol powder should not be snorted.

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            “Tragedy in Churubusco when three residents went on a walk to show off their spring clothes during the warm up this morning, and were later found frozen to death. Their bodies were originally scheduled to be cremated, but couldn’t be thawed fast enough.”

            This is why writers should live in Indiana; that kind of stuff just writes itself.

            Oh, I know, I’ve talked a lot about the weather this year. It’s only April—whatever will my columns be about in July? Heat, I’m guessing. But we came close this spring to actually having that snow tornado I used to joke about, so if you’re interested in weather at all, it’s been an interesting year.

            “Mental health officials are seeing a sudden spike in emotional breakdowns after people went out last week to mow their lawns, only to find two inches of snow on the ground.”

            You don’t even have to make it up: That actually happened to me last week, except that I went to the door to bring the dog in. His frostbite/heat exhaustion is healing nicely, by the way.

            It’s one of the few times I actually dropped the F-bomb in public. I opened the door that morning and stood there for a moment, honestly puzzled about why everything outside had a strange white coloring to it. Then the dog came storming in as if a snow tornado was chasing him, and he was covered in white. He shook himself, and a winter storm developed in my kitchen.

            Then I looked outside and said, “What the fudge?!?!”

            Only, to quote writer Jean Shepherd, I didn’t say fudge.

            The neighbors have teenagers, but since it was early morning I’m hopeful they didn’t hear me. If they did, they probably thought something like, “Hey, they had that word when he was a kid!” Then I’d yell “Get off my lawn!” and it would be downhill from there.

            Anyway, this is Indiana. Worse, this is northern Indiana, within the range of lake effect snow while too far away to actually play in the waves, assuming the waves haven’t frozen themselves into some Salvador Dali shape.

            (Yes, I’m a small town Midwestern boy who actually knows who Salvador Dali is. Okay, I looked him up. What’s with the melting clocks? Is it August?)

            Sorry if this column seems a little disjointed: There have been so many barometric pressure changes this month that my sinuses exploded, and I’ve been off balance ever since. Which brings me back to my point: We’re used to big weather extremes, to such an extent that many people actually say “I wish it would just stay cold, instead of going up and down like this.” That’s a concept we pay for in January, when the missing Polar ice cap often lingers in the fields just outside of Huntertown.

            By the way, Huntertown wasn’t named after my family. It actually stems from the Indian world “Hunyukcoldon”, which means “The snow’s melting, grab your sandbags”.

            Anyway …

            What brought all this up was last week, when it hit the mid 70’s here in Albion. Then thunderstorms came through. Then the next day I walked out on the front porch and not only was everything covered in snow, but it felt and even smelled like winter. The next night we reached a record cold temperature. The day after that it hit 60.

            The day after that I boarded up all my doors and windows, and set fire to my boots.

            Is it any wonder everyone’s talking about the weather? I mean, except the Weather Channel. I had it on at work for eight hours the other night, and every time I glanced up I saw … no weather. Only a scroll across the bottom of the screen explaining that the weather for the next hour would be delayed by a very special episode of “Extreme Ice Road Air Rescue Fishing With The Stars”.

In their defense, thanks to The Weather Channel, I now know a great deal about tow truck drivers, steel construction workers, the Coast Guard, and Mars. Still, I can’t help thinking a name change is in order.

            But who can blame them? Reality programming gives them a chance to sit back, take a breath, and try to figure out what the fudge is going on in Indiana.

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

I can make fun of anything. It’s my job. For instance, last July, as we stood on a scenic overlook over the Mississippi River in Missouri (you can’t look at the Missouri River in Mississippi), I got a phone call to tell me my father had cancer.

Um …

Okay, I can’t make fun of everything.

My Dad had a long, six month fight that wasn’t much fun for anyone, especially since he’d been diagnosed with a type of cancer that has a poor prognosis. (As opposed to a poor proboscis, which wins this column’s unusual word prize by a nose.)

But Dad is one of those people who is always working, so he went to work, kicked cancer in the face, and messed up its proboscis so much that it now looks like proboscis and gravy. His latest checkup is due in a few days (Me? Nervous?), but as of now he’s been declared cancer free.

I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say Dad’s particular cancer, and how advanced it was, makes his cure a miracle … a miracle assisted by modern medicine, just as my father was assisted by the American Cancer Society.

(Suffice, by the way, is the word proboscis beat by a nose. But enough parenthesizing.)

