dumb dumber 3 — and the night the 7th microwave died

dumb dumber 3 was buffering on a screen the moment the microwave finally caught up to me. the IKEA shelf, still half built, watched. the third yoga mat watched. the seventh microwave was new then, brave, hopeful. it is not new now. nothing in this kitchen is new now.

writing this from the desk i am supposed to be using, on a thursday at 11:42am, to format a slide deck nobody on the call will look at. the kitchen i am about to describe is two miles east, currently dark, currently holding the evidence.

so. dumb dumber 3. there is no such film, technically. there is the 1994 original. there is the 2014 sequel the marketing team called dumb and dumber to because someone in a meeting room decided spelling was funny. and then there is what people actually search for at 1am, looking for a third installment that does not exist. that gap has become, for me, a kitchen.

dumb dumber 3: the unmade third installment of the dumb and dumber franchise. it does not exist on any streaming service. it has never been filmed. but it is, in the cultural imagination, a placeholder for the version of a story you keep waiting for that never arrives — a third act, in your own life, that does not get made. the search query is more honest than the franchise.

THERE IS NO. THIRD ACT. UNTIL THERE IS.

and that is the entry. that is the whole essay, structurally. the rest is decoration. but i live in the decoration, so we’ll go through it.

dumb dumber 3, the spelling i prefer and why i picked it

i type dumb dumber 3 into the search bar without the and, without the to. i type it the way i think it. three words. one digit. the digit is doing all the work — asking, with a tiny bend at the top, where is the rest of this story.

the official sequel, the 2014 dumb and dumber to with jim carrey and jeff daniels, came out twenty years after the original. it was, depending on who you ask, a misfire, a victory lap, or an accidental documentary about how nothing improves with a long enough pause. i watched it on a sunday. i went looking for the third one afterwards. there is no third one.

the way you mistype a thing tells you what you actually want from it. dumb dumber 3 is not the title. it is the wish. for the longer treatment of why dumb is not the insult people think it is, the pillar essay defending the entire concept of dumb as a posture is what i would point you at. this post is the kitchen-level version of that argument.

the night i tried to reheat during the third act

here is the night. sunday. late, but not late enough to be brave about. dumb dumber 3 — the search, not the film — was open in a tab. i had been looking for a third installment for forty minutes the way other men look for old girlfriends online. i was finding articles about whether it would happen, articles about whether it should, articles by people who clearly had not seen the second one but had a thesis anyway.

i decided to reheat soup. soup was a generous word. it was a leftover i had been carrying across the week the way a man carries a grudge. into the seventh microwave. three minutes. i stood there, watching the carousel.

at minute one and seventeen seconds there was a flash. small. blue. quiet. not the cinematic kind. the kind that says i was a microwave for forty minutes and a paperweight for the rest. the seventh microwave, the brave one, was finished.

i called dave. dave said “that’s the seventh.” i said “i know.” dave laughed for, by my count, nine minutes. i did not interrupt. somewhere in the middle of the laugh, i pulled the fork out of the soup and put a small black mark on it with a sharpie. that fork now lives in the drawer with the others. i do not, again, interrogate this.

the ikea bookshelf, leaning in solidarity

two saturdays before the microwave incident, i had bought a shelf. you know the store. blue building, swedish vowels, meatballs on the way out. the instructions had been drawn by a man who had never met a hex key. by sunday afternoon i had three quarters of a shelf and a small angry pile of leftover hardware that i suspect was load-bearing.

the shelf currently leans at a 7-degree angle against the kitchen wall. i have been calling it, in private, the suggestion of a shelf. it holds one mug, an unopened envelope from the bank, and a small ceramic frog i did not buy and cannot account for. the shelf is, structurally, a third act that did not get made. it is doing the same job, in my apartment, as dumb dumber 3 is doing in the wider culture — a thing that announced itself, half built itself, and then waited for somebody who knew what they were doing to finish it. nobody is coming.

i am using the shelf as a metaphor, but i am also using the shelf as a shelf. that is the trouble with my apartment. every metaphor in it is also a problem i have to walk around. the shelf and the missing sequel are the same shape. they both lean. they both wait.

the third yoga mat, watching from under the couch

i have three yoga mats. this is one and a half more than a man with my level of yoga has any right to. the first one i bought in 2017 with intention. the second one i bought in 2020 with the panicked optimism of a person who had recently been told to find a hobby. the third one i bought eleven months ago because it was on sale, and because i thought buying a yoga mat would do the yoga for me.

none of them have been unrolled in a posture you would recognise as yoga. the first is in a closet. the second is propping up a wobbly leg of the couch — its second career, more honest than the first. the third is rolled tight under the couch, watching. that is the one i think about.

the third yoga mat is the most accurate emotional object in the apartment. it was bought to do a thing. it has not done the thing. it is just present, waiting for the version of me that buys yoga mats to also be the version of me that uses them. that version is a sequel that has not been greenlit. the search query for him is roughly the same as the search for dumb dumber 3. both return mostly speculation.

if you have started keeping a small embarrassing record of your own equipment-to-effort ratio, there is a longer post on the notebook habit i have been running for fourteen months.

the sundays end at six take, briefly

here is something i have been holding onto. sundays should end at 6 PM. not 9. not 11. not midnight. 6 PM. anything after 6 on a sunday is a structural error. it is the part of the weekend where you start watching films you do not enjoy because you are afraid of what the silence would tell you if you turned the screen off.

this is, for the record, when i was searching for dumb dumber 3 the night the microwave gave up. 9:14 PM. three hours past the deadline. the search was the symptom. the soup was the symptom. the microwave was the symptom. a sunday that runs past 6 opens a small door at the back of the apartment that the third yoga mat slides out of, and the half-built shelf leans into, and the seventh microwave buzzes inside in a way that, with hindsight, was a warning. that is the chain.

verdict, the microwave is the third act

if you want a cousin of this argument, applied to the ritual of asking your one remaining friend things you already know the answer to, the post on the nine real dumb questions i have actually asked dave on the phone is the sister piece. that one is the comedy. this one is the kitchen. they share a fork.

11:58 on the desk. the slide deck is still open. nobody has joined the call. the microwave at home has been dark for two weeks. the eighth one will arrive on saturday. i am not naming it yet. it has to earn that.

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