Flotsam and Jetsam

Catching up

I haven’t posted in a bit. I’ve been busy, and I’ll get to that, but I’m never too busy to write, so there must be other reasons I’ve been reluctant to comment.

One of the reasons I’ve been so quiet is that commenting on current events often feels like shouting down a well. Mortality is a real thing and nothing mankind creates is lasting. Some things last a bit longer than others, but nothing is permanent. The oldest human sculptures, The Venus of Hohle Fels and Löwenmensch figurine, are about 35,000 years old and sometimes that seems like a long, long time. But the planet has been spinning away for about 4.5 billion years, so it’s not very long ago at all, and no one can say who the artists were or what they intended. Sometimes, when I think about it, I imagine Homer and Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Beethoven all going into the hopper of time, ground to a fine dust, and sprinkled on the past. It isn’t a sad image, really. Just an acknowledgement that I know nothing of real time. I can’t tell you what either of my great-grandfathers did for a living, what they thought, what they looked like or even their full names, and they walked the Earth just 150 years ago. It would be pure hubris to think I matter more. So there is that.

This attitude is further compounded by the sheer pettiness I see around me, even in myself. Whether it is the person in traffic so consumed by their need to rush they behave like jackwads or the person on the television informing me that his or her feelings trump someone’s freedoms, I find myself taking the long, long view and seeing this obsession with self as a normalize mental illness. You think you are important? I catch myself thinking. No one is important. Not me, not you, and because of this, we are all fleeting miracles.

In my youth, I believed that there were important people, people who shook the world, but now I’ve lived long enough to see Hemingway and Steinbeck fall off of reading lists after their time at the top of the hill. In another thirty or forty years, they will be read the way people today read George Eliot or Thomas Hardy—quietly and alone, because there is no one to discuss them with. Conversation is always topical. The weather. Politics. Whatever narrative du jour the mainstream media is touting this news cycle. I’ve watched JFK fall from sainthood status to historical token, as my parents must have seen become FDR, and men walking on the moon become a moment trotted out in history classes, like Washington crossing the Delaware or the battle at the Alamo.

We all sink into time, and I’m okay with that.

*

What I have been doing is building stuff. My sister and her boyfriend/husband bought a house and I took it upon myself to refit it. It is fed by a well and the water is very hard, full of iron, and the softening system had been neglected for years. All of the fixtures—the toilets, the showers, the sinks—were dark brown and orange with stains and they were all as dated as the books I read. Avocado fiberglass, fixtures plated with brass to look like gold, all worn beyond repair. A late 20th century horror that filled two dumpsters.

So I gutted the bathrooms and rebuilt them, one with a black slate shower over a shower pan and the other in tile, with a floor made of pebbles. Here’s how they look now:

I’m no manner of tile wizard, but by taking my time, putting one foot in front of the other, it got done and I like the result. I also redid the kitchen. Here’s before and after. The kitchen looks even better now, with all of the tools removed and the appliances in, but you get the idea.

I enjoy this sort of thing when there is no pressure to make money or meet a deadline. If I screw up (and I did) I can go back and fix whatever I’m not happy with. When I’m in these rooms I can see many defects, little things i would have done differently, but they appear to be invisible to most people and my sister is happy.

*

As for what is happening in the world? Hoo boy. I am not surprised in the least, because I saw all of this coming in November of 2020. Anyone wringing their hands today and feigning surprise is an idiot, and probably voted for the very people who have brought us to this pass. At 8.9% inflation, fuel prices through the roof, crime rampant in the streets of the cities, and one proxy war I figure we’re getting off easy. It could be much, much worse. We elected an elderly man in his dotage and a squad of ignorant navel-gazers and turned them loose with the keys. I knew it would be bad, and I understood that the country would have to feel the pain to understand how silly we have been. Frankly, I thought it would be worse. The Green New Deal, CRT, defunding the police, victimology and a loud appeal to everyone’s most base instincts could not end well and was never going to result in anything but unmitigated disaster.

It’s the nature of delusions, and the obvious result of delusions normalized and mainstreamed.

Now that the nation sees the result and feels the reality they voted for, we will move on and make the architects pay for what they have built. All is well.

Peace.