Now, I know what you’re thinking. (Scary, ain’t it? Oops—I parenthesized.) “Mark, you’re not going to use your father’s illness to shill for the Noble County Relay For Life, are you?”

Yes. Yes, I am. But isn’t it better than when I misuse my column to sell books? I mean, use my column to sell books?

(Editor’s note: We’ve only had one complaint about Mark self-promoting in his column. Still, we smack him when we have to. With one of his books.)

(Writer’s note: I’ve got a new book coming out this spring. Ow!)

I try to portray myself as rather self-centered and profiteering, because that way people don’t ask me to, say, help them move, or donate my time. Just the same, some years ago I was brought on board as promotions chair for Noble County’s Relay organization, because they told me I could wear a captain’s hat and put my name on a chair at the meetings. Captain’s hats are cool. We all need to give a little back to our community, and by giving I don’t mean littering in the park.

Finding out I may have prostate cancer made it a bit more personal to me, but after a couple of years of sitting on pins and needles (It’s the prostate. Think about it), Doctor Finger declared that it was probably more or less a false alarm, for now.

(Darn, parenthesis. Oops—darn!)

I have to say, I wasn’t all that thrilled with the caveats on Doctor Finger’s diagnosis. By the way, I had peas and caveats for dinner last night.

Then my step-father had a cancer scare. Then my father actually got cancer. And my father received support from the American Cancer Society, direct, concrete support that involved money, not concrete. Money that people donate through events like the thousands of Relays For Life (Relay For Lives?) that take place around the world.

So, how can I not help our local Relay? Especially after they gave me the cool captain’s hat? Sometimes, when I’m sitting in the living room in my captain’s chair, I pretend the TV is a view screen and order Sulu to go to warp speed. Unfortunately, the only available Sulu is my dog, and he hasn’t mastered the helm controls.

My point, and I had to get to it because all those parentheses have me running out of space, is that cancer is bad. The American Cancer Society is our largest voluntary health organization, unless you count Girl Scouts, who contribute to our emotional health with those cookies. They’re not perfect (The ACS, I mean, Girl Scouts are)—for instance, they didn’t get me a Captain Kirk shirt, which is okay because he didn’t actually wear a captain’s hat. I’d have looked pretty silly ordering the dog to go to warp speed “while … talking … likeCaptain … Kirk” in both a Starfleet uniform and a captain’s hat, wouldn’t I?

I wonder why my wife is laughing at me?

(Editor’s Note: It just occurred to us that Captain Kirk kind of talks in parenthesis. That explains a lot.)

For more information about the Noble County Relay For Life and how you can get involved, contact Mike White at (260) 302-2052 or mjw_2013@hotmail.com            The Noble County Relay website is:

http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR?pg=entry&fr_id=58860

            And the Facebook page is:

https://www.facebook.com/RFLofNobleCounty

And you can buy my books at www.markrhunter.com (Ow!)

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            It occurs to me that this column comes out on March 5^th, my third wedding anniversary.

            And by “occurs”, I mean my wife reminded me.

            As I wrote a few years ago, it wasn’t supposed to be our “real” wedding. Our intention was to get married here in Indiana, then have a bigger celebration in her home state of Missouri. The first wedding was exactly the kind most guys want: Get it done and over with:

            “Mark, ya’ll wanna?”

            “Well … ouch! Yep.”

            “Emily, ya’ll wanna?”

            “I get his stuff?”

            “Yep.”

            “Why not?”

            “By the authority of the World Wide Web Church Of Nigerian Princes, ya’ll is hitched.”           

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            Did you hear about the pothole that swallowed Cleveland?

            It spit the city back out. Thought it didn’t have good taste.

            Actually, a few years ago I wrote a story inspired by a news report I read, in which a hole opened up and really did swallow an entire intersection in Cleveland. Cleveland residents will tell you nobody beats them for potholes, by any measure: depth, width, hang-time while falling into it …

            But everyone else in every other community across the country, large and small, will make the same claim. Potholes are a nationwide problem, like politicians, Obamacare, and bobbleheads. (I can’t help it, they freak me out. Bobbleheads, too.)

            Potholes happen due to fatigue. No, not the driver: the road surface develops a crack, and the cracks form a pattern called crocodile cracking. At that point crocodile skin is stronger than the pavement, so the cracks spread until the pressure of passing vehicles pops whole areas loose. They’re usually made worse by large temperature changes, so around here they’re a winter and spring thing. But like politicians, potholes can pop up anywhere, anytime, and cause great damage.