Liquid Fire, Etc — News from Achewood Manor

Good Monday Morning, Valued Denizen of the Author’s Tier!

Here is some news of my week, which I present to you as valid entertainment.

1. An Exciting Medical Device!

Tonight I am installing a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) onto the side of my arm. I have no reason to do this other than pure curiosity about how my body is working. It was simply mentioned to me that anyone — regardless of diabetic status — can do this, in order to see how their pancreas or whatever is responding to the foods they eat and the various other things they do (step up and down on a step-up-and-down machine, have a mild disagreement about a partner’s visiting sibling, smoke marijuana until they are so horny they are squinting).

I was turned on to these devices by a long-time reader who also happens to be an MD, and who also wears one for the purpose of deeper visibility into a bodily function which we have every capacity to understand and manipulate with almonds.

We’d been talking about how we built our respective gym routines, and I believe this was the exchange which prompted him to mention elective glucose monitoring technology:

HIM: …every 22 year old with a tank top has a Tik Tok explaining why every other 22 year old with a tank top is a moron.

ME: It's unfair that these young bucks — who can build pectorals the size of allergic reactions simply by pulling the Fruit Loops off a high shelf — can also present bodybuilding claims to the world. At this point, I would have to undertake a fitness project worthy of a Ken Burns feature simply to not have tits.

The CGM is about the size of those palmed joy buzzers of yore, and in my case it will be held in place by a bright magenta waterproof patch which looks, ironically, like a mini donut. I could have gotten the generic “medical flesh color” patch, but I worried that would have evoked feelings of pity by the general public. With a bright magenta patch, one is boldly proclaiming that their disquieting cybernetic nodule is a feature, not a bug.

2. C.O.O.P.

I very recently engaged a personal trainer. His name is Coop. I hired him because in the lobby of my gym there is a poster of him competing in a Natural Bodybuilding competition, and he looks like a crucifix to which someone has glued several hundred tanned bananas.

“This guy obviously knows how to get it done,” I thought to myself. (I realize, upon typing this, that I should have just asked him who his personal trainer was.)

I work out at the gym five times a week. I also run an average of twenty-five miles, and eat thirty different plants (later, from the grocery store). I almost never consume sugar or processed hot dog buns. And yet, I continue to look like a regular-ass guy. My wager here is that for just a few hundred dollars, Coop can get me looking like I have a couple tanned bananas of my own. (I do not want to look like some skinned, iodine-spritzed Adonis — I’m happy just to not muffin-top in the Levi’s.)

So far he’s guided me through three different custom-designed workouts, each of which has left me unable to pick things up off the floor for days afterward. My chest feels closer to the inside of my shirt. I swagger down the aisles of the grocery store, batting bags of cookies and cheddar away from my basket with the back of my hand.

3. Liquid Fire

Lauren’s sister is coming to visit from Kenosha, so I have been pouring Liquid Fire (pure sulfuric acid, which you can just buy at Ace Hardware, for some reason) down the permanently clogged sink in the guest bathroom. Tonight, I will capitulate and let Elliott the Plumber come and show me, using a ruler, how much money actually replacing the dead pipe will cost.

I like Elliott alright, but he always assumes I am fluent in: current and historic plumbing code; plumbing hardware slang; fluid mechanics and hydrostatics; high school chemistry. (I stopped taking high school chemistry in 1991 and no longer know about how calcium and galvanized aluminum feel about one another, Elliott.)

For the record, it was his idea I use Liquid Fire in the first place, probably so that there was guaranteed damage for him to fix.

4. Monster Trucks

All the world’s an anthropological field trip, and March 3rd’s monster truck expo at the Moda Center here in Portland promises to be a juicy tour indeed. My son and I are going with a couple friends who have been before, and they promise us that even, “sniveling nerds whose Dickens must be prised from their pallorous claws with unkind tools” will find their jaws ecstatically unhinged at the spectacle. I have it on good authority that GRAVE DIGGER will be competing. (Although I am unsure how victory is calculated.)

Okay, off to return some plumbing pieces and buy more Liquid Fire.

C