We Need More Scaffolding

Across the street from the window of the second floor room where people get coffee and sit on sofas, the insurance agent is having the house he occupies rebricked.

Re- makes it sound like it used to have bricks, but I'm virtually sure that the only bricks that house pretends to have are a kind of odd aluminum siding. I cold be wrong, they could be just very well laid bricks. In any case they only go halfway up the house and, judging from the scaffolding and the ascending lines of bricks, I'm assuming that he's having the whole thing bricked in.

Did I tell you before about the dreams that I have? That I am doing design work INSIDE of the computers I face everyday? I am responsible to physically push words and columns and spacing and leading around. By hand. It's never difficult, but always tedious. I wake from such dreams wanting to ask for money back. But its a long drive to church from our house so I just mumble and gripe all morning instead.

These bricklayers writhe through the crisscrosses of scaffolding like fish through seaweed. They treat the four by sixes they walk on like magic carpets which seem to fly up onto their shoulders and then shoot out of their hands -- landing on more scaffolding mili-seconds before their construction boots land on what would have otherwise been nothing but a twelve foot drop.

It's the most mundane magical thing going in town. I'm sure of it. But it doesn't seem to be showing up in the ENTERTAINMENT section of the paper.

I wonder if they dream scaffolds like I dream layout and design. I wonder if the scaffolds have become such integrated parts of their bodies that sometimes they try to shoot four by sixes up into the rafters of their garage to ascend and pull down the Christmas tree. I wonder if they visit their friends houses and measure the space in terms of scaffold ladders.

What if everything had scaffolding everywhere? What if permanence and finality were the exception rather than the rule. And of course I mean "finality" with irony. Don't be absurd. Every storefront is simply a measurement of the last storefront's deficiencies, also a stopgap measure until the standards shift and sufficiency becomes decay.

Work is good, but

"Jobs" are bad.

I'm coming to make that more universal observation after previously only holding it for particular jobs. I'm willing to go out on a limb now.

Work is good; a job is bad.

I wish I could send myself an email

Back in time or forward in time. Either way. I'd just like to remind myself about some things. I'm not thinking about the Big things either -- stock market windfalls and such. I'm also not thinking about the really small things (remember to pick up milk or Karen's going to beat your ass). Other stuff like, say new years resolutions that I think of in July. Favorite tastes that may taste good in a smoothie only there's no time to make Smoothies in the middle of life.

Ear Buds

Does anyone else think that this is a very wierd name to give a technology? I mean I *get it*. They blossom music into your ears. Great metaphor, but still, the idea of pushing something called a "bud" into my ear just feels completely odd. A strange aural violation.

BUT these "buds" are my salvation. Everytime the banging of the boiler starts up -- what? did you think that it had gone away? just because i wasn't whining about it regularly on my blog? oh no, i still work inside the cavernous innards of a company that does something I'm still not exactly sure of, but that has incredible employee benefits -- everytime I hear the first ominous belch, in go the buds.

A few of you asked if I had moved offices or something. No. I just found buds. I'm thinking of using them next time I have a conversation with Richard.

Has Anyone Ever Died of a Swollen Uvula?

Because if they did, I realized as I lay in my bed trying to hold the panic at bay, having exhausted the ligaments in my jaw by holding it wide enough to stare at my obscenely absurdly large and pinkish white eleventh thumb, if they did, it must have been a horribly embarrassing ordeal for the family; an entire life rendered into naught but a cocktail party punchline with something as silly as an allergic reaction to hummus combined with alcohol (source: careful combing through seven pages of googled folk wisdom).

I got up to blog this entry only briefly before I return to my (death?)bed to lie awake until the sun rises and Dr. Hennessey's answering service will take my first of 22 calls.

I stumble up the driveway in the dark, two beers past where I should've stopped,

and in my head or heart wherever such things come from I write a little song:

I'm afraid that skunks are everywhere,
When the Moon is lying low
My heart hurtles through nocturnal air
Always unfaithful to the bow...

I can barely stay awake long enough to type thi...

