In house painting and hand grenades, posterity must yield to pragmatism. We bought a skeleton and we’re trying to paint flesh onto its bones. The right kind of flesh has to go in the right place, I guess. And fast. And everyone’s all the time saying we need to take before-and-after pictures. We’re more concerned with putty and plaster and kitchen cabinets. The cabinets got primed and painted yesterday. Today some of them got torn out and soon they’ll be cut and cropped and whatnot.
We’re making room for new organs.
The house has this psychosomatic old-people smell that persists unabated despite the powerful funk of paint fumes and body odour we’ve left there to stew for a few days. We left the windows open a crack and there’s a strong breeze so we’ll see what sort of flavours and scents we’ll imagine the house to have in a day or two when we come in to pick up the brushes and rollers for a second run of bone-painting.
I can’t wait till we have a home. One home, none of this nomadic shifting between my apartment in Barrie and Skywalker Ranch in Utopia, herding bantha and following the air conditioning. We’re going to put pictures on the wall of our new house, and I’ll keep my medicine in the medicine cabinet and I’m going to read books on the couch in the living room.
I start back to school tomorrow at Georgian College. It’s a novel sort of program for me: there’s a job at the end of this road. With an ID badge and a corporate email account maybe. Or a toaster oven in the break room. Salary. RRSP contribution matching to a maximum of %4 of my annual income. Ergonomics. Let me touch your servers. Let me tweak your databases. These are the things that are important to me now and I will fight for them.
I’ll fight the empire.
I’ll fix the robots.
The maddest of props are to be extended to the following persons for their efforts this weekend:
- Amy, for coming up from the Hamilton to help us prime and paint cabinets that are so old that I’m sure they figure prominently in the “do you remember what you were doing when you heard about the Kennedy assassination?” story of some now-seventy-five-year-old cabinetmaker. His story’s probably like, “Yeah, I was installing some inexpensive and stylish kitchen cabinets.” Also Amy brought a scaffold on wheels that changed my life.
- Tyson, my little brother, for being a friggen patching and sanding machine. And for bringing coffee. And for carrying himself with a certain quiet dignity.
- My parents, for bringing lasagna and Caesar salad and spirituous beverages, and for their house-warming gifts of extreme usefulness.
- Sherry’s parents, for their tools and their sweat and their kitchen-reconfiguring efforts.
- Sherry herself, for running a tight ship and somehow remaining sane through the joyful and stressful task of making our new home. The colours she picked look nice on the wall, Tyson’s opinions to the contrary.
You’ve seen his beard, Sherry. He and I are of the same blood. Don’t expect colour sense from either of us. He wears only brown and blue clothes. I just last week discovered I had been wrong for several years about what fuchsia is.
Everyone all the time is awesome. After-pictures will arrive when there’s an after to document.
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