You know what I need? You know what else I need? I need some new doorknobs. When I go to open my bedroom door or the bathroom door off my bedroom, sometimes the doorknobs stick and won’t open the door. Usually they go and work the second try, but opening a door is pretty much the definition of a doorknob’s job. Opening the door and holding a shirt up you just stuck there instead of hanging up properly since you’re going to be wearing it again soon. But mostly a doorknob is to open a door. And my doorknob is currently not batting .1000 in that department.
I guess I don’t need need two new doorknobs. How long would your average modern doorknob work with proper maintenance? Until the Sun grows cold and the oceans freeze? But that’s not the way it works. When the Sun gets old, but just before it craps out completely, it’ll get big. That’s kinda counter-intuitive: it runs out of stuff, so it gets bigger. I blame gravity, but there you go. So a modern doorknob (or two) should, with proper maitainence, last until the Sun gets real big and eats the Earth. Probably all we’re talking about a couple squirts of WD-40 being “proper maitainence”. For the doorknobs, not the growing Killer Sun.
But to get the couple squirts of WD-40 where it’ll do the most good, I’d have to take the whole doorknob apart. (Four whole screws!) While the doorknob it all apart, I might as well chuck it out and put in new, better ones. Because, as much as I hate to admit it, my doorknobs are old. And they are a little beat-up. They used to be all shiny (not that I’m a big fan of shiny doorknobs, deep in my heart), but now they’re a little beat-up and some of the shine is worn off here and there. So you see, the obvious choice is to replace my doorknobs. I probably should replace all the doorknobs since they’re all at the same level of usedness and non-shinitude. But right now, I’m just worried about my doorknobs. The boys can look out for their own knobs (or not) and live with the consequences. Of course the consequences are their doorknobs won’t open their doors and they’ll be trapped in their rooms until I get my tools out and squirt some WD-40 into the knob and hope that fixes it, because it’s really hard to fix a door that’s broken shut because all the bits you have to fix are not easily accessible what with the stuck door blocking it all. But those are their doors, so what do I care?
So I brought up my “Change the Doorknobs” plan to the Little Woman.
“What kind of new doorknobs would you like?” I asked her.
“I dunno. I haven’t given doorknobs much thought,” she says to me.
Can you believe that? “I haven’t given doorknobs much thought”! Women! What can you do with 'em? (Besides that.)
Maybe we’ll get to picking out the new doorknobs soon. (I wouldn’t want to pick out something as major as new doorknobs by myself. I’ve been married long enough to know better than that.) Until then, I’m just going to have to leave a can of WD-40 and a screwdriver in the bathroom. Just in case. (For the stuck doorknob, you perv!)
In other news, since the Little Woman had yesterday off, I left the boys in her capable hands and went to get my hair cut. I’m not going to talk about my haircut this time. (If you care, go back six months, a year, eighteen months etc. It was like that.) The best part of getting my haircut was reading the Field & Stream magazine while I waited my turn. They had an article about how if your Trapped in the Wilderness and you don’t have any matches with you, you could start a fire using Alternate Meathods. One way was to take a battery and some steel wool and you hook it up and the steel wool with catch fire. (Really, Bill Nye the Science Guy did it. It works!) Or you could take the spark plug out of whatever gas engine you have with you and hold it next to a gasoline soaked rag and let it spark (because you left it hooked to the engine, just not still screwed in) and make a fire. Or you could, and this one slays me, take the gunpowder out of a bullet and then stuff the casing with some cloth and shoot the gun (after you stuff you rag bullet in there) and it’ll catch fire and then you toss it onto your pile of wood with the gunpowder on top.
So, you’re too stupid to have matches with you, but you’ll have a live battery and steel wool, or a spark plug wrench, or some way to take a bullet apart (Is this easy? I figure you’ll need two pairs of pliers, at least.) plus a rag you can stuff into your gun. What wouldn’t occur to you is that you can buy those little lighters (about the size of your thumb) in five packs and you could duct tape them to the side of your gear (if it takes a spark plug, odds are it’s gonna be big enough to duct tape a lighter somewhere on it), or just drop one (or even two) in your pocket.
Field & Stream is funny.
-Rue.