Improbably

I lost my keys and my wallet within one hours time. And I do not lose things. I know you don't have much to go on if you're just some random stranger looking at me.

After all, blogging is a form of lying at its core anyway isn't it? Resituating the truth in order to make it presentable.

And arguably, any resituation of truth -- ends up in a situation other than truth, right?

Most bloggers I've ever met are compulsive liars anyway.

But I am not lying when I tell you that I do not lose things. Of course, like everyone, I HAVE lost things. My aunt Bernice insists that I lost some pendant she had let me play with during a Christmas celebration in 1976. That's right, your vision did not deceive you. My 50something year old aunt is still blaming me for losing something when I was three years old.

And the crazy thing is:

These stories stick to your life like a criminal record. Because maybe in the rest of my thirty three years I've misplaced or had to look for three things (and I'm being generous with this number) and one of my siblings or my parent, or another of my damnable aunts would say:

Oh, but...

Remember!?

Aunt Bernice?

And these stories get leaked out of your family to the general public, too. If you ever have the misfortune of having the general public meet your family-of-origin.

Which is precisely what happened with Brittany. When I first brought her to a family Thanksgiving, Aunt Bernice (bitter old hag...) filled her ear with the apocryphal story of the missing pendant. That night when I delivered the mashed potatoes to the table without a serving spoon, my mother looked at me:

David, honey?

-Mmmm?

Did you forget the spoon?

A beat while I look around the table (my mistake. *this loss*, the loss of my presence of mind for only this second, is the only thing I actually regret losing in this post...)

Aunt Bernice, to my chagrin, did not miss a beat:

Or maybe he lost it!

HOWLS of uproarious laughter! (seriously, in general I would she away from characterizing laughter with tired words like Howling and Uproarious, but in this particular case these words MEAN something. This was the kind of hysterical laughing that sprung not from any genuine or improvisational mirth. This laughter was a collective expression of relief on the part of a group practically bereft of any common sensibility. But OH! this thing we share. Little David and his Losing Things. Ha. Ha. Fucking Ha.)

Seriously, they didn't stop laughing even when I brought the spoon.

My mother patted my cheek over her shoulder. Grown women should not pat grown men's cheeks in public. Even if, at some point in the distant past they did clean up their messy asses and nappies. This gesture on the part of my mother was proof positive that I had been scapegoated here. All the fears of the family that the recent falling out between Aunt Beverly and Aunt ReeseAnn would rent us into a million unrelated strands of loosely connected strangers (not unlike most modern american families and not unlike the structure of the internet...), were resolved in this laughter. We were sautered back together as One Whole. And where were the scar marks to prove it? No, nothing new. Just one more guffaw at David's expense.

So the fact that I'm owning this absence...Keys, Wallet....Is not a confession of general guilt. It is a repudiation of this large myth and a simple statement of frustrating fact. Improbable. But true.

I got the job!

It's completely perfect! I set my hours (within, as they like to say, "the company horizon").

My work is all project based.

I like the people I've met at the water cooler (though I can't figure out *at all* how or why most of them work here...).

There is a real water cooler and someone already changes it regularly (I don't take this lightly, given my "curse").

I'm allowed to...no, wait....(L2T) I'm encouraged to blog, do email and search the web.

Eric always used to say that the problem with bands was that as soon as they signed with a label, the angst drained out of them like a Hot Air Balloon on a cell phone tower. If we wanted to have good rock music, he said, we should force promising young artists to take jobs in fast food.

So before you cross-apply his arguments and get out of my blog like a bat out of hell...

Wait. There is a downside.

This perfect job? This fantasy of a workplace? This wet-dream employment?

I work in the boiler in the bowels of the earth.

That's right. A lovely pristine mac and drafting board, some nice IKEA shelves. All very neatly organized IN THE BOILER. You have to take a stairway hidden next to a broom closet. Once you get into the basement, you have to wander through a maze of file cabineted archives. You walk through these for about fifteen minutes, and then you arive at Hades, er, my "office."

