downsizing, evaluating, other stuff

As Some of You May or May Not Know,

traci and I recently quit our jobs. We’re trying to sell our house. We’d like to, in turn, buy some chickens and plant a garden near those chickens. Preferably some place in Southeastern Ohio. We’re downsizing, and taking a step away from academia for a while. We’re going to make more time for our art and our kids and our health, and put less energy into worrying over where our students want to put semicolons or what our colleagues think of our publication records. It’s all, I know, a noble pursuit. It simply overwhelmed us a touch. We found ourselves looking forward to retirement, rather than enjoying our lives.

So I know that raises a lot of questions: what’s your house look like?, is it close to a park, how much are you asking?, chickens?, I thought you already had chickens?, and will you find true happiness once you’ve left teaching?

In response to the first three questions: check out our realtor’s website here. Or if you just want to see our crib, which has not yet been featured on any reality shows. I know. I’m constantly shocked as well. In response what appears to be the fourth question, “chickens?” Well, that’s not really even a question. Or a sentence for that matter. But I’ll do my best to respond: a chicken is a medium-sized flightless . . . you know what just click here to find out. In response to question four, which is also, I see now, not a question, I must say, you can think it all you want, that’s not going to get us farm fresh eggs. And, finally, we’re not even sure what happiness is, but one thing that I’m only now beginning to understand is that happiness, like writing, is a process, not a product, and it is in the enacting of happiness that happiness exists.

I’ve been meditating, which is like weightlifting for one’s soul. That’s how come that last line there sounds so smart. Bet your ass.

Meditating has its limits.

Meanwhile, the above is all part and/or parcel of the reason I’ve written so little lately – I’ve found it hard to celebrate a life in limbo. But I also want you all to know what we’re up to, where we are going, where we have been, what’s on the horizon, what’s off to the left there, just around the bend, up ahead, yet to be, off to the north, up, and going on.

So keep the questions coming, or else I’m gonna have to keep making them up. Until then. Y’ens take care.

The Renovator

I’ve been away from the blog this week, as I have been busy pretending to work on the house and grade my students’ papers while secretly reading The Great Book of Amber. Yesterday, in fact, when I was supposed to respond to student quizzes, I asked them all if they’d got the all the right answers. Some said, “Yes.” For those who said, “No,” I said, “Would you get all the right answers now if I gave you the same quiz?” They said, “Oh, yes. Oh, my, yes.” So I marked them all down for A’s and drove to the hardware store parking lot to pretend to shop while I secretly read a fantasy novel.

Before we begin, I have a morality tale from earlier in the week:

Have you ever been stung by a wasp whilst spraying for mosquitoes?
Me too, which begs the question: who is the real monster here?
It’s the wasps. Trust me, that’s the moral.


Anyway, what’s wrong with me? Well, it probably all has to do with my plumbing. Plumbing is a delicate art that, if I understand correctly, was invented 8,000 years ago in Egypt, perfected 2,600 years ago in Rome, and introduced to Western Pennsylvania in the late 1970’s.

A lot of one’s personality can be determined by answers to fundamental questions about plumbing. For instance:

When there’s a problem with the plumbing, do you:
A: Call a professional?
B: Call for Sam to bring you a pair of socks and a roll of duct tape?

One’s answer, I believe, speaks volumes.

So yesterday, when the problems arose, Sam showed up with the duct tape and said, “I couldn’t find any socks. What about the one you have on.” That’s my boy. Problem solved.

Sometimes the kids ask me, “How did you learn so much about building stuff?”

Well, just from paying attention mostly. Also, I spent some time doing various forms of construction when I was supposed to be studying for my Intro to Biology final exam. But at the heart of everything I know about stuff getting built is Pappap. For instance, I remember his vivid instructions about plumbing. When I was very young, he told me, “There are three things you need to know about plumbing. Hot water goes on the left. Cold on the right. And shit don’t run uphill.”

Clearly I was destined for renovating.

Some people like to call it “home improvement,” but, really, would anybody call this improvement?

I think not. Renovating, rather, from the root word “novate,” meaning: screw up real bad. I think. I hope not to be redundant here in quoting the great plumber and writer Ray Carver, who said, “We all do better in the future.”


Meanwhile, Blaisey borrowed Zac’s guitar this morning and wrote three songs. Song 1: “All the Penguins Go to School.” Song 2: “All the Other Animals Go to School, But Not the Penguins.” Song 3: “The Animals Don’t Go to School, But Sissy and Blaisey Go to School.” Each of the songs has similar motifs and rhythms, a lot of humming in the middle of the lines, and several words that I’m not familiar with. Each song also contains the lyrics, “But you and me will never die, hmmm hmm hmmm hmm I like pie.” Needless to say, if Isaac Brock gets a hold of this talent, Blaisey certainly be a Glacial Pace artist any day now.

