COLUMN: Microwave Mask

I have reached an age where I am absolutely, positively, inarguably an adult. Frankly, I still don't believe it.

The facts, however, are not on my side. As much as I try to ignore them, there are hairs growing from my head that are NOT brown in color. I'm getting junk mail from the AARP. My weekends were once spent DJing to dancefloors full of my friends. These days, I'm more likely DJing to dancefloors full of the CHILDREN of my friends. Some of my classmates are (shudder) grandparents. This is scary stuff.

There's no denying my adult status. I suppose this is an impressive achievement, seeing as how I've made it this far without having ANY earthly clue what I'm doing. Let's be real: I'm almost fifty years old and still wear Velcro because I can't keep my shoes tied for longer than a half hour. I'm THAT cool.

But for a while now, I've been starting to feel downright mature. I've been adulting pretty hard lately. I've almost got my credit cards paid off. I've prepared meals consisting of more ingredients than peanut butter and/or jelly. 2020 might be terrible, but at the very least it's led me to curb my spending habits somewhat. After all, it's tough to impulse buy when you're too afraid to step into a store.

But just when I thought I had this adult stuff figured out, last week confirmed it's still a wonder I can even dress myself in the mornings. (And let's be honest, yesterday I looked down and realized I was wearing one blue sock and one black sock. My dressage skills are still iffy at best.)

Last Friday night started out okay. I'd arrived home from work, made dinner, thrown in a load of laundry, and was preparing to head out for another exciting evening of DJing to kids half my age. 

As you know if you read my column on the regular, I am very much pro-mask. 

Wait, let me take that back. I'm not pro-mask. I don't sit around going, "YAY! WE'RE SO LUCKY TO WEAR MASKS EVERYWHERE WE GO! IT'S SUPER FUN!"

Masks aren't fun. They're not enjoyable to wear. I'm not pro-mask. I am, however, pro-science. I'm not going to engage in the nation's endless argument on the efficacy of masks. Let's just say I've seen enough empirical evidence to agree with most major medical organizations that masks help people stay safe. My mind's made up just as yours likely is, whichever side of the cootie-riddled fence you're on.

There's no way I'm setting foot inside a nightclub without masking up, so with fifteen minutes to spare, Responsible Mature Adult Shane went down to the basement to grab a clean mask out of the dryer. There was just one problem. It turned out Responsible Mature Adult Shane had transferred the laundry to the dryer and then, apparently, completely checked out. Maybe I saw a squirrel. I don't know what on Earth distracted me, but somehow I had forgotten to push the start button on the dryer. Every mask I owned was in a soggy pile.

But that's no insurmountable obstacle for Adult Shane. No, sir. Adult Shane is a creative problem-solver. With all the confidence and know-how of my 49 years of wisdom, I grabbed a soggy mask, headed upstairs, looked around to make sure no one in my empty house was watching, and tossed it in the microwave.

On paper, this still seems like a solid plan. When water heats, it turns to steam and evaporates. That's all a dryer really does, right? It just blows some hot air around and evaporates the moisture in the clothes. A microwave should just speed up the process, no? I figured two minutes of nuking would be enough to get things steamy, so I left the microwave to its pleasant hum and ran into the bedroom to change for the gig. But when I stepped OUT of the bedroom, the hum coming from the microwave had turned somewhat less pleasant.

That's because the microwave was on fire. I had forgotten one important thing about my soggy little mask: it had one of those bendy whatzits to keep snug around your nose. And that little bendy whatzit was, I quickly learned, a copper wire. Copper is an especially good conductor and an especially bad thing to microwave should one NOT want to burn down one's kitchen.

I opened the microwave to put out the fire, which sent a ball of charred smoke directly into my smoke detector, setting it off. The detectors in my house are monitored by my home security system, which suddenly sprang to life and informed me via prerecorded message that it was sending the fire department to my house. So there I was, standing in my kitchen, trying to scoop up a flaming mask with a plastic spatula while the smoke detector blared, the security system was helpfully flashing a strobe light, and I was trying to explain to a 911 operator that emergency services were far less needed than a life coach at that precise moment.

