Why John Darnielle Is the Only Person Who Can Understand My Relationship With My Dishwasher

Heading By Someone Who Listens To The Mountain Goats and Has a Broken Dishwasher

John Darnielle, in his infinite wisdom, has spent his entire career turning the mundane heartbreaks of everyday life into cathartic anthems. And me? I have a broken dishwasher and a $50 coupon to The Home Depot.

I honestly don’t know what went wrong. Maybe after years of silently judging my inability to rinse properly, it finally surrendered to entropy.

Every night, I load it up with the leftovers of my increasingly sad dinners: a tupperware lid from a failed attempt at “healthy eating,” a spoon with faint traces of peanut butter (because sometimes you skip meals and go straight to peanut butter), then I hit start, hoping to hear that comforting hum of an appliance doing its job.

Instead? Silence. Ominous, uncaring, spiritual silence.

So there I stood in the middle of my kitchen, staring into the cold metal maw of my dishwasher. The faint white light that once promised cleanliness now blinked at me as if to mock my very existence. I half-expected a tiny note taped to the inside of the door, written in dishwasher handwriting:

“I quit. I’m tired of your crusty coffee mugs and sad excuse for a lasagna pan. Find someone else to hate.”

No  note appeared. Nothing happened.

I pressed every button in a desperate morse code, hoping to wake some hidden mechanism of redemption. Nothing. The dishwasher, like my last shred of patience, refused to respond.

So what now? Call a repairman? Sacrifice the dishwasher to the gods of household appliances? Or—here’s the terrifying part—wash the dishes by hand?! That means abandoning all progress, all civilization, and surrendering to the primordial act of manual scrubbing, complete with hot water, soap, and the existential dread that comes with such monotonous and outdated rituals.

(Have I forgotten what this article is supposed to be about? Briefly, yes. I will admit. But I’m back now.)

I know it sounds absurd, but if anyone understands what it feels like to stand in front of a broken dishwasher, the silent refusal, the betrayal, the  creeping realization that your appliances are judging your life choices: it’s John Darnielle. 

Because how can the story of modern man’s strife be about anything else? I have seen, yay, men of Haddam. I know how you yearn for the old days, the better days, when freezers would last a lifetime, when you didn’t need an app to order a pizza! (mountain goats)

How your bawds of euphony still look east toward salvation, yet nothing looks back. (MoUnTaIn gOaTs)

And though your equipage keeps riding, I know your spirit’s weakened (MOUNTAIN GOATS).

So alas, arise, go forth.

Don your glorious garments! Tip your waiters, close the tops of your toilet seats! Use paper plates and plastic utensils! Leave your houses and don’t look back!

Because somewhere out there, John Darnielle is probably doing his dishes.
And I bet his dishwasher works.