eyeballing

Posted on by August 15, 2013

crooked_house_1901

I’m working on a bathroom project these days.

It should have been something simple.

It’s not a full remodel…it’s just tearing out a short wall, rebuilding the wall, sheetrocking and taping and finishing the new wall, replacing the door with a sliding barn style door (that I’ll build), and generally cleaning up the mess and making it all look pretty again.

What a pain in the rear.

The railing has to be level for the door to slide correctly.  The railing needs to be level to look right against the doorway that has to be level to look right in relation to the railing. The railing mounts have to be up high enough over the door frame that the door I’m going to build covers up the whole door opening.

The ceiling isn’t level.

This whole old mushroom house must be sinking down into the earth or something because nothing in it is really level.

To top it off, the ceiling isn’t only “not level”, it’s also not straight.  It curves down into the corner.

You don’t see many ceilings that curve down into the corner.

I’m glad that I don’t see that very often.

Anyway, I’ve got to figure out how to scribe a 2×10 so that it sits flush with the ceiling, comes all the way out to the precise “very edge” of the wall so that it covers up a small hole in the ceiling drywall, and then cut it down on the bottom of the 2×10 so that it sits (level) at the top of the door frame and acts as the top piece of trim on the door because we don’t have enough head room to put the railing up like the instructions specify.

I should just tear out the old ceiling, shim the rafters to make it all level, put up new sheetrock, tape and finish the new level ceiling, and start fresh.

But I don’t want all the rock wool that I know is up there to fall into my eyes.

I want to avoid making the simple job more and more painful.

Gnnnnhhhhhhhhhhahhhhhh.  FNNNNNNIIIIKKKKKKKKK.

When I put the trim up on the interior part of the door, the railing wasn’t a concern.  That part goes on the outside of the door.

The top of the door is level but the ceiling isn’t level.

So everything looks crooked even if some of it’s level.

When Jenny saw that, she said, “The pros say to just eyeball it and make corrections as needed for it to look right.”

Cool.  Solutions.

“The pros”.  Where are they when I need them?

I was going to write this blog about compromise and appearances and “going along to get along” and reading each and every situation we come into contact with…and adjusting accordingly for the most harmonious outcome possible.

But then I started to think that the more obvious and pressing lesson this whole shebang was teaching me is that sometimes even if you try to do the right thing…even if you try to “level up”…if you don’t have something good to start with, the whole thing is bound to look a little bit “wonky”.

No mattter how much eyeballing you do, it’s never going to be right.

And let’s say you get it close to right.

Let’s say you get it so right that everyone else who looks at it can’t see the defect.

You are always going to see that one side is a little lower.  You’re always going to remember that shim you put in so it didn’t creak quite as badly. You’re always going to remember what you did to cover up the defect.

You are the author of this debacle, and you see every hidden compromise that you made to try to get “almost right” to look correct in a reality that’s a little crooked.

There is a victory supreme in taking something weird and making it workable.

That’s a good feeling.

I think my wife would agree that with hard work and optimism, you can take something weird and make it workable.

(Look how she puts up with me.)

But good grief.  Why couldn’t that ceiling have been a little higher and more level?

And I sure could have done without those weird dips.

Detroit…again

Posted on by August 14, 2013

detroit houses

It’s hard to stop returning to thinking about Detroit.

That’s a good and powerfully convoluted way of saying that Detroit and all those vacant buildings have captured my imagination.

Detroit!

What’s up with that?

I was driving around (one of the central themes of my life and job) yesterday, and I started thinking about homesteading…and the history of homesteading in this country…and some of the hardships the homesteaders faced…and how it must have felt to carve a niche for yourself out of a hostile land…and…

I started thinking about Detroit again.

Now, it’s kind of naïve and presumptuous and obnoxious to suppose that anybody busting a move up in Detroit like, “Look!  Here we are!  We’re going to SAVE THIS CITY! YOUR PROBLEMS ARE OVER NOW THAT WE’VE ARRIVED!! NOW…GIVE US SOME FREE LAND/HOMES!” would be received with open arms.

That would be pretty irritating to the long time residents.  It would get me mad if I’d been trying to make it in an area that was really going downhill and some over educated dude showed up to stake his claim in the middle of blight town.

But look at all those vacant houses.  Blocks and blocks of vacant houses.  That’s crazy.

Blocks and blocks of vacant land and houses…left to the occasional gang and the roving packs of feral pit bulls.

