Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) by Dave Barry

Author:Dave Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2015-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT HOME OWNERSHIP I LEARNED FROM JOHNNY CARSON

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Basically there are two kinds of houses:

New houses, which are crap, because they don’t build them the way they used to anymore.

Old houses, which used to be good, because they were built back when they built them the way they used to, but which today, as a result of being old, are crap.

So whichever kind of house you own, it’s going to be some variety of crap, which means sooner or later everything in it will break. Dealing with broken things is the essence of home ownership, and it’s exhausting. This is why all civilizations eventually end up in ruins. At some point the ancient Romans got sick and tired of keeping Rome fixed up, so they became lax, and then the Vandals come in and started vandalizing, and then the Goths showed up wearing heavy eye makeup and listening to The Cure, and that was the end of the Roman Empire.

Decay, leading to ruination, is the inevitable fate of every human structure, including your house. Your job, as a homeowner, is to stall the process as long as you can, knowing you will ultimately fail. I am here to help you.

I’m very familiar with house decay. I own an old house, defined as “a house that is nearly as old as I am.” It was built back when electricity had just been invented by the Wright Brothers, so the original wiring was primitive. Over the years additional sets of wires were installed by various owners to accommodate the newer, faster kinds of electricity, as well as later technological advances such as the telephone, intercom, cable TV, Internet, Wii, doorbell, etc. As a result, our house is now infested by a vast swarming mass of wires, thousands of miles of them, all of them currently obsolete. I would not be surprised to discover that we have telegraph wires leading to the attic, where the skeleton of a long-deceased Western Union operator is hunched over a telegraph key, waiting for word on the Titanic. (I don’t know, because I’m afraid to go into the attic.)

Our plumbing is also old, and—as is the case in many older homes—possessed by demons. They live in the toilets. Sometimes I hear them moaning at night, when the house is quiet except for the sound of rats in the attic, gnawing on the bones of the Western Union operator.

Every week or so—more often during hurricane season*—something in our house breaks—lights go out, the phone stops working, an appliance malfunctions, a toilet starts shrieking ancient Aramaic curses, etc. My wife reports these problems to me, because we are a modern enlightened couple who have divided up our household responsibilities equally along non-gender-stereotypical lines:

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