For the record, did anybody hear me ask for cpvc rubber cement in my coffee this morning? No. You didn’t. Which again, is sort of beside the point as it leaves me wondering: if the cpvc rubber cement applicator is in my coffee mug, what’s holding all the plumbing together? The answer, I believe, is clear: we’ll never know.

Cup Half Something

In response to your questions about distinctions between optimism and pesimism:

On the one hand, I spent three hours this morning / afternoon installing one particularly tricky piece of drywall. Granted there was some plumbing and some wiring involved. But still.

On the other hand, I got to listen to We Were Already Dead before the Ship Even Sank and The Moon and Antartica (twice) today, and all I had to do was hang one crumby sheet of drywall.

Everything said, I've had worse days. How was yours?

An Atlas, Some Vikrell, and a Premium Beer

So, yes, it’s true, traci and I and various numbers of our children drove 3,000 miles over the past few weeks, wishing at every turn that we had an atlas. “We always have an atlas,” we told each other. “Where might it have gone?” we asked. But it was nowhere to be found. Until, that is, we pulled into our own driveway in N.C. and looked in the glovebox for house keys. Figures.

Meanwhile, during the 500 mile stretch from Maga and Pappap’s camp to our own home, we stopped into the Store Whose Name Should Not Be Mentioned and tried to buy an atlas. You know how the store is – enormous and blinding – but I walked the quarter mile back to the automotive department. They had three maps of Pittsburgh and one of Canada. No atlas. Still, I asked the man behind the counter if they sold atlases. He said, “You mean like a book of maps?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Oughtta be in with the books.” After I looked through the quarter-acre book section, I asked the woman at the service desk if she had a book of maps. She said, “Like an atlas?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “Oughtta be in automotive.”

Now, here’s the thing. We all know that the Store Whose Name Should Not Be Mentioned started using computers in 19 freaking 68, and I’m not saying I’m super-tech-savvy, but in those past forty-two years shouldn’t someone have taught her how to type “atlas” in the where-it-is-in-the-store box on the computer?

It’s been like that this summer. Earlier, we went to our favorite home improvement store looking for a special order shower basin. Between the two of us, we’ve done a fair amount of building. We’ve done a great deal of research into supplies. As far as amateurs go, we know our stuff. Still, traci pointed at a picture in the catalog and said, “This one says it’s made out of Vikrell. What’s that?” The man answered, “Vikrell.” traci said, “Yes, but what is it? Will it scratch? Is it like porcelain or like fiberglass? Is it heavy? Is it dense? Is it synthetic or natural? Will it dent or rust or what?” The man said, “Oh, it’s nothing. It’s a kind of material.” The three of us stared at each other for a few seconds. Then we walked away and bought our shower basin from our second favorite home improvement store.

At the beer distributor, I asked, “What’s the difference between this brand’s lager and it’s premium lager?” The salesperson said, “One’s premium, one ain’t.”

A teacher once told me, “In order to be a good teacher, you don’t have to know all the answers, you just have to know where to find the answers.” And I’ve found that to be true. But I’ve also found that to be true of working in the steel mill and as a hoddie and as a janitor. I long for a time when people understood their jobs, when, maybe, they cared a little more. I don’t know if such a time exists. I’m probably being nostalgic for a myth. I’m probably longing for a moment which only exists in nostalgia. Might as well pile melodrama on nostalgia and close with some words of Nick Carraway: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

New Plumbing

Anyway, this is what we ended up with:

We don't know what it is, but we couldn't have done it without you. Thank you, PVCman.

PVCman

Tim Burton would do the artistic version:

"Edward PVCknuckles."

PVCman

A rare photo of PVC man's alterego: me:

Apparently, I have a lot of fans I didn't know about:

PVCman making a funny line: "Let's shoot the shit," he says:

 

PVCman

traci got some pics of PVCman in action:

Which leads me to my next point: traci and I have decided to quit work and focus on a series of movies about a guy who gets bitten by a radioactive turtle and falls into a PVC factory. The tagline, of course, would be, "He doesn't take shit . . . he gives it":

new plumbing

Now, I know what you're thinking: "What does one do without plumbing?"

And I have an easy answer: "I have no idea."

We would have been in quite a bind . . .

. . . had it not been for PVCman.

cast iron

Anyway, one thing lead to another, and we decided since we took the walls down, we might as well move the bathroom to the girls' room, the laundry to the bathroom, and the girls to a closet. In the meantime, we got a hold of a cast iron pipe and said to each other, "That's not modern. That's not modern at all."

We didn’t get pictures of the demolition, but you can imagine me with a BFH* and these enormous writerly hands pounding away on four-inch cast iron plumbing – truly a thing of beauty.

(BFH: Big Fill-in-the-_____ing Hammer)
After wailing away on the pipe for thirty, forty minutes with little progress, I pulled the old it-sure-is-fun-to-smash-cast-iron routine on Sam.

This is what he did to it:

Look ye mighty upon Sam's cast iron and beware. All that's from the second floor. We gutted the pipe from the basement through the roof -- it was quite a time.