Who wouldn’t see the opportunity in a situation like that?

You think about the homesteading of Detroit and it seems like it could be a win/win situation for both the city and the homesteaders.

You get a bunch of naïve people with enough money to pay the taxes and refurbish some of these derelict properties.  They pay the taxes, fix up the area, revitalize some…stick around for a period of years…and then they get the land…and then they own the houses.

Simple.

No Sweat.

I don’t really know how bad it is up there.

In all the old Cowboy and Indian movies, the settlers had a heck of a time.  Those Indians gave them fits when the settlers blew through to steal their land.

The Indians didn’t like that.

But the settlers were the heroes in all those old movies.  They were the ones who came off looking good when they blew an Indian off his horse with a well placed bullet from their lever-action Winchesters.

Maybe that’s what we need up in Detroit?  A bunch of WHITE GUYS with lever-action Winchesters?!

KIDDING, KIDDING, KIDDING…I’M JUST KIDDING.

That wasn’t funny.

Too many guns in the hands of too many people.  You don’t use a gun to rebuild a city…unless it’s a Paslode…or a Senco.

I think that most of the folks up in Detroit are good people who just want their city back.  Nobody wants to live somewhere where things are falling in around them.

Life should be nicer than that.

So…homestead the heck out of Detroit.  Give these houses away…give those blocks away…plant some gardens, fix some houses, convert some factories into studios and housing and youth centers and….

Who knows?

When you’ve stopped caring about these places…and the city’s bankrupt…and everything is just going to pot…why not just give it away in return for revitalizing some of the bad situations?

What do you have to lose?

You can’t subtract nothing from nothing.

It’s cheaper than having the bulldozers come back around, right?

missing

Posted on by August 13, 2013

compass-musicians

When someone goes missing in the woods, they send out a search party.  They don’t let another evening pass when they discover that a person isn’t where they need to be.

But what if a person’s “never left the building” and they’ve been missing for years?

How do you search for someone who seems to be in the room?

I love books.  I love buying books.  I read a lot of the books that I buy.

(Maybe I should read my own “hungry ghost” post again….)

I used to buy all the “60’s manifestos” I ran across.  By “60’s manifestos”, I mean all the hippy writings about living an authentic life, sticking it to the man, living without material possessions, living in a van down by the river, living…

Just generally “living”….there’s always going to be someone to tell you how to live.  Why not let some old hippy tell you what’s going on? There may still be a commune somewhere you can join, after all.

Coming from a slightly more adult perspective, it looks pretty selfish and unproductive…but when you’re young, the life of freedom and adventure sounds pretty appealing.

But really, it’s just joining the stream of young people through the centuries who convinced themselves that their parents don’t know how to really live …nothing all that new here.

It’s the same old story with some new and desperate youthful energy behind the telling…a frantic “I’m going to do it better! I’m going to bust out of these chains of impending adulthood before I’m bound up like my parents!!”.

“Hididdlededee, an actor’s life for me” we keep singing as we skip off to Pleasure Island.

But what if the problem was more subtle?  What if we really have dropped the ball somewhere? What if we’ve failed to live the genuine big life we were capable of living?

What if no one else in the world could see the lack but us?

We’d be so full of angst all the time.  It’s hard enough when it’s something physical that we can quantify…weight, income, material possessions,etc….but when it gets into the spiritual, or “youthful promise”, or artistic integrity, or anything that’s hard to measure…then it sets us up for a lifetime of feeling like we’ve shortchanged ourselves.

We don’t really know anyone else’s hearts.  We don’t know that they all had dreams that they’ve put on a back burner or given up on completely.

We each carry a hidden secret.  We all have dreams and aspirations that don’t show their faces.

There is always going to be some kind of invisible bar that seems out of reach.

(Someone else would say, “What bar? What are you talking about? Bar?!”.  It’s hard to see someone else’s aspirations.)

So…someone goes missing in the physical world and we send out a search party.

Someone goes missing in the spiritual world and it’s harder to see.

It’s the old story of the monk in the business suit, making his way through his own personal vigil. He can be full of life and understanding and not give his “hidden secret” away.

On the other hand, there may be someone who’s built up such a wall of apparent success that they can hide behind it.  They can be a shell without a middle…dead inside but hard to read, like if they kept scurrying to the next camouflaged deceit fast enough no one would notice that they’re not really alive.

Who am I to know, though?  I can’t even take care of myself sometimes.