Oh sure, it looks like it has a door and walls and such, but these MUST be a clever illusion, which MIGHT (if you were lucky) distract you from realizing that you were working INSIDE of a boiler for, oh, maybe, if you were really naieve, one full work day. Your first work day, when you were still dizzy from the nectar of your perfect job's benefits and work habits and 30 minute training. (30 minutes! Seriously! I've spent longer watching assembly videos for lamps I got for "Christmas presents"). Given how magical that day has been. How great you're feeling. You might actually say something like,

"No, this is great!" To someone giving you a tour and showing you your space, and incidentally apologizing for the slight inconvenience of your office location.

You might, somehow not hear the thunderous belches of motors, the wild banging of metal gears, and the shrill release of steam from the boiling lurching bowels that you now live within.

It might actually take three days of fruitless exploring to realize that there is NO heater, NO boiler that is accessible or locatable anywhere within walking distance of your "office" until you realize that all the sound and fury is best heard inside your office. You realize that you are actually working INSIDE the boiler.

Okay the banging just started again. I gotta go up to the water cooler.

The precarious business of sleeping limbs

Halfway through the job interview dinner I realized that my leg was asleep.

Not a little asleep, but completely numb. Completely useless. Like a huge, painful piece of driftwood hanging from the trunk of my body.

When I stood up, as, inevitably I would be forced to do, what would happen?

I would fall down? Maybe I would fall suddenly and accidentally grab hold of this nice girl Sheila's coat sleeve. Sheila does really seem to be the only nice girl that works on this team. Or at least that's what my inward scoop is just now. The rest of them seem like normal average dull coworking types.

The more you get to know them, the more backstabbing they become at the watercooler, until office cuts means that the watercooler company contract is cancelled and then all the gossip moves to the copymachine and into the bathroom.

And when I grab Sheila's coat sleeve by accident, we will both come crashing down on these dishes, still smeared with the sauce from the ribs that we ate and her coat sleeve, Sheila's nice carefully groomed black coat would be ruined. Maybe her shirt and definitely all of my new interview clothes.

And the damn thing hurt. I kept thinking maybe I should get up and go the mens room so I could walk it off or stumble to my humiliation before anyone else was standing and I would take them down with me. But I couldn't make myself take the humiliation.

So I didn't....

I waited until the very last minute, until everyone else at the table was standing and ready to go home, and then, only then, I stood up.

Secrets are locked up everywhere

Upstairs in the walk in closet off of our master bedroom

(which is only party a master bedroom because, when the house was designed and sent around the united states of america like all the other sears homes of its particular model, our masterbedroom was supposed to be a sleeping porch),

behind the row of floppy collared shirts that i have collected at thrift stores all over the state of michigan,

down next to the floor, where i keep a line of shoes that i rarely wear because most of them barely fit me, but looked fiercely hip when I impulse bought them (also at musty cluttered thrift stores all across the state of Michigan),

There is a small two foot by two foot door. It is a door only because there is a knob in the center of it. It is not a door because it does not open. Did not open.

When we arrived in the house ten years ago, before we had started to buy it on time and based on the repairs that we did, I happened to notice that there was a very small piece of paper, college ruled, carefully ripped, written neatly:

"never open this."

And then taped over and over, carefully to the door with packing tape.

so last week, i was drunk and so mad that I couldn't imagine my life going forward more than a week, tops longer than it already had. and I knew once I blew out the thirty seven candles that Brittany lit thinking that candlelight could forgive a lot more than love handles and cottage cheese thighs, I knew that once those suckers were out, my imagination toward the future would halve its life expectancy, so in this state:

I opened the door.

I used a putty knife to scrape through the layers and layers of caulking and rubber and glue that sealed the "door" to its place. (Did I mention that it was hardly a door because it really, really, truly did not want to open.)

There was a point during the cutting that I thought to myself:

I'm so Drunk and I love this SO much because its such a fruitless TAsk that I might just disapPEar into nothing if I just KEep CHIPping awAY at such a fruitless TASK. If I PUT enough of myself into this ridiculous Cutting, then i might DIS appEAR Evetually.

