The Weekly Essay

The power went out.

We knew storms would be rolling through so we were prepared. We had the closet cleaned out and ready to hold us and the dogs if the tornado watch turned into a warning. There are flashlights in a couple of different rooms and the house is small enough that even in the dark I could find them. I’d tested them earlier and, in spite of not having been used in a long time, they worked. We also have good old fashioned matches and I’m pretty sure we’ve got candles somewhere, if it came to that. Phones were charged.

The striking about the power going out, the part that always surprises me, is the sudden silence. Even with the TV off, even when the air conditioning or heat aren’t running, the house has a steady hum as long as electricity is running through it. It’s only noticeable when it’s gone.

The refrigerator, of course, has its own pulse as coolant streams through its veins, a sound pitched just above that of the rest of the house but also, because of its constancy, we only become aware of it when it’s gone. And with the power out the countdown begins. We keep the refrigerator closed to keep the cold in for as long as possible but there’s still the looming threat of spoilage, the possibility that we’ll lose the highly perishables: dairy products, poultry, eggs. Well, the sour cream will probably be fine. The freezer, on the other hand, is in greater danger. How long will the ice cubes hold out? The ice cream? As soon as the frozen shrimp thaws it’s done for. It wouldn’t be right for sushi even if we could plug in the rice cooker.

At least right now the weather is on our side. It’s the middle of spring so the weather is just temperate enough that the house wouldn’t get too cold, which can happen in winter, or too hot, which would happen in summer.

Still I made plans for the long term. There are some large rocks in the backyard I could arrange into a fire pit for cooking. Or I could just use the neighbor’s fire pit. They wouldn’t have to know. I’m pretty sure they weren’t home since their lights were out.

The dogs had all been out and taken care of business, so they were fine. I thought I could always go outside too, before I remembered the plumbing doesn’t need electricity.

We still had the cars, and once the worst of the storms passed there were plenty of places we could go. The power has gone out before and we’ve always managed. I just always want to be prepared for whatever could happen. I want to stay calm and know that we will get through.

I was in the middle of reassuring myself when the power came back on, and everything was fine again. Still that was a pretty grim thirty seconds.

When I moved all my stuff out of my cubicle the one thing I was most worried about, most protective of, the one thing that made me beg my boss–who’d offered to clear out everything and box it up and leave it in the hall to save me the trouble–to let me do all the packing myself was a simple small glass bowl. It doesn’t look like much but I painted it myself during my second round of chemotherapy, at the Nashville Gilda’s Club, which offered, among other things, a weekly art therapy class. I was really lucky to meet people there who’d had cancer, in some cases decades earlier, and who were doing fine. It was nice to get together and make stuff.

So the bowl has a lot of personal significance for me, and it also became significant at work a couple of years later. A new person had just been hired and she came to my cubicle for some training. She saw the bowl on the shelf next to my monitor and asked what it was.

“It’s a goldfish bowl,” I said.

“You’re really into dad jokes, aren’t you?”

I’m not sure if that was a compliment but it helped break some of the tension that’s always present when work brings strangers together.

So this week I was involved in training another new person. We all went around introducing ourselves and talking about what we do. I’ve held a lot of different jobs in the library but I explained that what we’d be focusing on was something that I’d been doing almost from the beginning and that I kept coming back to in spite of my efforts to move on to something else. And then it hit me that I had a perfect opportunity, so I did my best to deliver a classic line.

Source: giphy

It was a great way to break some of the tension, although I worry that I might have sounded more like George Costanza than Al Pacino, which could be a little too much insight into my personality.  

Source: Yarn

Whenever I see an ad for a beauty product with hyaluronic acid in it I think, who wants to put acid on their face? I also wonder what hyaluron is, but, seriously, there have been far too many times when acid has been used as a weapon that leaves the victim permanently disfigured.

Well, that took a bit of a turn and I don’t want to treat such incidents lightly but what mainly comes to mind when I hear about beauty products that contain acid, aside from how horrifying the history of beauty products is, which could be another turn in itself, is my school science classes and learning about acids for the first time. They seemed like magical potions since they were usually described as “eating” through metal and other substances. I think we all learned that silly little rhyme that also gets written on cardboard tombstones at Halloween every year: “Peter was a happy boy/But now he is no more./What he thought was H2O/Was H2SO4.” Which is a pretty horrifying short story of a potent potable. Fortunately none of us were given access to sulfuric acid, at least not at my school where, thanks to budget cuts, pretty much everything we learned about chemistry we learned by reading about it. Most practical work was limited to all of us gathering around the table while the teacher placed a piece of sodium the size of a pinhead in a beaker of water and it fizzed for about ten seconds before fizzling out.

