Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川 広重
Dragons Among Clouds
(1844)

"…humiliated into a begrudging silence again."

Prosperity has a way of attracting possessions. If one’s not extremely careful and cautious, these can accumulate to become suffocating. Short of outright hoarding, possessions can come to possess us, and they inevitably become harsh taskmasters. Among their most onerous expectations lie the necessary periodic maintenance. Nothing about achieving Prosperity prepares anybody for what becomes necessary to maintain their resulting possessions in something approaching original operating order. Even the kitchen faucet requires some infrequent maintenance, its very infrequency rendering this essentially impossible for the merely Prosperous to successfully accomplish. Still, a kind of hubris can overtake the Prosperous, the sort that temporarily convinces them that, if only due to their Prosperity, they might be capable of successfully engaging in DIY-ing, Doing It Yourselfing. They probably aren’t.

The primary reason we will never have household nukes generating our residential energy lies in this first principle of Prosperity, that the Prosperous tend to get these preposterous notions that possession somehow bestows the ability to maintain, when it might at best inflict that obligation. In what amounts to one of those celestial or cosmic jokes, the result of this sense has been to leave a sad trail of improperly maintained possessions in its wake. Most Prosperous lives are surrounded by half-broken appliances, stuff for which some fix was attempted back near the end of the second Reagan administration, but which never quite succeeded. It didn’t fail badly enough, though, to completely disable the damned thing, so it’s limped along as a probable fire hazard since, its owner no less Prosperous, but humbled, perhaps even humiliated into a silent acceptance.

The attempts all begin the same. A flood of possibility breaks over some otherwise indistinguishable Saturday morning. This will be the day that the long-procrastinated chore will get conquered and the appliance owner will escape the little Hell they’ve inhabited since that possession turned up wounded. These days, a YouTube video will have helped convince the owner that only a more complete idiot than he would ever experience any trouble with the fix. Five easy steps. The narrator accomplished the fix while providing color commentary. Not one of his tools slipped to raise a nasty blood blister, as yours often have. Neither did he find himself discovering a previously unknown subfield of engineering once that set screw loosened. This quick peek into the promised land raised the interest to near hubris level, and served to nearly guarantee your fate. You become an eager victim.

Armed with what will prove to be useless knowledge, you set to work with unfamiliar yet strangely reassuring confidence. Until, that is, you encounter your faucet’s set screw. Yours seems distinctly different than the one displayed in the video. The instructor mentioned a certain size of wrench, but that kind of wrench comes in hydra-headed form with no designations on any individual head. It’s hunt and peck. After a frustrating half hour, you realize that you’ve been using a Torx tool, whatever that is, a form of Allen wrench designed to humiliate nonmechanics. No civilian knows what it was designed for. You bought it by accident years ago. Back to the basement to choose one of the nearly half dozen other specimens of that particular tool available, wondering how you’ll tell which one might be the correct one. The YouTube video suggested no such ambiguity. Prosperity features just these sorts of surprises that one must somehow reason out for themself without adequate background knowledge or understanding. To be humiliated by a set screw tends to be par for this course, though.

I try, try, and even try again, finding that some of the wrenches seem to fit, but none seem capable of budging that set screw even a little bit. It’s a tiny little thing, but damned insistent. I even raise a little sweat, but I cannot make any headway with it. I surrender. As per usual, the omitted scenes in the YouTube video must have contained the inside secret, for there’s always an inside secret. If a YouTube video mentioned it, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore, would it? I shuffle into our living room to report to The Muse that that leaky kitchen faucet will require a professional’s attention. It features technology that should have been prominently labeled “no owner maintainable parts,” but didn’t. She responds, “Not on a Sunday,” to which I heartily agree. Those who call plumbers on Sundays don’t stay Prosperous for long. A day that had begun with uplifting promise had by late morning crashed, burned, and severely wounded the pilot again. Perhaps a dripping kitchen faucet hadn’t been that bad.

The difficulty had been my expectation, not the dripping faucet or the tenaciously impossible technology the Delta faucet company insisted upon using when they designed the damned thing. No manufacturer gives a good goddamn about maintainability. They engage with their own forms of hubris, which seems to perfectly play into the Prosperous’ occasionally visiting unwarranted sense of DIY self-importance, one of the greater self-inflicted sins commonly exhibited by the Prosperous. The Muse struggled into her post-surgery boots and wheeled her wheelchair into the kitchen, ordering me to turn off the water again and go fetch the rest of those damned Allen wrenches. I did as she ordered, though I felt humiliated. The Muse somehow mastered that set screw before ordering me to find two pairs of channel locks. Five minutes later, she ordered me to go turn on the water. I hunkered in the basement after that, folding some laundry I’d somehow managed to wash and dry for her, though the seal on the front of the washer has been leaking for at least two years. No owner-maintainable parts inside that appliance, either, and the leak seems modest and completely tolerable, if a little continually humiliating. I later excused myself to my monk’s cell to perform some well-earned self-flagellation the Prosperous must often engage in, humiliated into a begrudging silence again.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz