Marital strife ensued this weekend, when I went on
craigslist and traded away the Wife's Horn-Of-Plenty to the Smithsonian for a flat-panel HD-ready television and a brick of M-80s.
I had no idea what kind of grief I would be getting for this. Apparently (and I never knew this until after I sold it), the Horn-Of-Plenty was a 1200-year-old heirloom, bought from some hard-up Druid in the English Midlands forty-odd generations ago. According to the Department of Agriculture, it is one of six extant, scientifically proven
Cornucopiae in the world today — and the only one not currently owned by Horn Hobbyist and Hoarder
Rue McClanahan.
That's what I
didn't know when I cut the deal online. What I did know about this particular Horn-Of-Plenty was that it dispensed cooking oil. Not wine, not beer, not balsamic vinegar, Uranium-238, frankincense, myrrh, or any other substance that we could sell out the back door of the apartment for a decent profit.
Cooking oil. Now if we were in the restaurant business, we might have some use for a bottomless, inexhaustible supply of cooking oil. But we're not. In fact, the Wife and I have been so on-the-go in recent weeks that we've had to eat out or order in most of our meals. And what we do eat, we're not going to cook up in corn oil, which is what this Horn-Of-Plenty has been serving up ever since the economy went to shit in '01. Back in 1999, during the dotcom boom, the Horn was running over with extra virgin olive oil — a lot healthier and better-tasting oil than the cheap Mazola we're getting these days.
Granted — an infinite supply of
anything is nice to have. Granted, granted, fine. Score a point for the Wife on that. But that is only half the issue: we simply don't use the Horn-Of-Plenty enough to justify the inconvenience of keeping it in the apartment. I mean, it's three feet long from rim to point, it won't fit in any of the cabinets, and it leaks
everywhere. You have to lay it flat on the kitchen counter
just so, or it will dribble out cooking oil until you fix it. The Wife tried hanging it from the ceiling last year, just before we went to bed, and overnight it literally flooded the apartment. I woke up at 4 a.m. to go to the bathroom, and I found myself ankle deep in corn oil. And don't even try slapping a lid on it or stopping it up with paper towels: it will back up and blow like a fire hose.
Simply not worth the hassle, I say, even knowing what I know now about that Horn-Of-Plenty's historical and sentimental value. Look — I've got two ALDS games to watch tonight on the new flat-panel, and an assload of firecrackers to light and throw out into the street between innings. And sooner or later the Wife will come around to my thinking here. She doesn't always, but this time she will because deep down she knows I'm right. All it will take is one episode of
Gilmore Girls in HD, and she'll be speaking to me again. I guarantee it.