I guess the real lesson is that Kerouac isn’t really a good role model…even if his exhortations to burn through life…”live, baby…live”… seem pretty appealing to someone just figuring things out.

 

there’s something happening here

Posted on by August 12, 2013

01 For What It’s Worth

I couldn’t find the Buffalo Springfield song…but here’s a version by Keb Mo’.

Driving-to-puppy-park-l

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I couldn’t think of a thing to write about this morning.

Then I “got to thinkin’ ” about it and came to the conclusion that it was pretty weak not to be able to think of anything to write about.

If I am breathing, something is happening around me.

There’s always going to be something to write about.

Yesterday, we went out and roamed around, went up to the bagel store and got some bagels, drove up to Asheville and watched a movie at the dollar theater, drove back down and picked up some lumber at Lowes.

We had a full day of it.

“Nothing to write about”?

Harumphhhh.

Some of what made yesterday a little interesting…(and I say “interesting” because the experience is so new…soon it will be as unconscious as most of the things that I do)…is that my “new driver teenage son” drove me into town in the little Toyota truck….and then drove me and the lumber back in the evening when we’d finished our “doins” up in Asheville.

We take most milestones for granted.  I don’t know why that is.  Driving seems to be one of the big ones…births, graduations, weddings are other huge milestones. There are a lot of milestones in a life.

I’m not saying we don’t notice that they’re important.  It’s just that in the moment I think we’re so caught up in the event that we don’t really appreciate how big a deal they are.

We think, “How’re we going to pay the caterer?” or “My insurance is really going to go up NOW!!” and get distracted.

We understand…but we don’t really notice.  Maybe we notice after the fact.  I don’t really know.  It’s hard to be mindful of every moment.

But it’s a big deal to have your child drive you.

It’s a big deal to have your child aim a 2000 lb hunk of metal with wheels on it…and to suppose that they are going to do their best not to hit, scrape, bump, plow through, go up, go down, flip over, gotoofasttooslow, or even find a way to bounce more than they should….all of this while you are held to the seat with thick and strong nylon straps.

And the most important part of the experience is to convey to the young adult…. your young adult, your child that you raised….that they are competent and capable.

It’s important to convey that they are going to be able to make this leap towards adulthood…that someone on the other trapeze is going to catch them when they let go of the bar.

Maybe that’s not a good analogy.  Maybe to say that it’s going to be a soft landing when they clear that 28th school bus is more fitting when they’re doing their first driving.

Anyway….it’s a gift that keeps on giving if you can let your children know that you have faith in them…no matter how frantically you scan the road ahead for all the kooks who might get in their way.

You can’t let your face show the concern you have for their well-being. Don’t let them smell the fear.

You just have to hand them the keys.

There is always something going on.

I am breathing.

pecking order

Posted on by August 11, 2013

260091-the-three-roosters

We have 8 chickens.

Five of those chickens are hens, and the rest are roosters.

Three roosters are too many by about a margin of 2.

We should get rid of two of our roosters.

There…that’s pretty straightforward.  We need to get rid of two of our roosters.

I think that we’ve decided that the ones that we want to get rid of are the ones that are currently down with the hens in the coop.

That’s not really the point of this story, though.

We have three roosters.  We decided that a bunch of roosters fighting each other in the coop was a bad mix…so we took two of the roosters out and let them “free range”.

I guess that “free range” means that they take up residence on the railing outside our bedroom window and take dumps on the porch all night so that they’re not bound up when they start crowing at five in the morning.

At least that’s my experience with the phrase “free range”.

One of the roosters on the porch has an extremely robust and masculine crow.  He is the alpha rooster and is very impressive.

The other rooster has a weak and wheezy crow.  It’s a rattly exhalation…a weird asterisk or something to the strong rooster’s crow…not even loud enough to be considered an exclamation point if it was only punctuation to a real rooster sound.

But lately the other rooster has found his way back into the coop and now roosts alongside the rooster that we’d let stay in the coop.  I don’t know if he’s growing up…or if it’s just a matter of not having the magnificent “alpha rooster” to draw comparisons to…but I think I heard him crow in a way that would invite comparisons to a “real man” rooster.

He sounded almost normal.

Maybe he got over his shyness when he didn’t feel so different…when he didn’t have the ultimate crow around to shame him.

I don’t really know.

I do know that the two roosters down in the coop don’t really fight each other all that much.  Maybe it’s a matter of the rooster that was in the coop continuously not being threatened by the “new rooster”.  I don’t think the returning rooster is really very macho.