One day a kid in my class named David tried to convince me he’d mixed all the chemicals in his chemistry set together and created an ultra-dangerous acid. “It eats through everything,” he told me. “It eats through metal, it eats through glass, it eats through wood.” I thought about asking, “What do you keep it in, then?” but he was a big kid and I was afraid he might hit me. I also liked the mental image of this stuff getting away from him and leaving a hole in his parents’ basement that went all the way through the core of the Earth.

“What do you think it is?” he asked me.

Trying to keep a straight face at the thought of Australians climbing out of the hole and stealing his dad’s car I just said, “I have no idea, I’ve never heard of anything like it.”

He must have thought of me as something of an expert because I’d done a science class presentation on acids and their effects on different metals. It sounded very serious and scientific, and it looked very impressive with a set of test tubes—two with hydrochloric acid I’d gotten from the hardware store, and two with sulfuric acid I’d gotten from an old car battery, and I put pieces of zinc and iron in each. I also had three big presentation boards illustrating each of the reactions. Everybody thought it was really cool but, in the back of my mind, I knew it was a ripoff of something I’d seen on Mr. Wizard’s World where he put sulfuric acid in a test tube then added a strip of zinc then capped the tube with a balloon. It swelled up with hydrogen released by the reaction. He then took the balloon and held it over a Bunsen burner so it exploded in a shower of water as the hydrogen combined with oxygen. And also a bunch of little pieces of burned rubber, but Mr. Wizard had stagehands to clean up after him. Since I didn’t have those I couldn’t blow up a balloon, and also none of my teachers thought causing a small explosion in the classroom was a good idea.

Even after that I kept doing some home experiments with acid which were mostly harmless. My father, who studied chemistry in college, told me not to mix any acid with the sodium cyanide crystals that came with my chemistry set because it could be lethal, so I mostly stuck to things like testing the effects of hydrochloric acid on our concrete driveway, and sometimes I wonder if any of the people who moved in after we left have ever found my initials palely etched into a corner.

I never could get my hands on nitric acid, powerful stuff, more reactive than Aunt Gerda after three glasses of sherry, which fascinated and terrified me—combined with hydrochloric acid it could be used to make “aqua regia”, a liquid that would dissolve gold. Not that I had any gold, but I knew that two German scientists, Max von Laue and James Franck hid their Nobel prizes from the Nazis with the help of a third scientist, George de Hevesy, who dissolved the gold medals then left the liquid on a shelf in his laboratory in Denmark when he fled to Sweden. After the war was over he went back and found the innocuous-looking orange liquid still there, so he was able to extract the gold and the medals were recast and returned to the scientists who won them.

So that was an interesting bit of history. Also the guy who told me about nitric acid, an older friend of the family who’d also studied chemistry, told me it could be combined with glycerin, which was easy to find at the drugstore, to make nitroglycerin. In tablet form it can be great to have around if you’re suffering from angina but brewed up in the basement could cause a large explosion, which would not have been a good idea.

All this leaves me thinking that hyaluronic acid might be beneficial—so is vinegar, also acidic, and orange juice, and various acids our bodies produce naturally, including hydrochloric acid which swirls around on our stomachs—but I wouldn’t want to go mixing it with the wrong thing.

It’s hard to come up with anything original to say about plagiarism. It’s been on my mind because some magazines have now shut down their submissions because they were being flooded with AI-generated stories, most of which, it turned out, were at least partially plagiarized, because artificial intelligence isn’t very creative, and also had clunky, often meaningless syntax because artificial intelligence still isn’t very intelligent, although it’s only a matter of time before it becomes indistinguishable from the real thing.

It hits me because I have friends who are writers, some of whom had submissions in process at places that are shutting down and might now have to find some way to prove their humanity, or had stories they were working on but will now have to find other venues. As for the people who submitted the AI-generated stories—because they were real people even if they were submitting work they hadn’t actually written—some of them say, “I needed the money.” I find this really hard to believe. There are some publications that pay, and it is possible for a new writer to get lucky, but there are easier ways to make money, and if you were submitting a story for money, even if it wasn’t one you’d written, wouldn’t you at least read it first?

This also hits me because in high school I entered a city-wide writing contest. I didn’t win, or even place, but I assumed my story just wasn’t good enough. It was science fiction and it might not have even made it past my teacher who was one of the first-round judges and very vocal about how much she hated science fiction. When the winners were announced there was a lot of fanfare about how the first-place story was more than double the word limit but the judges all thought it was so good they let it pass. Of course they thought it was good. When I read it I was stunned that it was “Sled” by Thomas E. Adams, first published in 1961. It had been in my seventh grade English textbook. But by then it was too late to do anything.