(I noticed that I was thinking in words not feelings because of the way the words helped me leverage my body behind each cut.)

"What are you doing?" Brittany whined from the bed in the master bedroom outside of the closet which was too cold to be a master bedroom because there were no heat ducts into a sleeping porch, and it was absurd that we were trying to pretend that this porch was something it wasn't. We and the last seven owners. Maybe eight. The place was built in 1921.

When I got the door open there was a blast of cold air. I thought.

So. They didn't want me to open it because of the insulation.

And I was string in at the rafters seperated by an ancient looking insulation

...when she came around the corner. She was a very small woman. Not a dwarf or an elf though she was wearing clothes from the Victorian Era. It was more like she had been shrinking over the last couple of centuries than that she had born as a "little person" or with any kind of genetic predetermination of her height.

You could take a very convincing picture of her next to someone who was, say 5'10", only convince her to stand three steps closer to the camera, and then you would be able to trick the camera completely. Because she looks like a person who was 5'8" but gradually got smaller. She has curles and hair that doesn't really have any color.

I left the "door" ajar, and I check every couple of hours when I'm not at the office. She's still in there even though she could come out.

Remember multiple choice tests? She's like a single answer to a multiple-question-test:

A. How did a portal between strangely seperate realms come to exist in my walk in closet?

or

B. How did some clever trickster lure his diminuitive immortal girlfriend up to this closet before he got even with her for being so much better than him?

or

C. How long can a drunken buzz last after you sober up? Aren't there limits to the amount of time that hallucinations can STICK after they no longer fit into the grid of what you expect?

Non-Paper Assets Anyone?

Is it possible?

Hope still exists on the horizon? Could it be that this amber light cast across my world is but a sunrise, not the ironically beautiful sunset I've been assuming it was for the last six months.

Let's not, any of us, get our hopes up.

But. To be fair. I should tell you. I got the interview. The SECOND interview. The work team from G______. wants to take me to dinner to find out a little bit more about my "interaction style" and my "non-paper assets."

It's a little wierd that on separte phone calls two different people used these same exact phrases.

Sheila (who seems nice enough) and Paul (who seems dull enough) slid these phrases into really different contexts. Sheila was talking about what the company likes. Paul was talking about my interview. "interaction style" seems normal enough, though not exactly a phrase I've heard used in a job interview before, but this other one --

"non-paper assets"

what the hell?

I think maybe this must mean: what's good about me that's not on my resume?

so what happens after the interview? Do they write down my "non-paper assets"

because don't they, then become:

"paper assets"?

And now I'm feeling panicky. What are my non-paper assets?

I dreamed.

That a thousand finger tips were touching my skin. It wasn't sexual at all. Or unpleasant. Just a lot of touching.

I speculated as to why:

Did they need me? Love me? Were they healing me? Forgiving me?

Should I be grateful? Annoyed?

I decided instead to just go to sleep.

In my dream, I went to sleep while a thousand finger tips were touching my skin, and once I was asleep inside my sleep.

Nothing.

Productive Waste

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that in the three hours since I have arrived here (the lovely cubicle i call "work"):

I have filled COMPLETELY one metal wastepaperbasket approximately one foot tall, one foot in diameter with used Kleenex. (Yes, GM actually springs for Kleenex Brand Name Tissues (!) I'm shocked that the cheap bastards would shell out, too. Wait. Maybe they own Kleenex.) And for the record, I'm not being immoderate in trashing these small bits of comfort & cleanliness.

I am filling the damn things with snot EVERY OTHER MINUTE. But who wants to use a sick day when the only symptom is sore, chapped nose holes? And an endless supply of snot?

So I was just wondering if we could find a way to harness the energy generated by nose blowing in the northern half of the northern hemisphere for the entire winter solstice...we might eliminate our needs for fossil fuels. If we could use productively the actual discharge or the kleenexi (one of those surprising plurarls) or some combination thereof...we might just render space travel uneccessary.

(because you know space travel, thus far, is the best hope we have as a human race for eliminating: cancer, aids, homelessness, and reality television.)