I hear him down there, though.  I hear his new crow.  I think he’s “coming into his own”.

His new crow makes me believe in his potential again.  He’s not just a “wheezy joke” anymore.

My “boy” is becoming a “man”.

This whole rooster escapade is just another reminder to me that sometimes it’s just a slight change in venue that lets us “come into our power”.

The trip down to the coop is a long way from being “intercontinental” (or anything close).

The rooster didn’t have to run very far on his little dinosaur legs to get back in with the hens.

But what a difference it sounds like it’s made in his young rooster life.

I love travel, too.

Helps me get my crow on.

the bad percentage

Posted on by August 10, 2013

IBR-1113189

I’ve been alive, let’s see….

53 years X 365 days = 19,345

Then add the days so far in this year (past my birthday in April…)  19,345 + 127 = 19,472

Then, if I was going to be completely accurate ( why not, huh?) I could add in the 9 months of a typical gestation period.  From what I remember of it, it came off without too many hitches.

So…19345 + 127 + 9 months X the average 30 days per…let’s say 270 days….so that would be a total of 19,742.

YAY, ME!!!  THAT’S A GOOD NUMBER OF YEARS.

COOL.

During that time, I don’t think there’s been too many days (except when I was deep in the woods on a hike or something) that I haven’t been exposed to the NEWS in some form.

Even when I was in the womb, I’m sure the television was on at some point….or someone was reading a newspaper out loud, or talking over coffee about the days events.  I’m sure that I was soaking all the news up by osmosis, and I bet I understood some of it even though I couldn’t speak English at the time.

That’s almost 20,000 days of soaking up news that, and I’ll be charitable to both the world and the news media here because I need to for my sake, is probably negative news at least 25% or more of the time.  Occasionally, it’s only 12.5%…but usually it’s a much higher percentage of negativity.

So what does that mean?  Does it mean that I was only exposed to negative news 5000 of my 20000 days of living?

No, it means that of my 20,000 days, only 20,000 contained some kind of bad news.  The good thing is that of the stories the people in the media told me, only a quarter of them were really disturbing and negative.

I’ve heard about all different kinds of killers…sanctioned in war and random on the streets…rapers, burners, wreckers, cheaters, shysters (small time and politicians), guys that didn’t clean the pool right,guys who stole for fun, crazy folks incarcerated and loose, and a whole lot more horrible weirdness that I would never have the opportunity to know about if I didn’t watch the NEWS.

Unless….unless…unless…unless this scenario played out:

Let’s say I never watch the news.  It’s a new matter of principle.  I decide that the negativity and fear may have a place in my life…but that I don’t want to stoke it with the daily catalog of worldwide misfortune….so I don’t watch the news.

I don’t need any help figuring out what to worry about.

Even though I may decide not to feed the flames of paranoia with the help of our news media, I always seem to find someone who is willing to pull up “the bad percentage” and report something that clues me in that the world can be a pretty crappy place after all.

It’s good to have the “open manhole” pointed out to you before you fall down into the sewer, but when the open manhole is in Paraguay, and it was open in 1983, and someone told me that someone’s sister knew a man who had been in the service with a cook who’d been married to a woman whose cousin had trained tigers…and, let me slow down for a miniute…it’s getting confusing…let’s just say that the tiger ate someone who was about to fall down into a manhole whose cover was left off once….BY A NAZI WAR CRIMINAL!!!

A NAZI WAR CRIMINAL!  I BET HE DID IT ON PURPOSE !

There are bad things that happen in the world. I’ve had 20,000 days to confirm that.

Stay ever vigilante.

But, you know, there have been 20,000 days of good things, too. There have been 20,000 days of small kindnesses and minor miracles, day after day of sunsets and sunrises, days full of the possibility of something good happening before the day was over.

Stay ever vigilante when you’re watching for those days, too.

I’m not a Pollyanna ….but I do believe in the expectation of a positive outcome.  It’s not always going to happen, sometimes horribly sad things happen that seem to linger for a while…but it’s going to happen sooner or later.

That is, whether I let the news media into my head or not, my reality.

10 All Things Must Pass

sharpening the ax

Posted on by August 9, 2013

PaulBunyan-mI have a knife that has ridden in my pocket for a number of years.

It’s been sharpened so often that the blade is getting kind of thin.  The main blade is pretty sharp….but a lot of the metal is gone now…sharpened away.  It’s still good…but it’s not as substantial as it once was.