Oh, and did I mention I was NAKED? Like, COMPLETELY naked? I was just starting to change when I heard the microwave go wonky, so I ran to the kitchen 100% sans clothing. As it turns out, Adult Shane might be capable of dressing himself in the morning, but at night all bets are clearly off.

I did manage to avoid both burning down the house and/or ending up on a docket for indecent exposure, so I'm taking that as a win. My microwave appears to still be functional; the mask considerably less so. Not only is half of it smoldering ash, but my little experiment also managed to fuse a rogue piece of macaroni directly into the fabric. It's now an art piece I'm tempted to never throw away.

So adulting is still a work in progress. But were it not for constant failure, I wouldn't be able to provide helpful bachelor tips, such as: If you forget to turn your clothes dryer on, do NOT microwave your masks. Trust me, results may vary. 

COLUMN: Derecho, Pt. 2

Right now, someone somewhere is likely paying good money to hang out in a quiet place. Entire business models exist around the concept. You can go relax at a tranquil spa. You can take a vacation to a completely isolated getaway. You can float in one of those sensory deprivation tanks. Experiencing pure calm and serenity is said to improve your cardiovascular health, reduce stress and tension, and even increase creativity and cognitive function.

Like many of you, I got to experience a full evening of absolute calm and serenity at the hands of our surprise derecho last week -- and I've got to say, I'm not a fan. Serenity is definitely overrated. I am now officially 100% pro-noise.

As I detailed in last week's column, I was home on my lunch hour when our derecho friend (I call him Derek) popped round for a quick visit to steal our power, trees, crops, and even a couple of wayward trampolenes. Later that night, once my alley was sufficiently cleared of debris, I ventured out assuming I could find limitless food options once I reached a neighborhood with power.

That neighborhood ended up being the I-80 truck plaza in Walcott, where I -- along with a measurable percentage of the Quad Cities -- waited in line for almost a full hour for a meal from some VERY stressed-out fast food employees doing God's work that night. Normally, when one leaves Walcott and heads east, you're greeted by the warm glow of the approaching QC metro. But THAT night, darkness was king.

After narrowly avoiding about 18.2 traffic collisions, I eventually made it back to my pitch black house and struggled to find the only two candles I own. They are NOT especially functional, but that's because their function is to smell like cinnamon rolls, NOT provide light to a powerless home. Not that it mattered, because I only kept them lit for about five minutes. It turns out the OTHER occupants of my home must have skipped cat school on the day they taught the "fire is bad" lesson. No sooner had I set the lit candles on the table than two of my furry friends attempted to run headfirst directly into the flames. 

For the safety of felines and human alike, I extinguished the candles and sat on the couch in total darkness going, "Now what?" I didn't even know where my phone was. "HEY SIRI," I yelled to the open air, "TURN ON FLASHLIGHT!" Somewhere on the table in front of me, I heard my phone croak, "I'm sorry, network not found." I wasn't just without power, cable, and internet -- I was without phone service, too. I was 100% cut off from society. You know, like the pioneers. The only thing I could think to do was document my harrowing journey through isolation for future generations to learn from. Just as Laura Ingalls Wilder once did, I picked up my iPhone, opened Notepad, and began a diary of my tribulations.

10:05 p.m. This is kinda fun. Peaceful. Relaxing.

10:15 p.m. This sucks. I'm bored.

10:20 p.m. What was that noise?

10:22 p.m. What was THAT noise?

10:25 p.m. In the back of my mind, I vaguely recall having existed from 1971 until June of 2007 without a pocket device connected to all of the world's information, but I'm not sure how I did it. I could have urgent e-mails to reply to. There could be people on Facebook this very second wanting to be MY friend. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SLEEP NOT KNOWING WHAT KYLIE JENNER ATE FOR DINNER OR WHAT SHOES SHE'S WEARING?

