Failing to touch on anything but necessities

Dear diary,

What news have I not yet told ye about our home-repair dilemmas? We picked up our ginormous truckload of floorboards, on Tuesday. Everything happens on Tuesday. "The day of Tiw, the god of victorious combat in Norse mythology," quoth Wikipedia. So I guess we could also call it Marsday, after Mars the Ancient Roman God of War. Or LORDsday, since

The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name.
(Exodus 15:3)

There are like twenty boxes of vinyl planks imitating wood lying all over our penthouse right now. You can't step anywhere without tripping on them. (They're still in their packages: once they're installed, they'll no longer be obstacles.) And they're H-E-A-V-Y: the wardens at the liquidator's warehouse wouldn't even let us haul more than ten at a time in our hatchback, because of the great weight of the matter; so we had to make two trips. By the way, "hatchback" is defined as a car with a door across the full width of its back end which opens upward to provide easy access for loading fake wood floorboards. Now it's my job to figure out how to cut and place these things so that they don't buckle or bulge, and so that they stay in place and don't slide off the globe when you moonwalk. I'll have to saw them into curvy and zigzag shapes in order to navigate them around all our air vents, dishwashers, doorway casings, and barber's poles. My spirit deflates, just thinking about all that work. So I'll change the subject.

The reason there are barber's poles between our building's floors, by the way, is to allow barbers to descend to the ground faster than by using a standard staircase.

I like that one can purchase vinyl planks from a lumber company; it makes me wonder if they also sell vinyl wear (see the explanation below). And then I wonder if someone will soon invent wood wear. But they've surely already done such a thing – it stands to reason: for this is the afterlife.

PVC clothing is shiny apparel made of the plastic polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which material is commonly known as "vinyl"; hence this type of garb is also called vinyl wear.

I also like that, when you decide to install the floorboards without using glue, they call the process floating. You click the planks together and they just float there. This is the method I favor; for after ripping up our ex floors, which were MORE THAN GLUED to the subfloor, I decided that I am categorically opposed to adhesives.

And I hate it when interviewers on television say "That was a perfect segue to my next question."

I gotta try to relax today. I'm stressed about the installation of this refuse; it's making it difficult to go about the forest without roaring. Everything's gonna be OK. It'll be nice to get this carpet out of the house: when I moved in, it had cigarette stains all over it – deep fried burnt lozenge-shaped craters – so I bought a big rug to mask the malformation. That was a mistake: What I should have done is...

By writing them down, I aim to master my fears: to exorcise them through articulation. But this no longer works to relieve the pressures of home repair; the stress grows every instant I remain mindful of it. I really hate everything that is not imaginary.

So let me try to quote myself away from this bad post. Below is a passage from Cormac McCarthy's novel Suttree. If it's too small to read, you should be able to enlarge it by clicking it. Instead of using my injured fingers (for the shocking truth about which, see my previous entry and the one before that) to type it into the screen, I snapped a photograph of part of page 414, because I feared that the average Internet browser would fumble its structure, as the text consists of single-spaced, indented paragraphs – a format nearly impossible for modern technology to effectuate. For there are two types of writing that this online realm is averse to: poetry and prose.