I was thinking about a quote that Abraham Lincoln is given credit for.  When I’m driving the mail, I have some time to think in between boxes.

The quote was:

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax

What a great quote…and what a great life lesson.

Get your “ducks in a row” before you start something. Make sure that you and your tools are ready so that you can do the job efficiently.

Good advice.

But what if we tweaked that quote a little to say,

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first six sharpening the ax

What if preparation becomes the most formidable weapon in your arsenal?

What if your blade is getting thin because you keep sharpening it in expectation of the cut that never comes?

I have a lot of books about how to do things.  I’ve read a good number of them…the others lay in wait for the right moment to seek out their wisdom.

I’m not really any farther along in my understanding of how to do things, though…even after all my book buying and reading.

Most of the things that I’ve learned, I’ve figured out because I look at the end results of my earlier efforts and say, “Oh….that’s how you’re not supposed to do it?  Oh….”.

The only lessons that stick for me are the ones that are learned through experience….and a lot of those lessons are forgotten,  and have to be repeated at least a couple of times.

For me, the quote might be more appropriate if it said something like this:

If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first hour wailing on it with my dull ax, the second hour looking for my file, the third hour sharpening my ax, the fourth hour wailing on the tree again.  I would spend the fifth hour going to buy gas for the chainsaw…and then spend my sixth and final hour cutting down the tree.

It is not as elegant a solution as Abraham Lincoln’s.

I guess that in the six hour time frame, it accomplishes the objective.  Just not as calmly as “sharpening the ax” and cutting down the tree when the tool is ready to do the job.

It’s a lot more frantic and willy nilly.

I try to prepare as “best I can”.

But sometimes you just have to take some leaps with a dull ax in tow…make a move before you’re ready… just to see what might happen.

If you never drive the car because you’re afraid you might get a flat tire, you don’t get very far down the road.

In my head, I have an expectation of big adventures.  I believe in a world that has a lot to show us.

Maybe it’s time to stop “sharpening my ax” and start chopping.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

dancing in the street

Posted on by August 8, 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XN_B1I6IpM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smXcLrn-iWM

Here’s the last two parts of the video those two guys made about the Whittier Hotel in Detroit.

Some of the language is kind of rough…they drop the “f-bomb” fairly frequently….so be prepared for that.

I’m fascinated with Detroit.

Why something falls so far…and seems to keep falling…is, thankfully, completely foreign to my experience.

Look at this hotel…at one point it was so beautiful.

Now, it’s just a big reminder of something that used to be good.

That’s crazy.

I was thinking about this old Motown song while I was driving the mail around in an earth-shaking downpour yesterday.

The version here is by David Bowie, but the original was a huge hit for Martha and the Vandellas (and Motown) in 1964.

That would have been a high point for both Motown and the “Motor City”.

How does one of the wealthiest and most prosperous cities in the world fall so far?  It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy thing.

Detroit was huge.  The automobile industry was pumping out great cars, the music coming out of Detroit was extremely influential and popular…people were moving to Detroit for a better life.

Then it started to change…and now you have beautiful buildings like this that lay vacant and decaying…and Detroit is bankrupt.

Motown moved out of Detroit in 1972…but you can’t blame Motown for a fall this deep.

Maybe the people just lost heart or something…I can’t figure it out.

I’ll probably do more posts on Detroit in the future.

It’s a strange new frontier.

18 Dancing in the Street

it’s a dollhouse…a starter house…a fixer upper

Posted on by August 7, 2013

There are a large number of YouTube videos of abandoned houses that I ran across while looking for “log cabin” videos.

You can find just about anything on YouTube.

Weird.

This tour reminded me of the first walk through I made when I found our house.  It had been vacant for a long time, then purchased and partially gutted by a young and hopeful couple, then sold to us when they gave up on it.

Actually, our house wasn’t quite as creepy as this one…but almost.

A vacant house can get weird fast.

The deeper into this house she gets the more I realize that our little gutted house was actually kind of “homey”.  This house is pretty rough.

That’s always a weird thing, to walk through an abandoned house.  It’s kind of strange to be able to sit in your dry and comfortable house and watch videos of other people walking through creepy abandoned houses while you drink your morning coffee.

There’s all sorts of houses….mansions, farm houses, bungalows….all sorts of houses.

It’s weird how we just let things go….for whatever reason.

One more video and then I’ll quit…

Here’s a video from up in Detroit…abandoned hotel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RppPzIRDbnk