dumb and dumber disney plus — a search that ended at the microwave

i typed dumb and dumber disney plus into the search bar and the screen said no results, so i made dinner instead. that dinner involved a fork, which is foreshadowing.

writing this from the desk. 10:38am, wednesday. the boss is on a vendor call he scheduled himself into and cannot exit. i have, conservatively, until lunch.

so the question on the table is whether dumb and dumber disney plus is a thing that exists, and the answer, after twelve minutes of personal investigation, is: no. not on disney plus. not today. not under any of the four typos i tried after the third coffee. i checked twice, while pretending to read a slack thread about the renewal burndown.

i took it personally. that is the post.

dumb and dumber disney plus: the 1994 film dumb and dumber is not currently available on disney plus. it is not a disney film, and disney plus tends to host disney films, plus the things they bought from people who are now allegedly disney. so dumb and dumber disney plus, as a phrase, returns no results. you may try a different platform. or, like me, a fork.

DUMB. AND DUMBER. NOT. ON. DISNEY. PLUS.

the search that ended at the microwave

the search began with a vague feeling. tuesday. i had remembered the scene where one of them eats a hot pepper and the other one buys him a slurpee, and i thought: that. that is the level of cinema i need on a tuesday evening. the 1994 film, the original, the one with the hair.

i typed dumb and dumber. nothing. i typed dum and dumber, in case the spelling had drifted overnight. nothing. i typed jim carrey. three things he has done for them, one of which is a christmas movie i do not believe he was contractually obligated to make.

this is when the resentment started. (i pay for four streaming subscriptions. i use one. that is, technically, a hobby.)

so i made dinner instead, and the seventh microwave was born

i closed the tv. i went to the kitchen. i took out a bowl, the leftovers — pasta, two-day-old. i put the pasta in the bowl, the bowl in the microwave. and then, because my hands had been typing dumb and dumber disney plus for the previous eleven minutes and were on autopilot, i picked up a fork, put it in the bowl, closed the door, pressed two minutes, and walked away.

fork night is what i call this now.

i was halfway back to the couch when the microwave made the sound. hum, then a higher hum, then a noise that is not in the manual. a flash, yellow at the edges and white in the middle. the kitchen wall had a small black scorch mark roughly the size of a quarter. the fork, when i opened the door, was bent. not melted. bent. as if it had been doing yoga.

this is the seventh microwave i have killed. the seventh, technically, still works in the sense that it makes light when you press start, but it no longer rotates the plate, and it now has a personality, and the personality is bitter. this is the seventh i have killed.

the relevant hot take here is mine: cars should have one cupholder. six is greed. excess is the disease. one fork in one microwave is enough, on a tuesday, to undo a man.

the bulk place, the box of forks, and the apartment of one

(the fork in question came from a thirty-six-pack i bought at the bulk place last spring under a membership that i, a single man with one chair, do not strictly need. mom sent the renewal notice with a sticky note that said “you’ll save money”. i have not saved money. i have thirty-six forks and a quart of mustard the size of a small child. but i digress.)

the point: when you have one fork, you respect the fork. when you have thirty-six, the fork becomes a resource. that is also, if you stretch a little, the philosophy of dumb and dumber. two men. one car. zero plan. unlimited courage. you cannot put that on disney plus. it would not survive the meeting.

what people actually mean when they search dumb and dumber disney plus

mike, at the corner bar, told me once that “people don’t search what they want, they search what they hope”. i have thought about that for nine months. mike is right. mike has also not opened his mail since february. the two facts coexist.

so what people hope, when they type dumb and dumber disney plus into a search bar at 10pm on a sunday, is one of three things:

• that disney plus has, secretly, in a vault, a copy of the 1994 film, mislabeled, waiting for them today. (it does not.)
• that there is a sequel, a spinoff, an animated reboot voiced by jeff daniels and a goat. (there is not.)
• that they are going to watch the original right now, on the platform they happen to have open, because the second platform requires a password and the password requires the email and the inbox is a place we do not visit. (this is the real one.)

the search is a small prayer from a person who has subscribed to four streaming services and assumes the world’s cinema is, between them, accessible. the prayer is denied. the licensing department does not take prayers.

i am the kind of idiot the entire site is named after, and the idiot, when he searches a thing, expects the thing to be there. when it isn’t, he eats. when he eats, he ends up with a bent fork.

what to do instead, by a man with no authority and a bent fork

i did not, in the end, watch dumb and dumber on tuesday. by the time i had survived fork night and called dave and listened to dave laugh for what i estimate was eleven minutes (he denies this; “two, maybe three”), it was 10pm and the will to watch a movie had left the building.

so what i did, instead:

1. i went to the dumb pillar on this site and re-read it, because i needed to remember that the word itself is a defensible concept and not a personality flaw.
2. i read three minutes of the piece on dumb and dumber as a misunderstood manifesto.
3. i woke up at 4:14am with the thought “you should have just bought it on a different store”. i ignored it. it ignored me back.

the boss just walked past holding a coffee i recognize as not his. that is, by the office’s own internal logic, a sign of distress. twenty minutes left.

if you want a tidier piece of work on this same general territory, the long-form piece on whether i am dumb, tested answers a related question, and the comparison piece on dumb vs stupid handles the philosophical neighborhood.

verdict — the closing argument on the search

dumb and dumber disney plus is not a real thing. it is a real search. the search is what people type at 10pm; the thing is what nobody has put on the platform. that gap is what made the internet what it is, and is also what made me what i am — a man with seven dead microwaves and a bent fork in a drawer next to a fork named sparky.

so if you came here looking for a way to watch the film on disney plus tonight: you cannot. you can watch it elsewhere. or you can, like me, make dinner, and possibly history. my history is bent. tom, who has a volvo and a sensible single subscription and goes to bed at 10:30, would not have put a fork in the microwave. tom does not know what he is missing.

the new microwave is coming thursday. the repair guy too. the universe is coordinating its calendars without consulting mine.

↑