One Day in the Basement

It all started one day when I went down to the basement, where I hideaway when I need to commune with cinder blocks, and I noticed, after some requisite hard toking, that there was a green sheen covering my copper pipes. It was a very nice shade of green and I reached into my abundant storehouse of useless knowledge and instantly identified the green residue as verdigris, which accumulates on copper.

I said Hmmmm…

After further reflection (about a half hour contemplating my table saw) I noticed that my old steel pipes also had residual matter accumulating along their ancient lengths. But this was a white powderish looking accumulate, and resembled calcium deposits in my old coffee pot and kneecaps.

I said Hmmmmm…

I went out to the Chevy and got my jumper cables and rolled a pinner on the way through the living room, where wifey was holding down the couch, eyes rapt and glued on the Young and Restless and doing her part to help us go broke smoking weed.

I hooked black up to the copper pipes, and red to the steel ones, and touched the other ends together and Vwahlah! I got sparks.

I said Hmmmmm…

About an hour later my better half came downstairs with a load of laundry and tales of that bastard Victor but I was lost in scientific beatitude making sparks and sipping Millers.

“Make yourself useful and hook those wires up to the washing machine or something Einstein” my flower trilled to my eternal delight and I complied, not suspecting nothing.

The washing machine tried but wasn’t quite making it.

I ran out to the VW on blocks in the “driveway” and got my other jumper cables, me being a believer in redundancy and also one to never throw anything out. I rolled a pinner on the way through the living room and grabbed a few cans of liquid coolant for my overheating grey matter from the kitchen, and made my way back downstairs to master and maybe capitalize on this amazing phenomenon, this free resource that will make LewSethics a household name and seal my fortune.

The second set of jumper cables helped but the damned machine wanted more juice.

I needed a better plan, so I rolled a pinner and grabbed a couple Millers, my brain a veritable Rubik’s Cube of unsolvability, and weighed my options.

So I stared at the dryer for about fifteen minutes until Spot, my dog, came downstairs and intimated with his most expressive face that if I ran sixty pairs of wires in parallel from the pipes to a pair of metal bars I may thereby multiply the amperage while increasing the voltage and mimic 60 cycles,, lower my electric bill, all without having to sacrifice decibels of musical volume or precious eye candy from the 32” Sony. He had anticipated my confusion and showed me a drawing he had made for me as soon as the glazed look on my face threatened to take my attention to Oz.

I said Hmmmmm…

I found a spool of single strand copper wire that I had liberated from the shop one time when the boss docked me for coming in late and ran buku wires across the basement. My basement looked like the inside of a Spirograph’s mind on crack. I have no idea what that would look like but it sounded like a good sentence. I pulled the wires tight and once the juice started flowing you could hear them hum.

I was feeling around my fusebox with my screwdriver when my cat came downstairs and informed me with much purring and leg-rubbing that the house was becoming magnetic and was attracting all manner of metal objects, which were then sticking to the house.

Not bad, I thought, scrapping metal is a good way to make one’s fortune in this devastated economy, but when I went outside to survey my inventory I discovered Cop Car 411 stuck to the house, sidewise, with the payload furiously writing tickets and spilling coffee, and reviling me with scatological references to impossible Darwinian cul-de-sacs in my family tree. Overhead were a couple of small planes that maybe were starting to circle, corralling the madness like a pair of Piper Parentheses.

I told the boys in blue that I had no idea what was going on but they were trespassing vis-à-vis they were stuck to my house, unless they had a warrant that gave them permission to park on my kitchen window, which I had to doubt, me having no priors, so to speak. This pissed them off and they swore and threatened for three minutes straight, but my wife pulled the plug on the basement experiment while they were ranting and the cop car fell off the house and hit the ground with a porcine thud. We got the cop car back on its wheels and sent it off into the sunset before they could recoup and plant any drugs or guns on us, and they headed off to a Duncan’s Donuts far away, waving their pistols in the air and yelling ‘Bang! Bang!’

My wife said Hmmmmmm and I was in the doghouse so fast Spot didn’t have time to change the sheets or vacuum.

So, that was then, and things are normal now; I had to promise my wife that I would not to do it again.

But I was in a quandary.

How do you operate AC devices from an obviously DC source?

Spot’s face is hard to read on this one: it seems the explanation has something to do with either Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, or a dead cat. The drawing looks like a dead cat.