Rust never sleeps

But thankfully, neither do I

By now, you’ve probably heard of the Five Remembrances of Buddhism. They’re often paraphrased (and re-translated), but they distill down to a reflection on impermanence. For the uninitiated, below is a simplified version that I like:

• I am of the nature to grow old

• I am of the nature to get sick

• I am of the nature to die

• I am of the nature to lose what I love

• How then, shall I live?

Another good question (as recently covered on, you guessed it, the Ezra Klein show), comes from the Seon school of Buddhism in Korea. It is simply to ask, repeatedly, “What is This?” —about yourself, the world around you, and the nature of existence. Reality really is quite baffling when you take a long hard look at it.

In science, this can be summed up by the phrase “rust never sleeps.” Conveniently the title of a 1979 album by Neil Young, it is also the subject of a phenomenal book by Jonathan Waldman, Rust: The Longest War. Everything corrodes, everything decays. Modernity is but a battle to delay the inevitable, building and rebuilding again and again. Even our efforts to combat climate change — with some very incredible technology — is but a waystation in the relentless march of time.

A tragedy in one act

I don’t bring this up because I am a sage living on the peaks of profundity. (Though, as you likely recall from past pieces about my very cool eco-friendly church and my obsession with Oliver Burkeman, I am a bit of an overly philosophical Christian of the Jew-Bu persuasion.) No, I mention these cold hard facts of life because I, like you — like us all — am a human living in the muck of reality. Like Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, I am confronted daily by the crumbling of my own little empire.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

What, you may ask has gotten me to navel gaze even more than usual? Well friends, I had an uninvited guest recently, one that threatened my great monument to climate progress. A mouse moved into my heat pump, and he did some damage.

Ask for Wally

I love my HVAC guy. I don’t love my HVAC company; their prices are a little high and they’re kind of slow to get back to me. But when they send out Wally, a Polish legend who knows heat pumps like the back of his hand, I know I’m in good hands.

On an unseasonably warm day in December — which should be peak heat pump time — I noticed that my furnace was still running. The problem, for better or worse, did not take long to diagnose. After reading through a bunch of error codes on my smart thermostat, Wally popped open the control panel on my heat pump and called me outside.

“See? Is mouse. Poo-poo. Pee-pee.”

Indeed, where Wally pointed, I could see a few little presents left behind by my new roommate — one who had declined to pay rent in any denomination other than “tiny turd.” Apparently, this is a thing that happens. Even in non-heat pump set ups, apparently AC units are full of mice down in Florida (thank you Reddit).

My friend entered through the tiny hole between the panel and the power cables

To Wally’s credit, he got it up and running in record time. Mr. Mouse, however, cost me a cool $600 in parts and labor. The question now is: what the heck can you do about a mouse moving into your heat pump?

Apologies for my snake, he’s rubber

Apparently, there’s not a ton you can do, though the internet is replete with conflicting advice:

• Some say to get a rubber snake to scare away rodents from the back of your house. Others say that is nonsense and will merely give your HVAC professional a heart attack.

• Some say to stuff the tiny holes in the control panel with steel wool. Others say steel wool is highly conductive and will start a fire if it comes in contact with electricity accidentally.

• Some say to use duct sealant or caulk and fill in any tiny holes. Others say mice can chew through that no problem.

• Some (including a farmer friend of mine) say that you can buy black market urine for basically any creature, and that I should spray some cat pee around. Others… I couldn’t find anyone who disagreed with this advice, per se, though I have yet to find a plug for cat pee.

• Some even said this was a known issue that could be easily solved by engineering teams at HVAC manufacturers, but they don’t solve it cause they like selling parts (yay!)

Ultimately, I consulted a few pest control experts, and they’re still debating whether or not they want to mess with an appliance. The good news is, statistically, there likely won’t be a mouse in my heat pump every year (I went four years without one). And while paying $600 stung, it’s not like there was physical damage on the machine’s critical components outside of a couple tiny (yet expensive) sensors. The real question then — as with all questions — remains a philosophical one. In a world where there’s “always something,” who do we march forward on our technological climate journey?

Mechanical monsters

For those that follow my feeble fiction writing career (thank you and apologies), you may have noticed that I had a short story published recently in the online horror magazine, Flash Phantoms. In it, I imagined a world where robots take over pest control — including robo-cats to hunt mice and bedbug robots that…well, you’ll find out if you read it.

But I think this continues to ignore a vital question — a question I tried to pose earlier with the Five Remembrances. Everything we have will break. And yet, we have, in our modern world, created an incredible built environment full of architecture, machines, and tools. In fact, the political battle for the climate often revolves around these questions: When do we update our technology and what do we replace it with?

For me, there’s also hope in such questions. The other day, driving over to the Southport Corridor in Chicago, I saw a lovely sight. An old, beautiful brick building was studded with heat pumps. For one, they gave me hope that I could someday lift my heat pumps off the mouse-covered ground… But for another, they helped me realize how much we can accomplish as we are now.

We built a charming city where many of the buildings are made of hundred-year-old brick (which were, in turn, made from clay deposits that formed over millions of years). And yet, even those buildings can have plug-and-play technology for the 21^st century. Meanwhile, we’re updating our decades-old electric grid with new resources, clean technologies that will power those new devices without the carbon footprint. And, yes, sometimes our heat pumps will get mice in them. But we carry on. We forge a new future for ourselves and wage our endless battle against rust.

We will all die, friends. How, then, shall we live? I, for one, want to live in greater harmony with our world. I want to rage against the machine and go anything but gentle into that good night. I want to fight for the climate and have fun doing it. And I hope, in 2150, they will find the rusted husk of my heat pump and wonder about me. My name is Ozymandias, I will etch into the side. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

*Art by Theodore Wores, Buddha’s Flowers: Lotus, Tokyo, 1894, courtesy National Gallery of Art.

**Email header art by Karl Nilsson (sigvardnilsson on instagram), includes portions of Beck’s Castle Ruins by László Mednyánszky Denbigh Castle, W he ales by Edward Dayes & Paysage de la Grand Chartreuse attributed to Jean Lubin Vauzelle