Last week, my fish died. His name was buster, and he was blue. Probably the oldest blue fish on earth. He outlived the one fish, two fish, and the red fish. Here is a picture of Buster:

And here is a picture of him when he died.

I guess I should miss him because I bought him in early 1997 when he was just a baby and he’s been with me all of these years, but the reality of the whole business is that he is a fish, and fish are like cats: humans with human friends can’t get emotionally attached to them.

Flushing buster along his merry way to the sanitation system of Atlanta got me thinking, though. When is my cat going to die, and what preparations do I need to make to ensure that her estate is in order? I can’t flush her down the toilet, and I’m not paying anyone to put her ashes in a tiny stupid urn that I have to lug around with me when I move, so what do I do? She’s a little over ten years old, so she can’t have too much time left…

Luckily Home Depot was running a special on garbage disposals, and I needed one anyway. We’ll get to that in a minute. In any case, the one I bought didn’t say anything about being cat safe, so Queasy and I went coffin shopping on Saturday afternoon. She liked the fit of this one-

And it came free with my shoes, so who am I to question her taste? Plus, I can put the lid all the way on with her in it, but it takes a lot of tape and rope to keep it there for very long.

As soon as I find somebody to dig a hole, everything will be over except the waiting.

Me and Home Improvement-

What is it about installing an appliance that feels so good? Earlier this year my friend Cram called me and said he needed help with the kitchen in the house he just bought. We fit and installed cabinets, countertops, a gas stove, a dishwasher, a refrigerator, and a garbage disposal in one day, and it was AWESOME.

Not quite awesome enough that I wanted to quit my easy job where I get paid too much, but awesome. We had plenty of cold beer, too.

Now I was the proud owner of my own disposal, and I seemed to remember installing Cram’s was easy enough. Run wires to switch, remove existing drain, attach plumbing, and start disposing of garbage. I figured I’d pop it in myself.

First, run the wiring. Luckily, the previous owner of my house had run wires from a switch to a j-box under the sink. So all I need to do now is find the circuit breaker that cuts power to those wires.

After flipping breakers and testing voltage, I found that the breaker that cuts power to those wires is the same one that controls all of the lights in the kitchen. So my choices were to work in the dark and risk killing myself, go to the hardware store and spend $20 on a light that I would use one time, or just turn off the light switch that powers the disposal. Naturally I went with the dumbest of the three choices.

I’ve been around me long enough to know that any project I undertake could very well end with my blackened and bloated body rotting under the kitchen sink for a few days before someone finds me. To prevent this, I used some electrical tape to secure the switch and remind me not to turn it on. Because it would take some kind of ape-like superhuman to break the surly bonds of electrical tape.

Now that I was 2% less likely to electrocute myself I started wiring stuff together. Once I had everything wire nutted and wrapped according to Georgia electrical safety code 114-32.a, I decided to try the switch. My garage door came flying open and my toilet flushed. Very odd since I don’t have a garage, and I sold the toilet when I decided to get the garbage disposal. Kind of stupid to have a toilet and a garbage disposal.

Actually it worked, but Garbage disposals come in different sizes, and I of course went with “The DeathMaker 4000”- 190 horsepower liquid cooled dual overhead cam with steel blades forged from the very Katana that legendary Samurai Utzuki Tazaka used to defeat the she-beast of Anger Mountain in 1270 AD. The box said it was capable of turning a human femur into edible pudding in 7 seconds flat and that’s just one of those claims you take at face value. This testament to modern engineering and capitalism was lying on its side under the sink, ready to make puddin’.

Hey kids, here’s a little experiment you can do at home- Take a small electrical motor (small, like something out of a toy car) and place it on its side. Then attach batteries to the leads and watch as it does a cute little dance as a result of its own torque. You just learned Newton’s third law of Physics. Now imagine the motor is about 700 times bigger and you attached it to 100 batteries and you are retarded like me. The dance becomes a hellish display of raw power and fear.

Now that the entire contents of my cabinet were scattered around the kitchen and my cat was hanging from the ceiling fan, I had room to get under there and attach it to the drain.

The p-trap (the little curvy section of pipe that keeps your house from smelling like shit) holds some unspeakable things. I do not recommend lying on your back to disconnect it. Don’t say I never gave you any good advice.

In any undertaking of this nature, something somewhere will piss me off until I scream and break stuff. I primarily do this to set an example for any children who may be watching. In this project it was the realization that this single piece of hardware had lots of fasteners on it, and they were all different. It required an Allen wrench (included in package), a stardriver (who the hell has a set of those?), a flat head screw driver, a phillips screwdriver, socket driver, and a pipe wrench. Most of it wasn’t any problem, but the pipe wrench thing was bothering me- I was not about to go out and buy a pipe wrench to loosen one stupid nut. Think, Dusty, think…what would Jesus unsafely improvise?

Then I remembered something my dad told me when I was 12- “Anything can be fixed with a big enough hammer. Now where’s my goddamn hammer?! Son, I swear, I’m going to lock up my tools if you can’t learn to put them away after you use them!! Now you go and find my damn 16 ounce framing hammer. I don’t care if you have to buy one, steal one, or mine some ore and forge one! I want my hammer back in here in one hour!! Move your ass!!!”

Actually the first sentence was the important part, but I recalled the whole thing…

So I found a c-clamp and tightened it down on the nut. Then I got the biggest hammer I had out of my toolbox and pounded it until the clamp came flying off and hit me in the knee. I coined the swearword “schatfuggin’ gakdamn” and repeated the process until I was sweating and the nut was lying on the kitchen floor. I gave it the finger and called it a bitch. It’s something I do when I win stuff, and one reason my friends won’t let me play board games with their kids.

Lucky for all involved, the rest of the installation went smoothly. It was also an excellent time to rid my refrigerator of some fetid produce. First went the chick peas. There should be an activism group to prevent the waste of chick peas. You can only buy them by the cubic yard, and every recipe that calls for them only calls for ¼ cup. The rest turn gross in a Ziploc bag over the next few days. I bet dude peas would be much tougher.

Then I destroyed some pomegranate, half a red onion, a long curly shaped thing that would have required dental records to identify, and some rubbery celery. By this time I was so wrapped up in my accomplishment that I decided to share the joy with my dad, who I knew would be proud.

“Hello?”
“Hi mom, is dad around?”
“Yeah…whats that noise?”
“Nothing, just the new garbage disposal I JUST INSTALLED IN AN HOUR ALL BY MYSELF.”
“You’re 33 years old. You should be able to do stuff like that. Does it work?”
“Uhh…no doy? Listen.”
*sound of celery meeting its choppy demise*
“Sounds like you did a good job. Just don’t put celery in it. The strings get all jammed up in the blades.”
“How did you know that was celer…nevermind. I guess I’m stupid.”
“Don’t put anything that’s not food in it either. I know how you are. Wanna talk to dad?”
“Yeah. But don’t tell him I already screwed it up.”
Sound of buttons being pushed, muffled “damn fancy phones…buncha’ random buttons…can’t ya just pick it up and talk…piss me off…”
“Yello?”
“Hey pop, I installed a big honkin’ garbage disposal and it works. You can come play with it, but you have to bring your own stuff to throw in it. No celery, and I’m not sure about cats.”
“Good job. How many trips to the hardware store did it take?”
“Four…but two of them were just to sniff the merchandise. I didn’t have a pipe wrench, so I imporvised.”
“what did you use?”
“C-clamp and a 16 ounce framing hammer.”
“Haha. Nice wor- wait. The blue framing hammer? MY BLUE FRAMING HAMMER?!”

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