About the Blanket

Last week, Erica's mother gave her an electric blanket. This was, and has ever since been, a Big Deal.

Where I'm from, electric blankets have three settings: low, high, and unplugged. This narrow range of potential demands that an electric blanket user is either saying "Is this thing on?" or "I feel like I'm burning in Hell right now". There is nothing in between.

Boy how the times have changed. This new blanket is made by Sunbeam, the same company that produced the precious Hot Shot device I use to make the perfect cuppa every weekend. Sunbeam engineers have mastered the technology of heat and heat transfer. I say this because their electric blanket is every bit a masterpiece of thermal energy as their counter-top hot water heaters.

When last I left the saga of the electric blanket, Erica's mother had left us with the blanket, complete with anti-theft device still attached, and no receipt at 8 PM on a Monday night. Erica had spent a while online looking for ways to disable an anti-theft tag, and we agreed that freezing was the best option available to us. Given that it was single digits outside at the time, we bundled up, took the blanket downstairs, and threw it into the back of her car for a couple of hours hoping that the ink inside the tag would freeze and we could remove the bag unmolested.

In a controlled environment, I would have given the bag an overnight stay in the chill. In a controlled environment, neither Erica nor I would be cold and anxious to use the goddamn electric blanket we just got. So after about three hours, we bundled up again and went out to the car to crack open the bag.

I opened the car door and went to pick up the blanket bag. The plastic had gotten cold and stiff, so as soon as I picked it up, it tore. At this point, we could have just opened up the tear, removed the blanket, and gone inside.

Correction. We could have gone inside first, then from the comfort of our home we could have extracted the blanket and thrown out the torn bag, but we were both interested in the scientific merits of shoplifting and too involved to turn back now.

Erica took pictures as I removed a glove and pulled my Leatherman off of my belt. With the pliers, I started to pry at the casing. There was some cracking and some scuffing, and after about thirty seconds I noticed the first few drops of ink rolling down the outside. Time was now of the essence. I hurriedly bent the tag around enough to snap it. Erica had scissors, so she cut off the top of the bag and we headed back inside. A passerby eyed us suspiciously.

I tossed the leaking anti-theft tag in the trash, and Erica and I examined the blanket for damage. None. Our completely unscientific experiment suggests that the ink was slushy and thick enough to not dribble all over the merchandise. Perhaps this is the normal consistency of anti-theft ink: I don't know. This, combined with the fact that the anti-theft tag was entirely located on the outside of a plastic protective bag, has given us a usable electric blanket.

"Usable" may not the right word for it, for just the same reason it is an understatement to call Mozart a "capable musician". Electric blankets in my mind's eye, as I said before, have three settings, and they're usually tiny little things that look like something your colorblind grandmother bought from Tim Leary in 1966. This blanket by comparison is a rich burgundy color and big enough to cover a queen-size bed. It has twenty unique settings, a ten-hour auto-disengage, and a pre-heat button. These features are supported by each of the dual controllers, so both sides of the bed can have separate settings.

The blanket goes up to 20. I have never needed to turn it above 7. I've found that 7 is too high: it's nice and toasty at first, but can easily escalate to feel sweltering, especially in the middle of the night. For similar reasons, 5 seems just right when I go to bed but I find myself waking up at 3 or 4 AM shivering and cranking it higher. 6 is ideal. There is one advantage and one disadvantage of having the blanket. Advantage: I go to bed much, much earlier than usual. Disadvantage: I wake up every morning muttering the exact same words in my head: "God damn you, blanket".

See, the one thing that did not immediately occur to me is the reluctance I would feel in getting out of a warm bed every morning and trudging through a cold apartment just to go outside and shuffle off to to a cold office and then back home 12 or more hours later. Are you understanding the tragedy of this? Enjoying the comfort of the electric blanket is the high point of my day. It is the best thing I do at night and the first (and last) thing I enjoy each morning.

The blanket has an incredible draw and I really hate getting up in the mornings because of it. This blanket could very well destroy my life. I'm going to take a shower, put my jammies back on, set it to 6, and finish the last four pages of Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness. Then I'll probably wake up tomorrow as I have every day since Monday, hating myself and the cold and the comfort of that damnable blanket.