I keep turning my dad's ice maker off. He keeps turning it back on.. He says that when it gets full, it'll turn itself off, but I don't believe him. I keep having nightmares that my parents' ice maker tray overflows and fills their kitchen and spills over into other rooms, and finally lifts the whole structure up from its foundations and then keeps on growing into an enormous mountain of ice cubes that covers the city, so that you can actually see it from space with the naked eye. Like the Great Wall of China, or so they say.
It's not like we're all raging alcoholics who have all these cocktail parties all the time. Or like this is the show Bewitched, where every time Darren got home he went straight to the bar. And then every time they had company (which was all the freakin' time) everyone had drinks in their hands. It's probably why Samantha had to do her magic by wiggling her nose: Because she was always drinking with both hands. I kept waiting for someone to do an intervention, although I'm not quite sure who would have been qualified to do an intervention, maybe the dominatrix mother-in-law, the flamboyantly gay Uncle Arthur, or the various senile great-aunts suffering from the witch's version of Alzheimer's? And does it strike anyone else as an extraordinarily bad idea for these mystical beings with infinite power over time and space to be getting plastered all the time?
Anyway, that was just a little off the subject. The point is, my parents don't need that much ice that they have to leave it turned on all the time. Their ice tray gets so full and then all the ice cubes freeze together and so every couple of weeks my dad takes it out and dumps it off the back deck outside in this one huge lumpy block that takes about a week to melt. It looks like something that fell off a plane in mid-flight, or like Frosty the Snow-Man went on a bender and threw up in their yard.
It's just this big cycle where I turn the ice maker off, he turns it back on, and eventually it all freezes until he dumps it on the yard where it all goes back to nature, only to be purified and go back through the ice maker. It's like a PBS naturue special, or a really really boring episode of Captain Planet.
I've thought about turning the freezer up all the way and the ice-maker on full-blast, so that he winds up dumping these huge ice piles into his yard everyday. Or when he drops them off the back deck, going out to the yard and putting dead birds and animals underneath them so that he thinks he's accidentally killing them. Or that ice meteorites are dropping from the sky. Or that some freak natural phenomenon is casing these mis-shapen ice piles to form in his yard.
I probably won't though.