In school I understand the pressure to plagiarize. I never did it, mostly because I took too much pride in trying to prove myself, but also, even pre-internet, I never thought I could get away with it. Even after the writing contest I didn’t think I, personally, could get away with it, and I wasn’t interested in trying.

In college I had a professor, Dr. Will, who taught philosophy and at the end of the term gave us two options: we could take the final exam or turn in a paper, but it would have to be a really good paper. He’d also grill anyone who turned in a paper to make sure they’d written it and understood the subject. Years earlier he had a student who’d failed every part of the class and who turned in a paper that started with the line, “Immanuel Kant transformed the hylomorphic distinction from an ontological to a noetic order.” Dr. Will offered the student a deal: if he could explain what that one sentence meant he’d get an A for the semester. The student flunked philosophy.

Being a very serious and dedicated student myself, one who’d done pretty well in the class, I, of course, opted for the final exam.

At the same time I was in that philosophy class I first read the short story “Who’s Cribbing?” by Jack Lewis. I won’t spoil the ending but it’s a series of letters between Lewis and various editors. His stories get rejected because, at first, they’re too similar to stories by another writer who died years earlier and whom Lewis has never heard of. Things get even weirder when what he thinks are his own original stories turn out to be word-for-word copies of ones the previous writer wrote.

It made me laugh even though at the time it seemed like a nightmare, especially for someone who makes a living as a writer, to be able to write anything original. Now, though, decades later, it makes me think about how “original” is a shifty term. The stories we tell each other are relatable because they’re built around common experience, and told in a shared language. Most stories are adapted from other stories, passed down and remixed or updated, but we still value the lived experience behind the stories. It’s because so much is shared, so much overlaps in our own storytelling, and the potential of losing what makes stories alive that makes AI so threatening. It’s also why it’s hard to say anything original about plagiarism.

At work I opened a can of worms. It was a simple mistake and, fortunately, I work in a library where, behind the scenes anyway, most of the work that goes on is relatively academic and abstract. There’s a reason one of the patron saints of librarians is Saint Minutia whose miracle was splitting a hair. The biggest problems libraries face come from outside—specifically stupid people who want everyone else to be stupid too, but that’s another story.

And the mistake I made turned out to be productive because it uncovered some other mistakes made by other people which in turn led to other mistakes, hence the proverbial can of worms.

Why a can of worms, though? Or rather why are we still opening cans of worms? Worms as bait for fishing used to be sold in metal cans, but, being alive, you don’t really want a tight lid on your annelids. By the time I was a kid and went fishing worms were sold in paper cups. Paper is easier to recycle and more biodegradable in addition to being easier to open. It’s also more porous, allowing more air in for the worms. It was also easier to tell which end was up with a paper cup and this made a difference because, while we were fishing, we’d keep the cup upside down. The worms, perhaps sensing the gruesome impaling followed by drowning that was their fate, buried themselves at the bottom of the cup which, since it was inverted, was actually the top.

Paper cups were then replaced by Styrofoam which, environmentally, is worse than either paper or metal, but by then I’d stopped getting my fish with worms and started getting it from the counter at the back of the supermarket instead.

If you’ve ever gone fishing with worms you also know they’re generally slow-moving so opening a can of worms isn’t that much of a problem unless you go off and leave the can for, well, at least a few hours. They’re also not upwardly mobile—as previously noted they’re more dowardly mobile, which makes them a lousy metaphor for anything business-related. The can of worms needs to be retired. After all pretty much anyone who remembers worms in a can has also long since retired and, in many cases, is now, well, food for worms.

To replace the can of worms for a business error, though, I don’t think we need to go any further than their mortal enemies. Someone in your office made a terrible mistake that spread out across several areas? Just say, “Boy, Carl really microwaved the fish this time.”

It’s useful because unless you work in a bait shop it’s really unlikely anyone brings cans of worms to work but in almost every office someone makes the mistake of microwaving fish. The smell goes everywhere, it’s difficult to get rid of it, but, hopefully, the person responsible will never do it ever again.

For a lighter, vegan option—that is, for problems that aren’t so serious, like my minor faux pas, I recommend saying that someone “burned the popcorn”.

Again this involves the microwave—something most offices have in their break rooms or kitchens—and a smell that permeates the entire department, although it’s not as bad.

In fact I remember the time a guy I worked with, for reasons I still can’t understand, put a bag of extra butter popcorn in the microwave for five minutes. That’s enough time to cook a twenty-pound turkey in most microwaves, or start a fusion reaction.

When he finally donned a hazmat suit and pulled the bag from the microwave the popcorn wasn’t just burned. It was smoking like Humphrey Bogart. He threw it in the trash where it burst into flames and we had to douse it with water.

It was a terrible mess but the office smelled wonderful for weeks.