Beaten Down

A fact of life in the universe of Alyce Smythee is that almost all good things come with a price. Sure, there can be great surprises here or there, or great runs of goodness, but overall, there’s always something crappy that can be directly linked to the good, and if something crappy happens once, it’s going to happen again.

For the second time in the 2+ years that I’ve lived in my apartment, I have had a food crisis. The first time, it was an attack of Indian Meal Moths. If you don’t know what they are, consider yourself blessed and lucky. They find a food source, multiply, and unless you find their home (which can be much more difficult than you can imagine), they just keep making new ones in all of your food. They eat through cardboard, thin plastic, and some other containers that you’d never imagine.

When they came to my beloved abode, they annihilated hundreds of dollars of food — my extensive tea collection, all of my good chocolate and regularly sealed baking supplies, some herbs, all of my grains, pasta, you name it. It took almost a year to find all of their homes and get them out. (Now they’re back in the hallways, and so help me god, if I get another infestation, I’m beating the shit out of the other people who live in this place.)

Anywho…

Tonight, I opened my freezer to decide what I wanted to cook with my fresh collard greens. The freezer looked like the Boston Massacre. Everywhere you looked, there were pools of deep red blood and moist pieces of flesh. My freezer and fridge had turned themselves off. Griping, I reset the plug, thinking it had just shorted. Oh, no.

The plug was working fine, and the light would turn on, but my 3-month old fridge stopped cooling. An elk roast, an elk filet, a few other steaks, a bunch of pork, a bunch of chicken breasts, some ground meat, tilapia filets — all completely thawed. (Imagine how long it must’ve been off to accomplish that… Or maybe it went off right before I went into it last time, sucking out the much-needed cold air…) I had to throw out a big bags of pierogies (handmade by local Poles), shrimp, and Jamaican beef patties.

The PTB are just lucky that my huge box of Black Jack gum was unharmed. If that was gone, I would’ve killed someone, no matter what the consequences.

But that’s not all — the minute my hand finally pulled the last piece of food out of the freezer — the motor turned back on and starting to chill again.

If you’re going to break, break. But don’t half break, so that the fixer dude will have no idea what’s wrong.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m just going to go to bed. I’m tired, I’m annoyed, and the mere sound of my fridge’s whirring motor is infuriating.