• The muse and me

    Lately I’ve been doing a bit of work on my web site. There was no reason. I just had to tinker with it. Have you ever had that feeling? Maybe you thought it was just right, or maybe you didn’t, but there was a little itch, right behind your starter switch, and you were driven to play around. Sometimes you played trial and error. Sometimes you played with a purpose, something new you wanted to try. But it was always something.

    I’ve never been satisfied with my site. It’s likely due to a terminal case of creativity deficiency. I wonder if there’s a supplement for it? If your cholesterol is too high you can start popping niacin tablets like M&Ms (though it doesn’t always work). So what do I take for creativity? Some use alcohol to lubricate the ‘ole neurons. I can’t drink, but it’s probably just as well. I look at some of the melancholy crap I wrote in college after a drink or six and I wince so hard I fear one day my face might get stuck like that. For others it’s drugs – but that’s out of the question, for reasons I shouldn’t have to explain.

    For me, on those occasions when I’ve really felt in a groove and the juices were flowing, sometimes I think it was mental illness. I’ve wondered if there was a touch of bi-polar to my depression, like my highs might be a touch too high. Medication has me on a more even keel lately… if not a little skewed towards the downward slope. The muse has been conspicuously absent. I can understand why some people don’t like taking their medication.

    Back when I was doing caffeine – before my doctor told me to stop – I noticed bursts of output… or I do now, in hindsight. It’s as close to an artificial high I’ve achieved, and my fingers could really move on them keys baby!

    Now I’m just tired. All the time. Sleep disorders will do that to you. Red blood cell counts on the downward slope will do it too, from what I hear (fucking leukemia).

    Still, my web site is something I can fool around with on the side, something that doesn’t require the “long term” commitment of writing. I can fire up my editor, tweak a stylesheet, sling some tags, and drop it at any time… changes saved or not, on a whim. Sometimes I like what I see. Trial and error has it’s moments. More than ever it’s like making something from nothing – not even inspiration – unless it can hide deep in the subconscious mind.

    This explains the somewhat ugly appearance of my genealogy pages these days. Although the software I use has very limited options for web output, it does allow changes to the convoluted stylesheets. (I’ve got virtually no control over the HTML.)

    Thus the ugly colors and the top border gradient I’m sure you’ve never seen on the web before.

    It kills me knowing I have to go to work tomorrow with ugly pages attributed to me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

    Well that’s not exactly true. I could delete the whole thing.

    No, I suppose couldn’t kill all of it, but maybe I could just delete those damn stylesheets. I could leave the pages a styleless mess, but is chaos better than imperfect?

    This post is kind of like my web site. It’s trial and error. No particular inspiration, I just wasn’t satisfied with where the blog left off.

    Maybe I’ll delete it.

    Maybe I won’t.

    Maybe I’ll do it again.

  • As the mind wanders…

    This is not a sad story.

    Saying it up front kind of puts into question though, doesn’t it? Sows a little doubt maybe?

    This is a story about home. It could be about your home or a friends home, but only you could write that post, or your friend. This is about scratches in the hardwood floors of a house in eastern Massachusetts, in a mysterious spiral pattern. It’s about a patch of wallpaper* where a younger you practiced writing your name. It’s about the front step and the proper angle of attack on the pile of snow from shoveling the walk. It’s about the tree you climbed high enough to look down on your two story house, before you learned your multiplication tables – and thus calculate the number of bones you could break if the potential energy became another kind of energy.

    It’s about a plaster patch in the back of a closet, about the size of child’s foot. Or the industrial grade swingset in the backyard that may out live you. Or the broken cement roof tiles you’d swear would handle the force of a football, kicked from 25 carefully measured yards away.

    It’s about projects large and small, like the new floors installed in the living room and all the bedrooms – and the back pain that came with it, free of charge. Or the small work of tinfoil art crafted to deflect the light of a fixture directly in front of a television. Or the pictures you hung in the family room, in places picked by the previous owners – no matter how well it fit your arrangement of stuff. It’s about the odd mirror you hung in an odd corner, the one your mother gave you shortly after you were married, before she lost her mind.

    It’s about all the little memories hiding in all the little nooks, corners or cracks.

    It’s about the feeling you get when you first think about leaving them all behind, to move to another place where memories are waiting to be made.

    – – –

    * Ten or fifteen years after we moved, my sisters visited the old neighborhood and asked to have a look around the old house. The current owners (at the time) showed them a room almost completely free of wallpaper, save for a small square hidden by a dresser, where someone had practiced writing their name many years ago.

  • I was an amateur plumber

    I was tired of sinks and drains backing up. I was ready to replace two inefficient faucets that started to leak. I wasn’t ready to pay a plumber two bills for a twenty dollar faucet and a quick clog job on two partially blocked drains. So I went to Home Depot.

    I didn’t find what I wanted.

    So I went to Lowes. I picked up a couple faucets and a drain snake/auger. I would’ve picked up a stronger stomach too, but they were on back order. The faucets went in without too much trouble, but the shower drain was more of a challenge. It wasn’t a technical challenge. It was a holding my cookies as I pulled the goo out of the drain kind of challenge. I was completely unprepared for its makeup and consistency. If you don’t think you can stomach a description, please read no further.

    I was expecting soupy. You know, something having a relatively high water content. Instead, it was more like a renewable resource for road repair. It was thick, black and greasy, held together by a matted matrix of hair. I was expecting the hair, but black tar? Then there was the smell. Should I tell you about the smell? Could I tell you about the smell? Could I possibly put it into words? It kind of smelled the way I’d imagine a sewer would smell – if I’d ever smelled a sewer. Crawling around in a sewer is one experience I’ve thus far been denied.

    Poor me.

    This was worse. It was like I’d bathed in it, the smell surrounding me in a swirl of moldy, rotting filth.

    Whatever the remains of our seemingly harmless showers became, it took ten minutes to wash off my hands. Two applications of Tilex and scrubbing would not remove it completely from the shower floor. When I say it was a God awful mess, I mean it like no other mess I’ve encountered, and remember – I have two kids.

    This weekend I’m going to clear out the sink in the kids’ bathroom.

    Pray for me.