Home (And Other) Improvements

"It would betray a lamentable ignorance of the principles governing Divine election and favour, not to say of patent and notorious facts, to suppose that our seeing what so many are blind to is due in any degree to superior intellectual acumen or to more extensive information and erudition on our part; or even to our superior fidelity to grace and light.”

 - George Tyrrel, Hard Sayings

Somebody recently scolded me for using profanity in what they considered an inappropriate context. Apparently, sanctimony is less offensive; a rule of civilized discourse about which I was lamentably ignorant. And yet somehow, my gentle sensibilities were wounded. Instead of lashing back with better words to further elucidate my position on the topic being discussed, I took the high road and simply added a line to the list of regrets I’ll review on my deathbed. Since then, I’ve added yet another item: I missed seeing the Roger Corman movie Sharktopus on TV last Saturday (Thanks, Dr. Dr. K.). At this rate, I’m going to need a long and lingering death.

It’s not that I claim a superior fidelity to grace and light. It’s just that these days I’m on my last nerve with trying to manage home improvements, and that leaves me little time to address self-improvements.

I’m getting my house fixed up and maxing out my home equity line of credit to do so: the theory being that once it’s done and doesn’t look like this “before” picture (discovered here) I can sell it and downsize my life and extracurricular responsibilities. I’ve been trying to do this for a while now and I’m tired. I think I’m finally past the stage of denying that I’m a hoarder (although I haven’t thrown away the coat rack in the laundry room that falls over if you put a scarf on one hook). 

The guys did finally haul away the window air conditioner that had stopped working sometime in the mid-20^th century and had simply been pushed out the window into the front yard where climbing vines made a lovely square topiary shape out of it. Last Saturday I made a trip to the hazardous waste disposal facility to dispose of those empty paint cans, pesticides I haven’t used since the room air conditioner stopped working, and some other chemicals that might otherwise have been admitted into evidence at my trial for the unsolved disappearance of a door-to-door bible salesman back in the day the old AC still worked.

I’m at the stage where I want to find an app to adjust the privacy settings on my life so people will leave me the fuck alone. Then, I need an app to make me avoid unnecessary profanity. But in that order, because while I have unnecessary people in my life, profanity keeps me from explaining that since actions speak louder than words it would be easier to punch them in the throat than use non-profane words alone to express how I feel about them. And by somebody, let me be clear: I mean everybody, no disrespect.

Meanwhile, I have to take the unnecessary dog to the dog beach in >90F heat so I can return home with a puppy tired enough to chill out, turn on the air conditioning, have some bourbon and popcorn, and watch old Godzilla movies until it gets dark and cools off.

The handymen will return after the weekend, as will the painters. Then it’s the tree guys, the pond guy and the termite guy. Then, heart bursting with hope, I will list this money pit on Zillow, cash out, and enter the Witness Protection Program. Then, self-improvement. I fucking promise.

The Quest for Smithereens of Truth

"It’s in the busted minds of troubled offspring, or among bones not quite picked clean, or poking out of the smithereens of collapse that I think the true truths are found."

Bill Cotter, Issue208 of The Paris Review 

Now you tell me. I’ve been seeking truth in all the wrong places.

Handymen have been repairing years of neglect on my house and in the process have made big piles of rotten wood, stripped wiring, broken flower pots, abandoned lawn ornaments decomposing cardboard boxes filled with sprinkler parts to systems no longer extant, and paint cans with 4 ounces of dried orange paint in the bottom but which have to be separated and dumped as hazardous waste.

Before they finish loading the piles into the truck to take to the dump, I should sift through these smithereens of collapse. 

I will not be deterred in my quest for truth. If I don’t find anything, I’ll sing the Lionel Richie song "Sunday Morning" into a fan. Perhaps I should get a tetanus shot first.

Choose Your Own Superhero or Saint

"I find it is a great strain for me to believe what I see, and I am becoming afraid occasionally to look at some things in case they would have to be believed."

 - Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

Dubious Superpowers 

• Bulletproof underpants
• Unerring ability to correctly use “literally” and “figuratively”
• Lasso of shame
• Always finding what one is looking for
• Motivational skills workshop leadership expertise
• Ability to shoot dental floss from fingertips, or silly string, depending on circumstances
• Invisibility socks
• Nonfatal curiosity
• Selective hearing loss
• Human kindness
• Infallibility in matters involving faith, morals, and tech support
• Poop that smells like peppermint
• Never applying the front brake first
• A superhero suit made out of memory foam that guarantees comfortable naps in otherwise uncomfortable spots, and which incidentally doesn’t make the wearer look fat
• Ability to apply inexorable logic to accept what cannot be changed without bursting into tears
• Secret power to initiate onset of hot flashes in others regardless of their age or gender
• Ability to open new CDs using only fingernails and patience (and not teeth)

 Elements of Mysterious Heroic Backstory

• Being tragically orphaned at a young age and left with a tremendously positive cash flow generated by Papa’s extensive interests in South American strawberry jam plantations.
• Event causing parents heartbreaking deaths never conclusively determined to be an unfortunate Act of God, a malicious act of Caltrans, or a particularly creative form of murder/suicide; all three theories coincidentally agreeing however that beyond any doubt, substance abuse was involved.
• Credible rumors that unexplained three-year hiatus from crime-fighting and damsel rescuing were connected with an almost fatal addiction to cat dander; which by the way, was only licked by chamomile shampoo and positive affirmations
• Founder and First Customer of the Witless Protection Program to avoid conspiracy theorists, despicable in-laws, and door-to-door preachers/storm window salespersons.
• Empathy for the downtrodden inexorably combined with unlimited power to hold downtrodders responsible.  
• Scientific discovery that the degree of a person’s verbal genius in mixing metaphors in hilarious ways is inversely proportional to their bodily hirsuteness; for which a single-use Nobel Price Category was invented to award the Nobel Prize in Mind-Bending Uselessness That Just Might Lift Homo Sapiens Up Next Rung of the Evolutionary Ladder, if Only We Could Answer the Question: “What?”
• Inventing a wearable monitor that measures how many rocks have been taken in one’s rocking chair and how fast each rock is. The device is programmable to establish a goal of rocks/day and speed/rocks, and to provide motivational reminders throughout the day, and can be uploaded via Bluetooth to one’s social media of choice.
• Being born without double-jointed thumbs but at the age of 11 learning through self-guided meditation how to make thumbs double-jointed.
• Posthumous speculations about whether or not you really existed or were a postmodern take on the myth of Sisyphus’ ultimate happiness written by Pat Nixon using the pseudonym Idiot Nonsavant.

 Miracles I Might Perform If Nominated for Canonization 

• I will create a polar vortex limited in time and space to people in the green room waiting to speak at a climate change denier convention. They will however be suddenly, mercifully painlessly, and permanently frozen into embarrassing positions.
• The next time my kitty has an allergic reaction to the food she can’t digest and loses her hair in patches, I will shape one hairless patch like the face of the BVM with bleeding scabs for eyes.
• I will assure that the doctors who cure a photogenic poverty-stricken young brother and sister of a fatal disease will be credited with miraculously saving the childrens’ lives, instead of giving credit to that old hypocrite Mother Theresa who caused untold suffering and premature deaths of poor women who she forced to have too many children to feed, and who generally died in childbirth before they were 30.
• I will give everybody who drives a car the power to find a perfect parking place three times in his or her life.
• I will create lasting peace on earth by genetically modifying human DNA to eliminate chromosome combinations that cause people to be mean. (Kidding. God created Man in his Image, so god only knows how to fix that mess.)
• I will give everybody who regrets having a tattoo the power to wish the tattoo away, but only once in their life; so wise up people contemplating that heart-shaped dolphin tattoo.
• Publicly eliminating an infestation of scary bugs and spiders from the vicinity some people who are deathly afraid of bugs and spiders.