10:35 p.m. Okay, maybe I can live without 24/7 access to the Kardashian clan, but let's be honest: it's scary to NOT be able to keep tabs on Trump's Twitter account. Whether you love or hate the guy, we need social media to keep up with him. I reckon there's a 20% chance he's named Ted Nugent as Postmaster General by now.

10:50 p.m. When I moved into this place, I thought it was crazy quiet. Nope. THIS is crazy quiet. Even as its most silent moments, there's usually still the hum of the fridge, the a/c, the air filter, and whatever I'm watching on Netflix.

10:51 p.m. I miss Netflix.

11:14 p.m. There is a horrible monster somewhere in this house making a terrifying noise. Tell my mom I love her.

11:18 p.m. Correction. There is a snoring cat somewhere in this house making a terrifying noise. Mom still has my love.

11:24 p.m. There is nothing more horrifying in a dark and silent house than the sudden sound of laughter NOT coming from me. I figure either (a) a couple people are walking down the sidewalk outside, or (b) the Children of the Corn are here seeking retribution for their homeland getting blown over.

11:26 p.m. The laughter has subsided. Either they've walked on or taken notice of my neighbor's tiny corn patch in her garden.       

11:28 p.m. Tiny corn sounds good. I wish I had a can opener that didn't take electricity.

11:35 p.m. I wish I had anything in my life that didn't take electricity. 

11:40 p.m. Wait, where's my ukulele?

I didn't bother transcribing what followed. I only know how to strum three chords, and I couldn't make out their faces well enough to see whether or not the cats enjoyed my one-man ukulele salute to the Ramones. Somewhere around trying to remember the words to "Beat on the Brat," I fell asleep on the couch.

Thankfully, when I woke up, I had power and phone service. Cable and internet returned the next day, then went away again, and then came back for what I'm hoping is keepsies. I was one of the lucky ones. I know some people who didn't get power back until a day or two ago. Had that been me, I'm pretty sure my house would have descended into tribal feudalism, and I'm pretty sure the cats would have won.

Some people say that moments of calm and tranquility lead to a sense of self-empowerment. It turns out I don't need self-empowerment as much as I need house-empowerment. That next night, I fell asleep with the lights on, the TV blazing, and My Bloody Valentine pumping out of the stereo.

I slept like a baby.      

COLUMN: Derecho, Pt. 1

Someone asked me an interesting question the other day: If you could drop one word or phrase right now from the common vernacular, what would it be?

2020 has given us so many choices. I'm sick of "pandemic." I hate "cancel culture." I've had it up to here with "quarantine," but I'm cool keeping it just to see all the fun ways people misspell it. Until now, my least favorite phrase of 2020 was "social distancing." Just like "conscious uncoupling" is a ludicrous way to say you're getting divorced, "social distancing" is just an awkwardly polite way of saying "STAY AWAY FROM ME, PLAGUE RAT!"

But now I've got a NEW least favorite word of 2020: derecho.

Let's just call it what it was: a sideways tornado. Or a Midwest hurricane. Maybe a tornadicane? No matter what you call it, it sucked. Specifically, it sucked branches off trees, siding off homes, trampolenes off backyards, and power and cable and internet away from pretty much everyone. Thanks to our uninvited derecho drop-in Monday, this has NOT been an ideal week. I suppose it could've been worse. The way 2020's been going, we should probably be thankful it wasn't a sharkderecho.

Those winds were probably strong enough to fling a wayward shark or two. That was a mighty impressive storm. I've always yearned to see a tornado, just once, with my own eyes. After this week, I find myself slightly less excited by the prospect. This was close enough.

I knew it was coming. I was on Facebook (DOING WORK STUFF, I SWEAR) when friends of mine from Des Moines posted they'd just lived through the worst storm of their lives. An hour later, my friends in Iowa City were saying the same thing. Uh oh. I knew which way the wind was blowing -- literally. As the severe thunderstorm warning was issued for the Quads, it was right when I normally leave for lunch. This was a dilemma. Do I ride out the storm in the relative safety of the newspaper office? Or would I be better off racing home before it hit?

