journal features

my place may be a dump

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Halifax, 2004.03.28

Recently, my apartment's plumbing has been exhibiting some strange behaviour. I'd suddenly hear some gurgling and flushing sounds from the kitchen sink. Which can be pretty disconcerting.

Last night the damn thing plugged up. Some initial exploration with the building manager - Danny, a friendly and competent fellow - revealed that the plug wasn't in the trap. So a plumber was going to be required.

This morning the plumber arrived. And to his surprise, he found that the jam seemed to be either in the 2" pipe into which my sink's outlet dumps almost immediately. Less than half a metre beyond that was the 3" pipe that descends the length of the building. He was certain that that couldn't be plugged, and after routing around with his snake for a while decided that the blockage must be gone. He put everything back together and tried the water.

Sure enough, I've got a functioning sink.

Between the crooked floors, the too-low stair ways, the antique collection of washers and dryers, and the wonky plumbing it's really starting to kick in how much inferior this place is to my past few apartments. But that's in keeping with the rest of the city, which is run-down and a bit dodgy.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)