  What I’d want to be Patron Saint of

• Cats with food allergies causing their fur to fall out in patches
• Finding movie parking spaces
• Persons with cat dander addiction
• Strawberry Jam Plantations
• Impatient people whose impatience is mostly justified
• People who begin three sentences in the middle of each sentence they attempt -  that they may resolve each sentence chronologically and intelligibly to the amazement of friends and relatives who had begun to despair at their increasing incoherence.
• Skate boarders who defy convention and don’t cut their hair like skateboarders and/or who refuse to wear baseball hats backwards.
• People who just want to make a perfect light flaky piecrust

The Age of The Ten-Year Plan is Over

“What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.” ― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman  (Picture Credit)

And I just found out. I’ve always had an empty beer can to throw hard at people who ask six year old children what they want to be when they grow up. I’m six! I’m busy being a kid. Stop rushing me or I’ll give you some crap about being an astronaut or a crime-fighting cyber-warrior or a princess.

So, I don’t know how old I was when the first vague plans began to coalesce around my future. I don’t remember ever saying I wanted to be a middle-management career bureaucrat at Research-O-Rama University. But at some point I knew I wanted to get married, and have kids and have a house – although by then the white picket fence was out. Definitely wanted a hedge instead. These days I’m still planning. For when I can’t drive a car anymore and have to walk out for groceries. For downsizing so if I drop dead without warning my heirs won’t find a hidden porn stash or that puzzling collection of beer bottle caps. I’m planning where to put my DNR and my weed where they will be respectively easy and hard to find.

But this morning I spoke to some Gen-X people who said when an interviewer asked them what their ten year plan was they pretty much said: why bother? Wouldn’t that make them think you were a flake? I asked.  No: pragmatic, they replied. First, there are no opportunities for buying houses with or without picket fences unless your parents are friends with Mitt Romney on Facebook. Second, stuff happens. They said that at every point of their lives, if asked to guess where they would be even five years hence they never would have predicted themselves to be where they found themselves five years later. Why should tomorrow be different?

This is the age of uncertainty, at least for the generation of Baby Boomers’ children who took our advice and went to college only to find themselves with six-figure debts and no job opportunities. Instead of getting mad - or maybe after passing through the stages of denial and anger etc, - they have reached acceptance. And while they may not exactly embrace the uncertainty, they find no cause for anxiety. Like the anxiety I have, for example, about whether I’ll ditch the porn before I’m suddenly stabbed by a door-to-door bible salesman.

Maybe in ten years, I’ll be an astronaut, I said. You never know, they said.

Impatience or Pride?

"Of all the causes which conspire to blind

Man’s erring judgment, and misguide the mind,

What the weak head with strongest bias rules,

Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools."

Alexander Pope

My Dad would have been 95 this month. He died when he was 76. The quote above is the epigram at the beginning of his one unpublished novel and I think it was modestly chosen to remind him of what he considered his greatest fault.

Those who knew and loved him all agree that his greatest fault was his impatience. Dad’s impatience was to ordinary impatience as global climate change is to a balmy spring day. A short while before his sudden and mercifully quick death he told one of my siblings that he’d been working on the impatience thing his whole life and thought he might be getting somewhere better. I cling to that with desperate white-knuckled hope: most mornings, I yell at the toaster to hurry up. But some mornings I don’t.  So there might be hope for me too.

I think Dad may have realized there’s a reason why pride is given pride of place as one of the seven top deadly sins while impatience doesn’t even make the top ten. I realize this too when I watch the news or read the internet or listen to people talk about religion or politics. We don’t even listen to each other any more. (I also yell at the TV) Only part of the reason is that we’re impatient for the other person to stop talking so we can reply/rebut. We may like to think we have open minds but we mostly don’t want anybody to put anything into them. We have all made up our minds that our beliefs, opinions and certainties are right and those who disagree are wrong. That, my friends, is pride – even if it happens to be true. And it’s a sin in the non-religious as well as religious sense to be so far along the sliding scale of self-confidence as to surpass arrogance.  I am humble enough to accept that even I can’t be right all the time.

We have two ears and one mouth, and yet we all want to talk more than listen, myself included.  So, I am resolving in Dad’s name to not only stop yelling at the toaster and the TV. I’m also going to try to listen better and talk less. Not sayin’ I’ll agree with every fool who speaks, or that I won’t snort in derision at their foolish biases. Just that I’ll listen and try hear what they are really trying to saying.

Happy birthday, Dad.