I opted for the latter, preferring my car to be in a garage instead of our parking lot. Crossing into Illinois and looking west, I could see the beast coming. Storm sirens were raging by the time I pulled into the garage. I entered my house to a chorus of concerned meows from my feline home security team -- who, despite never leaving the house in their lives, strangely know more about weather than any of us ever will. "Ha," I thought to myself, "maybe I'll get stuck at home and score an afternoon off! Win!"

Smart people would have immediately gone to the basement (where the smart cats already were.) This idiot columnist instead opted to stand in front of the back door watching it roll in. But it was okay -- after all, I'm a professional. One year ago, I spent an hour in a Henry County basement training to become a certified National Weather Service storm spotter. It was time to put my vast expertise to use.

Well, I sure spotted it, alright. My first clue was when the storm door suddenly flew open and almost shattered into a million pieces. My second clue was when about one-tenth of the tree in my backyard came crashing down, raining a barrage of walnuts onto my head. 

"GOLLY GEE!" I exclaimed. (AND THAT'S MY STORY AND I'M STICKING TO IT BECAUSE THIS IS A FAMILY NEWSPAPER AND BESIDES, I MAY HAVE A SLIGHT WALNUT CONCUSSION.) 

I locked the doors down tight and joined the cats in the basement for twenty minutes of not-unlike-the-end-of-the-world sound effects. I don't have to tell you. If you're reading this, odds are good you're from the area and probably didn't sleep through the derecho yourself. Let's just say it wasn't pleasant.

I was luckier than many. The trees in my yard looked like one of those crash diet "after" pictures, but remained mostly upright. My house appears to be intact. My car was safe in the garage. I even got my wish. Trees had crashed down across both ends of my alley, essentially trapping me at home. As it turns out, though, snow days are considerably less fun when there's no internet, no phone service, no power, and no snow. That's why if you were cruising around Rock Island in the afterstorm, you may have witnessed a rare sight in nature: yours truly performing manual labor, pushing a downed tree out of the way in order to GET to work. What have you done to me, derecho?

That night, I went out in search of food, assuming only a minority of us were in the dark. How naive I was. I drove all the way to John Deere Road before discovering the only place with juice was the Wal-mart corridor, and about 300 other people had already beat me in line. I kept driving all the way to Silvis, assuming I'd find SOMETHING open. Nope. I followed the river back to Rock Island in darkness, crossed over to Davenport and up to Locust and then Kimberly. No power anywhere and I was getting mighty hungry.

Finally, I saw it in the distance: the beautiful, unnatural glow of lights, food, commerce, and t-shirts featuring any number of wolves howling at any number of moons. If the apocalypse ever hits, I'm now quite sure the only things left will be cockroaches, zombies, and the Walcott truck plaza. After an hour wait in the drive-thru lane, I had what I'm pretty sure was the best Quarter Pounder of my life, even if most of the ketchup ended up on my shirt. Who's gonna notice in a pandemic blackout?  

Returning home MUCH later than expected, all I had to do was enjoy peace and quiet. And pitch darkness. And the longest night of my life. More on that next week.

Here's hoping you and yours have remained upright. Let's remove "derecho" from the dictionary before 2020 starts liking the way it sounds.     

COLUMN: Squirrel

Society has long been rife with conspiracy theories -- and there's nothing like a good old-fashioned global pandemic to bring them out in full force. Maybe I just have weird friends, but I can't go five minutes on Facebook without seeing someone claiming the coronavirus is a Democrat hoax to get Biden elected or that masks are just the government's way to subjugate society on the road to fascism. 

I'm pretty sure most conspiracy theories are hogwash, especially these COVID-19 ones. But I swear to you all right here and now there IS a sinister conspiracy afoot -- one that involves an evil collaboration between car washes, major grocery stores, and the most blackhearted masterminds of malice in the world: squirrels.

Once upon a time, I thought squirrels were cute and fuzzy and charming. Then I made the mistake of buying a house with a walnut tree in the backyard. Every year, a small army of squirrels farm that tree 24/7. They're efficient, organized, and their clear purpose in life is to make mine a living hell.

