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.