Last Sunday, I went to the grocery store on a food run. While there, I was happy to find a couple big jugs of hand sanitizer perfect for the office. Returning home, I pulled onto the parking slab in my backyard and unloaded the car.

The next morning, I opened my back door to leave for work and nearly screamed. In my rush to put the groceries away, I'd forgotten entirely about my car. I'd meant to park it in the garage when I was through unloading. Instead, I let it sit overnight on the parking slab -- directly underneath the agricultural operations of Squirrels, Inc. In just one night, those cute and fuzzy backyard demons had turned my white car into a walnut-stained abstract art piece. With no time to sort it out, I had to cruise to work in a ride that looked like it lost a twelve-round TKO with a flock of diarrheal pigeons. Lovely.

At least I had my new hand sanitizer and used it throughout the day. Well, at least until 3 p.m. That's when I got a breaking news blast on my phone. The FDA had just released a new list of dangerous and ineffective sanitizers, and sitting atop that list was the very jug of "Be Safe" I'd been liberally dousing my hands in all day. As if on cue, twenty minutes later my right hand broke out in a red and painful rash. Double lovely.

After work, there was nothing I wanted to do except sheepishly drive my Poopmobile to the nearest car wash. But I was on a mission. On most days, I'm a fairly timid person. Normally, I would've just cursed my luck and tossed the bottles of hand poison in the trash. But I wasn't going to let COVID or squirrels or grocery stores get the better of me. Not when my hand was burning and my car was a mobile Jackson Pollock painting. Besides, that hand sanitizer wasn't cheap.

So I got off work, held my head up high (then ducked it WAY low to give a wide berth to the sticky nightmare of my car exterior), and headed indignantly to the grocery store, receipt in my red and itchy hand. I went straight for the line to the customer service desk, which of course was the cue for every unmasked heathen in the place to line up beside me at a distance substantially less than six feet apart. Timid Shane probably would've stood there and risked the plague. Not today. Besides, I had a mask on. I was virtually anonymous. That's probably why I spun angrily on the dude behind me and said, "Hey, could you give a little distance?"

He looked at me as if I were the one openly exhaling cooties, but he backed off. Instead, he put his shopping cart between the two of us, which would have been great had it not been occupied by his maskless and coughing children. For a while, I wondered if I'd be the guy in the next grocery store fight video shared around Youtube. I would've started yelling, but I was too busy holding my breath. 

Eventually, I made it to the counter and informed the clerk about the new FDA warning while asking for my money back.

"It's not our policy to issue refunds."

I blinked.

"Is it your policy to sell hand sanitizer that doesn't work?"

He blinked.     

"It's not our policy to return opened items."

I blinked.

"Is it your policy to sell products that do THIS?" I asked, waving my blotchy hand in front of his face.

Eventually I got my refund. Well, for ONE of the jugs, at least. It turned out the cashier accidentally hadn't charged me for the second one. It's just my luck that the one time I inadvertently managed to cheat the system, it was for a jug of free poison. 

Still, I took the refund for the one jug, although the clerk's probably still wondering why I asked for it in quarters. Ten minutes later, I was furiously plugging change into the machine at the nearest car wash, eager to show those squirrels what's what. Of course, unbeknownst to me, I was shoving money into a car wash bay that was out of order and featured water pressure barely more effective than me spitting on my car, which I couldn't even do because I was still wearing a mask.

Fifteen minutes, I found another car wash and spent three full cycles of quarters getting all the muck off my car, but not before somehow managing to pinch a nerve in the hand holding the spray gun -- the same hand that was already red and blotchy.   

So here I sit, two days later. My hand still hurts and the rash is still there. My refunded treasure now sits scattered around the change collection boxes of every car wash in the greater Rock Island area. The great squirrel / car wash / grocery store conspiracy of 2020 may have won the battle, but NOT the war. And in case my boss is reading, that "sales call" I made earlier to that tree service was DEFINITELY about newspaper advertising. Any discussion of rates to chop down a walnut tree was purely coincidental, I swear.

It wasn't the first time I swore this week.